The term 'jar' refers to any man-made shape with the capacity to enclose something. Few objects are as universal and multi-functional as a jar – regardless of whether they contain food or drink, matter or a void, life-giving medicine or the ashes of the deceased. As ubiquitous as they may seem, such containers, storage vessels and urns are, as this book demonstrates, highly significant cultural and historical artefacts that mediate between content and environment, exterior worlds and interior enclosures, local and global, this-worldly and otherworldly realms. The contributors to this volume understand jars not only as household utensils or evidence of human civilizations, but also as artefacts in their own right. Asian jars are culturally and aesthetically defined crafted goods and as objects charged with spiritual meanings and ritual significance. Transformative Jars situates Asian jars in a global context and focuses on relationships between the filling, emptying and re-filling of jars with a variety of contents and meanings through time and throughout space. Transformative Jars brings together an interdisciplinary team of scholars with backgrounds in curating, art history and anthropology to offer perspectives that go beyond archaeological approaches with detailed analyses of a broad range of objects. By looking at jars as things in the hands of makers, users and collectors, this book presents these objects as agents of change in cultures of craftsmanship and consumption.

Transformational Preaching: Theory and practice is a comprehensive textbook for the beginning student of preaching, the graduate student in pulpit discourse, or the seasoned preacher. Seeking to reclaim the pulpit for biblical preaching, the book counteracts the popular "teaching" approach that is common today, and argues that preaching must be persuasive rather than informative, that the preacher is central to the act of preaching, and that through the preaching event, both preacher and listener together fashion the "message" and its meaning. Both theoretical and highly practical, the book offers a challenging look at all aspects of the preaching ministry. It contextualizes preaching in pastoral ministry and congregational worship, but, most significantly, argues that the practice of preaching must be informed and driven by theory. As such, the book draws from a wide perspective of disciplines, including biblical theology, classical rhetoric, contemporary human communication, public discourse, persuasion, linguistics, performance, and orality. The book's wealth of practical guidelines for every step of sermon development encourages students to apply general principles within their own contexts of ministry.

This volume focuses on a wide range of scholarship on one of the most compelling periods in the antiquity of the Mediterranean and Near East. It presents new interpretive approaches to the problems of the Bronze Age to Iron Age transformation.

Papers presented at a symposium at the annual meeting of the South- eastern Archaeological Conference, held in Nashville, Tenn., November 1986, explore the wide range of societal organization during the Late Woodland period (A.D. 600-900) in the Southeast, and address explicitly the kinds of explanatory models useful for understanding social integration by noting the relationships among critical variables (e.g. settlement, subsistence, exchange, demography, etc.) that affect social organization. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR