Together at the Table is the personal story and public message of Bishop Karen Oliveto, the first openly LGBTQ person to be elected a bishop in The United Methodist Church. Her election was and is controversial, with opponents seeking to have her removed and some even threatening violence against her. The denomination has been debating the inclusion of LGBTQ people for decades and will be gathering in February 2019 to determine whether it can agree to let conferences within the church ordain as they see fit and let congregations decide what weddings to hold or whether conservative and liberal factions will break off from the denominational body. Bishop Oliveto believes that the church can stay togetherthat people of different convictions can remain in communion with one another. Woven together with her own story of coming out and following God's call to ordained ministry is her guidance for how to live together despite differencesby practicing empathy, living with ambiguity, appreciating the diversity of creation, and embracing unity without uniformity.

Over the course of the past 40 years, painter John Wesley has created a remarkably singular body of work whose subject is no less than the American psyche. While many artists of his generation have used popular images to explore the cultural landscape, Wesley has employed comic strip style and compositional rigor to make deeply personal, often hermetic paintings that strike at the core of our most primal fears, joys and desires. In this first volume ever to collect the entire iconic Bumstead series, which spans from 1974 until the present, we are introduced to several paintings that have never been reproduced before. These are dark and erotic works, sly and witty without ever giving too much away. Linda Norden described them thus in Parkett 62: "The Bumstead paintings--whether detailing scenes of domestic misunderstanding, zooming in on off-camera moments of bafflement or simply scanning empty halls and walls for private memories--are excruciatingly specific representations of the gulfs between feeling and comprehension... smart, funny, startling, irreverently empathetic and often heartbreaking, they are a welcome antidote to more laborious discourse." With an insightful new essay by Robert Hobbs.