Estés. "She wears hundreds of costumes, dozens of skin tones, is patroness of deserts, mountains, stars and oceans. Thus she comes to us in billions of images, but at her center, she is the Great Immaculate Heart." With Untie the Strong Woman, Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés invites us to reconnect with "the fierce and loving Blessed Mother who is friendly, but never tame—she who flies to our aid when the road is long and our hearts are broken, ever ready to rekindle the inner fire of our creative souls." In her first book in more than a decade, Dr. Estés illuminates Our Lady through blessings, images, and narrative, including:* Stories of connecting with the Blessed Mother, including "Meeting the Lady in Red" and "Untie the Strong Woman";* Blessed Mother's many images from around the world, including "Litany of The Mother Road: A Chant of Her Incandescent Names", "A Man Named Mary", and "The Marys of Mother Africa";* The wild side of her love, including "Massacre of the Dreamers", "The Maiz Mother", "Holy Card of Swords Through the Heart", and "Guadalupe is a Girl Gang Leader in Heaven"."The Blessed Mother is often 'Friend to the friendless one' and Mother to all—yet too many of us have been estranged from her for far too long." Untie the Strong Woman opens a channel to this sacred and nurturing force—"breaking through walls that have held us back from her presence, and instead, inviting us to shelter under her starry green mantle."

    Imagine a marriage rooted in faith, friendship and mutual fulfillment. Imagine a marriage with amazing sex, but where great sex is only the icing on the cake. This might all sound too good to be true, but it's actually what God designed marriage to be, and He doesn't want you settling for anything less. Having a "Naked Marriage' is about much more than just nakedness in the bedroom (although that's part of the fun). It means being naked emotionally and spiritually as well as physically. It also means undressing all the misconceptions our culture has used to cover God's original, beautiful design for marriage and rediscovering all marriage can be. You and your spouse can have a thriving, Naked Marriage with a lifetime of love and laughter together. This book will show you how. About the Authors: Dave and Ashley Willis have become some of America's most trusted teachers on marriage. Their books, blogs, videos and speaking events reach millions of couples worldwide. They are part of the team at XO Marriage and MarriageToday, which is the largest marriage-focused ministry in the USA. Dave and Ashley have four young sons and live near Dallas, TX.

    This brilliant scholarly treatise succeeds in bringing to our consciousness women who played an important role in the origins of Christianity.

    "Jo is one of my most trusted voices in Christian leadership... She leads auditoriums full of people, and she leads me one-on-one." --Jen HatmakerIn this particular cultural moment, where the momentum of #MeToo meets raised voices over injustice in wage equality and minority representation, popular speaker and podcaster Jo Saxton wants to move women beyond disempowerment. Instead, she draws women together to grow their grit and to establish new partnerships that will have a powerful chain effect.You Are Made for This tackles the real-life issues women face--workplace harassment, sexism, low self-esteem, financial woes, power battles, and old wounds--while providing meaningful wisdom from Jo's own journey to leadership. Added to this personal reflection are stories of empowered women from the Bible. Jo then calls on readers to invest in the next generation of women and build new communities where diverse female leadership can flourish.You Are Made for This pulls together Jo's best practices in both listening to the hearts of women and empowering them to change the landscape.

    That’s one way to describe Peter. Here’s another: poor, uneducated, quick-tempered, and full of doubts and fears. Doesn’t even sound like the same man. And that’s the point of Simon Peter, a new book and six-week adult Bible study by Adam Hamilton. Peter was just an ordinary guy who heard and followed God’s extraordinary call. Discover how you, too, have special gifts, talents, and abilities that God can use to make a difference today. In addition to the Leader Guide and DVD components for adult studies, corresponding youth and children’s resources, sold separately, can be used to create a churchwide study.Chapters Include: The Call of the Fisherman Walking with Jesus in the Storm Bedrock or Stumbling Block? “I Will Not Deny You” From Cowardice to Courage The Rest of the Story

