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“Women of faith, discussing complicated things.” That’s how  authors Susan Hinckley and Cynthia Winward describe At Last She Said It, and they don’t expect the knots to untangle themselves. Even with two very different personalities and a decade or so between them, as their friendship developed they kept stumbling onto what felt like an uncanny amount of common ground in their church experiences. Often their conversations ended with, “Why isn’t anyone talking about this? Someone should do a podcast!” So they did. They had a hunch they weren’t the only women wishing they had a place to discuss the things they were thinking about, a lot of which they’d never said—or heard—out loud. That hunch was right. Their 200-and-counting recorded conversations have been downloaded some two million times. Hinckley and Winward have learned, right along with their listeners, that there’s no power quite like finding out you’re not alone. 

Their book now asks Latter-day Saints to think about old ideas in new ways. Stretching can be uncomfortable, but the willingness to consider diverse perspectives—even on the things we hold most dear—feels essential in an evolving world. So does being open to changing our minds, including how we think about ourselves. Faith is alive when it’s growing, and growing means change. Hopefully, these conversations will be the beginning of thousands more.

“Women of faith, discussing complicated things.” That’s how  authors Susan Hinckley and Cynthia Winward describe At Last She Said It, and they don’t expect the knots to untangle themselves. Even with two very different personalities and a decade or so between them, as their friendship developed they kept stumbling onto what felt like an uncanny amount of common ground in their church experiences. Often their conversations ended with, “Why isn’t anyone talking about this? Someone should do a podcast!” So they did. They had a hunch they weren’t the only women wishing they had a place to discuss the things they were thinking about, a lot of which they’d never said—or heard—out loud. That hunch was right. Their 200-and-counting recorded conversations have been downloaded some two million times. Hinckley and Winward have learned, right along with their listeners, that there’s no power quite like finding out you’re not alone. 

Their book now asks Latter-day Saints to think about old ideas in new ways. Stretching can be uncomfortable, but the willingness to consider diverse perspectives—even on the things we hold most dear—feels essential in an evolving world. So does being open to changing our minds, including how we think about ourselves. Faith is alive when it’s growing, and growing means change. Hopefully, these conversations will be the beginning of thousands more.

Japan may not hold the key to this planet's future; no single nation does. Yet the continuing interest in its history, society, and people and the incresed awareness of its recent trends and growing global impact engage an expanding audience. Avoiding cliches, sympathetic to its subject yet analytical, unflinching in judgment, and withal highly personal, Between the Eagle and the Sun offers a unique image of its subject by a distinguished and well-traveled critic, at home in several cultures.

The Nasca Lines are one of the world's great enigmas. Who etched the more than 1,000 animal, human, and geometric figures that cover 400 square miles of barren pampa in southern Peru? How did the makers create lifelike images of monkeys, birds, and spiders without an aerial vantage point from which to view these giant figures that stretch across thousands of square yards? Most puzzling of all, why did the ancient Nasca lay out these lines and images in the desert? These are the questions that pioneering archaeoastronomer Anthony Aveni seeks to answer in this book.

Writing for a wide public audience, Aveni begins by establishing the Nasca Lines as a true wonder of the ancient world. He describes how viewers across the centuries have tried to interpret the lines and debunks the wilder theories. Then he vividly recounts his own years of exploration at Nasca in collaboration with other investigators and the discoveries that have answered many of the riddles about who made the Nasca Lines, when, and for what purposes. This fascinating overview of what the leading expert and his colleagues currently understand about the lines is required reading for everyone intrigued by ancient mysteries.

Between the Middle East and the Americas: The Cultural Politics of Diaspora traces the production and circulation of discourses about "the Middle East" across various cultural sites, against the historical backdrop of cross-Atlantic Mahjar flows. The book highlights the fraught and ambivalent situation of Arabs/Muslims in the Americas, where they are at once celebrated and demonized, integrated and marginalized, simultaneously invisible and spectacularly visible. The essays cover such themes as Arab hip-hop's transnational imaginary; gender/sexuality and the Muslim digital diaspora; patriotic drama and the media's War on Terror; the global negotiation of the Prophet Mohammad cartoons controversy; the Latin American paradoxes of Turcophobia/Turcophilia; the ambiguities of the bellydancing fad; French and American commodification of Rumi spirituality; the reception of Iranian memoirs as cultural domestication; and the politics of translation of Turkish novels into English. Taken together, the essays analyze the hegemonic discourses that position "the Middle East" as a consumable exoticized object, while also developing complex understandings of self-representation in literature, cinema/TV, music, performance, visual culture, and digital spaces. Charting the shifting significations of differing and overlapping forms of Orientalism, the volume addresses Middle Eastern diasporic practices from a transnational perspective that brings postcolonial cultural studies methods to bear on Arab American studies, Middle Eastern studies, and Latin American studies. Between the Middle East and the Americas disentangles the conventional separation of regions, moving beyond the binarist notion of "here" and "there" to imaginatively reveal the thorough interconnectedness of cultural geographies.

