Sacred Cows and Hot Potatoes challenges many of the assumptions of current agricultural policies-such as equating "farm" with "rural," high farm prices with high farm incomes, or farm programs with food programs-and examines the agrarian roots of these policies. From the origins of agrarian myths to the latest controversies over farming and the environment, this book provides an overview of the use and abuse of agrarian values in policymaking. Illustrated with pictures, cartoons, and graphs, the book will appeal to a broad audience, including policymakers, rural sociologists, agricultural economists, political scientists, ethicists, and the interested public.

Sacred Cows and Hot Potatoes challenges many of the assumptions of current agricultural policies-such as equating "farm" with "rural," high farm prices with high farm incomes, or farm programs with food programs-and examines the agrarian roots of these policies. From the origins of agrarian myths to the latest controversies over farming and the environment, this book provides an overview of the use and abuse of agrarian values in policymaking. Illustrated with pictures, cartoons, and graphs, the book will appeal to a broad audience, including policymakers, rural sociologists, agricultural economists, political scientists, ethicists, and the interested public.

Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching is a distinctive resource for those who interpret the Bible in the church. Planned and written specifically for teaching and preaching needs, this critically acclaimed biblical commentary is a major contribution to scholarship and ministry.

History and Interpretation is a collection of seventeen essays on the Old Testament and the history of ancient Israel and commemorates the sixtieth birthday of John H. Hayes, Professor of Old Testament at Candler School of Theology (Emory University). All the contributors were Hayes's doctoral students at Emory, and their essays cover a wide range of topics that reflect their teachers own scholarly interests-from historical geography and the history of ancient Israel to religion, theology, and the exegesis of individual texts. The methodologies employed are equally diverse: some focus on text-critical or form-critical issues, while others are essentially historical, rhetorical, or literary critical studies. Three essays are devoted to the Pentateuch, three to the Historical Books, four to the Prophets, and seven to the history of ancient Israel. A bibliography of Professor Hayes's publications is also included.

Is the Bible infallible as some churches claim? Is it a historical document or a piece of literature, as scholars suggest? This helpful new book offers a brief introduction to the question of biblical authority, using essays by sixteen scholars who use the Bible as the word of God in their own religious tradition and scholarship. After William Brown introduces the basic issues of biblical authority, each scholar presents a different, but sympathetic, view from his or her own perspective. Included are traditional Reformed, Lutheran, Wesleyan, Catholic, Jewish, and Orthodox views; recent conservative and evangelical positions; and critical African American, Asian American, Hispanic, feminist, and womanist perspectives.

Offering a host of classic and new essays surveying the scholarly ethical and biblical debate surrounding the Ten Commandments, William Brown organizes his volume into three parts: the history of interpretation, contemporary reflections on the Decalogue as a whole, and contemporary reflections on individual commandments. A useful addition to ethics as well as Old Testament and Hebrew Bible courses, Brown's "The Ten Commandments" will be a standard reference for all Decalogue research, as it facilitates a helpful balance between moral, theological, and biblical study.

The Library of Theological Ethics series focuses on what it means to think theologically and ethically. It presents a selection of important and otherwise unavailable texts in easily accessible form. Volumes in this series will enable sustained dialogue with predecessors though reflection on classic works in the field.

This work explores the promises and challenges of interpreting the book of Psalms through the lens of metaphor. While form-critical analysis has been the staple of psalms research for over a century, scholars have by and large overlooked the Psalter's use of imagery - at great theological cost. The psalmists' use of metaphor, the author argues, has the power to captivate the imagination, edify the mind and cultivate moral discernment and theological reflection.

This engaging volume traces the development of creation themes through the Pentateuch, the psalms, Job, the prophets, and the New Testament, discussing their implications for Christian faith and ministry.

Ecclesiastes is a collection of sayings traditionally attributed to Solomon and deemed by some the strangest book in the canon. It comprises an unusual blend of autobiographical references, theological reflections, philosophical musings, and proverbial instructions, all probing the seeming pointlessness of human striving. Brown explores the text as it engages our own culture's era of questioning and search for self full-fulfillment.

Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching is a distinctive resource for those who interpret the Bible in the church. Planned and written specifically for teaching and preaching needs, this critically acclaimed biblical commentary is a major contribution to scholarship and ministry.

Recent studies of the biblical story of creation try to uncover its roots in ancient Near Eastern myths or its compatibility with modern science and ecology. In contrast, this work by William Brown investigates how the various pictures of creation found in Scripture helped shape the ancient faith community's moral character. Bridging the fields of biblical studies and ethics, this interdisciplinary work demonstrates how certain creation traditions of the Old and New Testaments were developed from the community's moral imagination for the purpose of forming and preserving both Israel's and the early church's identity in the world. Bringing to light insights largely overlooked by modern treatments of biblical ethics and creation, The Ethos of the Cosmos ends by recommending the formative power of creation for the contemporary church.

