What does it mean to be gay ... and a Christian? Beginning with how the Bible describes the Church, author Nate Collins outlines a vision for community life that challenges Christians to examine obstacles that inhibit spiritual unity. This new vision calls straight and non-straight believers alike to patterns of Christian obedience that respect and honor their similarities and differences.In addition, Collins provides a theological framework for understanding how Genesis 1-2 describes both gender and sexuality. He then unpacks biblical concepts like desire, lust, and temptation, and applies them to modern constructs like sexual attraction and orientation.Collins explores the theme of identity, focusing on facets of personal identity that are central to the experience of Christian gender minorities. He looks at what Scripture says about the formation and function of Christian identity, highlighting several theological and sociological tensions. Collins writes for believers who have a traditional sexual ethic and provides a compelling vision of gospel flourishing for gay, lesbian, and other same-sex attracted individuals.

New Testament students have not always been well served by study of the historical Jesus, which tends to segregate Jesus from his significance vis-à-vis Israel’s scriptures and God’s agenda as this is developed among the New Testament writers in the living context of a faith community’s memory. The witness of scripture does in fact help us remember Jesus well. From beginning to end, the Bible tells the story of God putting God’s family back together. Its plot develops in multiple, sometimes competing, ways. It exhibits the full range of human emotions and, perhaps surprisingly, it claims that these are also God’s emotions. But on every page, we hear the call of a God whose family has chosen an early inheritance instead of an intimate relationship. That God – pictured as a parent, often a father – beckons God’s children, inviting them to return and to sit at the table, clothed by mercy and affirmed as God’s very family.

An Edgar Award Finalist: A lost teen allows a friend to draw him into a suicidal game Stanley chose the house carefully. It has 3 chimneys and a perfect lawn. Stanley knows it’s nicer than any place he will ever live—and tonight, he’s breaking in. His friend Jared calls it a game. Sneak in, steal something, and get out. You’ll be invisible in the darkness, Jared promises. You’ll get high on fear. But when the homeowner awakes during the break-in, Stanley’s not invisible, and the fear tastes like ash in his mouth. The man has a gun, and Stanley escapes just before the bullets start to fly. Jared says Stanley did pretty well for a 1st-timer; he’ll have to try again. Soon Stanley begins to understand the lure of danger, and as Jared draws him closer and closer to the brink, he learns the games have only just begun.

The Swallows and Amazons is a series of twelve adventure novels set in the interwar period, involving group adventures by children, mainly in the school holidays and mainly in England. They revolve around outdoor activities, especially sailing. The series begins with the Walker children from London, who stay at a lakeside farm in the school holidays, sail a dinghy named Swallow, while the local Blackett girls, living on the opposite shore, have one named Amazon. The Walkers see themselves as explorers, while the Blacketts declare themselves pirates. They clash on an island in the lake, make friends, and have a series of adventures that weave tales of pirates and exploration into everyday life in rural England. Table of Contents: Swallows and Amazons Swallowdale Peter Duck Winter Holiday Coot Club Pigeon Post We Didn't Mean To Go To Sea Secret Water The Big Six Missee Lee The Picts and the Martyrs: Or Not Welcome At All Great Northern?

The character of the Creole woman—the descendant of settlers or slaves brought up on the colonial frontier—is a familiar one in nineteenth-century French, British, and American literature. In Creole Crossings, Carolyn Vellenga Berman examines the use of this recurring figure in such canonical novels as Jane Eyre, Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Indiana, as well as in the antislavery discourse of the period. "Creole" in its etymological sense means "brought up domestically," and Berman shows how the campaign to reform slavery in the colonies converged with literary depictions of family life. Illuminating a literary genealogy that crosses political, familial, and linguistic lines, Creole Crossings reveals how racial, sexual, and moral boundaries continually shifted as the century's writers reflected on the realities of slavery, empire, and the home front. Berman offers compelling readings of the "domestic fiction" of Honoré de Balzac, Charlotte Brontë, Maria Edgeworth, Harriet Jacobs, George Sand, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and others, alongside travel narratives, parliamentary reports, medical texts, journalism, and encyclopedias. Focusing on a neglected social classification in both fiction and nonfiction, Creole Crossings establishes the crucial importance of the Creole character as a marker of sexual norms and national belonging.

Scientist, teacher, author, and champion of the natural world, Dr. Kenneth S. Norris reveals the insights gained over a lifetime devoted to learning and teaching about the natural world and human nature, and the global environmental crisis we've helped to bring upon ourselves.