The Malevolent S Mark

In this dark fantasy romance, a powerful young woman must face the destructive truths of a forgotten past if her kingdom has any hope of a future. It's 1921 in Camelot City, and King Arthur is still missing. Not that nineteen-year-old Birdie Smith, the Siren Thief, much cares. She's too busy getting arrested. Only the machines are allowed to use magic according to the king regent. To clear her name, Birdie will have to help a fallen knight, Sir Gawain, save the king by listening for a shattered sword's song that only she can hear. And she'll have to find it before Mordred, a handsome traitor from a past Birdie doesn't want to remember, can enslave the seven United Kingdoms with his mark. Ensnared in a world where machines control magic, dark secrets abound, and forbidden romances await, Birdie is unsure whom she should trust, even her own heart.

After decades of imperfect secularism, presided over by an often corrupt Congress establishment, Nehru’s diverse republic has yielded to Hindu nationalism. India, the first major democracy to fall to demagogic populism in the twenty-first century, is racing to a point of no return. Since 2014, the ruling BJP has unleashed forces that are irreversibly transforming the country. Indian democracy, honed over decades, is now the chief enabler of Hindu extremism. Bigotry has been ennobled as a healthy form of self-assertion. Anti Muslim vitriol has deluged the mainstream. Religious minorities live in terror of a vengeful majority. Congress now mimics Modi; other parties pray for a miracle. In this highly acclaimed critique of post-Independence India from Nehru to Narendra Modi, revised and expanded with a new chapter, K.S. Komireddi charts the dismaying course of the world’s largest democracy. He argues that the missteps of the nation’s founders, the mistakes of Nehru, the betrayals of his daughter and her sons, the anti-democratic fetish for technocracy carried to extremes by Manmohan Singh—all of them prepared the way for Modi’s march to absolute power. If secularists fail to wrest the republic from Hindu supremacists, Komireddi argues, India may go the way of Yugoslavia and collapse under the burden of sinister ethno-religious nationalism. A gripping short history of modern India, Malevolent Republic is also a passionate plea for India’s reclamation.

It would be difficult to find a better starting point for the present inquiry than the words which stand at the head of the canonical accounts of the life of Jesus. “The Gospel according to S. Mark” suggests clearly enough the nature of the facts and the method of their investigation. It implies that there is one Gospel, and that is presented in more than one form. It sanctions a distinction between the essential facts and interpretation of facts upon which Christian belief depends, and the partial and more or less accidental presentation of them which survives in the written records of the evangelists. There is a Gospel behind the Gospels: but it is through the Gospels that the Gospel is to be know.

A collection of articles on Twain's work expressing a broad range of critical perspectives and pedagogical methods, intended to address race, gender and class issues in the classroom.

Done, done, and done. This book solves three important problems: What role did Jewish leaders play in the death of Jesus (it certainly wasn’t to help Rome execute him)? What was Judas’ role (he certainly was no traitor)? And how does Barabbas fit into this? These problems were solved in the author’s previous book, The Ghost in the Gospels, but here even more evidence is presented and in a more compact way for a faster ride. The first chapter is a knock-out punch, proving it is absolutely impossible that Judas betrayed Jesus. Not merely improbable. Impossible. Absolutely. What Judas actually did awaits a later chapter, after reviewing the historical context from Josephus and all the evidence in the New Testament that exonerates Jewish leaders of any blame in Jesus’ death. What has blinded us to the evidence is theology: An obsession with surrounding Jesus with Jewish enemies and portraying him as an alien and threat to his own culture. Pure theology. That’s all it ever was. No solid pattern of evidence in the Gospels ever supported it. Could the great majority of scholars have been wrong about this for the last two centuries? Yes.

This book is a collection of revised-and-updated essays about the Hebrew Bible written by a North American scholar over a period of several decades. Subdivided into three parts--Torah, Prophecy/Apocalyptic, and Wisdom--these seventeen essays attempt to model for younger scholars and students what the discipline of biblical interpretation can look like, attending carefully to literary, historical, canonical, and comparative intertextual methods of investigation.