Böcker av Michael Barnes

Water Wheels is a story of historical fiction about two immigrant teenagers who grew up in Minnesota during the 1870s. Halvor Dahl's Norwegian family are poor Lutheran farmers who settle in the Cannon River valley of southern Minnesota. Emelia Meier's German family are Catholic merchants in the capital city of St. Paul. Halvor and Emelia meet each other and experience adventures in all four corners of the state, traveling urban and rural Minnesota by train, steamboat, and horse-drawn buggy. Separately and together, they witness social and political changes, financial ups and downs, crimes, fires, blizzards, swarms of insects, and a comet. Chapter by chapter, the teens meet and are affected by well-known Minnesota entrepreneurs James J. Hill, Cadwallader Washburn, Isaac Staples, and Theodore Hamm; politicians John Pillsbury, Oliver Kelley, and Ignatius Donnelly; bishop John Ireland, author Laura Ingalls Wilder, and outlaw Jesse James, in addition to others.

The twelve linked chapters form a personal introduction, with a degree of autobiography and illustrative anecdote, to an interior dialogue between Christian faith and the challenging context of contemporary religious pluralism.

This book provides a modern, scholary edition of the runic inscriptions, Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon, discovered in the Isle of Man. All are carved into stone and most are commemorative in nature. A broad view has been taken of the Manx runic material. Weight is given to runological and linguistic questions, in particular graph-types and their implications, orthography, the origin and linguistic background of the rune carvers, and language contract and its possible consequences. But attention is also directed at matters such as dating and the implications of what the inscriptions say for our understanding of Manx society at the time they were made. Archaeology and art history are brought into the discussion insofar as these fields of study cast light on the inscriptions and their context. Emphasis is further placed on the nature of the discovery of the rune-stones, their subsequent history and their treatment by earlier scholars. The work is copiously illustrated. It contains recent photographs of all the stones and their runes, computerised drawings of each inscription, and significant early depictions of parts of the material.

In this vital contribution to current comparative theology studies, Michael Barnes puts learning at the centre of responsible interfaith dialogue. Discussing a Christian spirituality which builds on virtues of hospitality and welcoming of other traditions, this book demonstrates that learning about another's faith goes together with learning about one's own.