The evolution of church culture has been something that has needed to happen for a long time. Culture, traditions, oral laws, and the status quo can be a good thing... but it can also be a bad thing. Do you remember what was happening in Israel around the time that Christ came on to the scene? Israel started to live by their own set of oral laws and traditions, or what we might refer to today as "culture." The "culture" in Israel when Christ showed up was one of the most judgmental and hypocritical cultures the world had ever seen. It was a very isolated and unaccepting culture. But Christ showed up and cast a net over all types of people. The Greeks, the Romans, the Samaritans, and every other nation across the globe. His net covered even the worst of repentant sinners. The only people that were excluded or "damned" were the unrepentant elite, the "scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites" who "strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel" (Matthew 23:23-24). Christ took the existing covenants and commandments and simplified them. He brought an evolution of love, empathy, and compassion. He built a culture that was geared toward the lowly of heart and revolted against those who spent their lives pointing out the flaws in others. "For ye are like unto whited sepulchers, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness" (Matthew 23:27). The bulk of Israel was living according to their culture and their superstition instead of their religion. This has been the bane of each and every covenant society, which caused Joseph Smith to say, "What many people call sin is not sin; I do many things to break down superstition, and I will break it down." The doctrine of the LDS church doesn't lose people. It's the culture and superstition that causes unnecessary strife. This book, The Cultural Evolution Inside of Mormonism addresses the changing culture, the unprecedented changes that are taking place in the church, and the historical transparency. The Table of Contents explains where this book will take you: 1. More Extended Hands 2. Fewer Wrecking Balls 3. The Cultural Evolution 4. Not Customizing Christ 5. The Three Types of Mormons 6. A Place Where Doubters Are Welcome 7. The Kindness of Christ 8. Embracing Intellectuals and Scholars 9. Change in The Church Comes Slowly For A Reason 10. The Humble Few 11. Millennial Mormons 12. Making Rash Decisions 13. Giving Volunteers A Break 14. Logical Evidence For The Church Is Mounting 15. From Which All Others Are Derived 16. Temple Workers Galore 17. No Other Religion Provides A Better Hope 18. People Throwing The Book of Mormon Out The Window 19. The Bible That Needed To Be Rescued 20. Looking For Just One Reason To Believe 21. Liberal Conservatives 22. Pageantry In The Church 23. Peeling Back Polygamy 24. Looking At Tithing A Little Differently 25. Not Judging Others Sabbath Day Worship 26. The Place For Gays Inside The Church 27. What I Really Believe 28. Why I Love The Church

    Written by distinguished American historians, it has more than 2,000,000 copies in print worldwide and is one of the classic works in its field.

    Century-long periods of population expansion come before long periods of stagnation and decline; the dynamics of prices mirror population oscillations; and states go through strong expansionist phases followed by periods of state failure, endemic sociopolitical instability, and territorial loss. Peter Turchin and Sergey Nefedov explore the dynamics and causal connections between such demographic, economic, and political variables in agrarian societies and offer detailed explanations for these long-term oscillations--what the authors call secular cycles. Secular Cycles elaborates and expands upon the demographic-structural theory first advanced by Jack Goldstone, which provides an explanation of long-term oscillations. This book tests that theory's specific and quantitative predictions by tracing the dynamics of population numbers, prices and real wages, elite numbers and incomes, state finances, and sociopolitical instability. Turchin and Nefedov study societies in England, France, and Russia during the medieval and early modern periods, and look back at the Roman Republic and Empire. Incorporating theoretical and quantitative history, the authors examine a specific model of historical change and, more generally, investigate the utility of the dynamical systems approach in historical applications.An indispensable and groundbreaking resource for a wide variety of social scientists, Secular Cycles will interest practitioners of economic history, historical sociology, complexity studies, and demography.

    A mob dragged them from the jail and lynched two of them. No one in Marion, Indiana was ever punished for the murders. In this gripping account, James H. Madison refutes the popular perception that lynching was confined to the South, and clarifies 20th-century America's painful encounters with race, justice, and memory.

    Masters, Virginia E. Johnson, and Robert C. Kolodny produce here for the first time for a general audience a comprehensive, warm, and highly readable survey of their most current findings on the remarkable range of complexities--biological, psychological, and social--that make up human sexuality.With the insight and authority that have made them leaders in this field, Masters, Johnson, and Kolodny suggest that by being well informed about sexual matters, people can better contribute to their own sexual satisfaction. Through the voices of hundreds of people they interviewed, complemented by their own practical advice, they introduce and update the issues that can help sexually active adults of the 1980s enhance their own personal relationships. They explore current research on the nature of love, the meaning of sexual fantasies, and common problems people have in attaining and maintaining intimacy. They also address topics as diverse as sexual burnout, sex education, sexual victimization, and low sexual desire, offering numerous, easy-to-follow suggestions about such anxiety-provoking dilemmas as how to deal with sexual boredom, how to prevent sexually transmitted disease, how to communicate with your lover about sexual matters, what to do if you're the victim of incest or sexual harassment, how to evaluate a contraceptive's safety and effectiveness, and how to find a sex therapist.Best of all, the authors discuss how to use the information in this guide to heighten the quality of your own intimate relations. Finally, they provide fascinating--and sometimes startling--forecasts about trends that will define our sexual attitudes and behavior as we move into the twenty-first century.

