Riding through the forest, a young boy named Mike explores the natural world around him. He watches trout swim, smells the rain damp leaves and feels the cool waters of a snow fed stream as he rides his bike alongside his parents. This memorable ride leaves Mike eager to experience additional bicycling adventures.

In this book, Michael Patrick Barber examines the role of the Jerusalem temple in the teaching of the historical Jesus. Drawing on recent discussions about methodology and memory research in Jesus studies, he advances a fresh approach to reconstructing Jesus' teaching. Barber argues that Jesus did not reject the temple's validity but that he likely participated in and endorsed its rites. Moreover, he locates Jesus' teaching within Jewish apocalyptic eschatology, showing that Jesus' message...

Chasing after a family secret--a curious silence surrounding a long-lost ancestor--led the author on a pilgrimage through the landscape, history and literature of Ireland. His journey of self-discovery, flavored by poems, stories, lore and legend, reflects his idea that literature may be the key that explains the past and reveals the present.Serving as part memoir and part journalistic chronicle, this work offers a unique look at how memory, literature and travel shape one's defini...

Red beans and rice, trad jazz, and second lines are the Big Easy's calling cards, but beyond where the carriage rides take you is a city brimming with genre-defying music, transnational cuisine, and pockets of wild, artistic locals that challenge preconceived notions of what it means to be New Orleans.With a respectful nod to the traditional and a full embrace of the obscure, New Orleans: The Underground Guide is a resource for discovering the city as it really is -- as much brass b...

The anti-busing riots of 1974 forever changed Southie, Boston's working class Irish community, branding it as a violent, racist enclave. Michael Patrick MacDonald grew up in Southie's Old Colony housing project. He describes the way this world within a world felt to the troubled yet keenly gifted observer he was even as a child: "[as if] we were protected, as if the whole neighborhood was watching our backs for threats, watching for all the enemies we could never really define."But...

Reading Oscar Wilde is a comprehensive interpretive guide designed for students and readers who come to Wilde’s writings for the first time, delivering a fuller understanding of the works and the background from which the canon has emerged. This ready-at-hand compendium details the scholarly perspectives of Wilde’s vast literary output. Meticulously arranged, this accessible volume includes freestanding discussions of individual works, including clarification of Wilde’s pioneering...

I was a musician before I was anything else. That's how I first used technology-not through code or commerce, but through sound. In the late 1980s, I stood in an "electronic music studio" at Bennington College in Vermont, staring at a new keyboard called The Synclavier. I didn't know how it worked, but I could feel what sounds it wanted to make. It wasn't just a machine-it was a co-conspirator. It could emulate, sample, sequence, and distort. I could pull emotion out of circuitry. At the t...

The “philosopher of truth” (Jill Lepore, The New Yorker) shows why truth is an essential democratic value—and how it can be strengthenedDo any of us really care about truth when it comes to politics? Should we? In a world of big lies, denialism, and conspiracy theories, democracies are experiencing two interlocked crises: a loss of confidence in democracy itself and the growing sense among many that politics is only about power—not truth. In this book, Mic...

This book is about the philosophy of de-extinction. To make an extinct species ‘de-extinct’ is to resurrect it by creating new organisms of the same, or similar, appearance and genetics. The book describes current attempts to resurrect three species, the aurochs, woolly mammoth and passenger pigeon. It then investigates two major philosophical questions such projects throw up. These are the Authenticity Question—‘will the products of de-extinction be authentic members of the original s...

The premise of this book is that the Beatitudes are like a stairway, each one leading to the next as a logical consequence of the one that came before, and that the rest of Matthew chapter 5 is a commentary, a fleshing out of the consequences of what the Beatitudes are designed to accomplish in our lives. The first Beatitude is salvation, and each of the others depict the gradual process of sanctification in our lives. In the rest of Matthew 5 Jesus shows us the true nature of our brokenne...

In Lukewarming, two environmental scientists explain the science and spin behind the headlines and come to a provocative conclusion: climate change is real, and partially man-made, but it is becoming obvious that far more warming has been forecast than will occur, with some of the catastrophic impacts implausible or impossible. Global warming is more lukewarm than hot. This fresh analysis is an invaluable source for those looking to be more informed about global warming and the da...

Geography is not only the study of the surface of the planet and the exploration of spatial and human - environment relationships, but also a way of thinking about the world. Guided by the Australian Curriculum and the Professional Standards for Teaching School Geography (GEOGstandards), Teaching Secondary Geography provides a comprehensive introduction to both the theory and practice of teaching Geography. This text covers fundamental geographical knowledge and skills, such as working wit...