In 1860, Damascus was a sleepy provincial capital of the weakening Ottoman Empire, a city defined in terms of its relationship to the holy places of Islam in the Arabian Hijaz and its legacy of Islamic knowledge. Yet by 1918 Damascus had become a seat of Arab nationalism and a would-be modern state capital. How can this metamorphosis be explained? Here Leila Hudson describes the transformation of Damascus. Within a couple of generations the city changed from little more than a way-station on the Islamic pilgrimage routes that had defined the city's place for over a millennium. Its citizens and notables now seized the opportunities made available through transport technology on the eastern Mediterranean coast and in the European economy. Shifts in marriage patterns, class, education and power ensued. But just when the city's destiny seemed irrevocably linked to the Mediterranean world and economy, World War I literally starved the urban centre of Damascus and empowered its Bedouin hinterland. The consequences shaped Syria for the rest of the twentieth century and beyond.

In Healing Marks (Energion Publications, 2012), Dr. Bruce Epperly challenged Christians to take the healings of Jesus seriously as a pattern for how we can become healing communities. Now he turns to the book of Acts as a pattern for the church in the 21st century. He says, “I believe that Acts of the Apostles provides a fluid, open-spirited, and holistic faith for twenty-first century people as well as a vision for congregational transformation and renewal. Anything can happen to those who follow Jesus. Life is adventurous, surprising, and interesting. Worship leads to mission and mission challenges narrow-mindedness and self-imposed limitations. For those who embrace the spirit of Acts of the Apostles, worship will never be boring and every day will be a holy adventure.” This book is not just an exposition of the book of Acts. It is a call to action. But it is more than that. It draws from the lessons of the early church a plan of individual and communal action to live an adventurous life of faith and to change the world. Each chapter includes activities to help you apply the content to your life and mission. Labeled “Transforming Acts” these point to the transforming acts you can take in your personal or congregational life . Acts is a story of a small group of people who set out to do what appeared humanly impossible – change their world. In this book you are invited to become a part of that story, to attempt the humanly impossible, and to bring transformation and renewal to the church and to the entire world.

This volume includes nine essays that move Ezekiel's creative reuse of older materials to the foreground of discussion. The essays highlight the transformation of earlier texts, traditions, and theology in Ezekiel. They explore the diverse ways thatEzekiel reshapes Israel's legal texts, rituals, oracles against foreign nations, royal ideology, conception of the individual, remembrance of the past, and hope for the future. The work concludes by noting the subsequent transformation of Ezekiel inscribal transmission and in the New Testament.

'An outstanding intellectual biography.' Eugene Rogan In 1813, high in the Lebanese mountains, a thirteen-year-old boy watches a solar eclipse. Will it foretell a war, a plague, the death of a prince? Mikha’il Mishaqa’s lifelong search for truth starts here. Soon he’s reading Newtonian science and the radical ideas of Voltaire and Volney: he loses his religion, turning away from the Catholic Church. Thirty years later, as civil war rages in Syria, he finds a new faith – Evangelical Protestantism. His obstinate polemics scandalise his community. Then, in 1860, Mishaqa barely escapes death in the most notorious event in Damascus: a massacre of several thousand Christians. We are presented with a paradox: rational secularism and violent religious sectarianism grew up together. By tracing Mishaqa’s life through this tumultuous era, when empires jostled for control, Peter Hill answers the question: What did people in the Middle East actually believe? It’s a world where one man could be a Jew, an Orthodox Christian and a Sunni Muslim in turn, and a German missionary might walk naked in the streets of Valletta.

The fourth book of the DEATH OF ROME SAGA is a must-read for those who loved the heroism of Gladiator and Spartacus. 687 AD. Expansive and triumphant, the Caliphate has stripped Egypt and Syria from the Byzantine Empire. Farther and farther back, the formerly hegemonic Empire has been pushed - once to the very walls of its capital, Constantinople. But what is all this to old Aelric, now in his nineties, and a refugee from the Empire he's spent his life holding together? No longer the Lord Senator Alaric, Brother Aelric is writing his memoirs in the remote wastes of northern England, and waiting patiently for death. Then a band of northern barbarians turn up outside the monastery - and then another. Before he can draw another breath, Aelric is a prisoner of unknown forces, and headed straight back into the snake pit of Mediterranean hatreds. What awaits him at the end of his long and dangerous journey is a confrontation that decides the fate of all mankind.