Written during this time, this is the account of prison life and the people he encountered.There is the guard who delivers blows with no visible traces. The fraudster stitched up by the police for murder. The man who refuses to lie for a packet of cigarettes. The abandoned teenager, the down-and-out, the grass... He describes a hidden world of brutality and corruption, yet one where moments of humanity still manage to shine through.One in ten Russian men pass through prison at some point in their lives. This book is a denunciation of an entire system of bureaucratic criminality, and a passionate call to recognise a human tragedy.

    Dr. Timothy Paul Jones gives easy-to-understand answers to popular questions on the Bible's reliability and accuracy.

    

    Galina’s artist father Mikhail has been kept away from the front to help save the treasures of the Hermitage. Its cellars could now provide a safe haven, provided Mikhail can navigate the perils of a portrait commission from one of Stalin’s colonels. Nearly 40 years later, Galina herself is a teacher at the Leningrad Art Institute. What ought to be a celebratory weekend at her forest dacha turns sour when she makes an unwelcome discovery. The painting she embarks upon that day will hold a grim significance for the rest of her life, as the old Soviet Union makes way for the new Russia and Galina’s familiar world changes out of all recognition. Warm, wise and utterly enthralling, Molly Gartland’s debut novel guides us from the old communist world, with its obvious terrors and its more surprising comforts, into the glitz and bling of 21st-century St. Petersburg. Galina’s story is at once a compelling page-turner and an insightful meditation on ageing and nostalgia.

    It covers social and interpersonal skills, as well as the underlying cultural assumptions and values of the Russian people.

    The narrative traces the ebb and flow of their relationships and the changes wrought in their lives by the birth of a son to one of the women. Grekova conveys vividly not only the decisive differences between the postwar generation and those who participated in the defense of their country, but also the extraordinary capacity of human nature to endure and overcome seemingly unendurable suffering and deprivation. Above all, this text spotlights female experiences of the war: the fate of those who did not engage in battle at the front, but fought just as desperately to survive starvation, cold, and exhaustion, to maintain homes and, in a sense, a country to which soldiers could return. Ship of Widows provides a cultural key to an understudied period of Russia's history and an understudied segment of its population - women. This new paperback edition includes an illuminating foreword by Helena Goscilo.

    But no matter how hard he tried, he was never able to experience the God he longed to know. His was a great dream that could not find fulfillment, a deep question that could not answer itself, an eternal thirst dwelling in a land of shallow wells. Ultimately, Gallatin's thirst was quenched by the deep waters of the historic Orthodox Christian Faith. In Thirsting for God, Gallatin expresses many of the struggles a Protestant will undergo in coming face to face with Orthodoxy, and gives readers a taste of the encounter with the living God that lies in store for them there.

    . . a marvelous source for the social history of Russian peasant society in the years before the revolution. . . . The translation is superb." —Steven Hoch" . . . one of the best ethnographic portraits that we have of the Russian village. . . . a highly readable text that is an excellent introduction to the world of the Russian peasantry." —Samuel C. RamerVillage Life in Late Tsarist Russia provides a unique firsthand portrait of peasant family life as recorded by Olga Semyonova Tian-Shanskaia, an ethnographer and painter who spent four years at the turn of the twentieth century observing the life and customs of villagers in a central Russian province. Unusual in its awareness of the rapid changes in the Russian village in the late nineteenth century and in its concentration on the treatment of women and children, Semyonova's ethnography vividly describes courting rituals, marriage and sexual practices, childbirth, infanticide, child-rearing practices, the lives of women, food and drink, work habits, and the household economy. In contrast to a tradition of rosy, romanticized descriptions of peasant communities by Russian upper-class observers, Semyonova gives an unvarnished account of the harsh living conditions and often brutal relationships within peasant families.

    This work, which was published for the general public in the Western world a year after it was sent to its intended audience, beseeched the Soviet Union's authorities to Give them their ideology! Let the Chinese leaders glory in it for a while. And for that matter, let them shoulder the whole sackful of unfulfillable international obligations, let them grunt and heave and instruct humanity, and foot all the bills for their absurd economics (a million a day just to Cuba), and let them support terrorists and guerrillas in the Southern Hemisphere too if they like. The main source of the savage feuding between us will then melt away, a great many points of today's contention and conflict all over the world will also melt away, and a military clash will become a much remoter possibility and perhaps won't take place at all"--

    s/t: Being Koetschau's Text of the De Principiis Translated into English Together with an Introduction & NotesThe FatherChristThe Holy SpiritLoss or falling awayRational naturesThe end or consummationThings corporeal & incorporealThe angelsThe world & the creatures in itThe perpetuity of bodily natureThe beginning of the world & its causesThat there is one God of the law & the prophets, & that the God of the old & new covenants is the sameThe just & the goodThe incarnation of the SaviourThat it was the same Spirit who was in Moses & the rest of the prophets & in the holy apostlesThe soulThe world & the movements of rational creatures both good & evil & the causes of these movementsResurrection & punishmentThe promisesFree willHow the devil & the opposing powers are, according to the Scriptures, at war with the human raceThe threefold wisdomWhether the statement made by some is true, that each individual has two soulsThat the world is originated & subject to decay, since it took its beginning in timeThe endThe inspiration of divine ScriptureHow divine Scripture should be read & interpretedThe principle underlying the obscurities in divine Scripture & its impossible or unreasonable character in places, if taken literallySummary of doctrine concerning the Father, the Son & the Holy Spirit

