The Sifting Project

Tony Crypt and Paul Elliott are brilliant, poverty-stricken teenagers living in the Bronx at the helm of the Second World War. As they grow up in a swelling wake of loss, a tunnelled path of engulfing research paves their way forward: they gain insight into the trajectories of souls and memories when someone dies. As Tony and Paul desperately deepen their understanding of the composition and malleability of these trajectories, their research falls into the wrong hands — a fearful government, frantic for the ability to sift through and control a tainted past and the path of knowledge. As Tony and Paul battle with an arrested ability to alter the outcome of their actions, two talented young people with arduous pasts are accosting the barriers of time and circumstance, connecting each line between Tony, Paul, their research, and the hands it should be left in. A swirling of the boundaries of neuroscience, astrophysics, and poetry, The Sifting Project characterizes the biological path of love, trust, loss, control, and legacy within the memories of time. The Sifting Project teaches tensions like non-fiction, illustrates experiences and observations like a memoir, and loves like that one story you'll never forget. It's the excuse you need to read fiction and forget that work exists. This story will remind you that the essence of who you are — your memories, experiences, and truths — is what makes you irreplaceable in the narrative of change. When you do the work to listen to yourself and others, you can lift both history and the future. You are The Sifting Project of today. Be the voice of the truth.

Sacred sites offer believers the possibility of communing with the divine and achieving deeper insight into their faith. Yet their spiritual and cultural importance can lead to competition as religious groups seek to exclude rivals from practicing potentially sacrilegious rituals in the hallowed space and wish to assert their own claims. Holy places thus create the potential for military, theological, or political clashes, not only between competing religious groups but also between religious groups and secular actors. In War on Sacred Grounds, Ron E. Hassner investigates the causes and properties of conflicts over sites that are both venerated and contested; he also proposes potential means for managing these disputes. Hassner illustrates a complex and poorly understood political dilemma with accounts of the failures to reach settlement at Temple Mount/Haram el-Sharif, leading to the clashes of 2000, and the competing claims of Hindus and Muslims at Ayodhya, which resulted in the destruction of the mosque there in 1992. He also addresses more successful compromises in Jerusalem in 1967 and Mecca in 1979. Sacred sites, he contends, are particularly prone to conflict because they provide valuable resources for both religious and political actors yet cannot be divided. The management of conflicts over sacred sites requires cooperation, Hassner suggests, between political leaders interested in promoting conflict resolution and religious leaders who can shape the meaning and value that sacred places hold for believers. Because a reconfiguration of sacred space requires a confluence of political will, religious authority, and a window of opportunity, it is relatively rare. Drawing on the study of religion and the study of politics in equal measure, Hassner's account offers insight into the often-violent dynamics that come into play at the places where religion and politics collide.

The Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) is the oldest and still active exploration society of the Levant. Since 1865 PEF scholars have conducted significant, systematic exploration of Jerusalem and the Holy Land. Marking its 150th anniversary, this volume provides a retrospective on the PEF's work in the light of contemporary archaeological research.

The history behind the Copper Scroll and the true story of Jim Barfield’s quest for its treasure. Whether the objects are of legend or history, certain ancient mysteries arrest the imaginations of every generation. These antiquities refuse to be forgotten by the human spirit—hidden sufficiently to evade discovery, but historically prominent enough to leave a smattering of clues. Many explorers have fallen prey to fortune’s siren call, spending their lifetimes searching for the artifacts that promise to alter human history. The Copper Scroll Project is a relative newcomer to the modern treasure hunt. Part of the Dead Sea Scrolls collection, the Copper Scroll is unlike any of the leather and papyrus documents, though not simply for its copper plates. The relic reads like a coded map, listing dozens of hiding spots where tithes and vessels thought to be secreted from the Jewish Temple were stored for safekeeping. More than fifty years after archaeologists found this unique artifact in a cave near Qumran, four adventurers have dared to chase after the scroll’s priceless relics. “A unique introduction not only to a famous biblical mystery but to the world of American Christian interest in Israel, which remains opaque or bewildering to many outsiders, and is often caricatured.”—Matti Friedman, author of The Aleppo Codex “Equal parts mystery, treasure hunt and erudite elucidation of biblical history.”—Chanan Tigay, author of The Last Moses “Neese’s narrative pacing and story-telling is masterful. She gets the political and religious nuances of contemporary Israel.”—Elliot Jager, Jerusalem-based author and former editorial page editor at The Jerusalem Post

From one of our most preeminent writers, a tale that captures the shifting meanings of the past and how our experience colors those meanings In Antiquities, Lloyd Wilkinson Petrie, one of the seven elderly trustees of the now-defunct (for thirty-four years) Temple Academy for Boys, is preparing a memoir of his days at the school, intertwined with the troubling distractions of present events. As he navigates, with faltering recall, between the subtle anti-Semitism that pervaded the school's ethos and his fascination with his own family's heritage--in particular, his illustrious cousin, the renowned archaeologist Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie--he reconstructs the passions of a childhood encounter with the oddly named Ben-Zion Elefantin, a mystifying older pupil who claims descent from Egypt's Elephantine Island. From this seed emerges one of Cynthia Ozick's most wondrous tales, touched by unsettling irony and the elusive flavor of a Kafka parable, and weaving, in her own distinctive voice, myth and mania, history and illusion.

Violence is rampant in today's society. From state-sanctioned violence and the brutality of war and genocide to interpersonal fighting and the ways in which social lives are structured and symbolized by and through violence, people enact terrible things on other human beings almost every day. In Archaeologies of Violence and Privilege, archaeologists Christopher N. Matthews and Bradley D. Phillippi bring together a collection of authors who document the ways in which past social formations rested on violent acts and reproduced violent social and cultural structures. The contributors present a series of archaeological case studies that range from the mercury mines of colonial Huancavelica (AD 1564-1824) to the polluted waterways of Indianapolis, Indiana, at the turn of the twentieth century--a problem that disproportionally impacted African American neighborhoods. The individual chapters in this volume collectively argue that positions of power and privilege are fully dependent on forms of violence for their existence and sustenance.

Pastor and Bible teacher Randy McCracken offers an intimate look at lesser-known members of 1 and 2 Samuel's four main families--those of Samuel, Eli, Saul, and David. Examining characters unfamiliar to many Bible readers, he reveals important lessons for today.