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  Racial Shorthand: Coded Discrimination Contested in Social Media

  Cruz Medina and Octavio Pimentel

  This collection is called Racial Shorthand because it sets out to unpack the dominant narratives embedded in media representations. These misrepresentations reinforce how people of color are framed by racist discourses and undermine the multimodal composing by communities of color, further erasing the rhetorical, oral, and aural traditions of these communities. Contributions to this digital collection include chapters analyzing racist discourse in social media and chapters that highlight multimodal and digital composing by people of color. This collection disrupts the dominant shorthand by demonstrating how communities of color produce multimodal projects and leverage the affordances of social media in ways that extend the rhetorical traditions and literacy practices of these communities.

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  Rebels 79: The Iconoclast, the Prophet, the Commando and the Bleeding Heart

  Michael Brillman

  Some people just own it. What is it? Transcendent charisma and the ability to articulate the unsung. In the 1970s, four musicians blurred the lines between the sacred and the profane. Come journey from Lagos and Kingston to New York City and London to live inside the raw imagination of that decade.

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  Speeches for the Dead: Essays on Plato's Menexenus

  Harold Parker and Jan Maximilian Robitzsch

  The Menexenus, in spite of the dearth of scholarly attention it has traditionally received compared to other Platonic texts, is an important dialogue for any consideration of Plato's views on political philosophy, history, and rhetoric - to say nothing of the dialogue's contribution to the study of civic ideology and institutions, natural law theory, and Plato's notion of race. Speeches for the Dead unites the contributions of scholars working on diverse aspects of the dialogue, growing out of a one-day workshop on the same subject at the University of Pennsylvania organized by the editors. In offering a variety of perspectives on the Menexenus, the volume is the very first of its kind in any language. In addition, the volume contains an up-to-date bibliography of scholarship in English, French, German, and Italian. This makes the book a definitive guide and ideal starting point for advanced students and scholars looking for further information about the dialogue.

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  Stay With Me Awhile

  Barbara Means Fraser and Mary E. Johnson

  Every milestone in life has a story. When a child is born, we tell the story. When we celebrate our vows in marriage, we tell the story. When we begin retirement, we tell the story. But there is one milestone story we seldom tell—the story of our experience of being present for the death of a loved one. Many times these are not easy stories to tell, so we don’t often ask about them, and the stories are left untold. When death is anticipated, many societies, cultures and family systems expect that loved ones will be present. The vigil, or devotional watching, is an intentional gathering. Stay With Me Awhile is a compilation of vigil stories from across cultures, religions, political views and socio-economic circumstances. The stories were collected over a seven-year period, and nearly 100 people shared their experiences. Each story was entirely unique, and many of the scenes described were snapshots of lifelong relationships played out as the end of life approached. At the talkbacks following every performance during the premiere run of Stay With Me Awhile, nearly every audience member stayed for the discussion and took advantage of the opportunity to engage with what they had just seen and experienced. These vigil stories are rooted in our community and represent a rich vein of common, human experience, and sharing these stories can enrich our lives together.

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  Stick Together and Come Back Home

  Patrick Lopez-Aguado

  In Stick Together and Come Back Home, Patrick Lopez-Aguado examines how what happens inside a prison affects what happens outside of it. Following the experiences of seventy youth and adults as they navigate juvenile justice and penal facilities before finally going back home, he outlines how institutional authorities structure a “carceral social order” that racially and geographically divides criminalized populations into gang-associated affiliations. These affiliations come to shape one’s exposure to both violence and criminal labeling, and as they spill over the institutional walls they establish how these unfold in high-incarceration neighborhoods as well, revealing the insidious set of consequences that mass incarceration holds for poor communities of color.

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  Stop Selling and Start Leading: How to Make Extraordinary Sales Happen

  Barry Z. Posner, James M. Kouzes, and Deb Calvert

  Make extraordinary sales happen!

