War and Words is a sweeping study of the profound, painful, and most significantly, defining cultural moments. Working from Homer through to Hemingway and in all traditions, some of the nation's best scholars of literature illustrate how literature and language affect not only the present but also future generations by shaping history even as they represent it. This powerful collection affirms that the humanities remain a site of the most profound reflection on human experience and historical events that have, for better and worse, shaped world civilization. War and Words offers students of literature critical tools for reading literary explorations of ambivalence toward war and provides teachers of literature a suggested syllabus for a course that has become all too necessary in a time when all our lives are touched by war.

1. You have heard it said that on the day of judgment only Christians will be saved and all others will be consigned to eternal damnation, but I say to you that the gospel proclaims salvation for the whole human race.2. You have heard it said that non-Christians are strangers who will not enter the Kingdom of God, but I say to you that God enters our lives through the very presence of the stranger.3. You have heard it said that heretics and sinners will have no place in the Kingdom of God, but I say to you that to reject even the least of these is to reject God and God's messiah.4. You have heard it said that human beings can be saved in no other name than that of Jesus, but I say to you that the name "Jesus" means we are saved in the name of a God who cannot be named or imaged.5. You have heard it said that only a chosen remnant can be saved, but I say to you that a saving remnant saves not itself but the whole human race of which it is a part.6. You have heard it said that in the final judgment many will be consigned to the eternal fires, but I say to you, God's judgment is a refining fire which transforms and saves rather than destroys. The final truth is that our God is the savior of the whole human race and especially all believers (1Timothy 4:10).

The fact that Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and Rwanda cast ominous shadows forward into the future compels us to confront these horrific results of the human head, heart, and hand. In Genocidal Temptation, Robert Frey presents a compelling, integrated focus directed toward the Nazi killing programs, American atomic bombings in Japan, Tutsi massacres in Rwanda, Soviet genocide in Lithuania, and other mass killing and repression programs.

Narrative Theology After Auschwitz addresses the pressing question of the failure of Christian ethics during the Holocaust. It's concern is to understand how and why so many Christians and Christian churches either cooperated with the Nazis or stood passively by while six million Jews were slaughtered. The goal is to uproot the propensity of Christians to equate "ethics" with "unquestioning obedience" to authority, and replace it with an Abrahamic chutzpah or audacity to question all authority, even God if necessary, in defense of the dignity of the stranger.