This book argues that the gospels are in an important sense "occasions for offense." The Jesus of the gospels is a scandal (skandalon, in the original Greek) and he is never more scandalous than when he is speaking in parables. Interpreters of the gospels over the centuries have consistently labored to domesticate the offense or to eliminate it entirely. David McCracken, focusing on parables, Matthew's narrative contexts, and the gospel of John, seeks to recover the gospels' sense of Jesus as skandalon. To this end, he enlists the help of Kierkegaard, the philosopher of...

Chuck Palahniuk, America's premier transgressive novelist, enjoys a tremendous readership. Yet he has not necessarily been embraced by critics or academics. His prose is considered vulgar by some, but his body of work addresses a core motivation of 21st-century life: individual self-empowerment. Palahniuk writes about what it means to be on the outside looking in, revising familiar narratives for a contemporary audience to get at the heart of the human condition--everyone wants a chance to win his or her fair share, no matter the cost. In Haunted, Snuff, Pygmy, Tell-All, Damned and...

From all outward appearances, Jade Nemo is trouble. The jet-black hair. The nose ring. Her father is absent-perhaps even missing, her step-mother doesn't know what to do with her, and now she's been accused of hatching a master plan of attack at her high school, planting explosives in a student's locker. But no one has bothered to ask Jade what her side of the story is. Until her teacher, Ms. Pearson, and the new school counselor, Mrs. Hamelin, give her a chance. Jade swears she has no intention of violence, and the true threat is Cassie Winters, the popular blond lacrosse captain who no one...