  In the Age of the Customer, sales effectiveness depends mightily on the buyer experience. Despite nearly-universal agreement on the need for creating value in every step of the buyer’s journey, sellers continue to struggle with how to create that value and connect meaningfully with buyers. New research bridges the gap and reveals the behavioral blueprint for sellers that makes buyers more likely to meet with them — and more likely to buy from them.

  In Stop Selling & Start Leading, you’ll discover that the very same behaviors that make leaders more effective also work to make sellers more effective, too. This critical shift in the selling mindset, and in the sales role itself, is the key to boosting your overall sales effectiveness.

  • Inspire, challenge, and enable buyers

  • Change your behavior to build trust and increase sales

  • Step into your leadership potential

  • See yourself the way your buyers do

  • Feel good about selling again

  When you’re aiming for quota attainment and real connections with buyers, this book gives you the confidence and skills you need.

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  The Crucifix on Mecca's Front Porch: A Christian's Companion for the Study of Islam

  David Pinault

  This book on Islam has an unusual perspective. It argues that a critically minded examination of Islam can help Christians achieve a deeper appreciation of the unique truths of their own faith. It draws on the author's personal experiences living in Islamic countries and his fieldwork with persecuted Christian-minority communities, especially in Pakistan, Yemen, Egypt, and Indonesia. It includes the author's own original translations of Islamic texts in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu, as well as primary-source materials in Latin that were written by Christian participants in the Crusades.

  The author focuses on Muslim interactions with the Christian tradition. He examines and takes issue with the misguided approach of Christians like Hans Küng and Muslims like Mustafa Akyol, who in the interests of Christian-Muslim rapprochement, minimize theological differences between the two faiths, especially in the area of Christology. Such attempts at rapprochement, he writes, do a profound disservice to both religions.

  Illustrating the Muslim view of Christ with Islamic polemical texts from the eleventh to the twenty-first centuries, the author draws on Hans Urs von Balthasar, and other theologians of kenotic Christology, to show how Islamic condemnations of divine "weakness" and "neediness" can deepen our appreciation of what is most uniquely Christian in our vision of Jesus, as God-made-man, who voluntarily experiences weakness, suffering, and death in solidarity with all human beings.

  A book that's both timely and urgently needed, The Crucifix on Mecca's Front Porch invites readers to reflect on the stark differences between Christianity and Islam and come to a fresh appreciation of the Christian faith.

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  The New Handshake: Online Dispute Resolution and the Future of Consumer Protection

  Colin Rule and Amy J. Schmidtz

  The New Handshake focuses on resolving disputes arising from online transactions. This groundbreaking book proposes a design to provide fast and fair resolutions for low-dollar claims, such as those in most B2C transactions. This revolutionary system is designed to operate independently of the courts, thereby eliminating procedural complexities and choice of law concerns. It can be integrated directly into the websites and provides consumers with free access to remedies.

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  The Student Leadership Challenge: Five Practices for Becoming an Exemplary Leader

  Barry Z. Posner and James M. Kouzes

  Real-world leadership training for real-world students

  The Student Leadership Challenge tailors one of the world’s most respected leadership models to students’ unique needs, and provides a proven pathway to success. Based on The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership, this book merges solid research with personal stories from real-world student leaders to help students develop the critical skills they need to lead both now and after graduation. Useful from high school to graduate school and beyond, these lessons are reinforced by reflective and critical thinking activities to help students internalize important concepts while honestly assessing their own practices. Updated and expanded, this new third edition includes four extra chapters to allow deeper investigation, while broader, deeper, and more vivid examples from real-life students illustrate what student leadership looks like around the world. New discussion delves into the research behind the model, as well as the usefulness of leadership in the transition to post-graduate life.

  What does leadership mean to you? Although it may be difficult to put into words, we all know it when we see it. Effective leaders tend to exhibit a specific set of traits, possess certain skills, and practice particular habits. This book helps you hone your natural talents and shape your path to success as the leader you want to become.

