All injustice affects others, so talking about justice that isn't social is like talking about water that isn't wet or a square with no right angles. But the Bible's call to seek justice is not a call to superficial, kneejerk activism. We are not merely commanded to execute justice, but to "truly execute justice." The God who commands us to seek justice is the same God who commands us to "test everything" and "hold fast to what is good."Drawing from a diverse range of theologians, sociologists, artists, and activists, Confronting Injustice without Compromising Truth, by Thaddeus Williams, makes the case that we must be discerning if we are to "truly execute justice" as Scripture commands. Not everything called "social justice" today is compatible with a biblical vision of a better world. The Bible offers hopeful and distinctive answers to deep questions of worship, community, salvation, and knowledge that ought to mark a uniquely Christian pursuit of justice. Topics addressed include:RacismSexualitySocialismCulture WarAbortionTribalismCritical TheoryIdentity PoliticsConfronting Injustice without Compromising Truth also brings in unique voices to talk about their experiences with these various social justice issues, including:Michelle-Lee BarnwallSuresh BudhaprithiEddie ByunFreddie CardozaBecket CookBella DanusiarMonique DusonOjo OkeyeEdwin RamirezSamuel SeyNeil ShenviWalt SobchakIn Confronting Injustice without Compromising Truth, Thaddeus Williams transcends our religious and political tribalism and challenges readers to discover what the Bible and the example of Jesus have to teach us about justice. He presents a compelling vision of justice for all God's image-bearers that offers hopeful answers to life's biggest questions.

    Drawing on anecdotes from science, economics, history, politics and philosophy, Matt Ridley’s wide-ranging, highly opinionated opus demolishes conventional assumptions that major scientific and social imperatives are dictated by those on high, whether in government, business, academia, or morality. On the contrary, our most important achievements develop from the bottom up. Patterns emerge, trends evolve. Just as skeins of geese form Vs in the sky without meaning to, and termites build mud cathedrals without architects, so brains take shape without brain-makers, learning can happen without teaching and morality changes without a plan.Although we neglect, defy and ignore them, bottom-up trends shape the world. The growth of technology, the sanitation-driven health revolution, the quadrupling of farm yields so that more land can be released for nature—these were largely emergent phenomena, as were the Internet, the mobile phone revolution, and the rise of Asia. Ridley demolishes the arguments for design and effectively makes the case for evolution in the universe, morality, genes, the economy, culture, technology, the mind, personality, population, education, history, government, God, money, and the future.

    We want to live a life of purpose and meaning. We want to leave a legacy for our children and grandchildren. We want to leave the world a better place. And yet we spend so much time wringing our hands over what’s wrong and not nearly enough time fixing those things within our control.John Kasich has walked the corridors of power both in the politics, as a former leader of Congress, governor of Ohio, presidential candidate, and in the private sector, as an in-demand public speaker, best-selling author and a strategic advisor to businesses and large non-profits. Yet he’s seen that the most powerful movements have started from the bottom up. Rather than waiting on Washington, the solutions happen once we become leaders in our own lives and communities. The strength and resilience of our nation lies in each of us. That’s what this book is about.In It’s Up to Us, Kasich shares the ten little ways we each can bring about big change. Taken together, they chart a path for each to follow as we look to live a life bigger than ourselves. Taken one-by-one, they can help to lift us from a place of outrage or complacency or helplessness and move us closer to our shared American dream.

    An accessible look at how the government promoted the housing bubble that it is now using for its own ends.

    So what comes next? Growth will resume. But economic uncertainty will worsen, making what comes next not just a boom but a nerve-shattering SONIC BOOM. Gregg Easterbrook - who "writes nothing that is not brilliant" ("Chicago Tribune") - is a fount of unconventional wisdom, and over time, he is almost always proven right. Throughout 2008 and 2009, as the global economy was contracting and the experts were panicking, Easterbrook worked on a book saying prosperity is about to make its next big leap. Will he be right again? SONIC BOOM: Globalization at Mach Speed presents three basic insights. First, if you don't like globalization, brace yourself, because globalization has barely started. Easterbrook contends the world is about to become "far "more globally linked. Second, the next wave of global change will be primarily positive: economic prosperity, knowledge and freedom will increase more in the next 50 years than in all of human history to this point. But before you celebrate, Easterbrook further warns that the next phase of global change is going to drive us crazy. Most things will be good for most people - but nothing will seem certain for anyone. Each SONIC BOOM chapter is based on examples of cities around the world - in the United States, Europe, Russia, China, South America - that represent a significant Sonic Boom trend. With a terrific sense of humor, pitch-perfect reporting and clear, elegant prose, Easterbrook explains why economic recovery is on the horizon but why the next phase of global change will also give everyone one hell of a headache. "Forbes" calls Easterbrook "the best writer on complex topics in the United States" and SONIC BOOM will show you why.

