Her disability couldn’t stop the coming dance . . . This biblical-timeframe story captures the heartache of terrible mishap, tension between cultures, and the redeeming power of one Man. When the mystifying dreams began at age five, Abia Ben-Judah realizes that her relationship with God is about to enter a new level. However, after suffering from an accident that crushes her hip and leaves her unable to bear children, Abia believes her dreams have lost all relevance in her life. Until the dreams begin coming true one by one. Twelve years of pain—mingled with the loving bond of a family in biblical times—creates in Abia an unbroken spirit that takes her from her humble Jewish home to Herod’s palace, and ultimately to the presence of the One who predestined her dreams. This timeless story encompasses the power of worship through dance, along with the ripening of prophecy in one’s life.

Dance in Scripture: How Biblical Dancers Can Revolutionize Worship Today examines the dances of seven biblical figures: Miriam, Jephthah's daughter, David, the Shulamite, Judith, Salome, and Jesus. Each figure offers a virtue that has the potential to revolutionize worship today. Yarber combines feminist and queer hermeneutics with dance history to highlight the nuances of the texts that often go unnoticed in biblical scholarship, while also celebrating the myriad ways the body can be affirmed in worship in creative, empowering, and subversive ways. Liberation, lamentation, abandon, passion, subversion, innocence, and community each contribute to the exciting ways embodied worship can be revolutionized. This is a book for those interested in biblical scholarship, dance, the arts, feminist and queer theory, or revolutionizing worship.

When God Was Flesh and Wild is dramatic and whimsical storytelling for adults at the service of faith and justice. Artist, storyteller, and theologian Bob Haverluck offers a rollicking set of stories—together with provocative cartoons and original music—that provide poetic takes on Daniel’s king of bigger and more; Jesus of the wilderness; Easter week, Jesus and the creaturely earth; and prison island John and the musical earth. The result is a more imaginative way to engage issues of conflict against the earth and her creatures in the light of God’s abiding providence and the witness of Scripture. Humorous, harsh, and persistently hopeful, When God Was Flesh and Wild will be an unforgettable reading experience for any person of faith.

Slang, writes Michael Adams, is poetry on the down low, and sometimes lowdown poetry on the down low, but rarely, if ever, merely lowdown. It is the poetry of everyday speech, the people's poetry, and it deserves attention as language playing on the cusp of art. In Slang: The People's Poetry, Adams covers this perennially interesting subject in a serious but highly engaging way, illuminating the fundamental question "What is Slang" and defending slang--and all forms of nonstandard English--as integral parts of the American language. Why is an expression like "bed head" lost in a lexical limbo, found neither in slang nor standard dictionaries? Why are snow-boarding terms such as "fakie," "goofy foot," "ollie" and "nollie" not considered slang? As he addresses these and other lexical curiosities, Adams reveals that slang is used in part to define groups, distinguishing those who are "down with it" from those who are "out of it." Slang is also a rebellion against the mainstream. It often irritates those who color within the lines--indeed, slang is meant to irritate, sometimes even to shock. But slang is also inventive language, both fun to make and fun to use. Rather than complain about slang as "bad" language, Adams urges us to celebrate slang's playful resistance to the commonplace and to see it as the expression of an innate human capacity, not only for language, but for poetry.

"Updated version of an Orbis classic"--

The book not only provides an overview of the Huichol and the plight of Mesoamerican Indians but also sheds light on traditional religion, indigenous Catholicism, messianic cults, urbanization, and indigenous conflicts with the modern Mexican state."--BOOK JACKET.

This volume is a comprehensive history of of Southern Plains powwow culture - an interdisciplinary, highly collaborative ethnography based on more than two decades of participiation in powwows - addressing how the powwow has changed over time.

Ben-Bassat (English, Tel Aviv U.) discusses crises of ideology and identity in the fiction of contemporary American authors. She contends that the fiction of John Updike, Flannery O'Connor, Grace Paley, James Baldwin, and Alice Walker has absorbed a diversity of prophetic modes from a diversity of