The belief that Native Americans might belong to the fabled "lost tribes of Israel"-Israelites driven from their homeland around 740 BCE-took hold among Anglo-Americans and Indigenous peoples in the United States during its first half century. In Lost Tribes Found, Matthew W. Dougherty explores what this idea can tell us about religious nationalism in early America. Some white Protestants, Mormons, American Jews, and Indigenous people constructed nationalist narratives around the then-popular idea of "Israelite Indians." Although these were minority viewpoints, they reveal that the story of religion and nationalism in the early United States was more complicated and wide-ranging than studies of American "chosen-ness" or "manifest destiny" suggest. Telling stories about Israelite Indians, Dougherty argues, allowed members of specific communities to understand the expanding United States, to envision its transformation, and to propose competing forms of sovereignty. In these stories both settler and Indigenous intellectuals found biblical explanations for the American empire and its stark racial hierarchy. Lost Tribes Found goes beyond the legal and political structure of the nineteenth-century U.S. empire. In showing how the trope of the Israelite Indian appealed to the emotions that bound together both nations and religious groups, the book adds a new dimension and complexity to our understanding of the history and underlying narratives of early America.

In 1988 Virginia Fabella from the Philippines and Mercy Amba Oduyoye from Ghana coedited With Passion and Compassion: Third world Women Doing Theology, based on the work of the Women's Commission of the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians (EATWOT). The book has been widely used as an important resource for understanding women's liberation theologies, in Africa, Asia, and Latin America emerging out of women's struggles for justice in church and society. More than twenty years have passed and it is time to bring out a new collection of essays to signal newer developments and to include emerging voices.

Divided into four partsContext and Theology; Scripture; Christology; and Body, Sexuality, and Spiritualitythese carefully selected essays paint a vivid picture of theological developments among indigenous women and other women living in the global South who face poverty, violence, and war and yet find abundant hope through their faith.