When organizations are committed to gender equality, what gets in the way of their achieving it? How and why do well-intentioned people end up reinforcing sexism? Katie Lauve-Moon examines these questions by focusing on religious congregations that separated from their mainline denomination in order to support women's equal leadership. In Preacher Woman, Lauve-Moon concentrates on congregations affiliated with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (CBF). Women are enrolling in Baptist seminaries at almost equal rates as men and CBF identifies the equal leadership of women as a core component of its collective identity, yet only five percent of CBF congregations employ women as solo senior pastors. Preacher Woman explores how congregations can be committed to ideas of gender parity while still falling short in practice. Lauve-Moon investigates how institutional sexism is upheld through both unconscious and conscious biases. In doing so, she demonstrates that addressing issues of sexism and gender inequality within organizations must extend beyond good intentions and inclusive policies.

As a missionary in Kashmir, India, in the early 20th century, Cecil Tyndale-Biscoe polarised opinion through his unconventional educational methods and his attempt to change the social order of a society steeped in old traditions. He was a man of contradictions: a Christian and a boxer, a missionary who made very few converts, a staunch supporter of British imperialism and a friend of Kashmir's political reformers. Aged 27 when he became the Principal of the Church Missionary Society's school in Kashmir, his vision was of a school in action, vigorously involved in the affairs and problems of the city of Srinagar. He made many enemies in the Hindu establishment, but earned the respect of two successive Hindu Maharajas and the Muslim leader who replaced them. Offering an insight into the history and religion of Kashmir, this book describes Tyndale-Biscoe's unusual approach to education and explores the many challenges he had to overcome in his work as a missionary in the early 20th century.

In Righteous Gentiles: Religion, Identity, and Myth in John Hagee's Christians United for Israel, Sean Durbin offers a critical analysis of America's largest Pro-Israel organization, Christians United for Israel, along with its critics and collaborators. Although many observers focus on Christian Zionism's influence on American foreign policy, or whether or not Christian Zionism is 'truly' religious, Righteous Gentiles takes a different approach. Through his creative and critical analysis of Christian Zionists' rhetoric and mythmaking strategies, Durbin demonstrates how they represent their identities and political activities as authentically religious. At the same time, Durbin examines the role that Jews and the state of Israel play as vehicles or empty signifiers through which Christian Zionist truth claims are represented as manifestly real.

We increasingly recognize that Paul did not write his letter to the Romans primarily out of doctrinal concerns. Paul B. Fowler presses that insight home in this attentive, yet eminently readable, study of the Letter's structure. The principles of Fowler's reading are that rhetorical questions in Romans 3?11 structure the argument, not as responses to criticism but as Paul's careful guiding of the reader, and that these chapters, like the paraenesis in Romans 12?15, address specific circumstances in Rome. Careful attention to the rhetorical structure of the letter points to tensions between Jew and Gentile that aggravate the already precarious situation of the Roman congregation. In the course of his argument, Fowler explodes the common conceptions that Paul employs diatribal technique to answer objections and that he is primarily engaged in a debate with Jews. In short, Fowler demonstrates that the apostle is not writing defensively, but responding with sensitivity to the volatile atmosphere caused by Claudius's expulsion of some Jews from Rome. The book includes an appendix on rhetorical devices and another on epistolary formulas in Paul's letters.