  • Learn The Five Practices of Leadership, and how they help you succeed beyond school
  • Discover how students around the world are exhibiting the best in modern leadership
  • Practice critical leadership techniques and engage in thought-provoking discussion
  • Assess your own potential with the Student Leadership Practices Inventory

  Great leadership is more important than ever before, and students are in a prime position to develop these critical skills. The Student Leadership Challenge provides a comprehensive framework with real-world application to help students become their very best.

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  Writing Flash: How to Craft and Publish Flash Fiction for a Booming Market

  Fred White

  Writing Flash is a fast and informative guide to developing your writing skills and your career in one of fiction’s most challenging genres.

  Flash fiction―the art of the ultra-short story―is a challenging skill-building exercise for any writer. Learning how to compress a story to its most essential elements will make your writing vigorous, evocative, and full of emotion. In Writing Flash, acclaimed writing teacher Fred D. White gives an in-depth introduction to a fascinating genre, complete with exercises to develop and strengthen your flash-writing techniques.

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  A Companion to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

  Christopher M. Nichols and Nancy Unger

  A Companion to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era presents a collection of new historiographic essays covering the years between 1877 and 1920, a period which saw the U.S. emerge from the ashes of Reconstruction to become a world power.

  The single, definitive resource for the latest state of knowledge relating to the history and historiography of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

  Features contributions by leading scholars in a wide range of relevant specialties

  Coverage of the period includes geographic, social, cultural, economic, political, diplomatic, ethnic, racial, gendered, religious, global, and ecological themes and approaches

  In today’s era, often referred to as a “second Gilded Age,” this book offers relevant historical analysis of the factors that helped create contemporary society

  Fills an important chronological gap in period-based American history collections

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  African, Christian, Feminist: The Enduring Search for What Matters

  Teresia Hinga

  For the past two decades, Teresia Hinga has been a leading academic voice in the fields of African Christianity, women in African theology, and gender and ethics in the African context. Gathered here for the first time are Hinga's own selections from her extensive body of work, both previously published and unpublished.
  
  Revealing the breadth and depth of Hinga's scholarly endeavors, this collection is a valuable resource for scholars and students, particularly those working at the intersection of multiple disciplines.

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  A Glossary of Liturgical Terms

  Dennis C. Smolarski SJ and Monsignor Joseph DeGrocco

  The dictionary will support the training and formation efforts of parish and diocesan offices in all areas of pastoral liturgy and will also be of interest to DREs, catechists,and many parishioners in adult formation classes. Nothing of this kind exists at the moment. The closest is a much longer, more complicated and expensive dictionary published by Catholic Book Publishing. The book in which this material appeared previously contained additional chapters of interest only to professional liturgists and its title did not state clearly what it contained. A new presentation of only the dictionary material with a clearer title will serve the pastoral needs of many liturgical ministers in training as well as individuals interested in the liturgy. Though it will not be a great money-maker, the book should be a modest, steady seller and will fill a real need in the pastoral liturgy world.

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  A Primer on Innovation Theology: Responding to Change in the Company of God

  Lanny Vincent

  What does innovation have in common with theology? More than you might think. Both are ways people attempt to make sense. Both have to do with value and knowledge creation. Both have much to say about change and how we respond to it (or not). And both affect human culture and physical realities with implications for generations to come. A Primer on Innovation Theology explores the territory where innovating and theology intersect. At this intersection, the Primer pours a theological foundation for innovators who aim to create new value for the common good, realize sustainable more than acquisitive value, and pursue generous and just relationships more than merely transactional ones. Adapted from the larger, original volume Innovation Theology: A Biblical Inquiry and Exploration, A Primer is intended for lay audiences, especially innovators, intrapreneurs, entrepreneurs, and investors who are theologically curious about their own roles and responsibilities.Change is unrelenting. How we choose to respond can insolate, insulate, or innovate. If we choose to innovate, our aim is to create new value for others. The success and failure of these aims may reveal whether we are innovating where the plumb lines of God may be more important than the bottom lines of our efforts, in other words, in the company of God.

