Excellent work! Segovia and Tolbert, following their successful "Reading from this Place" volumes, offer a collection of essays that represents, for me, the best of contemporary biblical scholarship.

From Musa Dube's postcolonial reading of the Great Commission to Kwok Pui-Lan's critique of the Western quest for the Historical Jesus; from Segovia's optic on empire and colony, of center and margins, to Tolbert's re-evaluation of biblical authority, readers are both challenged and inspired by these 21 essays' explicit focus on flesh-and-blood readers and their concrete social locations.

The author approaches her interpretation of the gospel from one basic line of analysis - the four types of "earth" of the "sower". Even so, the approach is deeply insightful in depicting the theme of discipleship and response to Mark's message. Although promising early in the book to provide an allegorical interpretation of the text, I was disappointed that the allegorical meanings of the "unclean spirits" and "demons" of the early episodes in the story were neither recognized nor explained. Thus, the social context of the implied audience was left virtually untouched in an otherwise thorough treatment of the characters of the narrative. Because the interpretation is based on understanding individual and group characters and not on the social context in which they lived, the overall interpretation left this reader unsatisfied. Not the most highly recommended or complete treatment among the contemporary texts on Mark, but nonetheless worthy of consideration for understanding the theme of discipleship in greater depth than many texts offer.