Dr. Faustus is a great Elizabethan tragedy by Christopher Marlow originally published in 1600. The story is based on an earlier anonymous classic German legend involving worldly ambition, black magic and surrender to the devil. It remains one of the most famous plays of the English Renaissance. Dr. John Faustus, a brilliant, well-respected German doctor grows dissatisfied with the limits of human knowledge - logic, medicine, law, and religion, and decides that he has learned all that can be learned by conventional means. What is left for him, he thinks, but magic. His friends instruct him in the black arts, and he begins his new career as a magician by summoning up Mephastophilis, a devil. Despite Mephastophilis’s warnings about the horrors of hell, Faustus tells the devil to return to his master, Lucifer, with an offer of Faustus’s soul in exchange for twenty-four years of service from Mephastophilis. On the final night before the expiration of the twenty-four years, Faustus is overcome by fear and remorse. He begs for mercy, but it is too late. At midnight, a host of devils appears and carries his soul off to hell. Marlowe’s dramatic interpretation of the Faust legend is a theatrical masterpiece. With immense poetic skill, and psychological insight that greatly influenced the works of William Shakespeare and other dramatists, Dr. Faustus combines soaring poetry, psychological depth, and grand stage spectacle. Marlowe created powerful scenes that invest the work with tragic dignity, among them the doomed man’s calling upon Christ to save him and his ultimate rejection of salvation for the embrace of Helen of Troy.

Shannon's a fallen angel. Hunted. Hiding. Her crime? She'd rather live on earth with humans--and exercise free will--than blindly serve a god she's never met. On the streets, Shannon keeps her wings tucked inside a hollowed out backpack and taps the will of young men. Nothing harmful. Just enough to get what she needs--until she meets George, an angel-obsessed artist, in Richmond, Virginia. Peter Arrowsmith is in charge of seeing to the Problem of the fallen, and he's closing in on Shannon. Trouble is, Peter's slipping into an entanglement of his own with Bethanie, a beautiful, compulsive liar. As Shannon flees and Peter pursues, they draw a group of misfits into their deadly battle. But as both angels and humans will learn, love can make a tragedy or a farce of even divinely inspired plans.

What are angels? Where were they first encountered? Can we distinguish angels from gods, fairies, ghosts, and aliens? And why do they remain so popular? This Very Short Introduction investigates stories and speculations about angels in religions old and new, in art, literature, film, and the popular imagination.

This text poses the question "what is theology?" and goes on to discuss issues of methodology, the relation of theology to other disciplines and different theological perspectives. It also investigates topics in the fields of philosophical theology (human existence; revelation; the language of theology; and Christianity and other religions), symbolic theology (triune God; doctrines of creation; the problem of evil and suffering; the person of Jesus Christ; and eschatology) and applied theology (the Church; ministry and mission; word and the sacraments; worship and prayer; and ethics).

This comprehensive classic textbook represents the most recent approaches to the biblical world by surveying Palestine's social, political, economic, religious and ecological changes from Palaeolithic to Roman eras. Designed for beginners with little knowledge of the ancient world, and with copious illustrations and charts, it explains how and why academic study of the past is undertaken, as well as the differences between historical and theological scholarship and the differences between ancient and modern genres of history writing. Classroom tested chapters emphasize the authenticity of the Bible as a product of an ancient culture, and the many problems with the biblical narrative as a historical source. Neither "maximalist" nor "minimalist'" it is sufficiently general to avoid confusion and to allow the assignment of supplementary readings such as biblical narratives and ancient Near Eastern texts. This new edition has been fully revised, incorporating new graphics and English translations of Near Eastern inscriptions. New material on the religiously diverse environment of Ancient Israel taking into account the latest archaeological discussions brings this book right up to date.