    Set between 1950 and 1963, Joe Bageant uses Maw, Pap, Ony Mae, and other members of his rambunctious Scots–Irish family to chronicle the often-heartbreaking post-war journey of 22 million rural Americans into the cities, where they became the foundation of a permanent white underclass.Combining recollection, stories, accounts, remembrance, and analysis, the book offers an intimate look at what Americans lost in the massive and orchestrated post-war social and economic shift from an agricultural to an urban consumer society. Along the way, he also provides insights into how ‘the second and third generation of displaced agrarians’, as Gore Vidal described them, now fuel the discontent of America’s politically conservative, God-fearing, Obama-hating ‘red-staters’.These are the gun-owning, uninsured, underemployed white tribes inhabiting America’s urban and suburban heartland: the ones who never got a slice of the pie during the good times, and the ones hit hardest by America’s bad times, and who hit back during election years. Their ‘tough work and tougher luck’ story stretches over generations, and Bageant tells it here with poignancy, indignation, and tinder-dry wit.

     According to MSNBC, having a child makes you stupid. You actually lose IQ points. Good Morning America has announced that natural blondes will be extinct within two hundred years. Pundits estimated that there were more than a million demonstrators at a tea party rally in Washington, D.C., even though roughly sixty thousand were there. Numbers have peculiar powers-they can disarm skeptics, befuddle journalists, and hoodwink the public into believing almost anything. "Proofiness," as Charles Seife explains in this eye-opening book, is the art of using pure mathematics for impure ends, and he reminds readers that bad mathematics has a dark side. It is used to bring down beloved government officials and to appoint undeserving ones (both Democratic and Republican), to convict the innocent and acquit the guilty, to ruin our economy, and to fix the outcomes of future elections. This penetrating look at the intersection of math and society will appeal to readers of Freakonomics and the books of Malcolm Gladwell.

    Are you sick of self-important celebrities preaching against “global warming,” yet flying private planes to their countless homes? Fed up with lectures about charity and philanthropy from miserly rockers who will do anything for a tax break? Disgusted by leftist stars decrying the evils of the Second Amendment as their personal bodyguards pack more heat than a Chuck Norris kick to the face? The same Hollywood loons who got Barack Hussein Obama elected in 2008 will do so again in 2012. That is, unless we muzzle them. Four years ago, Republicans sat back like wimps and let Obama’s celebrity-fueled cool machine steamroll them into electoral smithereens. This time, we must do the steamrolling. New York Times bestselling author of Obama Zombies and gonzo journalist Jason Mattera takes the first stand with Hollywood Hypocrites, as he slays the Left’s sacred celebrity cows and teaches Obama’s Tinseltown foot soldiers their most important lesson yet: No longer can they attempt to deny Americans the very liberties they use to catapult themselves to prosperity and stardom. In his trademark eye-opening, no-holds-barred, and hilarious style, Mattera puts scores of A-list celebrities, including Sting, Madonna, Bono, Al Gore, Alec Baldwin, Matt Damon, Cameron Diaz, Bruce Springsteen, and many, many more under the microscope to analyze whether they live by the same environmental, health, anti-violence, civil rights, and other policy prescriptions they seek to inflict on Americans. What he uncovers will shock you. Hollywood’s megaphone is powerful, and the mainstream media’s love affair with the president will roar back with a vengeance when their guy is against the wall. Anyone who thinks Barack Obama’s abysmal first term will be enough to demoralize the Liberal Left Coast from flexing its mediated political muscle is a fool. It’s time to recognize the marketing and fund-raising power the Hollywood Progressives wield. It’s time to dig into the data and set the record straight. It’s time to turn the media spotlight back on the image makers and prevent the Hollywood elite from hoodwinking American voters once again.

    But the most important, consequential, and widening gap in American society is between the upper middle class and everyone else.Reeves defines the upper middle class as those whose incomes are in the top 20 percent of American society. Income is not the only way to measure a society, but in a market economy it is crucial because access to money generally determines who gets the best quality education, housing, health care, and other necessary goods and services.As Reeves shows, the growing separation between the upper middle class and everyone else can be seen in family structure, neighborhoods, attitudes, and lifestyle. Those at the top of the income ladder are becoming more effective at passing on their status to their children, reducing overall social mobility. The result is not just an economic divide but a fracturing of American society along class lines. Upper-middle-class children become upper-middle-class adults.These trends matter because the separation and perpetuation of the upper middle class corrode prospects for more progressive approaches to policy. Various forms of “opportunity hoarding” among the upper middle class make it harder for others to rise up to the top rung. Examples include zoning laws and schooling, occupational licensing, college application procedures, and the allocation of internships. Upper-middle-class opportunity hoarding, Reeves argues, results in a less competitive economy as well as a less open society.Inequality is inevitable and can even be good, within limits. But Reeves argues that society can take effective action to reduce opportunity hoarding and thus promote broader opportunity. This fascinating book shows how American society has become the very class-defined society that earlier Americans rebelled against—and what can be done to restore a more equitable society.