    The simple truths of the gospel became so obscured by worldliness and pagan idolatry—kicking off the Dark Ages of Catholicism—that Christianity required a complete reboot. This theory is popular… but it’s also fiction. This idea of a “Great Apostasy” is one of the cornerstones of American Protestantism, along with Mormonism, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and even Islam. Countless millions today profess a faith built on the assumption that the early Church quickly became broken beyond repair, requiring some new prophet or reformer to restore the “pure” teaching of Jesus and the apostles. In The Apostasy that Wasn’t, Rod Bennett follows up his bestseller Four Witnesses with an account of the historical events that led him out of his own belief in apostasy theory and into the Catholic Church. With the touch of a master storyteller, he narrates the drama of the early Church’s fight to preserve Christian orthodoxy intact even as powerful forces try to smash it to pieces. Amid imperial intrigue, military menace, and bitter theological debate, a hero arises in the form of a homely little monk named Athanasius, who stands against the world to prove that there could never be a Great Apostasy—because Jesus promised his Church would never be broken.

    The new capital of the legitimate government of Russia, once a trading post in the far east, is now a fast-growing boom town. Into this maelstrom come peddlers and exotic dancers, criminals and craftsmen, nobles and assassins. Crime is running rampant and the city guards that passes for policemen don't have a clue how to handle it—and wouldn’t know a clue if they stumbled right over it. They can manage to walk a beat, at least in broad daylight. But solve a crime?         Not a chance. And Czar Michael Romanov and his officials aren’t any help, since they’re pre-occupied with building a nation out of spit and bailing wire.          But the bargirl who was murdered had friends who cared. And thosefriends call in Vasilii Lyapuno, an engineer working at the newly-founded Dacha in Ufa and loves up-timer murder mysteries.          Can Vasilii track down the killer? Luckily for him, he has the assistance of another bargirl named Miroslava, who has a unique way of seeing the world. Together they might figure out who did what to whom and who was responsible for the crime.         Crimes, rather. Murder starts adding up.

    To cheer the fall of a bankrupt totalitarian regime is one thing; to build on its ruins a stable democratic state is quite another. The challenge of helping to steer post-Soviet Russia-with its thousands of nuclear weapons and seething ethnic tensions-between the Scylla of a communist restoration and the Charybdis of anarchy fell to the former governor of a poor, landlocked Southern state who had won national election by focusing on domestic issues. No one could have predicted that by the end of Bill Clinton’s second term he would meet with his Kremlin counterparts more often than had all of his predecessors from Harry Truman to George Bush combined, or that his presidency and his legacy would be so determined by his need to be his own Russia hand.With Bill Clinton at every step was Strobe Talbott, the deputy secretary of state whose expertise was the former Soviet Union. Talbott was Clinton’s old friend, one of his most trusted advisers, a frequent envoy on the most sensitive of diplomatic missions and, as this book shows, a sharp-eyed observer. The Russia Hand is without question among the most candid, intimate and illuminating foreign-policy memoirs ever written in the long history of such books. It offers unparalleled insight into the inner workings of policymaking and diplomacy alike. With the scope of nearly a decade, it reveals the hidden play of personalities and the closed-door meetings that shaped the most crucial events of our time, from NATO expansion, missile defense and the Balkan wars to coping with Russia’s near-meltdown in the wake of the Asian financial crisis. The book is dominated by two gifted, charismatic and flawed men, Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin, who quickly formed one of the most intense and consequential bonds in the annals of statecraft. It also sheds new light on Vladimir Putin, as well as the altered landscape after September 11, 2001.The Russia Hand is the first great memoir about war and peace in the post-cold war world.From the Hardcover edition.

    In our wider culture it's now tucked in the endnotes of book-club histories or forms the ghostlike ellipses in the six o'clock news. But in Introducing Christian Mission Today, Michael Goheen brings the vibrant history, motivation and challenges of Christian mission to the fore. Through the centuries Christian mission has always been recalibrating, retooling and reevangelizing. It has repeatedly taken surprising turns as it is carried along by the Spirit of God. Goheen's introduction to mission's biblical, theological and historical dimensions engages the present and anticipates the future. As he unfolds the major issues of the global and urban, the pluralistic and wholistic contexts of mission today, he lays the ground for engaging in God's great kingdom enterprise. This full-scale text incorporates the keen missional insights of Lesslie Newbigin, David Bosch and other formative thinkers. It will be a valued resource not only for those in crosscultural contexts but also for those engaged in reevangelizing the West.

    Baker practices astonishing verbal magic over and over again." - Clancy Martin, Paris Review"Strikingly intimate... Free of the stilted or formal locutions that clutter up some of the more antique-sounding translations... Ms. Baker has given the play a natural but distinctly contemporary American sound." - Charles Isherwood, New York Times"Devastatingly beautiful... People are going to be talking about this one for years." - Jacob Gallagher-Ross, Village Voice"More than a modern-dress treatment of a classic work, it's a fresh rethinking of the material from the perspective of a modern mind." - Marilyn Stasio, VarietyAnnie Baker, one of the most celebrated playwrights in the United States, lends her truthful observation and elegant command of the colloquial to Anton Chekhov's despairing masterpiece Uncle Vanya. A critical hit in its sold-out Off-Broadway premiere, Baker's telling is a refreshingly intimate and modern treatment of a Chekhovian classic.Annie Baker's plays include The Flick (The Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, Obie Award), The Aliens (Obie Award), Circle Mirror Transformation (Obie Award) and Body Awareness. Her work has been produced at more than a hundred theaters in the U.S. and in more than a dozen countries internationally. Recent honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Steinberg Playwright Award and New York Drama Critics Circle Award. She is a resident playwright at the Signature Theatre.