In the vein of In Cold Blood, Closing Time is the stunning story of good and evil colliding in the most tragic of ways, both for the victims and their loved ones left behind to re-live their horror. Kenneth Staton was the well-respected owner of a jewelry store in Van Buren, Arkansas. Although crippled with rheumatoid arthritis and unable to walk without crutches, he had built his business through excellent watch repair work, fine quality jewelry sold at fair prices, and a dedication to his customers that surpassed all other merchants. He was the quintessential gentleman in all aspects of his life, and a beloved father. Unknown to him, two men—a seasoned criminal with a propensity for violence and a younger man, handsome, but broke and with an obsessive thirst for alcohol—plotted to rob the jewelry store at closing time on September 10, 1980. The thugs had only met each other days before, and it was the younger one's first venture into armed robbery. When Staton and his daughter Suzanne didn't show up for supper, his other two daughters became alarmed and went to the store. There they found the bodies of their father and youngest sister lying in pools of blood, gagged, hogtied, and shot twice in the head. Close to $100,000 dollars in diamonds and other jewelry had been stolen. This senseless, bloody crime rocked the town of Van Buren and set its lawmen, sworn to find the killers, on a fiercely determined hunt that led from Rogers, Arkansas to Jacksonville, Florida, and all the way to Vancouver, Canada. Seventeen years later, was justice served? Praise for Closing Time “Anita Paddock is the newest and strongest voice in true crime writing. Closing Time makes you feel as if you are there, seeing what happened, and feeling the terror and sorrow of those felled by these brutal crimes.” – Marla Cantrell, Editor of Do South Magazine and an Arkansas Art Council Fellow “Anita Paddock delivers again. Closing Time reveals an unvarnished truth that will, at times, leave her readers breathless. Those familiar with her work will quickly conclude that Closing Time is a worthy successor to her previous best seller, Blind Rage. Get ready for some late nights because you won’t be able to put this one down.” – Greg Shepard, author of Earthstains, the story of Matt and George Kimes who came of age in the Roaring Twenties with a string of sensational bank robberies.

    Can a computer think? Why is your consciousness like Bitcoin? Will there be an artificial intelligence apocalypse?

    On August 11, 1921, in Birmingham, Alabama, a Methodist minister named Edwin Stephenson shot and killed a Catholic priest, James Coyle, in broad daylight and in front of numerous witnesses. The killer's motive? The priest had marriedStephenson's eighteen-year-old daughter Ruth to Pedro Gussman, a Puerto Rican migrant and practicing Catholic.Sharon Davies's Rising Road resurrects the murder of Father Coyle and the trial of his killer. As Davies reveals with novelistic richness, Stephenson's crime laid bare the most potent bigotries of the age: a hatred not only of blacks, but of Catholics and foreigners as well. In one of the case'smost unexpected turns, the minister hired future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black to lead his defense. Though regarded later in life as a civil rights champion, in 1921 Black was just months away from donning the robes of the Ku Klux Klan, the secret order that financed Stephenson's defense.Entering a plea of temporary insanity, Black defended the minister on claims that the Catholics had robbed Ruth away from her true Protestant faith, and that her Puerto Rican husband was actually black.Placing the story in social and historical context, Davies brings this heinous crime and its aftermath back to life, in a brilliant and engrossing examination of the wages of prejudice and a trial that shook the nation at the height of Jim Crow.Davies takes us deep into the dark heart of the Jim Crow South, where she uncovers a searing story of love, faith, bigotry and violence. Rising Road is a history so powerful, so compelling it stays with you long after you've finished its final page.--Kevin Boyle, author of the National Book Award-winning Arc of JusticeThis gripping history...has all the makings of a Hollywood movie. Drama aside, Rising Road also happens to be a fine work of history. --History News Network

     For most Pagans of any denomination, Yule is a high holy season. The ancient festival was a 12 daylong celebration beginning on the eve of the Winter Solstice (known to most Pagans as Yule) and ending at the new calendar year. This celebration was so important in ancient times that it was converted by the Christians to the 12 Days of Christmas. Many Pagans, especially those devoted to the Norse and Anglo Saxon Gods and Goddesses try to find some way to keep these 12 days, yet many are unsure exactly how to celebrate. Social media blows up in the weeks leading up to the Solstice with questions like: How do you celebrate? What do you do exactly? What activities, what rituals, what prayers and celebrations? For the past several years I have been working on this guide in an attempt to answer some of those questions for my own family and for others. This guide is a result of creating family traditions for this special and most sacred (not to mention FUN!) time of year. I put it all together into one little, handy and easy to follow guide, so that you and your family can celebrate the 12 Days of Yule together, with a little inspiration from what our family has been doing. Please enjoy!

