Detective Aristotle Ashford and his rookie partner, Myles Sivad, witness the apocalyptic suffering of Chicago's Woodlawn community in the 1970's.

The figure of the traitor plays an intriguing role in modern politics. Traitors are a source of transgression from within, creating their own kinds of aversion and suspicion. They destabilize the rigid moral binaries of victim and persecutor, friend and enemy. Recent history is stained by collaborators, informers, traitors, and the bloody purges and other acts of retribution against them. In the emergent nation-state of Bhutan, the specter of the "antinational" traitor helped to transform the traditional view of loyalty based on social relations. In Sri Lanka, the Tamil Tigers' fear of traitors is tangled with the Tamil civilians' fear of being betrayed to the Tigers as traitors. For Palestinians in the West Bank, simply earning a living can mean complicity with people acting in the name of the Israeli state. While most contemporary studies of violence and citizenship focus on the creation of the "other," the cases in Traitors: Suspicion, Intimacy, and the Ethics of State-Building illustrate the equally strong political and social anxieties among those who seem to be most alike. Treason is often treated as a pathological distortion of political life. However, the essays in Traitors propose that treachery is a constant, essential, and normal part of the processes through which social and political order is produced. In the political gray zones between personal and state loyalties, traitors and their prosecutors play roles that make and unmake regimes. In this volume, ten scholars examine political, ethnic, and personal trust and betrayals in modern times from Mozambique to the Taiwan Straits, from the former Eastern Bloc to the West Bank. This fascinating collection studies the tension between close personal relationships, the demands of nation-states, and the moral choices that result when these interests collide. In asking how traitors are defined in the context of local histories, contributors address larger comparative questions about the nature of postcolonial citizenship.

It’s 1849, the year John Huffman’s father is sentenced to London’s Whitecross Street Prison. He’s been put away for gambling debt—leaving fourteen-year-old John and his family out on the street. But it seems gambling is the least of their problems: Father Huffman is accused of treason. Surrounded by a cast of sinister and suspicious characters, John’s not sure what to believe…or whom.

As a Protestant theologian and diciple of renowned critics of Christianity, Albert Schweitzer and Martin Werner, the Author wanted since long to contribute to the breakthrough of their resolute nontrinitarian position which has throughout the twentieth century by all and every Western Christian university theology been silenced by pretending tacitly and tenaciously the non-existence of their strong argument.

In this engrossing exploration of martyrdom, Lacey Baldwin Smith takes us on a riveting journey through history as he examines one of the most baffling characteristics of the human species: its willingness to die to sanctify a deity, to defend a cause, or simply to prove a point. In telling the stories of his chosen martyrs, by delving into their psyches, politics, and remarkable personalities, he illuminates the complex and elusive subject of martyrdom as it has evolved over two and a half millennia. The story starts with Socrates, the Western world's first recorded martyr, and moves on to Judaic and early Christian martyrs: the Maccabees and their heroic suffering; Jesus of Nazareth and the impact of the crucifixion on his message; and Saint Perpetua, who died spectacularly in a Roman amphitheater. The narrative then transports us to England: to Archbishop Thomas Becket and his sensational murder at the altar of his own cathedral in Canterbury; to Sir Thomas More, who died Henry VIII's "good servant but God's first" ; to the Protestant martyrs under Catholic Mary Tudor; and to Charles I, the only English king to be tried and executed as a traitor. The concluding chapters cover modern martyrdom as it has become increasingly secularized and entangled with treason. They include John Brown, whose "body lies a-mouldering in the grave but whose soul" goes marching on, Mahatma Gandhi and his school for martyrs, the Holocaust and its impact on modern Jewish thought, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the unsuccessful attempts to assassinate Hitler, and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg's execution for giving secret information about the atomic bomb to the USSR. The book ends with the troubling figure of SS Lieutenant Kurt Gerstein and the ultimate question: Is there such a person as a totally disinterested martyr? Fools and traitors to some, heroes to others, all the men and women who appear here have helped shape our definition of martyrdom. The questions Lacey Baldwin Smith raises, and the way he brings the past to life, make this a uniquely compelling book.