Whose Land? Whose Promise?: What Christians Are Not Being Told about Israel and the Palestinians


Gary M. Burge - 2003
    Whose Land? Whose Promise? is Burge's personal exploration of his feelings about the crisis in the Middle East, put on paper to communicate with other Christians who share the same opinions he does and seek answers to the same questions he does; questions such as: How do I embrace my commitment to Judaism, a commitment to which I am bound by the Bible, when I sense in my deepest being that there is a profound injustice afoot in Israel? How do I celebrate the birth of this nation Israel when I also mourn the suffering of Arab Christians who are equally my brothers and sisters in Christ? How do I love those Palestinian Muslims who are deeply misunderstood by all parties in this conflict?

Why Be Catholic?: Understanding Our Experience and Tradition


Richard Rohr - 1989
    It would alsomake a good RCIA resource as well as a blockbuster stimulus fordiscussions."—Book Nook, Pecos BenedictineThe authors answer the question, "Why Be Catholic?" fairly and squarely, showing a deep appreciation about what is good in Catholicism and a penetrating honesty about the Church's shortcomings. Rohr and Martos also examine what it means to be Catholic in the United States today. Finally, to answer the title question in a more personal way, they present portraits of some outstanding Catholics, especially those we call saints, who have found personal fulfillment by living their faith to the utmost.After reading this book, you will appreciate more fully the unique heritage of the Catholic Church. You will understand how its magnificent tradition enriches the lives of Catholics today and propels the ever-changing Church into the 21st century and third millennium. A popular resource for RCIA, evangelization and religious education.

Woman of Clay


Linda Caddick - 2012
    Then another, striking her on the temple with a head-splitting blow, stones slamming into her from every direction. She felt the terror of death and heard her own screams inside her head. “God, have mercy on me,” she whimpered."Self-deception, passion, and turmoil threaten to destroy everything Shana holds dear, even her own life. Driven by a burning quest for happiness, she sacrifices the love of a good man to satisfy a need she can't identify, paying a high price for the legacy of her father's rejection.A shocking face-to-face encounter with a controversial young rabbi reveals the truth. He claims her heart and gives his life in exchange, but still she must suffer the consequences of her choices. A cruel twist of fate presents her with a final test - her will or God's will? Love requires a sacrifice, but can all she has lost ever be restored?From bestselling biblical fiction author Linda Caddick, this poignant account of a woman’s journey from brokenness to healing through redeeming love, provides an enlightening, true-to-life experience of history during the time of Jesus, that illustrates the bible in a new way.

The Ascent of Man


Jacob Bronowski - 1973
    Bronowski's exciting, illustrated investigation offers a perspective not just on science, but on civilization itself. Lower than the angelsForewordThe harvest of the seasons The grain in the stoneThe hidden structure The music of the spheresThe starry messanger The majestic clockworkThe drive for power The ladder of creation World within world Knowledge or certainty Generation upon generationThe long childhoodBibliographyIndex

The Parameters of Our Cage (DISCOURSE Book 1)


Alec Soth - 2020
    

Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake-Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia


Dennis Covington - 1995
    A snake-handling preacher by the name of Glendel Buford Summerford has just tried to murder his wife, Darlene, by snakebite. At gunpoint, he forces her to stick her arm in a box of rattlesnakes. She is bitten twice and nearly dies. The trial, which becomes a sensation throughout southern Appalachia, echoes familiar themes from a troubled secular world - marital infidelity, spouse abuse, and alcoholism - but it also raises questions about faith, forgiveness, redemption, and, of course, snakes. Glenn Summerford is convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to ninety-nine years in prison. When Dennis Covington covered the trial of Glenn Summerford for The New York Times, a world far beyond the trial opened up to him. Salvation on Sand Mountain begins with a crime and a trial and then becomes an extraordinary exploration of a place, a people, and an author's descent into himself. The place is southern Appalachia - a country deep and unsettled, where the past and its culture collide with the economic and social realities of the present, leaving a residue of rootlessness, anxiety, and lawlessness. All-night video stores and tanning salons stand next to collapsed chicken farms and fundamentalist churches. The people are poor southern whites. Peculiar and insular, they are hill people of Scotch-Irish descent: religious mystics who cast out demons, speak in tongues, drink strychnine, run blowtorches up their arms, and drape themselves with rattlesnakes. There is Charles McGlocklin, the End-Time Evangelist; Cecil Esslinder, the red headed guitar player with the perpetual grin; Aunt Daisy, the prophetess; Brother Carl Porter; Elvis Presley Saylor;Gracie McAllister; Dewey Chafin; and the legendary Punkin Brown, all of whose faith illuminates these pages. And then there is Dennis Covington, himself Scotch-Irish, whose own family came down off of Sand Mountain two generations ago to work in the steel mills of Birmingham, and

