The Practice of Saying No will appeal to anyone seeking more meaning and spirituality in their everyday lives. Barbara Brown Taylor, acclaimed author of Leaving Church and An Altar in the World (from which this eSelect is taken), writes with the honesty of Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love) and the spiritual depth of Anne Lamott (Grace, Eventually) and reveals how to encounter the sacred as a natural part of everyday life.

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

    Orphaned as a teenager, he came to America in search of an education, a home, and the war that would at last bring him fame and honor. As George Washington’s most trusted aide, Hamilton helped to win the American Revolution—but after the war, his enemies lost no time accusing him of trying to sell his country back to the British. He was the most powerful member of Washington’s presidential cabinet—so why did Adams and Jefferson hate him so much?In this book, you will learn how the author of the Federalist Papers and the first Secretary of the Treasury nearly ruined his career by fighting duels, seducing women, and getting involved in America’s first sex scandal. The duel that killed Alexander Hamilton is the most famous duel in American history, but you’ll have to come up with your own answer to its greatest mystery: who shot first, Hamilton or Burr?

    What has kept him willing to see the best? Every time he returns to Iraq he may be saying goodbye to his family for the last time. What do they think? He suffers from MS. How does he remain cheerful despite his physical weakness, and its progression? What does he say to God, alone in his study, late at night? He has been caught up in momentous events. Can he see the hand of God? Looking ahead, can he be optimistic about the future? Where are his sources of spiritual energy? He solicits prayer: why? 'Not everything God calls us to do is painless, ' he comments. 'Much of my work is simply about showing love to the unlovely.'

    With penetrating insight and practical applications, Relationships: A Mess Worth Making identifies how to work through the most stubborn problems that plague any contemporary relationship - be it marriage, parent-child, or friendship.

    What was this great political enterprise all about? Who were these people who are considered the philosophical, spiritual, and moral ancestors of our nation? What Vowell discovers is something far different from what their uptight shoe-buckles-and-corn reputation might suggest. The people she finds are highly literate, deeply principled, and surprisingly feisty. Their story is filled with pamphlet feuds, witty courtroom dramas, and bloody vengeance. Along the way she asks:Was Massachusetts Bay Colony governor John Winthrop a communitarian, Christlike Christian, or conformity's tyrannical enforcer? Yes! Was Rhode Island's architect Roger Williams America's founding freak or the father of the First Amendment? Same difference. What does it take to get that jezebel Anne Hutchinson to shut up? A hatchet. What was the Puritans' pet name for the Pope? The Great Whore of Babylon. Sarah Vowell's special brand of armchair history makes the bizarre and esoteric fascinatingly relevant and fun. She takes us from the modern-day reenactment of an Indian massacre to the Mohegan Sun casino, from old-timey Puritan poetry, where "righteousness" is rhymed with "wilderness," to a Mayflower-themed waterslide. Throughout The Wordy Shipmates is rich in historical fact, humorous insight, and social commentary by one of America's most celebrated voices. Thou shalt enjoy it.

    It's about thinking outside the “institutional walls” of Christianity and asking the hard questions. It boldly says in public what many people are thinking in private. And its hilarious stories and life-changing insights will inspire those who are dissatisfied with fear-driven religion but believe—deep down—there’s a better message out there for the world to hear.

    The first edition, The Right Fights Back, follows the campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.   The battle for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination promises to be one of the most hotly contested and closely fought in recent memory, as establishment Republicans, Tea Party favorites, and dark horse insurgents vie to take on President Obama in the November election. In The Right Fights Back, Mike Allen, chief White House correspondent for POLITICO, and Evan Thomas, the award-winning journalist and author of Robert F. Kennedy and The War Lovers, chronicle the dramatic events of this historic campaign as it unfolds.   With exclusive real-time reporting from the campaign trail, The Right Fights Back provides detail, color, and in-depth analysis that take readers beyond the hourly headlines and commentary. From the role of Super PACS and conservative interest groups to the clashes of personality and policy that will define the race to capture the GOP nomination, this is a history-as-it-happens account of the resurgent American right at the crossroads.

    We need to depart a kingdom that creates isolation, polarized debate, an exhausted planet, and violence that comes with the will to empire. The abbreviation of this empire is called a consumer culture. We think the free market ideology that surrounds us is true and inevitable and represents progress. We are called to better adapt, be more agile, more lean, more schooled, more, more, more. Give it up. There is no such thing as customer satisfaction. We need a new narrative, a shift in our thinking and speaking. An Other Kingdom takes us out of a culture of addictive consumption into a place where life is ours to create together.  This satisfying way depends upon a neighborly covenant—an agreement that we together, will better raise our children, be healthy, be connected, be safe, and provide a livelihood. The neighborly covenant has a different language than market-hype. It speaks instead in a sacred tongue. Authors Peter Block, Walter Brueggemann, and John McKnight invite you on a journey of departure from our consumer market culture, with its constellations of empire and control. Discover an alternative set of beliefs that have the capacity to evoke a culture where poverty, violence, and shrinking well-being are not inevitable—a culture in which the social order produces enough for all. They ask you to consider this other kingdom. To participate in this modern exodus towards a modern community. To awaken its beginnings are all around us. An Other Kingdom outlines this journey to construct a future outside the systems world of solutions.