    Many of the events in his life, and the characters whom he knew, are described in his books: this is the story of the man who wrote them.

    

     Raised in the confines of evangelical Christianity from a young age, Cassie Fox served and sought the God she loved with all of her heart. A true believer, she attended Bible college and became an ordained minister, fervently preaching the Gospel to others with passion. After years of living a life dedicated to her faith in God, she learned information that cast her religious beliefs in a different light. In this raw, transparent, and sometimes heartbreaking autobiography, Cassie Fox shares her gripping journey as she battled and agonized over the implications of her newfound understanding until she ultimately found peace and healing in the least expected of places. Walk through this incredible, life changing story of triumph, and discover the message of optimism and hope she found at the end. Buy Black Sheep: My Journey from Evangelical Christianity to Atheism today!

    The God series fully reveals what Pythagoras meant. Mathematics - built from numbers - is not an abstraction but is ontological: it actually exists. Numbers are real things. Specifically, they are the frequencies of energy waves. (Moreover, energy waves are simply sinusoidal waves: sines and cosines, meaning that the study of energy is the study of sinusoids). There are infinite energy waves, hence infinite numbers. No numbers are privileged over any others, so negative and imaginary numbers are as ontologically important as real numbers (upon which science is exclusively based).Real numbers correspond to space and imaginary numbers to time. Negative numbers are "antimatter": a mirror image universe.The two most powerful numbers of all - and the ultimate basis of Illuminist thinking - are zero and infinity, which are harnessed together ontologically (opposite sides of the same coin, so to speak). The existence of zero and infinity is vehemently denied by the ideology of scientific materialism. In Illuminism, these two numbers not only exist, they are the "God" numbers: the origin of all other numbers. Zero and infinity comprise the Big Bang Singularity itself from which an infinitely large universe emerged: "everything" literally came from "nothing".Moreover, zero is also the "monad" of Leibniz (an Illuminati Grand Master). It is therefore the number of THE SOUL, and it has INFINITE capacity. Being dimensionless - a mathematical point - the soul is outside the dimensional, material domain of space and time, hence the soul is indestructible, immortal and cannot be detected by any conventional scientific experiment.What we are describing are the necessary, analytic, eternal truths of mathematics - they have no connection with Abrahamic religious faith. There is NO Creator God but, astoundingly, each soul is capable of being promoted to God status, just as the pawn in chess can become the most important chess piece, the Queen, if it reaches the other side of the battlefield (the board). In Illuminism, if you reach gnosis - enlightenment - you become God.Mathematics is literally everything. Unlike science, mathematics offers certainty: 100% true and incontestable knowledge. Mathematics unifies science, religion and metaphysics. Mathematics is the true Grand Unified Theory of Everything that science pursues so futilely. Science can never deliver truth and certainty because it is inherently a succession of provisional theories, any of which can be overturned at any time by new experimental data. Science is based on ideas of validation and falsification. Mathematics is based on absolute analytic and unarguable certainty. No experiment can ever contradict a mathematical truth.Mathematics is the ONLY answer to everything. Mathematics is the ONLY subject inherently about eternal, Platonic truth. As soon as existence is understood to be nothing but ontological mathematics, all questions are ipso facto answered.The God series, starting with The God Game, reveals the astonishing power of ontological mathematics to account for everything, including things such as free will, irrationalism, emotion, consciousness and qualia, which seem to have no connection with mathematics.Read the God series and you will become a convert to the world's only rational religion - Illuminism, the Pythagorean religion of mathematics that infallibly explains all things and guarantees everyone a soul that is not only eternal but also has the capacity to make of each of us a true God.Isn't it time to become Illuminated?

    At 70,000 words and 450 pages, The Anxious Truth goes well beyond just telling that that you'll get better. It actually shows you exactly how! You're anxious all the time, experiencing panic attacks over and over, and maybe afraid to leave your house or to be left alone for even a few minutes. You are avoiding simple things like driving, eating in restaurants, attending family functions, or going to the supermarket. You are terrified of the next wave of anxiety or the next panic attack. Your anxiety problems are ruining your relationships, your family life, and your career. Your anxiety problems have you afraid, confused, lost, and feeling hopeless. How did you get here? What went wrong? You've tried so many things, but nothing has cured your anxiety? What can you do now?This book, written by a former anxiety sufferer, best-selling author of "An Anxiety Story", and host of The Anxious Truth podcast will walk you through exactly how you got to where you are today, why you are not broken or ill, and what the true nature of your anxiety disorder is. Next, the book will walk you through what it takes to solve your anxiety problems, how to make an anxiety recovery plan, then how to correctly execute that plan.The Anxious Truth isn't always what you want to hear, but it's what you NEED to hear in order to solve this problem once and for all and move toward the life you so desperately want. Based firmly on the principles of cognitive behavioral therapies that have been shown over decades to be most effective in treating anxiety problems, the Anxious Truth will teach you how to move past your anxiety symptoms, past endless digging for hidden "root causes", and into an action oriented plan that will help your brain un-learn the bad reaction and fear habits that have gotten you into this predicament. The Anxious Truth will take the cognitive mechanism that got you into a corner, throw it in reverse, and use it to your advantage, backing you out of this jam and into a life free from irrational fear and needless avoidance.More than just a book, The Anxious Truth goes hand-in-hand with The Anxious Truth podcast (theanxioustruth.com) and the growing and vibrant social media community surrounding it. Read the book, listen to five years worth of free podcasts chock full of helpful advice and information, and join a large online community of fellow anxiety sufferers that are done talking about this problem and ready to actually take action to solve it. Change is possible. No matter how long you've suffered with your anxiety issues, you can get better. The Anxious Truth will tell you what you need to hear and will arm you with the information, understanding, and skills you need to get the job done.Let's do this together!