The first book to focus on the connections between sexuality, activism, and documentary film.

From film festivals to university campuses, from private homes to first-run theaters, people everywhere are viewing and discussing gay, lesbian, queer, bisexual, and transgender films and videos. Between the Sheets, In the Streets considers these videos and films, testifying to the unavoidable connections between sexuality (the sheets) and activism (the streets) for all who identify as gay, lesbian, or queer in the 1990s.

Chronicles the peace process negotiations between Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos and the Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia

In Between the Sword and the Wall: The Santos Peace Negotiations with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, Harvey Kline, a noted expert on contemporary Colombian politics, brings to a close his multivolume chronicle of the incessant violence that has devastated Colombia’s population, politics, and military for decades. This, his newest work on the subject, recounts and analyzes the negotiations between Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos and the Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), which ended with a peace agreement in 2016.

The FARC insurgency began in 1964, and every Colombian president after 1980 unsuccessfully tried to negotiate a peace agreement with the group. Kline analyzes how the Santos administration was ultimately able to negotiate peace with the FARC. The agreement failed to receive the approval of the Colombian people in an October 2016 plebiscite, but a renegotiated version was later approved by the congress in the same year. Afterward, more than 7,000 rebels turned over their weapons to the UN mission in Colombia. The former combatants were then to be judged by a special court empowered to punish but not imprison those who had violated human rights. Throughout the book, Kline emphasizes the dual nature of the Santos negotiations, first with the FARC and second with the democratic opposition to the agreement led by former president Álvaro Uribe Vélez.

Kline provides readers with a well-researched analysis based on a variety of resources, including media articles and primary documents from the government, international organizations, and the FARC. He also conducted extensive interviews with twenty-eight government officials and Colombian experts from all ideological persuasions.

The founding and development of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints run parallel to the rise of the modern tax system and administrative state. Samuel D. Brunson looks at the relationships between the Church and various federal, state, local, and international tax regimes.

The church and its members engage with the state as taxpayers and as members of a faith exempt from taxes. As Brunson shows, LDS members and the Church have at various times enacted, enforced, and collected taxes while also challenging taxes in the courts and politics. Brunson delves into the ways LDS members used their status as taxpayers to affirm themselves as citizens and how outsiders have attacked the Church’s tax-exempt status to delegitimize it. Throughout, Brunson uses the daily interactions between the Latter-day Saints and taxation to explain important and inevitable holes in the wall between church and state.

Enlightening and informed, Between the Temple and the Tax Collector provides general readers and experts alike with a new perspective on a fundamental issue.

Examining the vivid, often apocalyptic church murals of Peru from the early colonial period through the nineteenth century, Heaven, Hell, and Everything in Between explores the sociopolitical situation represented by the artists who generated these murals for rural parishes. Arguing that the murals were embedded in complex networks of trade, commerce, and the exchange of ideas between the Andes and Europe, Ananda Cohen-Aponte also considers the ways in which artists and viewers worked through difficult questions of envisioning sacredness.

This study brings to light the fact that, unlike the murals of New Spain, the murals of the Andes possess few direct visual connections to a pre-Columbian painting tradition; the Incas’ preference for abstracted motifs created a problem for visually translating Catholic doctrine to indigenous congregations, as the Spaniards were unable to read Inca visual culture. Nevertheless, as Cohen Suarez demonstrates, colonial murals of the Andes can be seen as a reformulation of a long-standing artistic practice of adorning architectural spaces with images that command power and contemplation. Drawing on extensive secondary and archival sources, including account books from the churches, as well as on colonial Spanish texts, Cohen Suarez urges us to see the murals not merely as decoration or as tools of missionaries but as visual archives of the complex negotiations among empire, communities, and individuals.

How do market forces influence the media in China? How does the Party both introduce and try to contain the market's influence? How do commercial imperatives both accommodate and challenge Party control? 

Yuezhi Zhao interviewed a wide range of scholars, media administrators, and media professionals to answer these and other questions. Working in China in 1994 and 1995, she monitored media content, carried out extensive documentary research in Beijing, and held off-the-record meetings with Chinese media insiders. What she found informs an in-depth look at the intertwining nature of the Communist Party and the news media in China, how they affect each other, and what the future might hold for each. 

A rare on-the-ground portrait, Media, Market, and Democracy in China is must reading for scholars, media and business professionals, and policymakers who need to understand what happened to China and its mass media during a period of dynamic growth and change.