Herein you will find a collection of sermon stories that speak to the modern era with fresh insights and occasional humor. Many of them are the personal experiences of the collector who brought them together. Each narrative is paired with an appropriate biblical text to elicit insight and some homiletical commentary is also provided. The stories are separated into historical memories, folklore, and fables. Some narratives come from the Jewish tradition, a source that we Christians too seldom consider. May you find some to be heartwarming, others pointed in meaning, and still others evoking new insights.

Carefully curated and translated by Dr. Manijeh Rabiei, Persian Garden of Imagination breathes new life into these ancient texts that shed light on Iranian culture and mythology. The literary stories of Iran contain complex topics and symbols related to the region’s classic, pre-Abrahamic faiths, including Zoroastrianism, Mithraism, and mysticism. This collection comprises thirty stories that began in the oral storytelling tradition from before the written word was created. For millennia, the folklore found in this book was used as a way for people to understand their fears, to express their culture’s worldview, and to interpret the deep and fascinating history of their region. Filled with beautiful and evocative literary art, tales of deception, and stories of enduring love, Persian Garden of Imagination captures the essence of the Persian belief system and provides essential reading for anyone craving knowledge about this mesmerizing part of the world.

This comprehensive collection of folk hero tales builds on the success of the first edition by providing readers with expanded contextual information on story characters from the Americas to Zanzibar. Despite the tremendous differences between cultures and ethnicities across the world, all of them have folk heroes and heroines—real and imagined—that have been represented in tales, legends, songs, and verse. These stories persist through time and space, over generations, even through migrations to new countries and languages. This encyclopedia is a one-stop source for broad coverage of the world's folk hero tales. Geared toward high school and early college readers, the book opens with an overview of folk heroes and heroines that provides invaluable context and then presents a chronology. The book is divided into two main sections: the first provides entries on the major types and themes; the second addresses specific folk tale characters organized by continent with folk hero entries organized alphabetically. Each entry provides cross references as well as a list of further readings. Continent sections include a bibliography for additional research. The book concludes with an alphabetical list of heroes and an index of hero types.

Learn all about Middle Eastern culture and how to use that literature in K-12 schools to promote understanding. • Use this one-stop resource for information on Middle Eastern culture and literature • Share this resource with classroom teachers to make your school more inclusive and culturally responsive • Chapters provide background information about the countries and peoples of the place, literature related to the region and to the major ethnic groups of the region, guidelines for selecting children's and young adult literature about the region, and strategies for incorporation This new resource includes an annotated bibliography of children's and young adult books with evaluations, reading/interest level, review sources, awards/prizes, and Accelerated Reader/Reading Counts availability.

Contemporary misogyny and antisemitism have their roots in the demonization of women and Jews in medieval Christendom. In church art and mass preaching, the construct of the devil as an outcast from heaven and the source of all evil was linked both to the conception of women as sensual and malicious figures betraying man's soul on its arduous journey to salvation and to the notion of Jews as treacherous dissidents in the Christian landscape. These stereotypes, widely disseminated for over three hundred years, persist today. The exemplum, or cautionary story incorporated into preachers' manuals and popular homilies, was an important mode of religious teaching for clerical and lay folk alike. Sermon narratives drawn from Hindu mythology, Arab storytelling, and secular folktales entertained all classes of medieval society while dispensing theological and cultural instruction. In Devils, Women, and Jews, the vital genre of the medieval sermon story is, for the first time, made accessible to specialists and nonspecialists alike. Rendered in modern English, the tales provide an invaluable primary resource for medievalists, anthropologists, psychologists, folklorists, and students of women's studies and Judaica. Critical introductions and explanatory headnotes contextualize the tales, and comprehensive endnotes and a bibliography allow readers to follow up analogue and subject studies in their own areas of interest.