We find risk everywhere--from genetically modified crops, medical malpractice, and stem-cell therapy to heartbreak, online predators, identity theft, inflation, and robbery. They arise from our own acts and they are imposed on us. In this Very Short Introduction, Baruch Fischhoff and John Kadvany draw on both the sciences and humanities to illuminate both the similarities and differences of var…
Rhetoric was once an essential part of western education. Aristotle wrote an important treatise on it and Demosthenes remains famous to this day for his skills as a rhetorician. But skill with rhetoric today is no longer admired. Rhetoric is often seen as a synonym for shallow, deceptive language-empty words, empty rhetoric--and therefore as something quite negative. But if we view rhetoric in …
Structural transformation in Africa has become a hot topic. Over the lastfiveyears, the African Development Bank and the UN Economic Commission forAfrica have expressed concerns about the pattern and pace of structuralchange in the region. The African Union (2015), in itsAgenda 2063: The AfricaWe Want, has called for the economic transformation of the continent, andthe Africa Center for Economi…
There have been many studies of the women in the Gospels, but this is a new kind of book on the subject. Rather than offering a general overview of the Gospel women or focusing on a single theme, Richard Bauckham studies in great depth both the individual women who appear in the Gospels and the specific passages in which they appear. This unique approach reveals that there is much more to be…
In recent years, the disciplines of biblical studies and systematic theology have grown apart and largely lost the means of effective communication with one another. Unfortunately, this relational disconnect affects more than just these particular fields of study; it impacts the life of the church as a whole. The first St. Andrews Conference on Scripture and Theology brought leading biblical sc…
Award-winning religious scholar Richard Bauckham here explores the historical figure of Jesus, evaluating the sources and showing that they provide us with good historical evidence for his life and teaching. To place Jesus in his proper historical context, as a Jew from Galilee in the early first century of our era, Bauckham looks at Jewish religion and society in the land of Israel under Roman…
The Details of Thomas Becket’s life and of the first fifty years or so of his cult are so well-known that they hardly bear retelling.1 For the fifteenthcentury monks who acted as custodians of his shrine there was a handy mnemonic for the most significant events of his path to sainthood—the Seven Wonderful Tuesdays—which they duly copied into the instructions written fo…
Ecocide is at hand in the next century unless great powers like China, the United States and Europe learn to work together on better global and national regulatory institutions and green markets for a global Green New Deal (Tienhaara 2018; Drahos 2021; Braithwaite 2021d). Unfortunately, green markets are as prone to corruption as any other. As we have seen with the …
Modern civilization is at a crossroads, at a potential inflection point in its historical evolution. The scientific community has advised that the window for decisive collective action to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions and avoid catastrophic impacts on people and the planet will close within a decade. The COVID-19 pandemic has created one of the worst health and socio-economic …
Near-death experiences offer a glimpse not only into the nature of death but also into the meaning of life. They are not only useful tools to aid in the human quest to understand death but are also deeply meaningful, transformative experiences for the people who have them. In a unique contribution to the growing and popular literature on the subject, philosophers John Martin Fischer and Benj…