Taken together, the nine prophets found in the books Obadiah through Malachi lived during a tumultuous two hundred years of Israelite history. Their communities dealt with the crisis of the impending Assyrian threat in the eighth century and the Babylonia exile in the sixth, as well as the hopeful age of restoration in the late sixth and early fifth centuries. Intimately connected to the travails and needs of their communities, these prophets had the responsibility of bringing God's message of hope--even in the bleakest times--to their people. Books in the Westminster Bible Companion series assist laity in their study of the Bible as a guide to Christian faith and practice. Each volume explains the biblical book in its original historical context and explores its significance for faithful living today. These books are ideal for individual study and for Bible study classes and groups.

At a time when the chasm between academic scholarship and theological reflection seems to be widening, both the academic guild and the church share in common an uncertainty over how to study and appropriate the wisdom literature of the Old Testament. On the one hand, mainline denominations have for the most part avoided the books of Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes in their preaching and educational curriculum. Biblical scholars, on the other hand, have labored hard to identify the theological significance and thematic center of the wisdom literature, but without much consensus. In Character in Crisis, William P. Brown helps to break the impasse by demonstrating that the aim of the Bible's wisdom literature is the formation of moral character - both for individuals and for the community. Brown traces the theme of moral identity and conduct throughout the wisdom literature of the Old Testament, with a concluding reflection on the Epistle of James in the New Testament, and explores a range of issues that includes literary characterization, moral discourse, worldview, and the theology of the ancient sages. He examines the ways in which central characters such as God, wisdom, and human beings are profiled in the wisdom books and shows how their characterizations impart ethical meaning to the reading community, both ancient and modern.

Biblical texts create worlds of meaning and invite readers to enter them. When readers enter such textual worlds, which are often strange and complex, they are confronted with theological claims. With this in mind, the purpose of the Interpreting Biblical Texts series is to help serious readers in their experience of reading and interpreting, by providing guides for their journeys into textual worlds. The controlling perspective is expressed in the operative word of the title interpreting. The primary focus of the series is not so much on the world behind the texts or out of which the texts have arisen as on the worlds created by the texts in their engagement with readers. The focus of the volume moves from the smallest to the largest of scales, from an examination of poetic segments to considerations of God and the world through the psalmists eyes. The author will present new slants and questions that equip the reader with various tools of interpretation while leaving issues open for the reader s further exploration. Included are discussions of Psalms as Hebrew poetry, species, performance, corpus, anthropology, and theology. "

Designed for both Hebrew and non-Hebrew students, A Handbook to Old Testament Exegesis offers a fresh, hands-on introduction to exegesis of the Old Testament. William P. Brown begins not with the biblical text itself but with the reader, helping students to identify their own interpretive lenses before engaging the biblical text. Brown guides the student through a wide variety of interpretive approaches, including modern methodologiesaEURO"feminist, womanist, Latino/a, queer, postcolonial, disability, and ecological approachesaEURO"alongside more traditional methods. This allows students to critically reflect on themselves as bona fide interpreters. While covering a wide range of biblical passages, Brown also highlights two common biblical texts throughout the work to help show how each interpretive approach highlights different dimensions of the same texts. Students will appreciate the value of an empathetic inquiry of Scripture that is both inclusive of others and textually in-depth.

All too often Scripture is read only to find answers to life's perplexing questions, to prove a theological point, or to formulate doctrine. But William Brown argues that if read properly, what the Bible does most fundamentally is arouse a sacred sense of life-transforming wonder. In this book Brown helps readers develop an orientation toward the biblical text that embraces wonder. He explores reading strategies and offers fresh readings of seventeen Old and New Testament passages, identifying what he finds most central and evocative in the unfolding biblical drama. The Bible invites its readers to linger in wide-eyed wonder, Brown says -- and his Sacred Sense shows readers how to do just that.

Wisdom's Wonder offers a fresh reading of the Hebrew Bible's wisdom literature with a unique emphasis on "wonder" as the framework for understanding biblical wisdom. William Brown argues that wonder effectively integrates biblical wisdom's emphasis on character formation and its outlook on creation, breaking an impasse that has plagued recent wisdom studies. Drawing from various disciplines - from philosophy to neuroscience - Brown discovers new distinctions and connections among Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes. An extensive revision and expansion of Brown's Character in Crisis (Eerdmans, 1996), this book demonstrates that the wisdom books are much more than simply advice literature: with wonder as the foundation for understanding, Brown maintains that wisdom is a process with transformation of self as the goal.

