"An overwhelming number of us are lonely," writes Marva Dawn. "Sometimes we are lonely for a specific reason: our spouse has recently died or left us; our children have just gone from home or have been tragically killed; we are fighting a particular battle against illness or suffering the ravages of chemotherapy; we are new in the neighborhood; our values are different from those of our work colleagues; it is a Friday night and all our other single friends have dates. Sometimes our loneliness is a general, pervasive alienation: we just don't feel as if we belong in our place of work, in our community, in our family, even in our church." Our struggle with loneliness often results in a lament directed at God. We might say something like "How long, LORD? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?" When we cry out words like these, we find ourselves praying the words of the Psalms. In My Soul Waits, Dawn guides us through psalms that reveal the burdens of our souls to God, and in turn reveal God's profound, intimate concern for our pain and a promise to abide with us in it. Readers feeling the sting of loneliness will take great comfort in this very personal book. Those who strive to support the lonely among them will take wise counsel from the Scriptures it expounds. All will encounter a renewed hope in the One who lists our tears only to wipe them all away.

Faith and Place takes knowledge of place as a basis for thinking about the relationship between religious belief and our embodied life.
Recent epistemology of religion has appealed to various secular analogues for religious belief - especially analogues drawn from sense perception and scientific theory construction. These approaches tend to overlook the close connection between religious belief and our moral, aesthetic and otherwise engaged relationship to the material world. By taking knowledge of place as a starting point for religious epistemology, Mark Wynn aims to throw into clearer focus the embodied, action-orienting, perception-structuring, and affect-infused character of religious understanding.
This innovative study understands the religious significance of a site in terms of i. its capacity to stand for some encompassing truth about human life; ii. its conservation of historical meanings, where these meanings make a practical claim upon those located at the place at later times; and iii. its directing of the believer's attention to a sacred meaning, through enacted appropriation of the site.
Wynn proposes that the notion of 'God' functions like the notion of a 'genius loci', where the relevant locus is the sum of material reality. He argues that knowledge of God consists in part in a storied and sensuous appreciation of the significance of particular places.

Among the best-known and most esteemed people known from antiquity is the Babylonian king Hammurabi. His fame and reputation are due to the collection of laws written under his patronage. This book offers an innovative interpretation of the Laws of Hammurabi. Ancient scribes would demonstrate their legal flair by composing statutes on a set of traditional cases, articulating what they deemed just and fair. The scribe of the Laws of Hammurabi advanced beyond earlier scribes in composing statutes that manifest systematization and implicit legal principles, and inserted the Laws of Hammurabi into the form of a royal inscription, shrewdly reshaping the genre. This tradition of scribal improvisation on a set of traditional cases continued outside of Mesopotamia. It influenced biblical law and the law of the Hittite empire significantly. The Laws of Hammurabi was also witness to the start of another stream of intellectual tradition. It became the subject of formal commentaries, marking a profound cultural shift. Scribes related to it in ways that diverged from prior attitudes; it became an object of study and of commentary, a genre that names itself as dependent on another text. The famous Laws of Hammurabi is here given the extensive attention it continues to merit.

Because there are more women in the Gospel of Luke than in any other gospel, feminists have given it much attention. In this commentary, Shelly Matthews and Barbara Reid show that feminist analysis demands much more than counting the number of female characters. Feminist biblical interpretation examines how the female characters function in the narrative and also scrutinizes the workings of power with respect to empire, to anti-Judaism, and to other forms of othering. Matthews and Reid draw attention to the ambiguities of the text-both the liberative possibilities and the ways that Luke upholds the patriarchal status quo-and guide readers to empowering reading strategies.

Beloved as "the Little Flower of Jesus," Marie-Franoise-Thrse Martin-or SAINT THRSE OF LISIEUX (1873-1897)-is remembered today for this, her spiritual autobiography. Before her too-young death from tuberculosis at the age of 24, she put down in words her simple yet profound approach to the worship of God, called her "little way," a philosophy of everyday goodness and appreciation of life and nature that anyone may follow. Remarkably, her deep piety grew from her own life-long suffering, from the loss of her mother at age four to her own ill health, and through them her dedication to obedience of and surrender to God's will. A favorite of spiritual seekers, this is a lovely work of devotion and prayfulness.

Myth is a complex but vital component of an understanding of religion, and issues surrounding the modern discipline of mythology are often fraught with difficulty. In Myth: Key Concepts in Religion students will find all the tools they need to achieve an understanding of this complicated topic. Structured around a typical programme of study, Robert Ellwood's accessible introduction covers all the major theories concerning the meaning and interpretation of myth, from structuralist to psychoanalytic, and includes illustrative examples throughout, including modern literary and cinematic myths, from The Lord of the Rings to Star Wars.