A solid career, a simmering romance and his own past conspire to keep Jonah Christopher at home. But when Our Lady, Queen of the Universe, calls, Jonah must traverse time and eternity to confront the evil only he can defeat. Can a sixth-grade teacher whose only plan for the next week is to enjoy spring break fishing and being with the girl of his dreams give up his comfortable life to battle the gathering darkness? And, if he does, will he ever make it back to the woman he loves, his home and the old brick school where he had finally found happiness? Traveling in a ten-foot rowboat through rough seas and urban congestion, Jonah must rely on a ring, a rosary, a telescope, a fisherman and a guardian angel named Dave to bring him to his journey's end.

An original, powerful, and programmatic reading of the Bible that emphasizes the biblical call to peacemaking Smith-Christopher shows us that biblical peacemaking recognizes and then crosses--or "runs"--borders. All too often, borders and other imaginary lines drawn between groups of people have a way of becoming the basis for conflict, bigotry, and ultimately, war. Danger signs are evident when people use "borders" to talk about the goodness of everyone within "our" border, and the evil of everyone "over there." Modern social commentators use the phrase "the other" to refer to the tendency of human groups to develop a positive image of themselves by contrasting it with negative images of others. Smith-Christopher states that when this happens, it is important for us to remind ourselves that it is a profoundly biblical lesson that making peace between groups of people often requires that somebody must be willing to intentionally cross the "borders" that separate groups. In this book, he argues that the Bible teaches Christians that they are this somebody. Crossing boundaries is a biblical mandate, and the foundation of peacemaking. About the title: "Coyote" in modern parlance refers to human traffickers of illegal aliens and immigrants. Coyote crossings commonly elicit the image of professional mercenary smugglers who prey upon the hopes and dreams of illegal aliens. However, among immigrants themselves, the overwhelming view of Coyotes is positive. Daniel Smith-Christopher uses this paradox, this provocative image, a very biblical paradox, he adds, as the central and effective metaphor in the book. Jonah and Jesus are reviled for the same reason, he says: they crossed boundaries, they met the "other," and they brought them over. They thumbed their noses at man-made and fear-based boundaries that exclude rather than embrace.

An international, interdisciplinary, and interreligious retrospective examination of Hans Jonas (1903-1993) that engages his ideas in light of Existentialism, utopian thought, process philosophy and theology, Zionism, and environmentalism.

As the incomes of affluent and poor families have diverged over the past three decades, so too has the educational performance of their children. But how exactly do the forces of rising inequality affect the educational attainment and life chances of low-income children? In Whither Opportunity? a distinguished team of economists, sociologists, and experts in social and education policy examines the corrosive effects of unequal family resources, disadvantaged neighborhoods, insecure labor markets, and worsening school conditions on K-12 education. This groundbreaking book illuminates the ways rising inequality is undermining one of the most important goals of public education—the ability of schools to provide children with an equal chance at academic and economic success. The most ambitious study of educational inequality to date, Whither Opportunity? analyzes how social and economic conditions surrounding schools affect school performance and children’s educational achievement. The book shows that from earliest childhood, parental investments in children’s learning affect reading, math, and other attainments later in life. Contributor Meredith Phillip finds that between birth and age six, wealthier children will have spent as many as 1,300 more hours than poor children on child enrichment activities such as music lessons, travel, and summer camp. Greg Duncan, George Farkas, and Katherine Magnuson demonstrate that a child from a poor family is two to four times as likely as a child from an affluent family to have classmates with low skills and behavior problems – attributes which have a negative effect on the learning of their fellow students. As a result of such disparities, contributor Sean Reardon finds that the gap between rich and poor children’s math and reading achievement scores is now much larger than it was fifty years ago. And such income-based gaps persist across the school years, as Martha Bailey and Sue Dynarski document in their chapter on the growing income-based gap in college completion. Whither Opportunity? also reveals the profound impact of environmental factors on children’s educational progress and schools’ functioning. Elizabeth Ananat, Anna Gassman-Pines, and Christina Gibson-Davis show that local job losses such as those caused by plant closings can lower the test scores of students with low socioeconomic status, even students whose parents have not lost their jobs. They find that community-wide stress is most likely the culprit. Analyzing the math achievement of elementary school children, Stephen Raudenbush, Marshall Jean, and Emily Art find that students learn less if they attend schools with high student turnover during the school year – a common occurrence in poor schools. And David Kirk and Robert Sampson show that teacher commitment, parental involvement, and student achievement in schools in high-crime neighborhoods all tend to be low. For generations of Americans, public education provided the springboard to upward mobility. This pioneering volume casts a stark light on the ways rising inequality may now be compromising schools’ functioning, and with it the promise of equal opportunity in America.

An analysis of the Jewish background of an eminent philosopher

This groundbreaking international bestseller lays to rest many myths about the Holocaust: that Germans were ignorant of the mass destruction of Jews, that the killers were all SS men, and that those who slaughtered Jews did so reluctantly. Hitler's Willing Executioners provides conclusive evidence that the extermination of European Jewry engaged the energies and enthusiasm of tens of thousands of ordinary Germans. Goldhagen reconstructs the climate of "eliminationist anti-Semitism" that made Hitler's pursuit of his genocidal goals possible and the radical persecution of the Jews during the 1930s popular. Drawing on a wealth of unused archival materials, principally the testimony of the killers themselves, Goldhagen takes us into the killing fields where Germans voluntarily hunted Jews like animals, tortured them wantonly, and then posed cheerfully for snapshots with their victims. From mobile killing units, to the camps, to the death marches, Goldhagen shows how ordinary Germans, nurtured in a society where Jews were seen as unalterable evil and dangerous, willingly followed their beliefs to their logical conclusion. "Hitler's Willing Executioner's is an original, indeed brilliant contribution to the...literature on the Holocaust."--New York Review of Books "The most important book ever published about the Holocaust...Eloquently written, meticulously documented, impassioned...A model of moral and scholarly integrity."--Philadelphia Inquirer