    Within those walls, voices were lifted up in song to call forth the best in each other, and to comfort each other when times were at their worst. In this book, his tender and magisterial reckoning with the meaning of the Black church in American history, Gates takes us from his own experience onto a journey across more than four hundred years and spanning the entire country. At road's end, we emerge with a new understanding of the centrality of the Black church to the American story--as a cultural and political force, as the center of resistance to slavery and white supremacy, as an unparalleled incubator of talent, and as a crucible for working through the community's most important issues, down to today.In a country that has historically afforded its citizens from the African diaspora tragically few safe spaces, the Black church has always been more than a sanctuary; it's been a place to nourish the deepest human needs and dreams of the African-American community. This fact was never lost on white supremacists: from the earliest days of slavery, when enslaved people were allowed to worship at all, their meeting houses were subject to surveillance, and often destruction. So it continued, long after slavery's formal eradication; church burnings and church bombings by the Ku Klux Klan and others have always been a hallmark of the violent effort to suppress the struggle for equality for the African-American community. The past often isn't even past--Dylann Roof committed his slaughter in Charleston's Emanuel AME Church 193 years after the church was first burned down by whites following a thwarted slave rebellion.But as Gates brilliantly shows, the Black church has never been only one thing. Its story lies at the vital center of the civil rights movement, and produced many of its leaders, from the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. on, but at the same time there have always been churches and sects that eschewed a more activist stance, even eschewed worldly political engagement altogether. That tension can be felt all the way to the Black Lives Matter movement and the work of today. Still and all, as a source of strength and a force for change, the Black church is at the center of the action at every stage of the American story, as this enthralling history makes vividly clear.

    “The purpose of this book,” says Housden, “is to inspire you to lighten up and fall in love with the world and all that is in it.” Reading it is a pleasure indeed.“When you die,God and the angels will hold you accountablefor all the pleasures you were allowed in life that you denied yourself.”Roger Housden, author of the bestselling Ten Poems series, presents a joyously affirmative, warmly personal, and spiritually illuminating meditation on the virtues of opening ourselves up to pleasures like being foolish, not being perfect, and doing nothing useful, the pleasure of not knowing, and even (would you believe it?) the pleasure of being ordinary.

    It examines various facets of the fundamentalist Christian faith, including the inerrancy of the Bible and the divinity of Jesus Christ. “Passing Through” takes an honest look at the existence of God and the danger of religion. As an author, philosopher, public speaker, cigar enthusiast, former pianist, history nut, and all-around good guy, Craig Hart considers himself something of a renaissance man. Craig is intensely interested in religion as it relates to a spiritual existence and adopts Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s idea that “we are not physical beings having a spiritual experience, we are spiritual beings have a physical experience.”

    Raised in a segregated Alabama mining camp, she eventually would become a renowned Indo-Tibetan scholar and professor of religion at Wesleyan University. Along the way, she took part in an armed takeover of a Cornell University building during a black student protest, marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. in Birmingham, and, ultimately, found peace within a Tibetan Buddhist monastery. Hers is a deeply personal journey of racial and spiritual healing that "will move anyone who is compelled by the examined life." (Publishers Weekly, starred review) "Jan Willis's honest, lucid, mindful, and heartful account of her amazing life thus far, its struggles and woundings, its triumphs and joys, is certainly the roar of a lioness of truth-awakening, empowering, inspiring! Listen to it with pride and pleasure!" (Robert Thurman, author of Inner Revolution) "Willis writes frankly about family, race, spirituality, and finding grace among life's most difficult challenges. Dreaming Me is more honest and fascinating than anything I've read in a long time." (David Pesci, author of Amistad) "Intensely felt...highly personal...A moving story that aims to reconcile the experiences of faith and racism." (Kirkus Reviews)

    Many prominent writers have acknowledged its influence on their work; students of intellectual history consider it a landmark; and the generation born after World War II considers Buber one of its prophets. Buber's main proposition is that we may address existence in two ways: (1) that of the "I" toward an "It," toward an object that is separate in itself, which we either use or experience; (2) that of the "I" toward "Thou," in which we move into existence in a relationship without bounds. One of the major themes of the book is that human life finds its meaningfulness in relationships. All of our relationships, Buber contends, bring us ultimately into relationship with God, who is the Eternal Thou.The need for a new English translation had been felt for many years. The old version was marred by many inaccuracies and misunderstandings, and its recurrent use of the archaic "thou" was seriously misleading. Professor Walter Kaufmann, a distinguished writer and philosopher in his own right who was close to Buber, retranslated the work at the request of Buber's family. He added a wealth of informative footnotes to clarify obscurities and bring the reader closer to the original and wrote an extensive prologue that opened up new perspectives on the book and on Buber's thought. This volume provided a new basis for all subsequent discussions of Buber.