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  ARM Assembly for Embedded Applications (3rd Edition)

  Daniel W. Lewis

  ARM Assembly for Embedded Applications is intended to be used as a textbook in a sophomore level undergraduate course for students majoring in computer science, computer engineering, or electrical engineering. The book approaches programming in ARM assembly language by writing functions in assembly that are called from a main program written in C. The primary goal of the text is to get students engaged as early as possible. Rather than spending several weeks going over the architecture and detailed instruction set of the processor before having them write programs, the text gets students programming very early in the course by introducing the C/Assembly interface (i.e., function call, parameter passing, return values, register usage conventions) before going into arithmetic, bit manipulation, making decisions, or writing loops. Programming assignments are supported by a free Integrated Development Environment that runs under Microsoft Windows, project templates and a run-time library for displaying text, measuring CPU clock cycle times, drawing graphics, and responding to the touch screen of the target platform. Binary number systems and assembly language programming are covered using regular integer arithmetic, saturating integer arithmetic, and floating-point arithmetic. The text includes extensive treatment of bit manipulation, shifting, extracting and inserting data that is stored in a packed format, as well as chapters on inline coding and programming peripheral devices.

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  Authority and Leadership: Values, Religion, Media

  Paul A. Soukup

  This book wrestles with questions of authority and leadership in the digital age, questions that hold particular relevance for religious communication and Church authority. The essays come out of a series of conferences that gathered acadèmic researchers, theologians, and communication scholars together from around the world. Using different methodologies and perspectives, the writers provide both historical, theoretical, and practical examination of authority and leadership. These essays originated in several academic conferences. Several of them come from the "Theocom 2015" [Theology and Communication in dialogue] meeting hosted by Santa Clara University in California and sponsored by the Pontifical Council for Social Communication, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops Communication Department, the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, and Santa Clara University. Others were directly asked from the Blanquerna Observatory on Media, Religion and Culture to several Global experts on Authority and Religion around the world.

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  Biblical Hebrew Vocabulary by Conceptual Categories: A Student's Guide to Nouns in the Old Testament

  J. David Pleins

  Biblical Hebrew Vocabulary by Conceptual Categories by J. David Pleins with Jonathan Homrighausen is an innovative study reference intended for both introductory and advanced students of the Hebrew language to help them understand and remember vocabulary based on logical categories of related words. Since our minds acquire and recall language by making associations between related words it is only natural that we would study language in this way. By organizing Hebrew vocabulary into logical categories, as opposed to frequency, students can quickly begin to familiarize themselves with entire groups of terms and more readily acquaint themselves with the ranges of meaning of particular Hebrew words.

  This reference tool focuses on nouns in the Old Testament, and includes over 175 word grouping categories including pottery, ships, birds, jewelry, seasons, and many more. For each Hebrew term a definition is given and a reference in the Hebrew Bible appears so readers can see the word in context. For many words additional lexical references are indicated where students can look for further study. Words that hapax legomena (words appearing only once in the Hebrew Bible) are marked with an "H" and words that are rare and appear less than 10 times are marked with an "R." Two helpful appendices equip students for further study, these include 1) a Guide for Further Reading where recommendations are given for helpful resources for studying the larger macro categories and 2) Lists of "cluster verses" where several words in a given category appear together, giving students the ability to see how these words function together in context.

  Biblical Hebrew Vocabulary by Conceptual Categories is intended to move students beyond rote memorization to a more dynamic grasp of Hebrew vocabulary, ultimately equipping them to read with more fluidity and with a deeper and more intuitive grasp of the biblical text.