    How does life begin? What does it mean? What happens when we die? “All anyone can do is ask,” Lepore writes. “That's why any history of ideas about life and death has to be, like this book, a history of curiosity.” Lepore starts that history with the story of a seventeenth-century Englishman who had the idea that all life begins with an egg and ends it with an American who, in the 1970s, began freezing the dead. In between, life got longer, the stages of life multiplied, and matters of life and death moved from the library to the laboratory, from the humanities to the sciences. Lately, debates about life and death have determined the course of American politics. Each of these debates has a history. Investigating the surprising origins of the stuff of everyday life—from board games to breast pumps—Lepore argues that the age of discovery, Darwin, and the Space Age turned ideas about life on earth topsy-turvy. “New worlds were found,” she writes, and “old paradises were lost.” As much a meditation on the present as an excavation of the past, The Mansion of Happiness is delightful, learned, and altogether beguiling.

    With wisdom and clear, ringing prose, he tackles head-on some of the most difficult problems confronting us near the end of the twentieth century––problems we still face today. Berry elucidates connections between sexual brutality and economic brutality, and the role of art and free speech. He forcefully addresses America's unabashed pursuit of self-liberation, which he says is "still the strongest force now operating in our society." As individuals turn away from their community, they conform to a "rootless and placeless monoculture of commercial expectations and products," buying into the very economic system that is destroying the earth, our communities, and all they represent.

    Our personal fulfillment depends on how well we choose and execute these commitments. In The Second Mountain, Brooks looks at a range of people who have lived joyous, committed lives, and who have embraced the necessity of dependence. He gathers their wisdom on how to choose a partner, how to pick a vocation, how to live out a philosophy, and how we can begin to integrate our commitments into one overriding purpose.In short, this book is meant to help us all lead more meaningful lives. But it’s also a provocative social commentary. We live in a society, Brooks argues, that celebrates freedom, that tells us to be true to ourselves, at the expense of surrendering to a cause, rooting ourselves in a neighborhood, binding ourselves to others by social solidarity and love. We have taken individualism to the extreme—and in the process we have torn the social fabric in a thousand different ways. The path to repair is through making deeper commitments. In The Second Mountain, Brooks shows what can happen when we put commitment-making at the center of our lives.

    Through an astute and devastating critique of Hinduphobia in today’s academia, media and popular culture, Vamsee Juluri shows us that what the Hinduphobic worldview denies virulently is not only the truth and elegance of Hindu thought, but the very integrity and sanctity of the natural world itself. By boldly challenging some of the media age’s most popular beliefs about nature, history, and pre-history along with the Hinduphobes' usual myths about Aryans, invasions, and blood-sacrifices, Rearming Hinduism links Hinduphobia and its hubris to a predatory and self-destructive culture that perhaps only a renewed Hindu sensibility can effectively oppose. It is a call to see the present in a way that elevates our desa and kala to the ideals of the sanathana dharma once again. “For a civilization is not just buildings and machines, but its people, their thought, and their culture. It is a way of knowing the world, a way of giving meaning and value to the contents of life. It is a resource, most of all, for living intelligently.”

    A month later, Haim returns alone, on his first leave home. Struggling to come to terms with his experiences he wonders what happened to Dov during those fateful days.

    Based on more than three decades of practical Bible teaching, these readings draw from the riches of God's Word and the compelling experiences of Mr. Carter's own life. Whether through fascinating glimpses into behind-the-scenes activity at the White House, or insightful remembrances of his career in the U.S. Navy, Mr. Carter never ceases to connect the wisdom of Scripture with your own crucial place on the stage of life. Frank, honest, sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking, and always relevant, Through the Year with Jimmy Carter challenges readers to be more Christ-like every day of their lives.