A counterintuitive approach to fostering greater innovation, collaboration, and engagement Most of us assume our success relies on a network of friends and close contacts. But innovative thinking requires a steady stream of fresh ideas and new possibilities, which strangers are more likely to introduce. Our survival instincts naturally cause us to look upon strangers with suspicion and distrust, but in The Necessity of Strangers, Alan Gregerman offers the provocative idea that engaging with strangers is an opportunity, not a threat, and that engaging with the right strangers is essential to unlocking our real potential. The Necessity of Strangers reveals how strangers challenge us to think differently about ourselves and the problems we face. Shows how strangers can help us innovate better, get the most out of each other, and achieve genuine collaboration Presents principles for developing a "stranger-centric" mindset to develop new markets and stronger customer relationships, leverage the full potential of partnerships, and become more effective leaders Includes practical guidance and a toolkit for being more open, creating new ideas that matter, finding the right strangers in all walks of life, and tapping the real brilliance in yourself To stay competitive, you and your business need access to more new ideas, insights, and perspectives than ever before. The Necessity of Strangers offers an essential guide to discovering the most exciting opportunities you haven't met yet.

Bearing with Strangers looks at inclusion in education in a new way, regarding education as a discipline with practical and theoretical concepts and criteria which emanate from education and schooling itself. By introducing the notion of the instrumental fallacy, it shows how this is not only an inherent feature of inclusive education policies, but also omnipresent in modern educational policy. It engages schooling through an Arendtian framework, constituted by and in a specific practice with the aim of mediating between generations. It outlines a didactic and pedagogical theory that presents inclusion not as an aim for education, but as a constitutive feature of the activity of schooling. Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, the book offers a novel and critical perspective on inclusive education, as well as a contribution to a growing literature re-engaging didactic and pedagogical conceptions of teaching and the role of the teacher. Schooling is understood as a process of opening the world to the young and of opening the world to the renewal that the new generations offer. The activity of schooling offers the possibility of becoming attentive toward what is common while learning to bear with that which is strange and those who are strangers. The book points to valuable metaphors and ideas – referred to in the book as ‘pearls’ – that speak to the heart of what schooling and teaching concerns. Bearing with Strangers will be of great interest to academics, researchers and post-graduate students in the fields of philosophy of education, inclusive education and educational policy.

Finding place and identity in a globalized world

Former colleagues and students honour Prof. Dr. A. van de Beek with contributions in this Festschrift on themes that have become central in his theology: christology, theology of Israel, eschatology, theology of the church, creation theology, and freedom of religion.

What did it feel like to be an openly Jewish soldier fighting alongside German troops in WWII? Could a Jewish nurse work safely in a field hospital operating theater under the supervision of German army doctors? Several hundred members of Finland’s tiny Jewish community found themselves in absurd situations like this, yet not a single one was harmed by the Germans or deported to concentration or extermination camps. In fact, Finland was the only European country fighting on either side in WWII that lost not a single Jewish citizen to the Nazi’s “Final Solution.” Strangers in a Stranger Land explores the unique dilemma of Finland’s Jews in the form of a meticulously researched novel. Where did these immigrant Jews—the last in Europe to achieve citizenship status—come from? What was life like from their arrival in Finland in the early nineteenth century to the time when their grandchildren perversely found themselves on “the wrong side” of WWII? And how could young lovers plan for the future when not only their enemies but also their country’s allies threatened their very existence? Seven years researching Finland’s National Archives plus numerous in-depth interviews with surviving Finnish Jewish war veterans provide the background for a narrative exploration of love, friendship, and commitment but also uncertainty and terror under circumstances that were unique in the annals of “The Good War.” The novel’s protagonists—Benjamin, David and Rachel—adopt varying survival strategies as they struggle with involvement in a brutal conflict and questions posed by their dual loyalty as Finnish citizens and Zionists committed to the creation of a Jewish homeland. Tensions mount as the three young adults painfully work through a relationship love triangle and try to fulfill their commitments as both Jews and Finns while their country desperately seeks to extricate itself from an unwinnable war.

This study presents a coherent interpretation of the Malta episode by arguing that Acts 28:1-10 narrates a theoxeny, that is, an account of unknowing hospitality to a god which results in the establishment of a fictive kinship relationship between the Maltese barbarians and Paul and his God. In light of the connection between hospitality and piety to the gods in the ancient Mediterranean, Luke ends his second volume in this manner to portray Gentile hospitality as the appropriate response to Paul’s message of God’s salvation -- a response that portrays them as hospitable exemplars within the Lukan narrative and contrasts them with the Roman Jews who reject Paul and his message.