Synopsis: Liberating Biblical Study is a unique collaboration of pioneering biblical scholars, social-change activists, and movement-based artists. Well known and unknown, veterans and newcomers, these diverse practitioners of justice engage in a lively and critical conversation at the intersection of seminary, sanctuary, and street. The book is divided into eight sections; in each, a scholar, activist, and artist explore the justice issues related to a biblical text or idea, such as exodus, creation, jubilee, and sanctuary. Beyond the emerging themes (e.g., empire, resistance movements,...

Bury the Dead is a collection of personal encounters with death: stories of Alzheimer's, AIDS, cancer, hospice, suicide, murder, systemic violence, genocide, and war. In this book a teenager tenderly washes her mother's body, a community organizer cries outrage over his blood-soaked comrade, a father builds a coffin for his infant son, martyrs are honored by a former political prisoner, a young scholar's experiences in Palestine shape her reading of the Exodus narrative, and a community of gardeners plant trees at urban-core murder sites. Drawing from sources such as the peace movement, the...

A fresh look at the Exodus story that opens our eyes to injustice in today's world. ""A remarkable book of contextual biblical studies . . . Dykstra's subject is the story of Exodus, not as told by the slaves, but from the perspective of the Egyptian empire. There she finds a haunting mirror of North American culture, of its oppression, self-aggrandizement, and brutal racism. The result is a splendid work of public theology."" --Kathleen M. O'Connor, Columbia Theological Seminary ""The late Robert McAfee Brown used to worry about how we North American Christians, with our vantage point from...