Michigan, like most of the states formed from the old Northwest, originated as a state of farmers, fishermen, and lumbermen and remained so until Detroit emerged as a major industrial center at the turn of the twentieth century. The growth of the automotive industry attracted new immigrants and new politics. Republican for most of its history, Michigan became a bipartisan state with political divisions: upper versus lower peninsula, agriculture versus industry, labor versus capital, developers versus ecologists, and conflicts between races. Lansing and its lobbyists and political action committees exemplify modern large-state politics. With double-digit unemployment and an enormous stake in cars, roads, and bridges, Michigan is acutely aware of its ties to the federal government. Two governors, G. Mennen Williams and George Romney, have contended for the presidency, and one representative, Gerald Ford, became president by legislative maneuver. A strong governorship, an independent and experienced bureaucracy, and a full-time legislature have created an activist, policy-directed state government that generally bears little resemblance to the laissez-faire leadership of Michigan's early years. Although this book provides much historical and geographical information, the primary focus remains Michigan's need to cope with its vacillating economy. The authors look at the state's regional, ethnic, racial, and socioeconomic diversity and show how these are affected by the forces of change.

This dictionary profiles 103 private US organizations involved with the nation's agricultural policy process. . . . It contains an introductory essay chronicling the growth, aims, and objectives of agricultureal groups, foolowed by the organization profiles in alphabetical order, an appendix of related groups not mentioned in the text, and an index of corporate and personal names. . . . U.S. Agricultural Groups also includes concise descriptions of each group's origins, organizational structure, funding, policy concerns, and electoral activity. Libraries seeking detailed descriptions of the major organizations in this area will benefit from this title.

"Choice"

This reference source is ideal for anyone interested in the role of agricultural interests in American national politics. The book provides detailed profiles of more than 100 private organizations that are most likely to gain the greatest attention from those who observe, study, and participate in agricultural policy making. A range of organizations is covered, including mass membership organizations, trade associations, cooperatives, unions, public interest groups, think tanks, and policy research organizations, all of which are involved in some manner in the agricultural policy process. Preceding the profiles is an essay on both interests and policy, written by the editors of the volume. U.S. Agricultural Groups is intended to acquaint readers with the nature and activities of the organized interests in the agricultural policy arena, both historically and in the contemporary context.

Entries in the volume are prepared from a common format. The first part of each entry is a summary statement concerning the type and purpose of the organization, who is represented, and where the membership is concentrated. Next, information is provided concerning when and under what circumstances the organization came into being, the historically important issues of its concern, and a general discussion of the historical development of the organization. Information concerning the governing structure of the organization, the basis of memberships, funding sources, and memberships benefits is also provided. This volume will be make a valuable addition to any public or university library.

Agriculture is at a critical juncture. The Food Security Act of 1985, which was intended to reduce surpluses by making American farm products more competitive in world markets, has not yet succeeded. Food imports have outstripped food exports. Huge grain surpluses continue to pile up. Because many farmers and economists fault federal agricultural policies for the current predicament, this book examines how recent policies, like the 1985 law, have been made and focuses on the key role that private interests play in the policy process. Not only does Browne give us the first comprehensive study of all of the organized interests at work in agricultural policymaking, but he also makes an important contribution to understanding the interaction of organized interests in the American political process. His book should appeal to a wide audience composed of those interested in agriculture, policy process, and interest group behavior.

In the early 1980s, 128 separate organizations employed Washington-based lobbyists who regularly worked to influence agricultural policies. Many other organizations periodically lobbied in agriculture. The general farm organizations have been joined by commodity organizations, trade associations, corporate spokesmen, farm activists, industry lobbyists, consumer groups, environmentalists, and advocates of a variety of food-related programs. Long gone are the days when the farm bloc preordained policy outcomes and when students of American politics looked upon agriculture as a classic example of the "iron triangle" or self-governing subsystem of interest groups, bureaucrats, and legislators. Now the policymaking process is fragmented by the clamor from competing organized interest groups, and the policy makers responded by fashioning piecemeal policy with no seeming thought to unity of purpose. In an attempt to throw light on what actually happens in Washington, Browne explains what groups and interests are active in agricultural policymaking, what strategy and tactics they employ, and why some have more influence than others. One of Browne's conclusions is that a surprising number of agricultural issues are uninfluenced by the interest groups because they ignore them.

For nearly a decade William P. Browne has studied the major farm organizations, congressional hearings and records related to agricultural issues, and the American Agricultural Movement. But perhaps his richest source of information has been extensive interviews with lobbyists, executives, and grassroots activists during and just after the 1985 farm bill debates. In the course of his research, Browne sought to learn how interest groups behave in deciding their policy priorities and how this behavior actually relates to influence over the desired policy outcomes.