Dinner With a Perfect Stranger / Day With a Perfect Stranger: An Invitation Worth Considering


David Gregory - 2005
    Although his seventy-hour workweek has already eaten into his limited family time, Nick can’t pass up the opportunity to see what kind of plot his colleagues have hatched.The normally confident, cynical Nick soon finds himself thrown off-balance, drawn into an intriguing conversation with a baffling man who appears to be more than comfortable discussing everything from world religions to the existence of heaven and hell. And this man who calls himself Jesus also seems to know a disturbing amount about Nick’s personal life.………….."You’re bored, Nick. You were made for more than this. You’re worried about God stealing your fun, but you’ve got it backwards.… There’s no adventure like being joined to the Creator of the universe." He leaned back off the table. "And your first mission would be to let him guide you out of the mess you’re in at work."…………. As the evening progresses, their conversation touches on life, God, meaning, pain, faith, and doubt–and it seems that having Dinner with a Perfect Stranger may change Nick’s life forever. From the Hardcover edition.

Children of the Promise: Volumes 1-5


Dean Hughes - 2012
    If you haven’t yet met the Thomas family, you are in for a real delight! “Every era has its own refiner's fire, and World War II put general Church membership and Utah to a test,” Dean Hughes explains. In Children of the Promise, his first historical fiction series for adults, Dean shows through the eyes of the Thomas family how LDS families were tested to the limit. Volume 1: Rumors of War - The first volume, Rumors of War opens in 1938 with Elder Alex Thomas and his companion serving in Germany. It soon becomes obvious that he will never complete his mission. War is coming, and that will affect not only Elder Thomas but also his family back home in Salt Lake City.Volume 2: Since You Went Away - Picking up where the bestseller Rumors of War left off, Since You Went Away continues with Wally Thomas's struggle to survive as a prisoner of war on the Bataan Peninsula while his family begin to disperse due to the war. Bobbi and Alex Thomas are leaving for military duty at the infant stages of World War II — Bobbi as a naval nurse at Pearl Harbor and Alex in army basic training. A gripping novel filled with memorable characters, Since You Went Away will draw you into a past charged with danger, action, romance, and the importance of family and faith.Volume 3: Far From Home - In Far From Home, Alex Thomas is still battling the Nazi forces. He’s also worried about whether or not he can preserve the lives of the men in his company, especially Howie, a particularly young and inexperienced soldier. But his biggest concern is staying alive for his wife, Anna, in England. Far From Home is a moving, powerful novel about the effects of adversity, and about the love of family members for each other.Volume 4: When We Meet Again - Following the Battle of the Bulge, Alex Thomas is reassigned — not without reluctance — to an intelligence unit in Germany. The new assignment challenges Alex's deepest moral values and is more life threatening than combat. As a POW in Japan, Wally suffers torture that may only find relief in death, while Bobbi sorts out her true feelings when she runs into Professor David Stinson thousands of miles away from home.As Long As I Have You - The war is over, and the Thomas family is slowly coming back together at home in Salt Lake City. But that doesn't mean all is well in Zion. In As Long As I Have You, the final volume of the Children of the Promise series, author Dean Hughes presents a moving picture of what life was like for an ordinary LDS family at the end of World War II.

