The manner in which Kathryn Johnston died so tragically at the hands of Atlanta narcotics police on the evening of November 21, 2006, anticipates and informs a number of very contemporary--and extremely volatile--issues that have become closely associated with the name of Ferguson, Missouri. As the ""Black Lives Matter"" movement makes clear, the issues center primarily around the relationship between racial identity and lethal police violence in the United States today. In this Second Edition of Policing the State, Louis A. Ruprecht Jr. attempts to situate both ""Ferguson"" and ""Black Lives...

Working within two popular genres, gardening books and biblical meditations, God Gardened East offers a meditation on the first twenty-five chapters of Genesis, emphasizing the tropes of cultivation, wandering, and ""the east."" Reconceived in a post-9/11 environment, Ruprecht wrestles with difficult questions about the violent legacy of monotheism and traces some of this violence back to the foundational story of Abraham and his dislocation from his homeland.

""God Gardened East is an essay in the tradition of Thoreau and Wendell Berry. It is about important things, such as empire, the...