In an age when "collisions of faith" among the Abrahamic traditions continue to produce strife and violence that threatens the well-being of individuals and communities worldwide, the contributors to Encountering the Stranger--six Jewish, six Christian, and six Muslim scholars--takes responsibility to examine their traditions' understandings of the stranger, the "other," and to identify ways that can bridge divisions and create greater harmony.

When Muslim women from diverse national and cultural contexts meet one another through transnational dialogue and networking, what happens to their sense of identity and social agency? Addressing this question, Meena Sharify-Funk encountered women activists and intellectuals in North America, the Middle East, South Asia and Southeast Asia - women whose lives and visions have become linked by 'the transnational' despite their differing circumstances and intellectual backgrounds. The resultant work provides a rich and cliché-bursting account of women's reflections on a wide range of topics including: the status of women in Islam, the role of women as interpreters of religious norms, the relationship between secular and religious forms of self-identification, perceptions of Islamic-Western relations, experiences of marginalization, and opportunities for empowerment. Giving careful attention both to common threads in Muslim women's experiences and to the unique voices of remarkable women, this is a compelling account of conversations that are bringing new energy and dynamism into women's activism in a world of collapsing distances.

Law calls communities into being and constitutes the "we" it governs. This act of defining produces an outside as well as an inside, a border whose crossing is guarded, maintaining the identity, coherence, and integrity of the space and people within. Those wishing to enter must negotiate a complex terrain of defensive mechanisms, expectations, assumptions, and legal proscriptions. Essentially, law enforces the boundary between inside and outside in both physical and epistemological ways. Law and the Stranger explores the ways law identifies and responds to strangers within and across borders. It analyzes the ambiguous place strangers occupy in communities not their own and reflects on how dealing with strangers challenges the laws and communities that invite or parry them. As the book reveals, strangers are made through law, rather than born through accidents of geography.

The author challenges the breach between the secular and the religious, rendering that breach ambiguous. Such ambiguity, the author affirms, is relevant to a time when rigid and simplistic notions of religion and secularity are used to justify thoughtlessness and even violence. All too often the secular is thought of either as a triumph in "overcoming" the presumed irrationality and oppression of religion, or as lament in "losing" the meaning religion is thought once to have offered. Atchley suggests a view of the secular as an opportunity to experience an immanent value that is neither controlled by the human self nor conferred by a divine entity.

Geographies of Embodiment provides a critical discussion of the literatures on the body and embodiment, and humanism and post-humanism, and develops arguments about "otherness" and "encounter" which have become key ideas in urban studies, and studies of the city. It situates these arguments in a wider political context, looking at power-relations through case studies at urban, national and transnational scales. These arguments are situated across disciplinary boundaries, at the borderline between between philosophy and social science that is associated to critical phenomenology, and reaches across Human Geography, Sociology, Philosophy, Anthropology, Cultural Studies and Urban Studies.

Book 1 of a Four-Part Series When Elizabeth Bennet goes to stay at Netherfield Park to keep her sick sister company, she is surprised by eerie noises in the night and ghostly faces at the attic windows. Could the rumours about the country manor being haunted be true? Then a midnight encounter with a tall, dark stranger thrusts Elizabeth straight into the path of scandal and danger. As she races to unravel the mystery, she finds unexpected assistance from the handsome but arrogant Mr Darcy. Is such a proud, reserved man to be trusted? A romantic Regency mystery inspired by Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice! This is the first book in the Dark Darcy series - a Pride and Prejudice variation combining mystery and romance. * Each book in this series features a standalone mystery which is resolved, but the overall story of Darcy and Elizabeth's courtship is told over the 4 books of the series. The Netherfield Affair (Book 1) Intrigue at the Ball (Book 2) The Poisoned Proposal (Book 3) Secrets at Pemberley (Book 4) - coming Jun 2015! KEYWORDS: Pride and Prejudice variation, Jane Austen fan fiction, Mr Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet fan fiction, 18th century 19th century historical mystery, romantic Regency mystery, Regency romance, Gothic romance, Pemberley Mr Darcy, Pride and Prejudice sequel, Jane Austen variation, Jane Austen mystery, Jane Austen inspired books, British detective amateur, historical cosy cozy mystery, England Regency historical fiction Britain, Elizabeth Bennet Fitzwilliam Darcy, clean romance, sweet romance

Border crossing is a significant experience in the global era when many people cross borders, whether in cultural, geopolitical, relational, or existential terms. Border crossing can provide a great opportunity for spiritual growth, yet it is often a violent and dangerous process. Thus there is a need to explore border-crossing spirituality: to examine how various aspects of border crossing impact human life, analyze why border crossing happens, and explain how the act of border crossing provides transformation. Border crossing is an action undertaken to expand one's own boundaries, and from it emerges the borderland--a third space where one's transformation can occur. This book primarily focuses on various teachings of border crossing and the notion of "being in between." Almost every religious tradition has within it a spiritual teaching of border crossing and the importance of the borderland. This book is, by nature, cross cultural, interreligious, and interspiritual. Through the action of border crossing, transformation occurs in the borderland, and border-crossing spirituality can be crystallized as living a radical hospitality, valuing friendship, remaining in the present, and reclaiming subjectivity.

Collected critical essays examine contemporary poetry in terms of cultural geography. Key themes are place and identity; literary cartographies; walking as trope and spatial practice; the poetics of edges, margins, and peripheries; landscape, language, and form.

Since Heidegger, it has become something of an unquestioned presupposition to analyse selfhood from the perspective of being-in-the-world. In the book, DeLay sets out a view of existence instead emphasizing humanity’s ineluctable experience before-God. Surmounting received divisions between philosophy and theology, the work’s eight chapters explore our relation to God and others, tracing a path instituted in antiquity and latent still in certain strands of contemporary phenomenology. After two introductory explorations of the ancient conception of philosophy as a way of life undermining the modern notion of philosophy as methodologically atheist, the third chapter examines our relation to others through an assessment of how, paradoxically, we are together in the world yet ever alone. The theme of being-with-others is deepened with an analysis of forgiveness in its various forms. The theme is continued in the next chapter’s discussion of peace, which is seen to prove so elusive because of the omnipresence of evil in the world, a fact which itself is explored in connection to the varieties of silence we encounter throughout our daily lives. Utilizing these results from the preceding chapters on forgiveness, peace, and silence, the final chapters inquire into perennial questions as doubt, deception, and hope. Drawing together the previous results, the conclusion underscores the view of man that has theretofore emerged: we are open to a God who in Jesus Christ calls each of us back to ourselves.