Christians are now often seen as the bad guys, losing both respect and influence.In our post-Christian culture, how do we offer the gospel to those around us who view it as not only wrong but possibly dangerous? And how do we ensure that the secular worldview does not entice us away with its constant barrage, online and elsewhere, of messages about self-determinism?Author Stephen McAlpine offers an analysis of how our culture ended up this way and explains key points of tension between biblical Christianity and secular culture. He encourages Christians not to be ashamed of the gospel as it is more liberating, fulfilling and joyful than anything the world has to offer. He also offers strategies for coping in this world, with its opposing values, and for reaching out to others wisely with the truth.

    . . Columbus statues attacked with red paint. They started with slave-owning Confederate generals, but they’re not stopping there. The vandals are only pretending to care about the character of particular American heroes. In reality, they hate what those heroes represent: the truths asserted in the Declaration of Independence and embodied in the Constitution. And they are bent on taking America down and replacing our free society with a socialist utopia. All that stands in their way is Americans’ reverence for our history of freedom. Which is why that history simply has to go. Now, Jarrett Stepman, editor at The Daily Signal and host of Right Side of History, exposes the true aims of the war on our history:The war on America: World history is full of conquests and suffering indigenous peoples. Why target Christopher Columbus? What they really want to tear down is America.The war on Thanksgiving: World history is full of colonists. Why target the Pilgrims? What they really want to tear down is American freedom and prosperity.The war on the Founding: World history is full of slavery. Why target Thomas Jefferson? What they really want to tear down are the rights endowed by our Creator.The war on the common man: World history is full of victorious generals and populist politicians. Why target Andrew Jackson? What they really want to tear down is democracy.The war on the South: World history is full of civil strife. Why target Confederate heroes like Robert E. Lee? What they really want to tear down is respect for America’s past and the reconciliation that renewed our Union.The war on patriotism: World history is full of national pride. Why target Teddy Roosevelt? What they really want to tear down is the idea of American greatness.The war on the American century: World history is full of bloody wars. What they really want to tear down is America’s defeat of totalitarianism. If America is to survive this assault, we must rally to the defense of our illustrious history. The War on History is the battle plan.

    Jones, CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, spells out the profound political and cultural consequences of a new reality—that America is no longer a majority white Christian nation. “Quite possibly the most illuminating text for this election year” (The New York Times Book Review).For most of our nation’s history, White Christian America (WCA) set the tone for our national policy and shaped American ideals. But especially since the 1990s, WCA has steadily lost influence, following declines within both its mainline and evangelical branches. Today, America is no longer demographically or culturally a majority white, Christian nation. Drawing on more than four decades of polling data, The End of White Christian America explains and analyzes the waning vitality of WCA. Robert P. Jones argues that the visceral nature of today’s most heated issues—the vociferous arguments around same-sex marriage and religious and sexual liberty, the rise of the Tea Party following the election of our first black president, and stark disagreements between black and white Americans over the fairness of the criminal justice system—can only be understood against the backdrop of white Christians’ anxieties as America’s racial and religious topography shifts around them. Beyond 2016, the descendants of WCA will lack the political power they once had to set the terms of the nation’s debate over values and morals and to determine election outcomes. Looking ahead, Jones forecasts the ways that they might adjust to find their place in the new America—and the consequences for us all if they don’t. “Jones’s analysis is an insightful combination of history, sociology, religious studies, and political science….This book will be of interest to a wide range of readers across the political spectrum” (Library Journal).

    Examines America's dismal welfare state and challenges the church to return to its biblical role as guardian of the poor.

    The end result of this conversation, Dark hopes, will be a better understanding that there is a reality more important, more lasting, and more infinite than the cultures to which we belong, the reality of the kingdom of God.

    His letters to various churches scattered throughout the Roman Empire articulated, for the first time, the beliefs that make up the heart of Christian practice and faith. In this extraordinary biography, Bruce Chilton explains the changing images of Paul, from the early Church period when he was regarded as the premiere apostle who separated Christianity from Judaism to more recent liberal evaluations, which paint him as an antifeminist, homophobic figure more dedicated to doctrine than to spiritual freedom. By illuminating Paul’s thoughts and contributions within the context of his time, Chilton restores him to his place as the founding architect of the Church and one of the most important figures in Western history. Rabbi Paul is at once a compelling, highly readable biography and a window on how Jesus’ message was transformed into a religion embraced by millions around the world. Drawing on Paul’s own writings as well as historical and scholarly documents about his life and times, Chilton portrays an all-too-human saint who helped to create both the most beautiful and the most troublesome aspects of the Church. He shows that Paul sought to specify the correct approach to such central concerns as sexuality, obedience, faith, conscience, and spirit, to define religion as an institution, and to clarify the nature of the religious personality—issues that Christians still struggle with today.

    They were distracted, discouraged, and ready to throw in the towel. But the prophet Haggai reminded them they could find courage in the God who had never left them.Sometimes the landscapes of our lives feel wrecked, with our hope and purpose in shambles. We too get distracted and discouraged. However, God's presence and promises give us courage to press on and trust Him with our story.In this 7-session study on the Book of Haggai, learn to walk confidently in your calling, stay motivated despite opposition, and courageously invest your life in God's purposes, trusting Him for results you may never see in this lifetime.Features: Leader guide to lead discussions within small groupsPersonal study segments to complete between 7 weeks of group sessionsEnriching teaching videos, approximately 25 minutes per session, available for purchase or rentBenefits: Defeat discouragement through God's presence, people, and Word.See beyond your current circumstances to a future hope.Learn to trust God more than your feelings.

