Here is a selection of print and e-books recently added to the collection:

 Is math real? : how simple questions lead us to mathematics’ deepest truths /Eugenia Cheng.“Where does math come from? From a textbook? From rules? From deduction? From logic? Not really, Cheng states that it comes from curiosity, from instinctive human curiosity, “from people not being satisfied with answers and always wanting to understand more.” And most importantly, she says, “it comes from questions”: not from answering them, but from posing them. Nothing could seem more at odds from the way most of us were taught math: a rigid and autocratic model which taught us to follow specific steps to reach specific answers. Instead of encouraging a child who asks why 1+1 is 2, our methods of education force them to accept it. Instead of exploring why we multiply before we add, a textbook says, just to get on with the order of operations. Indeed, the point is usually just about getting the right answer, and those that are good at that, become “good at math” while those who question, are not. And that’s terrible: These very same questions, as Cheng shows, aren’t simply annoying questions coming from people who just don’t “get it” and so can’t do math. Rather, they are what drives mathematical research and push the boundaries in our understanding of all things. Legitimizing those questions, she invites everyone in, whether they think they are good at math or not.

Life application study Bible.The Life Application Study Bible has been significantly expanded and thoroughly updated. The relevant notes not only explain difficult passages and give information on Bible life and times, but go a step further to show you how to “take it personally,” speaking to every situation and circumstance of your life! It includes over 10,000 Life Application notes and features designed to help readers apply God’s truth to everyday life.

The flame imperishable : Tolkien, St. Thomas, and the metaphysics of Faërie /Jonathan S. McIntosh.J. R. R. Tolkien was a profoundly metaphysical thinker, and one of the most formative influences on his imagination, according to this new study of his works, was the great thirteenth-century theologian, St. Thomas Aquinas. Structured around Tolkien’s Middle-earth creation myth, the Ainulindale, The Flame Imperishable follows the thought of Aquinas as a guide in laying bare the deeper foundations of many of the more familiar themes from Tolkien’s legendarium, including such notions as sub-creation, free will, evil, and eucatastrophe. More than merely using Aquinas to illuminate Tolkien, however, this study concludes that, through its appropriation of many of the philosophical and theological insights of Aquinas, what Tolkien’s literary opus achieves is an important and unique landmark in the history of Thomism itself, offering an imaginative and powerful contemporary retrieval, interpretation, and application of Thomistic metaphysics for the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

 Themes of contemporary art : visual art after 1980 /Jean Robertson, Craig McDaniel ; with Scott Contreras-Koterbay.Themes of Contemporary Art: Visual Art after 1980 offers students and readers an introduction to recent art.

 Understanding human evolution /Ian Tattersall.Human life, and how we came to be, is one of the greatest scientific and philosophical questions of our time. This book engagingly explains not only the human evolutionary process, but the technologies currently used to unravel the evolutionary past and emergence of Homo sapiens. By separating the history of palaeoanthropology from current interpretation of the human fossil record, it lays numerous misconceptions to rest, and demonstrates that human evolution has been far from the linear struggle from primitiveness to perfection that we’ve been led to believe. It also presents a coherent scenario for how Homo sapiens contrived to cross a formidable cognitive barrier to become an extraordinary and unprecedented thinking creature. Elegantly illustrated, Understanding Human Evolution is for anyone interested in the complex and tangled story of how we cam