A Gift From Afar

An increasing number of families around the world are now living apart from one another, subsequently causing the defining and redefining of their relationships, roles within the family unit, and how to effectively maintain a sense of familial cohesion through distance. Edited by Maria Rosario T. de Guzman, Jill Brown, and Carolyn Pope Edwards, Parenting From Afar and the Reconfiguration of Family Across Distance uniquely highlights how families--both in times of crisis and within normative cultural practices--organize and configure themselves and their parenting through physical separation. In this volume, readers are given a unique look into the lives of families around the world that are affected by separation due to a wide range of circumstances including economic migration, fosterage, divorce, military deployment, education, and orphanhood. Contributing authors from the fields of psychology, anthropology, sociology, education, and geography all delve deep into the daily realities of these families and share insight on why they live apart from one another, how families are redefined across long distances, and the impact absence has on various members within the unit. An especially timely volume, Parenting From Afar and the Reconfiguration of Family Across Distance offers readers an important understanding and examination of family life in response to social change and shifts in the caregiving context.

An imaginative girl shares some of the wonderful ways she can still show her love to friends and family far, far away. This moving, hopeful picture book is perfect for fans of While We Can't Hug and Outside, Inside. Inspired by the universal feelings of loss and loneliness that came when the pandemic forced people to stay inside and far apart, Racha Mourtada wrote a reassuring poem about connection and the endurance of love that will appeal to readers of all ages. This gorgeous picture book is a tribute to all the hugs and moments we haven't been able to share with each other. In tender and lyrical rhyming text perfect for reading aloud intimately or in a group, the little girl thinks of creative and wondrous ways to support and reach her loved ones from afar. Positive and encouraging, these ideas will make any reader feel more hopeful about the future. With an adorable cast of kids from all around the world, I'll Love You from Afar is a universal message about how we can express love for one another.

After fulfilling every objective of a top secret mission to Jupiters Ganymede and now only days from home, four NASA astronauts learn from their computer systems analyst in Houston through an unauthorized channel that a bomb may be on a rendezvous course with their ship, the Copernicus. Mission Specialist Jana Novacek, the youngest astronaut ever, who has been chosen for mysterious reasons, suggests breaking security, announcing their existence to everyone over the net, and asking for help. Someone might be willing to help who unknowingly is involved in the plot against them. Cocommander Fawzshen, Prince of Rhatania, further recommends revealing their amazing discovery. Commander Jackson Medwin thinks that Janas journal is ideal for that purpose. Jana is distressed and feels her personal journal is not suitable. Commander Medwin will do anything to save his crew, this mission, and their discovery, but he decides neither to take evasive actions nor break security until they have proof that something is on a collision course with their ship. He considers a deactivated meteoroid detection program uploaded to them from Houston as insufficient proof.

Routledge is proud to be re-issuing this landmark series in association with the International African Institute. The series, published between 1950 and 1977, brings together a wealth of previously un-co-ordinated material on the ethnic groupings and social conditions of African peoples. Concise, critical and (for its time) accurate, the Ethnographic Survey contains sections as follows: Physical Environment Linguistic Data Demography History & Traditions of Origin Nomenclature Grouping Cultural Features: Religion, Witchcraft, Birth, Initiation, Burial Social & Political Organization: Kinship, Marriage, Inheritance, Slavery, Land Tenure, Warfare & Justice Economy & Trade Domestic Architecture Each of the 50 volumes will be available to buy individually, and these are organized into regional sub-groups: East Central Africa, North-Eastern Africa, Southern Africa, West Central Africa, Western Africa, and Central Africa Belgian Congo. The volumes are supplemented with maps, available to view on routledge.com or available as a pdf from the publishers.

One book plus 16-piece nativity set.

With the onset of spring in Sudrland, alliances of love and loyalty have shifted and settled. Eirik resides with his wife, Asta, at Cairnby Manor, but keeps his consort, Alison—dream-traveler from the twentieth century—tucked away at a nearby cottar’s cottage. While Asta understands her husband’s relationship with Alison, Eirik’s brother, Sigmus, accuses Alison of witchery. And despite his own betrothal, Sigmus not so secretly covets and pursues Asta. Circumstances are further complicated when matriarch, Britna, proposes that her sons return her skraeling lover to his desert home—the surprising condition, that she goes too. As sails are set for another voyage, betrayal and desire become undercurrents aboard the ships, and when seas turn stormy the arduous journey threatens to be their last great adventure.

In Brothers from Afar: Rabbinic Approaches to Apostasy and Reversion in Medieval Europe, Ephraim Kanarfogel challenges a long-held view that those who had apostatized and later returned to the Jewish community in northern medieval Europe were encouraged to resume their places without the need for special ceremony or act that verified their reversion. Kanarfogel’s evidence suggests that from the late twelfth century onward, leading rabbinic authorities held that returning apostates had to undergo ritual immersion and other rites of contrition. He also argues that the shift in rabbinic positions during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was fundamentally a response to changing Christian perceptions of Jews and was not simply an internal halakhic or rabbinic development. Brothers from Afar is divided into seven chapters. Kanarfogel begins the book with Rashi (1040–1105), the pre-eminent European rabbinic authority, who favored an approach which sought to smooth the return of penitent apostates. He then goes on to explain that although Jacob Katz, a leading Jewish social historian, maintains that this more lenient approach held sway in Ashkenazic society, a series of manuscript passages indicate that Rashi’s view was challenged in several significant ways by northern French Tosafists in the mid-twelfth century. German Tosafists mandated immersion for a returning apostate as a means of atonement, akin to the procedure required of a new convert. In addition, several prominent tosafists sought to downgrade the status of apostates from Judaisim who did not return, in both marital and economic issues, well beyond the place assigned to them by Rashi and others who supported his approach. Although these mandates were formulated along textual and juridical lines, considerations of how to protect the Jewish communities from the inroads of increased anti-Judaism and the outright hatred expressed for the Jews as unrivaled enemies of Christianity, played a large role. Indeed, medieval Christian sources that describe how Jews dealt with those who relapsed from Christianity to Judaism are based not only on popular practices and culture but also reflect concepts and practices that had the approbation of the rabbinic elite in northern Europe. Brothers from Afar belongs in the library of every scholar of Jewish and medieval studies.