Historians have had little to say about the lands that stretch 'beyond the black stump'. These essays from around the country build inland Australia into our national history, crisscrossing both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Contributors are Lorina Barker, Amanda Barry, Badger Bates, Peter Bishop, Nici Cumpston, Jean Duruz, Charles Fahey, Lionel Frost, Heather Goodall, Jenny Gregory, Patricia Grimshaw, Rodney Harrison, Rick Hosking, Darrell Lewis, Alan Mayne, Chrissiejoy Marshall, Margaret Somerville and Richard Waterhouse.

Ryder Burket is an aspiring culinary and gossip writer for a local newspaper, sent to interview monks at an old monastery turned into a cheese factory. It seems the cheese these monks are making is out of this world. Unfortunately, Ryder is delayed by a small car accident and arrives later than expected, feeling unwell, but her unease has only just begun When she arrives at the monastery, there are no monks, no cows, and no buildings to indicate a cheese business. The only occupants of the Angels Gate property are creepy caretaker Sam Wilmott and his wife. Too tired to drive, Ryder stays the night but abandons the story in the morning and flees. She returns home to an even more shocking surprise. She has not been gone a day but four months, and detectives have been investigating her disappearance. Seeking answers, she returns to Angels Gate but never returns. Ryder seems gone for good this time, and the search is on as her friends try to solve the mystery of the mysterious monastery. Will they find Ryder, or will her friends meet the same strange fate?

The economy is in freefall. Inflation skyrockets. Crime and violence are out of control. Countless millions of illegal immigrants, representing votes for the entrenched administration and cheap labor for its ally, Big Business, flow unimpeded across the southern border. America’s enemies gleefully watch and plan as what was once the world’s only superpower descends to Third World status. In desperation, the American government secretly conspires with China to divide the globe between them. Seven extraordinary individuals, dubbed the Sleeping Dogs by the government agency that originally recruited them, are all that stand in the way. Compounding the challenge is the American government, in cooperation with the Chinese, has sent the world’s best assassins to hunt down the seven men and kill them. How can only seven individuals possibly make a difference?

In this highly original and ground-breaking work, the author brings together discussions in the philosophy of time and space, philosophy of language, phenomenology, philosophy of science, Special and General Relativity, classical cosmology, quantum mechanics, and so forth, with the concerns of philosophy of religion and theology, in order to craft a philosophically informed and scientifically tenable doctrine of divine eternity and God's relationship to time.

The problem of evil has generated varying attempts at theodicy. To show that suffering is defeated for a sufferer, a theodicy argues that there is an outweighing benefit which could not have been gotten without the suffering. Typically, this condition has the tacit presupposition given that this is a post-Fall world. Consequently, there is a sense in which human suffering would not be shown to be defeated even if there were a successful theodicy because a theodicy typically implies that the benefit in question could have been gotten without the suffering if there had not been a Fall. There is a part of the problem of evil that would remain, then, even if there were a successful theodicy. This is the problem of mourning: even defeated suffering in the post-Fall world merits mourning. How is this warranted mourning compatible with the existence of an omniscient, omnipotent, perfectly good God? The traditional response to this problem is the felix culpa view, which maintains that the original sin was fortunate because there is an outweighing benefit to sufferers that could not be gotten in a world without suffering. The felix culpa view presupposes an object of evaluation, namely, the true self of a human being, and a standard of evaluation for human lives. This book explores these and a variety of other topics in philosophical theology in order to explain and evaluate the role of suffering in human lives.