Jason Richards is ridiculously in love with his friend and coworker, Ahmed Kazimi. Unfortunately, Ahmed is a package deal—he has a boyfriend who, as far as Jason is concerned, needs to be launched into the sun.Then a mysterious carnival rolls into town, and Jason and Ahmed can’t resist going. Not even if Ahmed’s boyfriend can be depended on to make everybody miserable.When Ahmed wins a strange prize from an even stranger carnival game, weird things start happening. First, a...

This accessible and authoritative introduction tells the American story of religious liberty from its colonial beginnings to the latest Supreme Court cases. The authors analyze closely the formation of the First Amendment religion clauses and describe the unique and enduring principles of the American experiment in religious freedom - liberty of conscience, free exercise of religion, religious equality, religious pluralism, separation of church and state, and no establishment of religion. ...

In the past, Christianity has had both positive and negative influences on democracy. Christian churches have served as benevolent agents of welfare and catalysts of political reform. But they have also served as belligerent allies of repression and censors of human rights. Christian theology has helped to cultivate democratic ideas of equality, li

The Rush for Black Diamonds, Volume One is the first of two volumes. It explores the Transatlantic slave trade and its mutation into chattel slavery. Volume One focuses on the involvement of two prominent Enlightenment philosophers as the architects of the political, legal, economic, and philosophical justifications for the human trade in the United Kingdom and the United States: John Locke (1632-1704), a British philosopher and "Father of Liberalism"; and Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), the...

Milwaukee, one of the nation's most segregated metropolitan areas, implemented in 1990 a school choice program aimed at improving the education of inner-city children by enabling them to attend a selection of private schools. The results of this experiment, however, have been overshadowed by the explosion of emotional debate it provoked nationwide. In this book, John Witte provides a broad yet detailed framework for understanding the Milwaukee experiment and its implications for the market...

Winner of the Terry McAdam Book AwardAs recommended on The Ezra Klein ShowFrom Pulitzer Prize finalist John Fabian Witt comes the “engrossing” (The New York Times) secret history of an epic experiment to remake American democracy. Before the dark money of the Koch Brothers, before the billions of the Ford Foundation, there was the Garland Fund.In 1922, a young idealist named Charles Garland rejecte...

What are the implications and likelihood of reform of the income tax system in the United States—specifically, the expansion and scope of the tax "expenditure" (loophole) system embedded in the income tax codes? This book details the tax system that now provides for more than 200 tax expenditures, highlighting the potential lost tax dollars.Income tax policy and politics is an inherently complex and potentially confusing topic. This book makes the tax loophole syst...

Combining Jewish, Greek, and Roman teachings with the radical new teachings of Christ and St. Paul, Christianity helped to cultivate the cardinal ideas of dignity, equality, liberty and democracy that ground the modern human rights paradigm. Christianity also helped shape the law of public, private, penal, and procedural rights that anchor modern legal systems in the West and beyond. This collection of essays explores these Christian contributions to human rights through the perspectives o...

Fiction, poetry, prose, and illustration by fourteen Tsunami Books clerks and fourteen significant others. A retrospective, a showcase, and a thank you to the people who, for twenty-seven years, have helped build an independent bookstore and community events center in Eugene, Oregon—and now, also, a new press in a new era. After a quarter century of bookselling and hard-won stewardship, our shelves bear fruit.

Disquiet is a collection of poems that utilizes natural phenomena—a bright beach, a fallen tree limb, the weight of gravity—to evoke and reflect upon memory and human experience. The poems are structurally innovative, each shaped around a central axis as they trace the speaker’s growth from childhood to adulthood. Acute observations resonate throughout the book as its focus shifts from the natural world to the world of the made—the grocery cart or pie-case or microscope—to the wor...

This is a self help reading for those that are seeking it. Its an opinion that life is as easy as deciding and doing. This read will break down the portions to help an individual be successful in their search for improvement.

The Bible is full of law.Yet too often, Christians either pick and choose verses out of context to bolster existing positions, or assume that any moral judgment the Bible expresses should become the law of the land. Law and the Bible asks: What inspired light does the Bible shed on Christians? participation in contemporary legal systems? It concludes that more often than not the Bible overturns our faulty assumptions and skewed commitments rather than bolsters them. In the process...