Featured Titles Tuesday- October 21, 2025

Here is a selection of print and ebooks recently added to our collection.

 A truce that is not peace: life and death so far /Miriam Toews.  An astonishing masterwork from one of our most renowned and acclaimed writers, telling a piece of her own story in nonfiction for the first time. “Why do you write?” the organizer of a literary event in Mexico City asks Toews. Each attempted answer from Toews—all of them unsatisfactory to the organizer—surfaces new layers of grief, guilt, and futility connected to her sister’s suicide. She has been keeping up, she realizes, a decades-old internal correspondence, filling a silence she barely understands. And we, her readers, come to see that the question is as impossible to answer as deciding whether to live life as a comedy or a tragedy. Marking the first time Toews has written her own life in nonfiction, A Truce That Is Not Peace explores the uneasy pact every creative person makes with memory. Wildly inventive yet masterfully controlled; slyly casual yet momentous; wrenching and joyful; hilarious and humane—this is Miriam Toews at her dazzling best, remaking her world and inventing an astonishing new literary form to contain it.

Bodies in motion: a religious history of sports in America /Arthur Remillard.  Are sports the new American religion? This question has become a recurrent inquiry for  Remillard, a seasoned scholar of religion and sports. For many, the curiosity behind this question stems from the juxtaposition of waning traditional religious institutions in our current age and the thriving, cash-rich world of sports where stadiums bustle with boundless enthusiasm, exuberant rituals, and potent symbols. According to Remillard, however, this question reduces “religion” to only its institutional form, thereby overlooking the many unscripted ways that sports have assumed sacred significance in our time and throughout American history. Bodies in Motion shines a bright light on the places where sports have served as a location for individuals and communities to develop, describe, and proclaim their most deeply held and strongly defended values and beliefs. From prizefighting and baseball to distance running and bowling, Remillard emphasizes that the fundamental element:

Conquerors not captives: reframing Romans 7 for the Christian life /Joseph R. Dodson with Mattie Mae Motl.  In Conquerors, Not Captives, Dodson and Motl challenge the popular view that Romans 7:14-25 describes the typical Christian battle against sin. The “wretched man” of Romans 7 seems unable to do what God’s law demands and, for many Christians, his inner conflict and turmoil seem all too relatable. But are we impotent before sin and powerless to do good? When we reexamine Romans 7 in light of Paul’s writings elsewhere and his interpreters throughout church history, we encounter better news. Conquerors, Not Captives is an accessible and thoughtful study that rebukes our gloomy expectations and invites us to take seriously the Bible’s assurances that the Holy Spirit frees us from sin’s power.

Crosses in the sky: Jean de Brébeuf and the destruction of Huronia /Mark Bourrie.  A biography of Jesuit missionary Jean de Brébeuf and a history of the colonization of Huronia, the home of the Huron-Wendat nation, Crosses in the Sky is the story of how and why the Jesuits came to “New France,” what happened when they arrived, and how these early encounters have shaped settler relationships with Indigenous people to this day. Departing from existing sainthood narratives of Brébeuf, this deeply researched narrative considers not only the missionary’s fate, but the ongoing tragedy of his colonial legacy and is an essential addition to–and expansion of–Canadian history.

De-sizing the church: How church growth became a science, Then an obsession, and what’s next /Karl Vaters. We thought bigger was better. “Church growth” and “numbers” dominated our thoughts and conversations. But more than ever, people are feeling disconnected. Vaters invites us to consider how removing church size from the equation can be an essential element in rebuilding trust, restoring relationships, and renewing our spiritual lives:

 Elgar encyclopedia of cross-cultural management /edited by Audra I. Mockaitis, Christina Butler.  This Encyclopedia presents a wide range of concepts across key themes in the dynamic field of cross-cultural management, including cultural awareness, identity, and diversity. Written by eminent scholars from across the globe, entries include summaries, commentaries, and new perspectives on both theory and research.

