New Titles Tuesday: Fresh fifteen

Nineteen new titles in print and eBook format were added to Alloway Library’s collection last week. Here are descriptions for fifteen of them. 

To view eBooks, click on the title, TWU login  may be required. Place a hold in the catalogue to =get "Available Soon" print items as soon as tomorrow.

Constructing Muslims in France: discourse, public identity, and the politics of citizenship  [eBook] /Jennifer Fredette. 

Provides a deft empirical analysis to show the political diversity and complicated identity politics of this relatively new population. She examines the public identity of French Muslims and evaluates images in popular media to show how stereotyped notions of racial and religious differences pervade French public discourse.

The correspondence of Wolfgang Capito 1532-1536. [eBook] /edited and translated by Erika Rummel ; with the assistance of Milton Kooistra.

Wolfgang Capito (1478–1541), a leading Christian Hebraist and Catholic churchman who converted to Protestantism, was a pivotal figure in the history of the Reformation. After serving as a professor of theology in Basel and adviser to the archbishop of Mainz, he moved to Strasbourg, which became, largely due to his efforts, one of the most important centres of the Reformation movement after Wittenberg. Kooistra’s annotation provides historical context by identifying classical, patristic, and biblical quotations as well as persons and places.

The ending of the canon: a canonical and intertextual reading of Revelation 21-22 (print) /Külli Tõniste.

Whilst the methods used in the church treat Revelation as scripture and keep the text intact, these approaches often lack the tools for sound interpretation. Tõniste observes the need for a more holistic and thoughtful methodology to study Revelation.

Engines of truth: producing veracity in the Victorian courtroom [eBook] /Wendie Ellen Schneider.

"During the Victorian era, new laws allowed more witnesses to testify in court cases. At the same time, an emerging cultural emphasis on truth-telling drove the development of new ways of inhibiting perjury. Strikingly original and drawing on a broad array of archival research, Wendie Schneider shines new light on cross-examination, the most enduring product of this time and the “greatest legal engine ever invented for the discovery of truth.

Essays on the patriarchal narratives [eBook & Print] /edited by A.R. Millard & D.J. Wiseman.

There is renewed interest in the history and traditions of the patriarchal period. Recent publications have sought, among other things, to show that the biblical patriarchs were a literary, even fictional, creation of the first millennium BC, produced to provide the nation of Israel with 'founding fathers'. Much of this new writing is helpful in distinguishing what are traditional or speculative interpretations from the basic text of Genesis. In the light of the importance of this subject for the proper understanding of the historical reliability and the theological teaching of the Bible (which cannot be separated), the Council of Tyndale House set up an Old Testament project group to look afresh at aspects of the problems raised.

Fact and fiction: literary and scientific cultures in Germany and Britain [eBook] /edited by Christine Lehleiter. 

Twelve essays cover a wide range of scientific disciplines, from physics and chemistry to medicine and anthropology, and a variety of literary texts, such as Erasmus Darwin’s poem The Botanic Garden, George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, and Goethe’s Elective Affinities. The collection will appeal to scholars of literature and of the history of science, and to those interested in the connections between the two.

An increase in time: story lines of Germantown MennoniteChurch and its historic trust, 1683-2005 (Print) /Richard J. Lichty. 

Lichty recounts the history of the oldest Mennonite church in North America. From within the congregation, he tracks its story through periods of slow growth and spiritual stagnation and renewal and vitality, through affiliation with other Mennonite bodies and through conflict and separation from them.

Making the white man's West: whiteness and the creation of the American West[eBook] /by Jason E. Pierce.

In the early nineteenth century, critics like Zebulon Pike and Washington Irving viewed the West as a “dumping ground” for free blacks and Native Americans, a place where they could be segregated from the white communities east of the Mississippi River. However, as immigrant populations and industrialization took hold in the East, white Americans began to view the West as a “refuge for real whites.” The West had the most diverse population in the nation with substantial numbers of American Indians, Hispanics, and Asians, but Anglo-Americans could control these mostly disenfranchised peoples and enjoy the privileges of power while celebrating their presence as providing a unique regional character.

Mind, body, motion, matter: eighteenth-century British and French literary perspectives  [eBook] /edited by Mary Helen McMurran and Alison Conway.

Focusing on embodied experience and the materialization of thought in poetry, novels, art, and religion, this collection offer new and intriguing readings of canonical authors.

New Testament interpretation: essays on principles and methods. [eBook & print] /edited by I. Howard Marshall.

The problem of interpreting a passage from the Bible is one to which we would all like to find the key, some simple and easy formula that will enable us to approach any text of Scripture and quickly establish its meaning. Alas, there is no such simple answer, but it is possible to indicate some general principles and types of approach which will enable us to wrestle with the text and come to an understanding of it.

On civic republicanism: ancient lessons for global politics  [eBook]/edited by Neven Leddy and Geoffrey C. Kellow. 

Explores the enduring relevance of the ancient concepts of republicanism and civic virtue to modern questions about political engagement and identity. Examining both ancient and early modern conceptions of civic republicanism, the contributors respond to the work of thinkers ranging from Plato and Aristotle to Machiavelli, Montesquieu, and Wollstonecraft.

Political strategies in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica   [eBook] /edited by Sarah Kurnick and Joanne Baron.

"New data from a variety of well-known scholars in Mesoamerican archaeology reveal the creation, perpetuation, and contestation of politically authoritative relationships between rulers and subjects and between nobles and commoners.

Reading Karl Barth, interrupting moral technique,transforming biomedical ethics  (print) /Ashley John Moyse. 

Moyse engages with Karl Barth's philosophical and theological thinking in order to investigate the moral discussions surrounding biomedical ethics. According to Moyse, Barth's moral theology not only grounds humans as ontologically relational but also fuels responsibility to, with, and for one's neighbors.

Undesigned coincidences in the writings of the Old and New Testament  [eBook]:  an argument of their veracity /John J. Blunt.

The argument from undesigned coincidences is one of the forgotten arguments for Christianity. When one examines the Scriptures, one finds a number of historical, factual claims which either overlap and confirm others made independently or fill in gaps that authors familiar with current events at the time of the writings would have assumed their readers knew about. These coincidences are therefore undesigned–they are unintentional–but they show that the authors who wrote the books which contain them were telling historical truths. (Wartick)

Theworld's oldest church: Bible, art, and ritual at Dura-Europos, Syria  [eBook] /Michael Peppard.

A historical and theological reassessment of the oldest Christian building ever discovered -- the third-century house-church at Dura-Europos. Contrary to commonly held assumptions about Christian initiation, Peppard contends that rituals here did not primarily embody notions of death and resurrection. Rather, he portrays the motifs of the church’s wall paintings as those of empowerment, healing, marriage, and incarnation, while boldly re-identifying the figure of a woman formerly believed to be a repentant sinner as the Virgin Mary. This richly illustrated volume is a breakthrough work that enhances our understanding of early Christianity at the nexus of Bible, art, and ritual.