“So…are we insane?” “Yes.” “And?” “What.” “What.” “Yes?” “You said we were insane.” “Yes. Yes, we’re insane. You asked if we were insane, right?” “And?” “And YES, we’re INSANE. Jesus, Bob.”

Interdisciplinary approaches to the material culture of the middle ages, from illuminated manuscripts to church architecture.

This collection of essays considers the development and meaning of the iconostasis, the screen used in churches to separate the sanctuary from the nave. The contributors approach the history of the icon screen from a variety of disciplines, including art history, theology, and architecture.

Faith has lost something in the twenty-first century. In a drive to market Christianity to the world, churches have sacrificed the depth and riches of theology. Faith is bought and sold in American churches, but it is a faith without substance. Martin Recio, an Augustinian with decades of experience in ministry, shows us what it is that we've lost. Christianity is a revealed religion of redemption and reconciliation with the Lord God, through faith in his son, Jesus Christ. It is also an eschatological religion. It points to a victorious and triumphant conclusion, when Christ shall come in his second advent. Recio presents the teachings of our religion in their near-classical form, from creation through salvation to the end of time. This retelling of the Gospel of grace as it was known in the ancient world has the power to transform our modern society and beckon the coming of the kingdom of God.

Threshold Phenomena reexamines Jacques Derrida’s thinking of hospitality, from his well-known writings of the 1990s to his recently-published seminars on the same topic. The book follows Derrida’s rereading of several central figures and texts on hospitality (Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, Kant’s Perpetual Peace, Levinas’s Totality and Infinity) and his attempt to rethink questions surrounding not only private but also public hospitality in the form of immigration law, the contemporary treatment of migrants or stateless peoples, and the establishment of cities of asylum. Naas develops many of the central themes of Derrida’s seminar—the relationship between hospitality and teletechnology (telephone, internet, cyberspace, etc.), the role of fatherlands and mother tongues in hospitality, questions of purity, immunity, and xenophobia, and the possibility of extending hospitality beyond the human—to animals, plants, gods, and clones. Reframing Derrida’s approach to ethics, Naas reconsiders the relationship between hospitality and deconstruction, concluding that hospitality is not merely a theme to be treated by deconstruction but one of the best ways of describing its work. Naas’s book turns around a figure that Derrida himself returns to several times throughout the seminar: the threshold—a figure of hospitality par excellence, but also, in his seminars, another name for what Derrida in the 1960s began calling différance. Threshold Phenomena concludes that Derrida’s seminar on hospitality is one of the best introductions we have to Derrida’s work in general and one of the surest signs of its continuing relevance, a seminar that is at once fascinating and engaging in its own right and necessary for analyzing today’s increasingly nationalistic and xenophobic political climate.

In this final chapter of the Order of the Wave trilogy, Grace Rainwater is closer to finding answers than she's ever been, while vampires and lycanthropes appear to take opposite sides in a ramp up to Armageddon.