This indispensable, easy-to-use tool for Sunday school teachers and pastors offers a year's worth of attention-grabbing object lessons. Guaranteed to spice up any story time or lesson.

"Drones are in the newspaper, on the TV screen, swarming through the networks, and soon, we're told, they'll be delivering our shopping. But what are drones? The word encompasses everything from toys to weapons. And yet, as broadly defined as they are, the word "drone" fills many of us with a sense of technological dread. Adam Rothstein cuts through the mystery, the unknown, and the political posturing, and talks about what drones really are: what...

During the breakdown of an unhappy marriage, writer Joanna Walsh got a job as a hotel reviewer, and began to gravitate towards places designed as alternatives to home. Luxury, sex, power, anonymity, privacy ... hotels are where our desires go on holiday, but also places where our desires are shaped by the hard realities of the marketplace. Part memoir and part meditation, this book visits a series of rooms, suites, hallways, and lobbies--the spaces...

"What is silence? In a series of short meditations, novelist and playwright John Biguenet considers silence as a servant of power, as a lie, as a punishment, as the voice of God, as a terrorist's final weapon, as a luxury good, as the reason for the torture - in short, as an object of we both do and do not recognize. Exploring the prospects for its future in a world burgeoning with noise, Biguenet asks whether we should desire or fear silence - or...

"Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. You might think that its name says it all. A bookshelf is just that - a shelf for books. It's the stuff of libraries, offices, and the bane of movers' existence. But every shelf is different and every bookshelf tells a different story. One bookshelf can creak with character in a bohemian coffee shop and another can groan with gravitas in the...

No matter how much you fight it, dust pervades everything. It gathers in layers, adapting to the contours of things and marking the passage of time. It is also a gathering place, a random community of what has been and what is yet to be, a catalog of traces, and a set of promises: dead skin cells and plant pollen, hair and paper fibers, not to mention the dust mites who make it their home. Dust blurs the boundaries between the living and the dead,...

"A popular, personal, historical take on a singular garment and its myriad associations with death, violence, and identity"--

"Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. What exactly is jet lag? And, more importantly, how do we live with jet lag? Christopher J. Lee's book introduces jet lag as an object of study, tracing medical, temporal, and technological approaches for understanding this strange, hidden cost of our populist cosmopolitanism today. Drawing upon personal experience and an array of cultural registers,...

" Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. From a young age, Matthew Newton understood that the shopping mall offered visitors far more than a collection of stores, it was a place of curiosity, ritual, and fantasy. The mall near Newton's childhood home in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-the state's first enclosed shopping mall, and the backdrop for filmmaker George A. Romero's zombie opus...

"The veil can be an instrument of feminist empowerment, and veiled anonymity can confer power to women. Starting from her own marriage ceremony at which she first wore a full veil, Rafia Zakaria examines how veils do more than they get credit for. Part memoir and part philosophical investigation, Veil questions that what is seen is always good and free, and that what is veiled can only signal servility and subterfuge. From personal encounters with...