Kristin Swenson

The Bible, we are constantly reminded, is the best-selling book of all time. It is read with intense devotion by hundreds of millions of people, stands as authoritative for Judaism and Christianity, and informs and affects the politics and lives of the religious and non-religious around the world. But how well do we really know it? The Bible is so familiar, so ubiquitous that we have begun to take our knowledge of it for granted. The Bible many of us think we know is a pale imitation of the real thing. In A Most Peculiar Book, Kristin Swenson addresses the dirty little secret of biblical studies — that the Bible is a weird book. It is full of surprises and contradictions, unexplained impossibilities, intriguing supernatural creatures, and heroes doing horrible deeds. It does not provide a simple worldview: what "the Bible says" on a given topic is multi-faceted, sometimes even contradictory. Yet, Swenson argues, we have a tendency to reduce the complexities of the Bible to aphorisms, bumper stickers, and slogans. Swenson helps readers look at the text with fresh eyes. A collection of ancient stories and poetry written by multiple authors, held together by the tenuous string of tradition, the Bible often undermines our modern assumptions. And is all the more marvelous and powerful for it. Rather than dismiss the Bible as an outlandish or irrelevant relic of antiquity, Swenson leans into the messiness full-throttle. Making ample room for discomfort, wonder, and weirdness, A Most Peculiar Book guides readers through a Bible that will feel, to many, brand new.

"Wonderfully penned meditations on the basic questions Christianity - and humanity - now face" - Professor Larry Rasmussen, author of Earth Honoring Faith: Religious Ethics in a New Key."Informed by rich appeal to religious mystery, voiced in poetic imagery and cadence… offers thick attentiveness to the world" - Professor Walter Brueggemann, author of God, Neighbor, Empire: The Excess of Divine Fidelity and the Command of Common Good "Seeker and visionary biblical scholar, Kristin Swenson blows past petrified Christian traditions to shine light on a profoundly radical new way to experience God" - Stephanie Pearson, contributing editor, Outside magazine."Calls us to heal and be healed... Fresh and poetic... opens a path for pilgrims seeking new ways of seeing and living with faith on the earth." Professor Cliff Edwards, author of Van Gogh and God: A Creative Spiritual Quest"...Motivates and empowers readers to stretch ideas of God as they care, in love and awe, for the earth." - Reverend Pat Watkins, United Methodist Missionary for the Care of God's CreationWhat happens if we imagine the Jesus of Christian theology to be realized in the nonhuman natural world around us? Basic to Christian belief is the notion that God, the creator of all, inhabited the earth in order to call to us. God of Earth embraces this central premise of Christianity - Jesus as both fully divine and fully human - and then allows for the possibility that such a Jesus need not be limited to a human man. What if Jesus were "God of earth" - not only over earth but also in and through it? As Swenson tracks that question through the cycle of a church year, she invites readers to reconsider our relationship to the nonhuman natural world and so experience new dimensions of the sacred and new possibilities for hope and healing.

We should all have one-a special place where we get away from the world. A place where distractions are kept to a minimum, worries and cares are forgotten, and an endless cornucopia of imagination is ours for the taking. A place where we can open a book, open our minds, and be transported elsewhere.A reading place.And that place could be anywhere: a soft bed in the bedroom, a cozy chair in the den, a cushy window seat, a lawn chair on the back porch, a single seat in a private bathroom, or even a booth in a crowded and noisy restaurant. It really doesn't matter where we read, as long as our minds can close off the world and focus on the words.Please, get settled in your reading place, take a couple of deep breaths, open this book, and begin reading.Now...isn't that a great feeling?

Since 1997, advertisements for lifestyle drugs have saturated the U.S. airwaves, print media, and the Internet. Viewers are asked to see their children’s difficulty in school as attention deficit disorder, their worry as anxiety, and their flagging sex life as dysfunction. And for each disorder, there is a corresponding pharmaceutical solution. Through the lens of these advertisements, Lifestyle Drugs and the Neoliberal Family unpacks our contemporary obsession with obtaining easy solutions for difficult problems. The ads’ discourse illuminates the experience of living within a society increasingly affected by the policies of neoliberalism, one that requires us to invest and manage our own health with the ultimate goal of a materially productive life. Advertisements for lifestyle drugs promise to make us sexier, happier, and better liked; not to cure us of a disorder, but, ultimately, to make us better workers, suggesting that drugs do indeed work to keep us working.

Why does the film Magnolia end in a downpour of frogs?Is the serpent in the Garden of Eden the devil or just a snake?How do people use the Bible to argue different sides of today's most controversial issues?Why did Metallica's bass player name their song "Creeping Death" after watching The Ten Commandments?Where does the fish symbol of the Christian faith come from?Who is the lamb with seven horns and seven eyes who opens the seven seals of a cosmic scroll?Without either promoting or undermining specific beliefs, religious studies professor Kristin Swenson offers an intelligent, humorous, highly accessible, engaging, and illuminating guide to the Bible--incorporating biblical scholarship with contemporary pop culture references to help readers better understand the most talked about book of all time.