The Beloved Son as Tantalizing Teacher is a contribution to the study of the "historical Jesus." It is meant for anyone interested in Jesus as a person as well as part of the academic project of discovering his humanity and his place in history. To truly uncover him in this way, the facts of his Jewish historical context are foundational. The context is in terms of six dynamics or factors: the history of late antiquity of the Mediterranean world from Alexander to the destruction of the temple and how people in the land of Israel interacted with that history; Israel's economic, social, religious, and political structures; and the ecology of the land of Jesus' time. In particular we understand Jesus and the movement he initiated as part of other renewal movements of his time and place that arose to confront what most of his contemporaries perceived as the corrosion of Jewish society. So the Jewish people of the first century, living in their patrimonial land of Israel, were embroiled in a crisis that threatened to overwhelm the nation. The Beloved Son as Tantalizing Teacher sums up the situation, with the pithy phrase borrowed from one scholar, as a people whose "backs were against the wall."

This study of the miracles attributed to Jesus in the Gospels begins with a survey of the sciences, because in our present cultural context, materialism is the dominant approach to and understanding of our world, of history, and of our very selves. If the materialist's understanding is true, then there is no such thing as miracles, because every event must occur as the result of some previous material events. Contemporary biblical scholarship mostly approaches the miracle stories from a materialist point of view. It questions their historicity because they violate what has now become the entrenched modus operandi in our culture and society, operating with the idea that the universe is a closed nexus of cause and effect. The miracles are understood, then, as products of the community and not historical reports, although, according to this line of scholarship, they may be based on some vague recollection of Jesus's activity that somehow had healing effects. Modern science, however, as one scientist has put it, in climbing the mountain of knowledge, has reached its peak and found a theologian at the top. The sciences, in other words, have led to the implication that our universe has a creator and that the universe and the human genome have been designed.

Includes extra sessions.

This third story about the madcap family introduced in Stephanie Tolan’s Newbery Honor Book Surviving the Applewhites features even more outlandish adventures and will appeal to fans of the Applewhites and those meeting them for the first time. E.D. and Jake are doing their best to forget their bewildering kiss—after all, they’re practically family—and get back to “normal” life with the decidedly abnormal, highly creative Applewhites. When the family’s biggest fan, Jeremy Bernstein, pulls up to Wit’s End in an “Art Bus,” he brings with him a proposal for an Education Expedition: a cross-country road trip, educational quest, and video-documented competition for a big cash prize. Jeremy also drags along his troubled but beautiful niece, Melody. She’ll be joining the expedition with her own rebellious flair, much to Jake’s delight . . . and E.D.’s exasperation. With characteristic Applewhite enthusiasm, the artists face disastrous performances, fainting goats, and some very bad ideas—but can they make it through the road trip in one piece?

Wolf (Southwest studies, Colorado College; Society of American Foresters) shows how the Sangre de Cristo Mountains' recent Wilderness designation may weaken links between their ecology and the economies of the surrounding human communities. He examines the environmental history of the Sangres' large