    Fr. George Moorman. Extremely informative, yet very easy to read! Explains, prayer by prayer, what happens at the Latin Mass and why. Answers all your questions about the Mass: why Latin is used, silence, bells, specific colors, etc., and how we participate. Ties in beautifully with Pope Benedict XVI's motu proprio opening the door to the universal celebration of the Latin Mass.

    As she was ministering to one illness-ravaged man, a visitor overheard her whisper a few words to him. These few words embody some of Mother Teresa’s most wonderful wisdom. This is what she said: You say a prayer in your religion, and I will say a prayer as I know it. Together we will say this prayer and it will be something beautiful for God.

    It was an era marked by polarization and posturing fueled by deep-rooted anger and insecurity.   Buchanan’s fiery speech marked a high point in the culture wars, but as Andrew Hartman shows in this richly analytical history, their roots lay farther back, in the tumult of the 1960s—and their significance is much greater than generally assumed. Far more than a mere sideshow or shouting match, the culture wars, Hartman argues, were the very public face of America’s struggle over the unprecedented social changes of the period, as the cluster of social norms that had long governed American life began to give way to a new openness to different ideas, identities, and articulations of what it meant to be an American. The hot-button issues like abortion, affirmative action, art, censorship, feminism, and homosexuality that dominated politics in the period were symptoms of the larger struggle, as conservative Americans slowly began to acknowledge—if initially through rejection—many fundamental transformations of American life.   As an ever-more partisan but also an ever-more diverse and accepting America continues to find its way in a changing world, A War for the Soul of America reminds us of how we got here, and what all the shouting has really been about.

    He found that his predecessors on the Court were complicit in the first step of this transformation, when in the 1870s they defanged the Civil War amendments intended to give full citizenship to his fellow black Americans. In the next generation, Woodrow Wilson, dismissing the framers and their work as obsolete, set out to replace laws made by the people's representatives with rules made by highly educated, modern, supposedly nonpartisan "experts," an idea Franklin Roosevelt supersized in the New Deal agencies that he acknowledged had no constitutional warrant. Then, under Chief Justice Earl Warren in the 1950s and 1960s, the Nine set about realizing Wilson's dream of a Supreme Court sitting as a permanent constitutional convention, conjuring up laws out of smoke and mirrors and justifying them as expressions of the spirit of the age.But Thomas, who joined the Court after eight years running one of the myriad administrative agencies that the Great Society had piled on top of FDR's batch, had deep misgivings about the new governmental order. He shared the framers' vision of free, self-governing citizens forging their own fate. And from his own experience growing up in segregated Savannah, flirting with and rejecting black radicalism at college, and running an agency that supposedly advanced equality, he doubted that unelected experts and justices really did understand the moral arc of the universe better than the people themselves, or that the rules and rulings they issued made lives better rather than worse. So in the hundreds of opinions he has written in more than a quarter century on the Court--the most important of them explained in these pages in clear, non-lawyerly language--he has questioned the constitutional underpinnings of the new order and tried to restore the limited, self-governing original one, as more legitimate, more just, and more free than the one that grew up in its stead. The Court now seems set to move down the trail he blazed.A free, self-governing nation needs independent-minded, self-reliant citizens, and Thomas's biography, vividly recounted here, produced just the kind of character that the founders assumed would always mark Americans. America's future depends on the power of its culture and institutions to form ever more citizens of this stamp.

    The new edition, An Enduring Debate, continues the important discussion of nuclear proliferation and the dangers of a nuclear-armed world. With new chapters on the questions surrounding a nuclear North Korea, Iran, and Iraq and the potential for a world free of nuclear weapons, this Third Edition will continue to generate a lively classroom experience.

    To what are our duties owed and why? How do we respond to the pull of globalisation and mass migration, to the rise of Islam and to the decline of Christian belief? Do we accept these as inevitable or do we resist them? If we resist them on what basis do we build? This book sets out to answer these questions, and to understand the volatile moment in which we live.Roger Scruton slices characteristically through the fog of debate with this sensible and profound account of our collective identity; essential reading for anyone interested in what it means to be British, what that might come to mean in future, and who wonders how we can define our place in a rapidly changing world.

    His guitarist is trying to get them all killed. Fans are stealing his things. Mechanics are rebuking his lifestyle. Even his own fragile, uptight psyche is antagonizing him. But despite having every odd stacked against him, Project 86's frontman is living the dream and loving it. In It's All Downhill From Here, Andrew Schwab chronicles the highs and lows, the struggles and triumphs of this underground, independent rock band's rocky road to stardom. From a hostage situation on their first day on the road, to a drummer's crushed hand, a haunting female fan and an '80s rocker's halitosis problem, Schwab tells it like it is, with biting wit and rock star charm. This insider's look at the real life of a rock band not only reaffirms that everyone's human, but makes you hungry for a dream of your own to chase after.

    But American governments legally suspended the free will of blacks for 150 years, and then denied blacks equal protection of the law for another 150 years. How did this happen in America, how were the Constitution and laws of the land twisted so as to institutionalize racism, and how did it or will it end? In a refreshingly candid book, Dred Scott's Revenge: A Legal History of Race and Freedom In America, Judge Andrew P. Napolitano takes a no-holds-barred look at the role of the government in the denial of freedoms based on race.