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  Brazil: Media from the Country of the Future Vol: 13

  Shelia R. Cotten, Laura Robinson, Apryl Williams, and Jeremy Schulz

  Sponsored by the Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology section of the American Sociological Association (CITAMS), this volume assembles the contributions of a dynamic editorial team composed of leading scholars from Brazil and the United States. Volume 13 provides an unparalleled compilation of research on Brazilian media and communication studies guided by the expert hands of prominent scholars from both Brazil and the United States. Over twenty chapters explore five key themes: the new face of news and journalism, social movements and protest, television, cinema, publicity and marketing, and media theory. Selections encompass research on emergent phenomena, as well as studies with a historical or longitudinal dimension, that reflect the Brazilian case as laboratory for exploring the evolving media environment of one of the world’s most fascinating societies.

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  Conscience and Catholic Health Care: From Clinical Contexts to Government Mandates

  David E. DeCosse

  Drawn from a two-day symposium at Santa Clara University, Conscience and Catholic Health Care provides a timely and up-to-date assessment of the Catholic understanding of conscience and how it relates to day-to-day issues in Catholic health care. The contributors explore a wide range of topics, including end-of-life care, abortion and sterilization, and the role of Catholic ethics particularly in hospital settings.
  
  With insights from key figures this book will serve as a useful text and reference for medical students and practitioners as well as a resource for ethics boards and chaplains in Catholic hospitals, most especially those merging with secular health institutions.
  
  In addition to the editors, contributors include Ron Hamel, Anne E. Patrick, Roberto Dell Oro, Lisa Fullam, Kristin E. Heyer, John J. Paris, M. Patrick Moore, Jr., Cathleen Kaveny, Lawrence J. Nelson, Kevin T. FitzGerald, SJ, Gerald Coleman, Margaret R. McLean, Shawnee M. Daniels-Sykes, and Carol Taylor.

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  Contagion, Isolation, and Biopolitics in Victorian London

  Matthew Newsom Kerr

  This book is a history of London’s vast network of fever and smallpox hospitals, built by the Metropolitan Asylums Board between 1870 and 1900. Unprecedented in size and scope, this public infrastructure inaugurated a new technology of disease prevention―isolation. Londoners suffering from infectious diseases submitted themselves to far-reaching forms of surveillance, removal, and detention, which made them legible to science and the state in entirely new ways. Isolation on a mass scale transformed the meaning of urban epidemics and introduced contentious new relationships between health, citizenship, and the spaces of modern governance. Rich in archival sources and images, this engaging book offers innovative analysis at the intersection of preventive medicine and Victorian-era liberalism.

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  Effective Conservation Science: Data Not Dogma

  Michelle Marvier

  This novel text assembles some of the most intriguing voices in modern conservation biology. Collectively they highlight many of the most challenging questions being asked in conservation science today, each of which will benefit from new experiments, new data, and new analyses. The book's principal aim is to inspire readers to tackle these uncomfortable issues head-on. A second goal is to be reflective and consider how the field has reacted to challenges to orthodoxy, and to what extent have or can these challenges advance conservation science. Furthermore, several chapters discuss how to guard against confirmation bias. The overall goal is that this book will lead to greater conservation of ecosystems and biodiversity by harnessing the engine of constructive scientific scepticism in service of better results.

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  Embodiment in Qualitative Research

  Laura L. Ellingson

  Embodiment in Qualitative Research connects critical, interdisciplinary theorizing of embodiment with creative, practical strategies for engaging in embodied qualitative research. Ellingson equips qualitative researchers not only to resist the mind–body split in principle but to infuse their research with the vitality that comes from embracing knowledge production as deeply embedded in sensory experience.

  Grounded in poststructuralist, posthumanist, and feminist perspectives, this innovative book synthesizes current interdisciplinary theories and research on embodiment; explores research examples from across the social sciences, education, and allied health; and features embodied ethnographic tales and evocative moments from everyday life for reflexive consideration. Each chapter offers flexible starting points for doing embodiment actively throughout every stage of qualitative research. An awareness of, and an active engagement with, issues of embodiment enhances scholars’ ability to produce high quality research and enlarges their capacity as public intellectuals to spark positive social change, particularly within marginalized communities. The strategies offered relate to methodologies from across the entire spectrum: from traditional qualitative methods such as grounded theory, critical/theoretical analysis, and discourse analysis, to arts-based research ― including performance, autoethnographic narrative, poetry, and documentary film making.