    This book explores examples of this process of invention - the creation of Welsh and Scottish 'national culture'; the elaboration of British royal rituals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the origins of imperial ritual in British India and Africa; and the attempts by radical movements to develop counter-traditions of their own. This book addresses the complex interaction of past and present, bringing together historicans and anthropologists in a fascinating study of ritual and symbolism which possess new questions for the understanding of our history.

    It was cosmetics, no slimming) as well as charting how you progressed to the elite Nazi cadres - administrators, propagandists, or coercers. It shows childhood with the Hitler Youth and describes the intense medieval ritual injected into every phase of life from school and university to farm labour. It shows life in the office, in industry, in the professions - doctors, lawyers, artists - and in the Nazi Party itself. Finally, it documents what happened at the two extremes of German society - to the aristocrats and to the Jews.

    At the dawn of the 21st millennium the world is still experiencing these anxieties, as seen by the onslaught of fantasies of renewal, doomsday predictions, and New Age prophecies.This fascinating book explores the millenarianism that flourished in western Europe between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries. Covering the full range of revolutionary and anarchic sects and movements in medieval Europe, Cohn demonstrates how prophecies of a final struggle between the hosts of Christ and Antichrist melded with the rootless poor's desire to improve their own material conditions, resulting in a flourishing of millenarian fantasies. The only overall study of medieval millenarian movements, The Pursuit of the Millennium offers an excellent interpretation of how, again and again, in situations of anxiety and unrest, traditional beliefs come to serve as vehicles for social aspirations and animosities.

    Bush called the "first war of the twenty-first century" actually began more than 2,300 years ago when Alexander the Great led his army into what is now a sprawling ruin in northern Afghanistan. Accounts of Alexander's invasion of ancient Bactria read eerily like news from our own day. In this vivid, meticulously researched, and elegantly narrated book, Frank L. Holt follows Alexander's historical, archaeological, and numismatic legacy back and forth between ancient Bactria and modern Afghanistan. Recounting the plight of the most powerful leader of the time as he led the most sophisticated army of its day into the treacherous world of tribal warlords, Holt describes those grueling campaigns and the impact they had on Alexander, his generals, their troops, and the world. Into the Land of Bones also examines the conflict from the point of view of the local warlords who pushed the invading Greeks to the limits of their endurance—and sometimes beyond, into mania and mutiny. The lively narrative situates the current war in Afghanistan in a broader historical perspective. Holt explains how the three modern superpowers that have invaded Afghanistan—Britain in the nineteenth century, the Soviets in the twentieth, and the United States in the twenty-first—are continuing the struggle that Alexander began centuries ago. That this legacy continues to play itself out today is a testament to the timeliness of Holt's fascinating and original account.

    And just as important as it is to choose the right major, choose the right career, and choose the right spouse, no consideration is given as to choosing THE RIGHT PLACE to live in this vast and great country. And where you live arguably determines much more in your life. Who you meet. Your job opportunities. Your career success. Who you fall in love with. Even your health and happiness. But every year millions of Americans let their current familiar environment determine where they live, thus condemning them to mediocre opportunities, mediocre hobbies, mediocre people, and a mediocre life. DO NOT LET THIS HAPPEN TO YOU! Become a "Reconnaissance Man" instead!"Reconnaissance Man" is the young (and old) person's guide to the United States. It explains how to explore this great and vast country to find out where you should go to school, where you will make the most money, where you will be happiest, and ultimately where you belong. Don't live in frozen wastelands like Minnesota. Don't live in socialist hell holes like California or New York. Find your American utopia NOW and not when you're 65, about to retire and about to die. Life's too short to be living in Ohio, so become the classical American "Reconnaissance Man" today! Buy and read "Reconnaissance Man!"

    Reprint. NYT.

    A critical history of planning in theory and practice in the twentieth century, as well as of the social and economic problems and opportunities that gave rise to it Trenchant, perceptive, global in coverage, this book is an unrivalled account of its crucial subject Comprehensively revised to take account of abundant new literature published since its original appearance, and to view the 1990s in historical perspective Reviews the development of the modern planning movement over the entire span of the twentieth century

    When Donnie Huff survives a near-fatal logging accident, his ambitious mother-in-law insists that he has returned from the dead, and he embarks on a Pentecostal revival trail and a discovery of his own faith.

    By 1930, most streets were primarily a motor thoroughfares where children did not belong and where pedestrians were condemned as "jaywalkers." In Fighting Traffic, Peter Norton argues that to accommodate automobiles, the American city required not only a physical change but also a social one: before the city could be reconstructed for the sake of motorists, its streets had to be socially reconstructed as places where motorists belonged. It was not an evolution, he writes, but a bloody and sometimes violent revolution. Norton describes how street users struggled to define and redefine what streets were for. He examines developments in the crucial transitional years from the 1910s to the 1930s, uncovering a broad anti-automobile campaign that reviled motorists as "road hogs" or "speed demons" and cars as "juggernauts" or "death cars." He considers the perspectives of all users--pedestrians, police (who had to become "traffic cops"), street railways, downtown businesses, traffic engineers (who often saw cars as the problem, not the solution), and automobile promoters. He finds that pedestrians and parents campaigned in moral terms, fighting for "justice." Cities and downtown businesses tried to regulate traffic in the name of "efficiency." Automotive interest groups, meanwhile, legitimized their claim to the streets by invoking "freedom"--a rhetorical stance of particular power in the United States. Fighting Traffic offers a new look at both the origins of the automotive city in America and how social groups shape technological change.Peter D. Norton is Assistant Professor in the Department of Science, Technology, and Society at the University of Virginia.