    

    Challenging the commonly held assumption that the “moral majority” backed Donald Trump for purely pragmatic reasons, Du Mez reveals that Donald Trump in fact represents the fulfillment, rather than the betrayal, of white evangelicals’ most deeply held values.Jesus and John Wayne is a sweeping account of the last seventy-five years of white evangelicalism, showing how American evangelicals have worked for decades to replace the Jesus of the Gospels with an idol of rugged masculinity and Christian nationalism, or in the words of one modern chaplain, with “a spiritual badass.” As Du Mez explains, the key to understanding this transformation is to recognize the role of culture in modern American evangelicalism. Many of today’s evangelicals may not be theologically astute, but they know their VeggieTales, they’ve read John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart, and they learned about purity before they learned about sex—and they have a silver ring to prove it. Evangelical books, films, music, clothing, and merchandise shape the beliefs of millions. And evangelical popular culture is teeming with muscular heroes—mythical warriors and rugged soldiers, men like Oliver North, Ronald Reagan, Mel Gibson, and the Duck Dynasty clan, who assert white masculine power in defense of “Christian America.” Chief among these evangelical legends is John Wayne, an icon of a lost time when men were uncowed by political correctness, unafraid to tell it like it was, and did what needed to be done.Trump, in other words, is hardly the first flashy celebrity to capture evangelicals’ hearts and minds, nor is he the first strongman to promise evangelicals protection and power. Indeed, the values and viewpoints at the heart of white evangelicalism today—patriarchy, authoritarian rule, aggressive foreign policy, fear of Islam, ambivalence toward #MeToo, and opposition to Black Lives Matter and the LGBTQ community—are likely to persist long after Trump leaves office.A much-needed reexamination, Jesus and John Wayne explains why evangelicals have rallied behind the least-Christian president in American history and how they have transformed their faith in the process, with enduring consequences for all of us.

     In this provocative book, theologian and blogger Drew G. I. Hart places police brutality, mass incarceration, antiblack stereotypes, poverty, and everyday acts of racism within the larger framework of white supremacy. Leading readers toward Jesus, Hart offers concrete practices for churches that seek solidarity with the oppressed and are committed to racial justice. What if all Christians listened to the stories of those on the racialized margins? How might the church be changed by the trouble we've seen?

    Dynamic Bible teacher Megan Fate Marshman will help you discover how to stop discounting yourself from a hopeful future, start living in active dependence on God, and find your way to the good plan He has for you. With authenticity and revelatory insights into the character of God, Megan shares an engaging and fresh look at the core themes within the well-loved scripture of Jeremiah 29:11-14. Through winsome and inspiring stories, Meant for Good will show you how to trust God in your daily life and, more importantly, how to trust God's definition of good above your own. You will discover:That your not-enoughness is exactly enough for God, and that in fact, you have everything you need to take that first step into the life God has for you.How to stop counting yourself out, because Jesus never has. God is up to something really good, and He's inviting you to join Him.How to hear and respond to God's voice, and intentionally grow a personal, intimate relationship with Him.How to defeat anxiety, trust God with all you're carrying and worrying about, and experience a life of freedom in relying on God daily.God has a good plan for you--a plan to give you a hope and a future. Are you ready to believe it?

    In American culture at large, anger--particularly among people of color--is delegitimized, demonized, or "supposed to be" suppressed. Social activist and Kagyu lama Rod Owens offers a different understanding. For Owens, the coauthor of Radical Dharma, anger is one of the most important aspects of his personal identity as a Buddhist, social activist, African American, and gay man. Anger serves as a bodyguard for our personal pain and suffering. When recognized and handled with attention, love, and compassion, it can be a powerful mobilizing factor in our solidarity and commitment to enacting social change. However, too many activist communities have an ill-informed, immature, and romanticized relationship to it. What is needed, says Owens, is a relationship to the heartbreak of anger that is embodied, nondestructive, and deeply healing for all. Here he offers personal insights, stories from others, as well as Buddhist teachings and meditations for tapping into anger's liberating potential.