  Embodiment in Qualitative Research is designed as a resource book for qualitative researchers who want to explore the latest trends in critical theorizing. The writing style will appeal to researchers who seek a bridge between abstract theorizing and pragmatic strategies for producing outstanding qualitative research, as well as to critical scholars who want to integrate embodied ways of knowing with their theorizing. Graduate (and advanced undergraduate) qualitative methods students and early career researchers, as well as advanced scholars seeking to enrich the scope and texture of their work, will find the text inspiring and engaging.

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  Finance for Normal People: How Investors and Markets Behave

  Meir Statman

  Finance for Normal People teaches behavioral finance to people like you and me - normal people, neither rational nor irrational. We are consumers, savers, investors, and managers - corporate managers, money managers, financial advisers, and all other financial professionals.
  
  The book guides us to know our wants-including hope for riches, protection from poverty, caring for family, sincere social responsibility and high social status. It teaches financial facts and human behavior, including making cognitive and emotional shortcuts and avoiding cognitive and emotional errors such as overconfidence, hindsight, exaggerated fear, and unrealistic hope. And it guides us to banish ignorance, gain knowledge, and increase the ratio of smart to foolish behavior on our way to what we want.
  
  These lessons of behavioral finance draw on what we know about us-normal people-including our wants, cognition, and emotions. And they draw on the roles of these factors in saving and spending, portfolio construction, returns we can expect from our investments, and whether we can hope to beat the market.
  
  Meir Statman, a founder of behavioral finance, draws on his extensive research and the research of many others to build a unified structure of behavioral finance. Its foundation blocks include normal behavior, behavioral portfolio theory, behavioral life-cycle theory, behavioral asset pricing theory, and behavioral market efficiency.

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  From Our Hearts to Yours: New Narrative as Contemporary Practice

  Rob Halpern and Robin Tremblay-McGaw

  Literary Nonfiction. LGBTQIA Studies. California Interest. Literary Criticism. FROM OUR HEARTS TO YOURS: NEW NARRATIVE AS CONTEMPORARY PRACTICE offers the first comprehensive anthology of essays regarding New Narrative writing and community practices by a younger generation of practitioners and scholars. As editors Rob Halpern and Robin Tremblay-McGaw write in their introduction, "We are not interested in offering an 'authoritative' canon of New Narrative work, nor are we interested in consolidating an official version of New Narrative's history. Rather, we want to use this as an opportunity to foreground New Narrative as a movement that is still coming into focus, a more or less unstable object that doesn't want to be 'fixed,' codified, or hardened into a limited & limiting list of names and works. One of our motivating questions is Why New Narrative now? Or, What are the stakes of New Narrative for our contemporary moment? In other words, while we remain committed to a set of past works that have been identified as 'New Narrative,' we are equally committed to maintaining New Narrative as a dynamic and ongoing project, one with consequences for our present writing." Roomy in the collective vision that they manifest, the twenty-four contributions to FROM OUR HEARTS TO YOURS address the AIDS crisis, the politics of race, the structural impacts of neo-liberalism on urban space, and the movement across queer, straight and transgender subject positions. Other topics of investigation include the category of queer art, the importance of "feeling," the fiction of personality, the necessity of risk, the function of pedagogy, the strategy of appropriation, as well as scandal and gossip as these topics have been important to New Narrative and its expanded sphere of influence.

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  Gods, Heroes, and Ancestors: An Interreligious Encounter in Eighteenth-Century Vietnam

  Anh Q. Tran

  Though a minority religion in Vietnam, Christianity has been a significant presence in the country since its arrival in the sixteenth-century. Anh Q. Tran offers the first English translation of the recently discovered 1752 manuscript Tam Giáo Chu Vong (The Errors of the Three Religions).
  
