This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1869 Excerpt: ...Your grandmother, who was the most beautiful woman I ever saw, the belle of the county all her young days, and the model for artists' fancy sketching even in her old ones, as modest as a violet and as honest as the sunshine, used to have the prettiest little way when we girls were in our teens, and she thought that we must be lectured a bit on youthful vanity, of adding, in her quiet voice, smoothing down her black silk apron as she spoke, 'But still it is a thing to be thankful for, my dear, to have a comely countenance "But to return to the track and our future bodies. We shall find them vastly convenient, undoubtedly, with powers of which there is no dreaming. Perhaps they will be so one with the soul that to will will be to do, --hindrance out of the question. I, for instance, sitting here by you, and thinking that I should like to be in Kansas, would be there. There is an interesting bit of a hint in Daniel about Gabriel, who, 'being caused to fly swiftly, touched him about the time of the evening oblation.'" "But do you not make a very mater al kind of heaven out of such suppositions?" "It depends upon what yor mean by 'matei iaL' The term does not, to n.y thinking, imply degradation, except so far as it is associated with sin. Dr. Chalmers has the right of it, when he talks about 'spiritual materialism.' He says in his sermon on the New Heavens and Earth, --which, by the way, you should read, and from which I wish a few more of our preachers would learn something, --that we 'forget that on the birth of materialism, when it stood out in the freshness of those glories which the great Architect of Nature had impressed upon it, that then the "morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy.'" I do not...

Gay and lesbian theology has been one of the most distinctive voices to have emerged in Christian theology in the last 30 years. It has placed lesbian and gay experience at the heart of the theological process. Elizabeth Stuart, one of the most prominent theologians in this field, presents the first critical survey of gay and lesbian theology arguing that its emergence was nothing short of miraculous. Gay and lesbian theologians managed to take a dominant Christian discourse which rendered them sinful, sick and harmful to the common good and transform it into a theology which argued that a person's sexuality provided the point of contact between God and themselves. Stuart argues that, miraculous though this was, gay and lesbian theology has revealed itself to be 'bankrupt' - incapable of providing universally convincing reasons for the inclusion of lesbian and gay people and their relationships in the Church and unable to deal with the defining experience of lesbian and gay communities in the late twentieth-century - AIDS. Stuart concludes that lesbian and gay people and their opponents in the Church have too easily bought into modern constructions of sexual identity and cut themselves off from a Christian tradition which is far more 'queer' in that it refuses to accept the stability of gender and sexual desire. Stuart argues that the only way out of the current deadlock on the issue of homosexuality in the Churches is for both sides to embrace this ancient queer tradition - a Christian tradition which teaches that in the end gender and sexual identities have no ultimate importance.

Trixy is a 1904 novel by the best-selling but largely forgotten American author and women's rights activist Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844-1911). The book decries the then-common practice of vivisection, or scientic experiments on live animals. Though not well known today, Phelps's 1868 spiritualist novel, The Gates Ajar, which offered a comforting view of the afterlife to readers traumatized by the Civil War, was the century's second best-selling American novel, surpassed only by Uncle Tom's Cabin. Recently scholars and readers have begun to reexamine Phelps's significance. In Trixy, contemporary readers can trace the roots of the early animal rights movement in Phelps' influential campaign to introduce legislation to regulate or end vivisection. Phelps not only presents a narrative polemic against the cruelty of vivisection but argues that training young doctors in vivisection makes them bad physicians. Emily E. VanDette's introduction illuminates that Phelps' protest writing, which included fiction, pamphlets, essays, and speeches, was well ahead of its time. As contemporary authors like Peter Singer, Jonathan Safran Foer, Donna Haraway, Gary Francione, and Carol J. Adams have extended her vision, they have also created new audiences for her work.