Amos-The Prophet and His Oracles: Research on the Book of Amos by M. Daniel R. Carroll (Westminster John Knox Press) this ancient text has served as the testing ground to explore how orientations drawn from other disciplines, such as literary theory, anthropology, sociology, and ethics, might illuminate the study of the Bible. Ultimately, all of the insights gained are designed to help draw Amos and the Hebrew Bible into a closer dialogue with the realities of the modern world, especially Latin America. Biblical studies for Carroll have always been for something, not an end in themselves or a scholarly exercise divorced from the very stuff of life. To try to bridge the gap in the academy between traditional approaches and more directed ones is not always easy, and there can be distrust (even disdain) from each side of the divide toward the other. Hopefully, the days of such scholarly apartheid are numbered. Perhaps this introduction to Amos research might serve to promote further study of this prophetic text. This volume is divided into two parts. The first part begins with two essays that present the history of Amos research. The initial essay takes the reader from the second half of the nineteenth century to about the year 1990; the second brings the survey up to the present and closes with some thoughts concerning where research might head in the future. It is difficult to try to distill the huge amount of research that has been done into a readable and truly representative survey. I encourage the reader to mine the endnotes, where other sources and details, which would have made the essays too cumbersome, are mentioned and discussed. The third essay of this initial part is not a sustained historical overview, but rather a presentation of what many would label "readings from the margins"‑that is, interpretations of the book since 1990 by minority groups within the West and from the perspective of the Two‑Thirds World.

Part Two consists of four bibliographies that cover commentaries, monographs, and articles on every aspect and part of the book. These are designed to be comprehensive, not exhaustive, listings of sources for further study. The last bibliography is an annotated listing of all doctoral dissertations on Amos completed between 1985 and 2000.

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