This second volume in the Baylor Handbook on the Hebrew Bible series provides expert, comprehensive guidance in answering significant questions about the Hebrew text. While reflecting the latest advances in scholarship on Hebrew grammar and linguistics, the work utilizes a style that is lucid enough to serve as a useful agent for teaching and self-study.

Americans increasingly think in terms of red and blue. God and Country examines the religious roots of these cultural divisions in American political life. But instead of pitting a people of faith against a secular humanist elite, God and Country helps Americans understand the religious differences that divide, appreciate the public agreements that allow us to live with religious differences, evaluate how existing democratic processes alleviate divisions, and identify ways Americans can agree to disagree.

Even though America was founded upon a belief that its mission was providentially ordained, its foreign policy decisions have failed to recognize the growing significance of religious faith as a global concern. With an eye on the turbulent century ahead, God and Global Order implores policy makers to recognize the power of faith to inform and enhance U.S. foreign policy. The contributors warn that ignoring the far-reaching role of faiths (those both religious and secular) and their influence upon international agendas could carry disastrous consequences—both for the U.S. and for the larger global order.

In recent years the United States has seen an influx of Christian athletes and coaches into big-time sports, as well as a heightened importance placed on sports in church programs and at Christian schools and colleges. However, as Shirl Hoffman critiques, a Christian vision of sport remains merely superficial—replete with prayers before free throws and praises after touchdowns but offering little, if any, alternative vision from the secular sports culture.

Good Game retells numerous fascinating stories from the world of ancient and contemporary sports and draws on the history of the Christian tradition to answer “What would it really mean to think Christianly about sport?”

The pragmatic demands of American life have made higher education's sustained study of ancient Greece and Rome an irrelevant luxury, ;and this despite the fact that American democracy depends so heavily on classical language, literature, and political theory. In The Grammar of Our Civility, Lee T. Pearcy chronicles how this came to be. Pearcy argues that classics never developed a distinctly American way of responding to distinctly American social conditions. Instead, American classical education simply imitated European models that were designed to underwrite European culture. The Grammar of Our Civility also offers a concrete proposal for the role of classical education, one that takes into account practical expectations for higher education in twenty-first century America.

Growing Up combines two flourishing historical fields-the history of childhood and world history-to address the question of how much of childhood is natural and how much is historically determined. The first lecture gauges the impact of the development of agriculture, civilization, and religion upon the premodern experience of childhood. The second lecture contrasts modern perspectives on childhood with more traditional ones before investigating how and why modern perspectives developed and spread. These lectures clearly demonstrate that the transformation of childhood is both recent and sweeping.

Helen Barrett Montgomery (1861-1934) was a social reformer, a Baptist luminary, and a prominent intellectual of the American women’s ecumenical missionary movement. In this definitive biography, Kendal Mobley analyzes the intellectual development of a fascinating woman and locates her in the context of her rapidly-changing times. Mobley explores Montgomery’s early family influences, her education and spiritual development, and her relationship with other notable individuals of the era, including Susan B. Anthony. As Mobley points out, Montgomery believed that Christianity gave women equal spiritual and social status with men. Consequently, she saw “woman’s work for woman” as the cutting edge of a global movement for women’s emancipation.

In Herodotus and the Philosophy of Empire, Ann Ward treats the classical writer not as a historian but as a political philosopher. Ward uses close textual analysis to demonstrate that Herodotus investigates recurring themes in the most important forms of government in the ancient world. This analysis of The Histories concludes with reflections on the problems of empire, not only for the Persians and the striving Athenians, but for our own government as well. To this end, Ward contrasts Herodotus on empire with the assumptions underlying speeches and writings of Paul Wolfowitz, Colin L. Powell, Joseph S. Nye, Jr. and Robert W. Merry.

A Higher Education collects the work of renowned scholars on the importance and mission of Christian higher education. Placing Baylor University at the center of these discussions, this compendium celebrates the inauguration of Judge Kenneth W. Starr over the first year of his presidency at Baylor University and underscores the necessity of Christian higher education in a global context. With an introduction by Baylor University Executive Vice President and Provost Elizabeth Davis, A Higher Education shows how the model set forth at Baylor University can influence institutions of higher learning here and abroad. 

This volume demonstrates that the Christian Right has a surprising past. Historical analysis reveals that the countercultural movements and evangelicalism share a common heritage. Shires warns that political operatives in both parties need to heed this fact if they hope to either, in the case of the Republican Party, retain their evangelical constituency, or, in the case of the Democratic Party, recruit new evangelical voters.