    A decade later, in a newly heated era of both struggle and divisions, he writes a letter to his now thirteen-year-old daughter. David is the son of Black and South Asian migrants from Trinidad, and he draws upon his personal and ancestral past, including the legacies of slavery, indenture, and immigration, as well as the experiences of growing up a visible minority within the land of one's birth. In sharing with his daughter his own story, he hopes to help cultivate within her a sense of identity and responsibility that balances the painful truths of the past and present with hopeful possibilities for the future.

    But natural selection has given us a suite of beneficial social features, including our capacity for love, friendship, cooperation, and learning. Beneath all of our inventions -- our tools, farms, machines, cities, nations -- we carry with us innate proclivities to make a good society.In Blueprint, Nicholas A. Christakis introduces the compelling idea that our genes affect not only our bodies and behaviors, but also the ways in which we make societies, ones that are surprisingly similar worldwide.With many vivid examples -- including diverse historical and contemporary cultures, communities formed in the wake of shipwrecks, commune dwellers seeking utopia, online groups thrown together by design or involving artificially intelligent bots, and even the tender and complex social arrangements of elephants and dolphins that so resemble our own -- Christakis shows that, despite a human history replete with violence, we cannot escape our social blueprint for goodness.In a world of increasing political and economic polarization, it's tempting to ignore the positive role of our evolutionary past. But by exploring the ancient roots of goodness in civilization, Blueprint shows that our genes have shaped societies for our welfare and that, in a feedback loop stretching back many thousands of years, societies are still shaping our genes today.

    With all our media now traveling a single network, an unprecedented potential is building for centralized control over what Americans see and hear. Could history repeat itself with the next industrial consolidation? Could the Internet—the entire flow of American information—come to be ruled by one corporate leviathan in possession of “the master switch”? That is the big question of Tim Wu’s pathbreaking book.As Wu’s sweeping history shows, each of the new media of the twentieth century—radio, telephone, television, and film—was born free and open. Each invited unrestricted use and enterprising experiment until some would-be mogul battled his way to total domination. Here are stories of an uncommon will to power, the power over information: Adolph Zukor, who took a technology once used as commonly as YouTube is today and made it the exclusive prerogative of a kingdom called Hollywood . . . NBC’s founder, David Sarnoff, who, to save his broadcast empire from disruptive visionaries, bullied one inventor (of electronic television) into alcoholic despair and another (this one of FM radio, and his boyhood friend) into suicide . . . And foremost, Theodore Vail, founder of the Bell System, the greatest information empire of all time, and a capitalist whose faith in Soviet-style central planning set the course of every information industry thereafter.Explaining how invention begets industry and industry begets empire—a progress often blessed by government, typically with stifling consequences for free expression and technical innovation alike—Wu identifies a time-honored pattern in the maneuvers of today’s great information powers: Apple, Google, and an eerily resurgent AT&T. A battle royal looms for the Internet’s future, and with almost every aspect of our lives now dependent on that network, this is one war we dare not tune out.Part industrial exposé, part meditation on what freedom requires in the information age, The Master Switch is a stirring illumination of a drama that has played out over decades in the shadows of our national life and now culminates with terrifying implications for our future.

    Herman and Noam Chomsky show that, contrary to the usual image of the news media as cantankerous, obstinate, and ubiquitous in their search for truth and defense of justice, in their actual practice they defend the economic, social, and political agendas of the privileged groups that dominate domestic society, the state, and the global order.Based on a series of case studies—including the media’s dichotomous treatment of “worthy” versus “unworthy” victims, “legitimizing” and “meaningless” Third World elections, and devastating critiques of media coverage of the U.S. wars against Indochina—Herman and Chomsky draw on decades of criticism and research to propose a Propaganda Model to explain the media’s behavior and performance. Their new introduction updates the Propaganda Model and the earlier case studies, and it discusses several other applications. These include the manner in which the media covered the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement and subsequent Mexican financial meltdown of 1994-1995, the media’s handling of the protests against the World Trade Organization, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund in 1999 and 2000, and the media’s treatment of the chemical industry and its regulation. What emerges from this work is a powerful assessment of how propagandistic the U.S. mass media are, how they systematically fail to live up to their self-image as providers of the kind of information that people need to make sense of the world, and how we can understand their function in a radically new way.

    

    Life is more complicated than that." " In this remarkable book of days, John Hildebrand charts the overlapping rings--home, town, countryside--of life in the Midwest. Like E. B. White, Hildebrand locates the humor and drama in ordinary life: church suppers, Friday night football, outdoor weddings, garden compost, family reunions, roadside memorials, camouflage clothing. In these wry, sharply observed essays, the Midwest isn't The Land Time Forgot but a more complicated (and vastly more interesting) place where the good life awaits once we figure exactly out what it means. From his home range in northwestern Wisconsin, Hildebrand attempts to do just that by boiling down a calendar year to its rich marrow of weather, animals, family, home--in other words, all the things that matter.