Grammar in action: building comprehensive grammars of talk-in-interaction /edited by Jakob Steensig, Maria Jørgensen, Jan K. Lindström, Nicholas Mikkelsen, Karita Suomalainen, Søren Sandager Sørensen.  Grammar in Action: Building comprehensive grammars of talk-in-interaction investigates how it is possible to write comprehensive grammars of languages based on analyses of interaction. The volume combines two traditions in language studies that have hitherto been separate.  Interactional Linguistics, which analyzes instances of language use in naturally occurring interactions, and Descriptive Grammars, which describe the grammatical regularities of languages. The authors are skilled researchers in Interactional Linguistics. They analyze interactional phenomena in Danish, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian and Swedish, and they make concrete proposals about how the phenomena may be described in a comprehensive interactional grammar. The volume also proposes solutions to problems that an interactional grammar faces, for instance, the written language bias, the role of prosody and the body in the grammar, how to approach different target groups, and how a web-based grammar may be useful for rendering the complexities of grammar in interaction.

How do we learn?: a scientific approach to learning and teaching (evidence-based education) /Héctor Ruiz Martín.  Go beyond personal experience and discover scientific principles that will elevate your teaching The international bestseller How Do We Learn? decodes years of cognitive science research into actionable strategies for K-12 teachers, curricula designers, and administrators. You’ll discover how classic and emerging findings can transform pedagogy by pointing at practices that take advantage of the innate structures of the human brain. Written in an easy-to-understand style, this book delves into the cognitive mechanisms that govern learning and memory. You’ll also discover the socioemotional factors that influence students’ motivation and performance. Researchers have investigated key teaching methods such as feedback and evaluation to identify how school environments influence self-motivation to learn. In this book, Martín unites scientific principles with personal engagement, helping teachers ensure that students can thrive in the classroom and beyond. :

Navigating generative AI in higher education: ethical, theoretical and practical perspectives /edited by Soroush Sabbaghan. This timely book explores the role of generative artificial intelligence (AI) in reshaping higher education. It presents a detailed examination of the impact of generative AI on teaching, research and academic practices, investigating its transformative potential and addressing key ethical concerns and challenges. Leading international experts discuss how generative AI can be used for personalized learning and innovative assessment and pedagogical strategies, providing practical insights and frameworks for equipping students with essential AI competencies. They identify ethical issues surrounding the use of AI such as bias, academic integrity and transparency, as well as demonstrating how human-centred design principles can ensure that AI enhances education while safeguarding equity and inclusivity. The book emphasizes the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration between educators, policymakers and AI developers, outlining global perspectives and encouraging a transdisciplinary approach to policy development. Students and scholars of education policy, curriculum, pedagogy and sociology will greatly benefit from this comprehensive book. It is also an essential resource for policymakers and practitioners in higher education administration and management:

Paul: the man and the myth /Calvin J. Roetzel, Cameron Evan Furguson.   A revision of the award-winning Paul The Man and the Myth. Includes updated research throughout, plus a new chapter on the significance of Paul’s childhood and its influence on his life as an apostle and on the inclusive gospel he preached, and a new chapter on Mark as one of the earliest gospel interpreters of Paul, if not the earliest.

The thing that would make everything okay forever: transcendence, psychedelics, and Jesus Christ /Ashley Lande.  For years, psychedelics were my religion. All I ever wanted was The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever, the panacea, the cure for what plagued me. From those first moments when I tasted the earthy pulp of a psilocybin mushroom, it was love. Psychedelics were my sacrament. They shot me into cathedral vaults. The promise of eternal life through chemicals glittered seductively, but hid a yawning abyss. The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever tells my story of psychedelic devastation and spiritual rescue. It chronicles my trajectory from acid enthusiast to soul-weary druggie to psychedelic refugee. I finally found The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever–in the last place I thought to look.

Understanding Hamas: and why that matters /Helena Cobban & Rami G. Khouri.  Both accessible and authoritative, Understanding Hamas provides much-needed insight into a widely misunderstood movement whose involvement in a just resolution of the Israel/Palestine conflict will be critical. Across Western mainstream discourse, the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas has been subjected to intense vilification. Branding it as “terrorist” or worse, this demonization intensified after the events in Southern Israel on October 7, 2023. This book does not advocate for or against Hamas. Rather, in a series of rich and probing conversations with leading experts, it aims to deepen understanding of a movement that is a key player in the current crisis. It looks at, among other things, Hamas’s critical shift from social and religious activism to national political engagement; the delicate balance between Hamas’s political and military wings; and its transformation from early anti-Jewish tendencies to a stance that differentiates between Judaism and Zionism.