Publisher description: Blenkinsopp investigates three forms of biblical Israel's religious leadership, and examines the development and character of these roles and how they functioned in their particular time and place. Based on sociological insights regarding role theory and audience expectations, the book demonstrates how Israel's prophets, priests, and sages represented their own traditions while responding to the political and professional pressures of their unique situations.

The Old Testament is an ancient collection of theological reflections of life with God that the church has claimed as authoritative Scripture. Whereas most introductory books march from Genesis to Malachi, this book engages four important leadership roles across the breadth of the Old Testament canon: king, prophet, priest, and sage. Despite the obvious differences between the societies of ancient Israel and modern America, lessons can be learned from our ancestors in the faith. This engaging volume is intended for people who want to know more about the Old Testament, whether in personal study, church groups, college classrooms, or seminary courses. The book may be used profitably in concert with Theological Themes of the Old Testament: Creation, Covenant, Cultus, and Character (Cascade Books, 2010).

The Old Testament is an ancient collection of theological reflections of life with God that the church has claimed as authoritative Scripture. Whereas most introductory books march from Genesis to Malachi, this book engages four important leadership roles across the breadth of the Old Testament canon: king, prophet, priest, and sage. Despite the obvious differences between the societies of ancient Israel and modern America, lessons can be learned from our ancestors in the faith. This engaging volume is intended for people who want to know more about the Old Testament, whether in personal study, church groups, college classrooms, or seminary courses. The book may be used profitably in concert with Theological Themes of the Old Testament: Creation, Covenant, Cultus, and Character (Cascade Books, 2010).

Aaron Chalmers gives students a unique introduction to the religious and social world of ancient Israel. The first part explores the major religious offices mentioned in the Old Testament, including prophets, priests, sages and kings. As well as considering what these key people said and did, the author traces the process through which one became recognized as a prophet, priest or sage, and where each of these offices were located in ancient Israel. The second part of the book focuses on the beliefs and practices of the common people--the group that made up the majority of ancient Israel s population.

By 1791, the French Revolution had spread to Haïti, where slaves and free blacks alike had begun demanding civil rights guaranteed in the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man. Enter Romaine-la-Prophétesse, a free black Dominican coffee farmer who dressed in women's clothes and claimed that the Virgin Mary was his godmother. Inspired by mystical revelations from the Holy Mother, he amassed a large and volatile following of insurgents who would go on to sack countless plantations and conquer the coastal cities of Jacmel and Léogâne. For this brief period, Romaine counted as his political adviser the white French Catholic priest and physician Abbé Ouvière, a renaissance man of cunning politics who would go on to become a pioneering figure in early American science and medicine. Brought together by Catholicism and the turmoil of the revolutionary Atlantic, the priest and the prophetess would come to symbolize the enlightenment ideals of freedom and a more just social order in the eighteenth-century Caribbean. Drawing on extensive archival research, Terry Rey offers a major contribution to our understanding of Catholic mysticism and traditional African religious practices at the time of the Haitian Revolution and reveals the significant ways in which religion and race intersected in the turbulence and triumphs of revolutionary France, Haïti, and early republican America.

Does the failure of the conventional idea of God spell the end of the Christian tradition? Or does it simply mean the end of conventional Christian doctrine? Christianity without God affirms the latter, treating Christian culture as a living and evolving stream. In this cogently argued book, Lloyd Geering brings the resources of his deep scholarship to look at what the world really needs from contemporary religion. His inspiration is the cultivation of the wisdom of Christianity, not a dependence on beliefs about a supernatural saviour.