National Best Books 2007 Award-Winner in Religion "Insightful, imaginative, and provocative! Val Webb's new book has freed the Divine from the religious. A striking achievement."-John Shelby Spong, author of Jesus for the Non-Religious In Like Catching Water in a Net, Val Webb is not out to prove the existence of a God or the Divine, but to set out intuitions or intimations of the Divine nature and attributes from the stories and literature of the world's religions. Casting her net more widely than Karen Armstrong in The History of God or Jack Miles in God: A Biography, Webb delves deeply into the poetry and sayings of Sufi, Buddhist, and Hindu mystics, the nature religion of the ancient Mesopotamians, their kin the Israelites, and the Aboriginal people of her own beloved Australia.

Val Webb describes in this book how humans have engaged the Divine across religions and centuries, through rituals, art, sacred places, language and song. Drawing on personal and observed experience of travel and meetings with strangers, Webb uses her anecdotes to supplement her analysis of centuries of theology, literature and travel writing. The sum effect is to remind us that we need as many stories as possible in order to engage the Sacred-beyond-description, even if only to remind us of the distance still to go and the limitless (and sometimes unsuccessful) journey. The result is an interwoven, vivid, and theologically reflective reading experience.

This Handbook, first published in 2005, provides standard procedures for planning and conducting a survey of any species or habitat and for evaluating the data.

This is an updated version of the best selling first edition, Ecological Census Techniques, with updating, some new chapters and authors. Almost all ecological and conservation work involves carrying out a census or survey. This practically focussed book describes how to plan a census, the practical details and shows with worked examples how to analyse the results. The first three chapters describe planning, sampling and the basic theory necessary for carrying out a census. In the subsequent chapters international experts describe the appropriate methods for counting plants, insects, fish, amphibians, reptiles, mammals and birds. As many censuses also relate the results to environmental variability, there is a chapter explaining the main methods. Finally, there is a list of the most common mistakes encountered when carrying out a census.