What can we possibly learn about our relationships to others from reading the story of an ancient father who raised a knife to slaughter his beloved only son? Contemporary Christian ethicists, faced with such dilemmas, are often tempted to treat the Hebrew Bible in a limited, distanced, and even dismissive way. Yet Emily Arndt here argues that ancient scriptures can be a vital resource for Christian ethical studies today. Focusing on a close analysis of the akedah the story of Abraham s near-sacrifice of Isaac she demonstrates the power of even the most troubling and uncomfortable Old Testament narratives to teach valuable ethical lessons. Placing ourselves in relationship to such complex, perhaps un-resolvable, and always challenging sacred texts, she says, is in itself a practice that can help us learn to relate authentically and ethically to others. This is a fully formed, sophisticated, and beautifully written book, offering an important contribution to the field of theological ethics. . . . A fitting tribute to a scholarly career that was cut short all too soon. Jean Porter (from the foreword)

This entry in the BEA Electronic Media Research Series, born out of the April 2017 BEA Research Symposium, takes a look at video games, outlining the characteristics of them as cognitive, emotional, physical, and social demanding technologies, and introduces readers to current research on video games. The diverse array of contributors in this volume offer bleeding-edge perspectives on both current and emerging scholarship. The chapters here contain radical approaches that add to the literature on electronic media studies generally and video game studies specifically. By taking such a forward-looking approach, this volume aims to collect foundational writings for the future of gaming studies.

From the author of the award-winning The Master Switch, who coined the term "net neutrality”—a revelatory, ambitious and urgent account of how the capture and re-sale of human attention became the defining industry of our time. "Dazzling." —Financial Times Ours is often called an information economy, but at a moment when access to information is virtually unlimited, our attention has become the ultimate commodity. In nearly every moment of our waking lives, we face a barrage of efforts to harvest our attention. This condition is not simply the byproduct of recent technological innovations but the result of more than a century's growth and expansion in the industries that feed on human attention. Wu’s narrative begins in the nineteenth century, when Benjamin Day discovered he could get rich selling newspapers for a penny. Since then, every new medium—from radio to television to Internet companies such as Google and Facebook—has attained commercial viability and immense riches by turning itself into an advertising platform. Since the early days, the basic business model of “attention merchants” has never changed: free diversion in exchange for a moment of your time, sold in turn to the highest-bidding advertiser. Full of lively, unexpected storytelling and piercing insight, The Attention Merchants lays bare the true nature of a ubiquitous reality we can no longer afford to accept at face value.