The Politically Incorrect Jesus: Living Boldly in a Culture of Unbelief


Joe Battaglia - 2014
    He is admired and ridiculed, embraced and rejected. If you want to provoke controversy and emotional discussion, just mention His name.Jesus was inclusive when He welcomed all the weary and burdened to come to Him and experience the love of His Father. But He was not open-minded when it came to the truth. He stated that He was the truth. And this flies in the face of current politically correct thought.In Politically Incorrect Jesus, Joe Battaglia exposes the intellectual dishonesty of political correctness and presents Jesus as the model for embracing a counter-cultural faith, which empowers us to be salt and light. Be bold and stand firm in your faith when the culture demands you stand down.

How the Bible was Built


Charles Merrill Smith - 2005
    But very few people could say just how its seemingly disparate jumble of writings — stories, letters, poems, collections of laws, religious visions — got there. Filling this knowledge gap, How the Bible Was Built clearly tells the story of how the Bible came to be. Penned by Charles Merrill Smith in response to his teenage granddaughter’s questions, the manuscript was discovered after Smith’s death and has been reworked by his friend James Bennett for a wider audience. Free of theological or sectarian slant, this little volume provides a concise, factual overview of the Bible’s construction throughout history, outlining how its various books were written and collected and later canonized and translated. Written in an easy conversational style and enhanced by two helpful appendixes (of biblical terms and dates), How the Bible Was Built will give a more informed understanding of the Bible to people of virtually any reading level and any religious persuasion. Did you know?The word “Bible” comes from biblion, a Greek word meaning “papyrus scroll.”It took several thousand years to construct the Bible.The book we call Deuteronomy was discovered hidden away in a dark corner during the reconstruction of the temple under King Josiah.The Apocrypha contains some of the earliest “detective” stories on record.Church councils had many disagreements about which books ought to be authoritative (a book called the Shepherd of Hermas almost made the cut; the book of Revelation almost didn’t).A heretic helped form the canon.Debate over the canon didn’t really end until the Protestant Reformation and the use of the printing press.

Jesus: A Life


A.N. Wilson - 1992
    N. Wilson's answers to these questions will fascinate readers of every shade of faith or skepticism.

Xenophobe's Guide to the Greeks


Alexandra Fiada - 1995
    They exhibit an extreme passion for freedom of choice—which has turned law circumvention into an art and has made them incapable of comprehending words like “discipline,” “co-ordination,” or “system.” There's no such thing as a meek GreekA Greek cannot talk unless he has his hands free, and a soft-spoken Greek is one who can be heard only as far as across the street. Two Greeks having an amiable conversation sound as if they are ready to murder each other, and a party of exuberant Greeks having a good time could be described as a pack of hounds that has just sighted the fox. Free spiritsMercurial in the extreme, the Greeks' temperament flourishes uninhibited throughout their waking hours. This is probably why the ancient sages saw fit to carve their maxims “Nothing in excess” and “Know thyself” on the portals of the Delphic Oracle, in an attempt to persuade their fellow Greeks to curb their emotions. They were not heeded then any more than they are now. How much does a Greek urn?In general, Greeks believe in free trade, fair dealing, and keeping one's word. They are quick at grasping (and inventing) complicated business and financial arrangements and they are past masters in acting as middlemen—which means that they are paid by both parties while risking nothing themselves.

In an Antique Land


Amitav Ghosh - 1993
    The journey took him to a small village in Egypt, where medieval customs coexist with twentieth-century desires and discontents. But even as Ghosh sought to re-create the life of his Indian predecessor, he found himself immersed in those of his modern Egyptian neighbors.Combining shrewd observations with painstaking historical research, Ghosh serves up skeptics and holy men, merchants and sorcerers. Some of these figures are real, some only imagined, but all emerge as vividly as the characters in a great novel. In an Antique Land is an inspired work that transcends genres as deftly as it does eras, weaving an entrancing and intoxicating spell.

Forged in Faith: How Faith Shaped the Founding Fathers and the Birth of a Nation


Rod Gragg - 2010
    The true drama of how faith motivated America's Founding Fathers, influenced the Declaration of Independence and inspired the birth of the nation.

Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám and Salámán and Absál Together With A Life Of Edward Fitzgerald And An Essay On Persian Poetry By Ralph Waldo Emerson


Omar Khayyám - 2010
    You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.