During the early nineteenth century, schools for the deaf appeared in the United States for the first time. These schools were committed to the use of the sign language to educate deaf students. Manual education made the growth of the deaf community possible, for it gathered deaf people together in sizable numbers for the first time in American history. It also fueled the emergence of Deaf culture, as the schools became agents of cultural transformations. Just as the Deaf community began to be recognized as a minority culture, in the 1850s, a powerful movement arose to undo it, namely oral education. Advocates of oral education, deeply influenced by the writings of public school pioneer Horace Mann, argued that deaf students should stop signing and should start speaking in the hope that the Deaf community would be abandoned, and its language and culture would vanish. In this revisionist history, Words Made Flesh explores the educational battles of the nineteenth century from both hearing and deaf points of view. It places the growth of the Deaf community at the heart of the story of deaf education and explains how the unexpected emergence of Deafness provoked the pedagogical battles that dominated the field of deaf education in the nineteenth century, and still reverberate today.

The author shows that "the ability to listen, to name one's feelings, to face conflict, to accept oneself, and speak clearly and honestly, are as closely related to witnessing the gospel as they are to expressing good mental health."

Most theologians believe that in the human life of Jesus of Nazareth, we encounter God. Yet how the divine and human come together in the life of Jesus still remains a question needing exploring. The Council of Chalcedon sought to answer the question by speaking of one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, the same perfect in divinity and also perfect in humanity, the same truly God and truly a human being. But ever since Chalcedon, the theological conversation on Christology has implicitly put Christs divinity and humanity in competition. While ancient (and not-so-ancient) Christologies from above focus on Christs divinity at the expense of his humanity, modern Christologies from below subsume his divinity into his humanity. What is needed, says Ian A. McFarland, is a Chalcedonianism without reserve, which not only affirms the humanity and divinity of Christ but also treats them as equal in theological significance. To do so, he draws on the ancient christological language that points to Christs nature, on the one hand, and his hypostasis, or personhood, on the other. And with this, McFarland begins one of the most creative and groundbreaking theological explorations into the mystery of the incarnation undertaken in recent memory.

In the fourth century a new narrative genre captured the imagination of the faithful--the accounts of the lives of Christian saints. Kleinberg argues that these stories were more than edifying entertainment. By retelling the story of virtue and salvation, by expanding the religious imagination of the West, they were reshaping Christianity itself.

What happens when persons living in the womb are declared to be legal non-persons? What is transgenderism? And why are so many countries changing the meaning of words such as Female, Husband and Mother? The Flesh Made Word makes visible the invisible thread which connects a redefinition of legal marriage to transgenderism to abortion. In doing so it shows that when the physically impossible is made legally possible the effect is that the physically possible is made legally impossible. By examining the relationships between body, mind, language and law, we can come to see that behind the curtain of language our body has been ushered off the legal stage. For legal purposes we no longer have a sex. From here on in we have only a gender.