  Structured as a dialogue between a Christian priest and a Confucian scholar, this anonymously authored manuscript paints a rich picture of the three traditional Vietnamese religions: Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism. The work explains and evaluates several religious beliefs, customs, and rituals of eighteenth-century Vietnam, many of which are still in practice today. In addition, it contains a trove of information on the challenges and struggles that Vietnamese Christian converts had to face in following the new faith.
  
  Besides its great historical value for studies in Vietnamese religion, language, and culture, Gods, Heroes, and Ancestors raises complex issues concerning the encounter between Christianity and other religions: Christian missions, religious pluralism, and interreligious dialogue.

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  Hard Sentences: Crime Fiction Inspired by Alcatraz

  David James Keaton and Joe Clifford

  Inside these walls, you'll find 19 stories detailing the cold, strange history of The Rock, nightmares real and imagined, including the deadly, acid-induced legacy of Whitey Bulger, Al Capone's final days, as well as dark tales of Robert "Birdman" Stroud, Creepy Karpis, and other less-notorious but equally memorable prisoners. Re-live the Civil War incarnation of Alcatraz, sample the prison's famous mess hall menu, and discover specters of the '70s Native American occupation who still haunt the crumbling halls. Read previously unreleased transcripts outlining wild plans and long-buried secrets. Experience the day-to-day routine of Alcatraz families, which included 80 children, who tried to go about life as usual on the island, every day playing within earshot of murderers. Learn what it takes to squeeze through the bars of a cell and why a man is sometimes better off simply serving his sentence. And find out what really happened in June of 1962 when Frank Morris and the Anglin brothers escaped the prison, only to disappear forever.Over 5,000 tourists travel to Alcatraz every day, drawn to the lonely clang of those steel doors, trying to catch glimpses of the shadows of those 1,500 former prisoners.Now you can take this experience home and read about it in solitude rather than solitary.
  
  
  

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  Holy Hip Hop in the City of Angels (Music of the African Diaspora)

  Christina Zanfagna

  In the 1990s, Los Angeles was home to numerous radical social and environmental eruptions. In the face of several major earthquakes and floods, riots and economic insecurity, police brutality and mass incarceration, some young black Angelenos turned to holy hip hop—a movement merging Christianity and hip hop culture—to “save” themselves and the city. Converting street corners to open-air churches and gangsta rap beats into anthems of praise, holy hip hoppers used gospel rap to navigate complicated social and spiritual realities and to transform the Southland’s fractured terrains into musical Zions. Armed with beats, rhymes, and bibles, they journeyed through black Lutheran congregations, prison ministries, African churches, reggae dancehalls, hip hop clubs, Nation of Islam meetings, and Black Lives Matter marches. Zanfagna’s fascinating ethnography provides a contemporary and unique view of black LA, offering a much-needed perspective on how music and religion intertwine in people's everyday experiences.

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  Innovation Theology: A Biblical Inquiry and Exploration

  Lanny Vincent

  Innovation Theology: A Biblical Inquiry and Exploration invites seminary leaders to explore an uncharted territory--theology for innovating. This unexplored terrain of practical and applied theology holds gems of substantive and practical wisdom for innovating in the marketplace, society, and church. Innovation Theology brings theological perspectives to the challenges of innovating and promises to transform how we make sense of change and where (and why) we choose to innovate. Innovation Theology makes the case that God continues to create and continues to invite us, through change, to co-create new value for others (i.e., innovate). Innovation Theology explores where discovery, invention, and value creation intersect (or not) with the intentions of God. Not to be confused with workplace spirituality, business ethics, or critiques of technology, theology for innovating can encourage scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs to aim their innovating toward the common good, not just in response to the invisible hand of the market. Innovation Theology invites us to make meaning before money, aim for plumb lines before bottom lines, and reattach extrinsic to intrinsic value. The one for whom all things are possible is interested, invested, and engaged in innovating. Are we innovating with him, or not?