Evil In The Land Without

Gott describes his journey through the heart of South America, across the swampland that forms the watershed between the Plate and the Amazon rivers. He intermingles his travel account with the results of his extensive research into the history of this land that once formed the contested frontier between Spanish and Portuguese territory and was the setting for a string of Jesuit missions and later for the extermination of the local peoples. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The gentle Karen, a tribe in Burma's eastern regions, call their country a land without evil. They number between four and five million, and have been fighting for half a century to keep their land and identity. Many - at least 40 per cent - are Christians, and have suffered particularly harsh treatment. Burma today, and Karen State in particular, is a land torn apart by evil. It is a land ruled by a regime which took power by force, ignored the will of the people in an election, and survives by creating a climate of fear. It is a land terrorised by a military regime which to this day perpetrates a catalogue of crimes against humanity. It takes people for forced labour, uses villagers as human minesweepers, captures children and forces them to become soldiers, systematically rapes ethnic minority women, and burns down villages and crops. It is a regime which has killed thousands of people in the ethnic minority areas. This compassionate but unflinching account of the Karen's predicament is an important step in galvanising Western opinion about this ongoing act of genocide.

In the neighborhood of Delmas in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, shortages run rampant. The relief organization CAMEP is inefficient, making water very difficult to find. CAMEP is responsible for the water, but the organization’s inadequacies cause widespread panic and sometimes death. The people have no option but to go rogue. In the light of the water shortage, the Jourdain family works with two peasant brothers who sell water from the family’s reservoir, benefitting both themselves and the family. The brothers carry the water in buckets on their heads and fight to make a profit. Things go terribly wrong, however, when Mr. Jourdain’s greedy boss cheats him of his earnings; now the family has nowhere to turn. Lucky for them, their servant SeSe is knowledgeable in the ways of the underground; she will teach them to survive. Even so, the family soon learns that in desperate times, there is a thin line between good and evil. Good fights to survive, but the evil path is sometimes the easiest. How will the Jourdain family choose, and will their choice lead to salvation or death?

Katerina Koci charts the development of the promised land motif, starting from its biblical roots and examining its reception over the centuries until the present day. As her cornerstone, Koci uses Hans-Georg Gadamer's claim that there are two complementary paths towards understanding and knowledge: science and art. Thus, to be faithful to the creed of the great hermeneutist, Koci ventures into both topics, arguing that while science sets out historical-critical analysis of the promised land motif in the Hebrew Bible and its later receptions, art enriches the interpretation with its literary illustrations. This volume places particular focus on American contexts, since the concept of the promised land is so deeply intertwined with American religious-political mythologies, and with the art of John Steinbeck and Walter Brueggemann in particular. By discussing artistic interpretation in biblical hermeneutics, the context and reception of Genesis 15.7 and Exodus 3.8 in the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, and the history of the promised land motif and its interpretations, Koci argues that artistic receptions of biblical motifs are crucial for biblical scholarship in opening new hermeneutical and thematical horizons.