As in the widely popular earlier editions, the latest revision of this comprehensive and systematic text approaches the Bible from a literary/historical perspective, studying it as a body of writing produced by real people who intended to convey messages to actual audiences. Avoiding assessments of the Bible's truth or authority, the authors maintain a rigorously objective tone as they discuss such major issues as the forms and strategies of biblical writing, its actual historical and physical settings, the process of canon formation, and the nature of biblical genres including prophecy, apocalypse, and gospel.
The fifth edition features a new coauthor, David Citino; a new chapter by contributor Nicola Denzey on the essential yet often overlooked role of women in the Bible; and a new appendix on modern approaches to the Bible. It also incorporates new maps, a timeline, updated bibliographies, and revised material throughout. This objective, easy-to-use, and exciting presentation of the Bible is indispensable to students and accessible to general readers.

In The News and Other Poems, David Citino confronts and attempts to make sense of the news. He explores the good and bad ways the world has of careening into a life and sending it off course. Citino tries to understand how we come to know what we know, driven as we are by haughty assumptions about the world we're making and the control we think we exert over our own lives and loves. While still holding romantic notions of ivory towers and ivy-covered garrets, Citino welcomes the latest information-no matter how bad the news. He struggles to understand stories from sources impeachable and unimpeachable-supermarket tabloids and journals of science, folklore and the laboratory, chronicles of ancient history and news wires, even those sometimes terrible things we learn from our doctors or those we love. "This is high entertainment by a poet who possesses honesty and playfulness in equal measure and who is an expert at deploying the line and boxing the stanza." -Billy Collins "Pound said that literature is news that stays news and the distinguished poet, David Citino, has taken this observation from the wittiest reinvention of current events all the way to the Great Tabloid of the inexpressible. The News and Other Poems is funny, remarkable, and profound." -Carol Muske-Dukes "The strength of this book resides in its vivid mixture of the sacred and the profane. The real 'news' of these poems is that here is a person alert to all our profane and post-modern predicaments, and yet who still finds within himself the stirrings and yearnings toward whatever we can dimly perceive of the sacred." -Fred Marchant "These vivid topical poems try wryly to come to terms with human depravity, with 'the grim, thorny symmetry/ of war,' 'the usual apocalypse' of people drowned or killed in meaningless accidents. But this is not a dark book. Citino's wit and passionate love of life sparkle throughout. Speaking through Sister Mary Appassionata, he declares, 'there is a place where it all makes sense.'" -Maxine Kumin