September 1, 2010 In 1999, an Oberlin, Ohio, mother named Cynthia Stewart took a few pictures of her eight-year-old daughter playing in the bathtub, little knowing that they would lead to her indictment on child-pornography charges. In Framing Innocence, author Lynn Powell tells the story of Cynthia Stewart’s ordeal—and of the community that came to her defense.

August 31, 2010 In Reconstructing Appalachia: the Civil War’s Aftermath, editor Andrew L. Slap pulls together scholarly essays that expand understanding of the mountain South, especially in relation to the turbulent years of Reconstruction.

August 30, 2010 In college, Rachel Held Evans had a crisis of faith: how, she wondered, can a loving god commit non-believers to hell? Can a scientifically and historically inaccurate Bible still be inerrant? How can a god of mercy allow poverty and injustice? Evans’s battle with such hermeneutical hobgoblins is the subject of Evolving in Monkey Town, an account of her eventual rejection of fundamentalist theology in favor of a faith that questions more than it answers. As Evans becomes increasingly uncomfortable with pat responses—that God’s ways are inscrutable, for example—she learns that belief must adapt and change in order to survive.