An Israeli lieutenant and a Palestinian woman find themselves on opposite sides when rioting breaks out after the lieutenant refuses to let the woman and her sick child through a checkpoint. The child's grandfather, a prominent Palestinian American surgeon, must also make choices as the violence continues.

Sanctified Aggression allies itself neither with the easy assumption that religions are by definition violent (and that only the secular/humanist/humane can offer a place of refuge from the ravages of religious authority) nor with the equally facile opposing view that religion expresses the "best" of human aspirations and that this best is always capable of diffusing or sublating the worst. Rather, it works from the premise that biblical, Jewish and Christian vocabularies continue to resonate, inspire and misfire. Some of the essays here explore how these vocabularies and symbols have influenced, or resonate with, events such as the massacre of Jews in Jedwabne, Poland (1941), the Rwandan Massacre (1994), the tragedy at Columbine High School (1999) and the emergence of the "Phineas Priesthood" of white supremacists in North America. Other contributors examine how themes of martyrology, sacrifice and the messianic continue to circulate and mutate in literature, music, drama and film. The collective conclusion is that it is not possible to control biblical and religious violence by simply identifying canonical trouble-spots, then fencing them off with barbed wire or holding peace summits around them. Nor is it always possible to draw clear lines between problem and non-problem texts, witnesses and perpetrators, victims and aggressors or "reality" and "art".

Considered the best book ever written about Haiti, now updated with a New Introduction, “After the Earthquake,” features first hand-reporting from Haiti weeks after the 2010 earthquake. Through a series of personal journeys, each interwoven with scenes from Haiti’s extraordinary past, Amy Wilentz brings to life this turbulent and fascinating country. Opening with her arrival just days before the fall of Haiti’s President-for-Life, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, Wilentz captures a country electric with the expectation of change: markets that bustle by day explode with gunfire at night; outlaws control country roads; farmers struggle to survive in a barren land; and belief in voodoo and the spirits of the ancestors remains as strong as ever. The Rainy Season demystifies Haiti—a country and a people in cruel and capricious times. From the rebel priest Father Aristide and the street boys under his protection to the military strongmen who pass through the revolving door of power into the gleaming white presidential palace—and the buzzing international press corps members who jet in for a coup and leave the minute it’s over—Wilentz’s Haiti haunts the imagination.

The essays collected here have in common the concept of boundaries, which is defined according to discipline, and movement through boundaries. The essays cover a range of topics and periods. The first section consists of literary approaches to boundaries, ranging widely in subject matter from Norman drama to sixteenth-century goodnight ballads. The second section includes mainly historical studies of such topics as social mobility in Geoffrey of Monmouth's twelfth-century History of the Kings of Britain, post-1453 Byzantine identity, and Milanese Renaissance musical genres. Individually and as a group, the essays contribute fresh insights into well-known and some less familiar works of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Contributions include: Linda Georgianna, 'Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae: lessons in self-fashioning for the bastards of Britain'; Robert L.A. Clark, 'Eve and her audience in the Anglo-Norman Adam'; John Damon, 'Seinte Cecile and Cristes owene knyghtes: violence, resignation, and resistance in the Second Nun's Tale'; Elaine R. Miller, 'Linguistic identity in the Middle Ages: the case of the Spanish Jews'; Emily Steiner, 'Medieval documentary poetics and Langland's authorial identity'; Patricia Marby Harrison, 'Religious rhetoric as resistance in Early Modern goodnight ballads'; Jami Ake, 'Mary Wroth's willow poetics: revising female desire in Pamphilia to Amphilanthus'; Annabel Patterson, 'The human face divine: identity and the portrait from Locke to Chaucer'; Jonathan Harris, 'Common language and the common good: aspects of identity among Byzantine emigres in Renaissance Italy'; Nolan Gasser, 'Beata et venerabilis Virgo: music and devotion in Renaissance Milan'; Elspeth Whitney, 'Sex, lies, and depositions: Pierre de Lancre's vision of the witches' sabbath'; Laura Hunt Yungblut, 'Straungers and aliaunts: the un-English among the English in Elizabethan England'.

From the acclaimed author of "A Bed for the Night," named one of the best nonfiction books of the year by the "Los Angeles Times," comes a provocative argument against armed humanitarian or human rights intervention.