Highlighting the role of cultures in both the development of the Bible and in its subsequent reception around the world, The Peoples Companion to the Bible enables students to see how social locationincluding gender, ethnicity, social class, and cultural pluralismhas figured in the ways particular peoples have understood the biblical text. But it also helps students formulate their own social location and biblical horizon as a key to understanding the Bible and its import for them.

Writing from a Native American perspective, theologian George Tinker probes American Indian culture, its vast religious and cultural legacy, and its ambiguous relationship to the tradition-historic Christianity-that colonized and converted it. After five hundred years of conquest and social destruction, he says, any useful reflection must come to terms with the political state of Indian affairs and the political hopes and visions for recovering the health and well-being of Indian communities. Does Christian theology have a positive role to play? Tinker's work offers an overview of contemporary native American culture and its perilous state. Critical of recent liberal and New Age co-opting of Native spiritual practices, Tinker also offers a critical corrective to liberation theology. He shows how Native insights into the Sacred Other and sacred space helpfully reconfigure traditional ideas of God, Jesus' notion of the reign of God, and our relation to the earth. From this basis he offers novel proposals about cultural survival and identity, sustainability, and the endangered health of Native Americans.

This fascinating probe into U.S. mission history spotlights four cases: Junipero Serra, the Franciscan whose mission to California natives has made him a candidate for sainthood; John Eliot, the renowned Puritan missionary to Massachusetts Indians; Pierre-Jean De Smet, the Jesuit missioner to the Indians of the Midwest; and Henry Benjamin Whipple, who engineered the U.S. government's theft of the Black Hills from the Sioux.