    NOW UPDATED. ideal route to discipleship--a place where the rubber of biblical truth meets the road of human relationships. leaders so that Willow Creek could build a church of small groups. Now he is committed to creating tools that will help church leaders pursue the same goal--to provide a place in community for everyone in their congregation. In Leading Life-Changing Small Groups, Donahue and his team share in depth the practical insights that have made Willow Creek's small group ministry so effective. ready-reference format of this book gives small group leaders, pastors, church leaders, educators, and counselors a commanding grasp of: * Group formation and values * Leadership requirements and responsibilities * The philosophy and structure of small groups * Meeting preparation and participation * Discipleship within the group * Leadership training ... and much more From an individual group to an entire small group ministry, Leading Life-Changing Small Groups gives you the comprehensive guidance you need to cultivate life-changing small groups ... and growing, fruitful followers of Christ.

    This is vintage Krakauer, an utterly compelling work of nonfiction that illuminates an otherwise confounding realm of human behavior.Jon Krakauer’s literary reputation rests on insightful chronicles of lives conducted at the outer limits. In Under The Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith, he shifts his focus from extremes of physical adventure to extremes of religious belief within our own borders. At the core of his book is an appalling double murder committed by two Mormon Fundamentalist brothers, Ron and Dan Lafferty, who insist they received a revelation from God commanding them to kill their blameless victims. Beginning with a meticulously researched account of this "divinely inspired" crime, Krakauer constructs a multilayered, bone-chilling narrative of messianic delusion, savage violence, polygamy, and unyielding faith. Along the way, he uncovers a shadowy offshoot of America’s fastest-growing religion, and raises provocative questions about the nature of religious belief.Krakauer takes readers inside isolated communities in the American West, Canada, and Mexico, where some forty-thousand Mormon Fundamentalists believe the mainstream Mormon Church went unforgivably astray when it renounced polygamy. Defying both civil authorities and the Mormon establishment in Salt Lake City, the leaders of these outlaw sects are zealots who answer only to God. Marrying prodigiously and with virtual impunity (the leader of the largest fundamentalist church took seventy-five "plural wives," several of whom were wed to him when they were fourteen or fifteen and he was in his eighties), fundamentalist prophets exercise absolute control over the lives of their followers, and preach that any day now the world will be swept clean in a hurricane of fire, sparing only their most obedient adherents.Weaving the story of the Lafferty brothers and their fanatical brethren with a clear-eyed look at Mormonism’s violent past, Krakauer examines the underbelly of the most successful homegrown faith in the United States, and finds a distinctly American brand of religious extremism. The result is vintage Krakauer, an utterly compelling work of nonfiction that illuminates an otherwise confounding realm of human behavior.

    Challenging the commonly held assumption that the “moral majority” backed Donald Trump for purely pragmatic reasons, Du Mez reveals that Donald Trump in fact represents the fulfillment, rather than the betrayal, of white evangelicals’ most deeply held values.Jesus and John Wayne is a sweeping account of the last seventy-five years of white evangelicalism, showing how American evangelicals have worked for decades to replace the Jesus of the Gospels with an idol of rugged masculinity and Christian nationalism, or in the words of one modern chaplain, with “a spiritual badass.” As Du Mez explains, the key to understanding this transformation is to recognize the role of culture in modern American evangelicalism. Many of today’s evangelicals may not be theologically astute, but they know their VeggieTales, they’ve read John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart, and they learned about purity before they learned about sex—and they have a silver ring to prove it. Evangelical books, films, music, clothing, and merchandise shape the beliefs of millions. And evangelical popular culture is teeming with muscular heroes—mythical warriors and rugged soldiers, men like Oliver North, Ronald Reagan, Mel Gibson, and the Duck Dynasty clan, who assert white masculine power in defense of “Christian America.” Chief among these evangelical legends is John Wayne, an icon of a lost time when men were uncowed by political correctness, unafraid to tell it like it was, and did what needed to be done.Trump, in other words, is hardly the first flashy celebrity to capture evangelicals’ hearts and minds, nor is he the first strongman to promise evangelicals protection and power. Indeed, the values and viewpoints at the heart of white evangelicalism today—patriarchy, authoritarian rule, aggressive foreign policy, fear of Islam, ambivalence toward #MeToo, and opposition to Black Lives Matter and the LGBTQ community—are likely to persist long after Trump leaves office.A much-needed reexamination, Jesus and John Wayne explains why evangelicals have rallied behind the least-Christian president in American history and how they have transformed their faith in the process, with enduring consequences for all of us.

    Wolfert was in the thick of it, facing death alongside the troops, and he reproduces events as they happen in real time, making for a tense, suspenseful read. Wolfert risked his life on several occasions for the sake of authenticity, and survived to write this, one of the most remarkable combat memoirs of World War 2.

    Yet, it is going unnoticed in far too many circles. Social Justice Goes to Church can serve as a wake-up call."—Samuel C. Smith, Ph.D.Chair and Graduate Program Director, Department of History, Liberty UniversityIn order to understand why so many evangelicals recently support left-leaning political causes, it is important to know a little history.In the 1970s, many campus radicals raised in Christian homes brought neo-Marxist ideas from college back to church with them. At first, figures like Jim Wallis, Ron Sider, and Richard Mouw made great gains for their progressive evangelical cause. But, after the defeat of Jimmy Carter, the religious right stole the headlines.Today, a new crop of mainstream evangelicals has taken up the cause of the New Left, whether they know it or not. As pro-life evangelicals rush to support movements like #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo, it is important to realize they are walking in footprints already laid down. Their mission may be more successful, but it is not new. To understand where the evangelical social justice movement is heading, it is vital to understand the origins of the movement.Social Justice Goes to Church: The New Left in Modern American Evangelicalism answers, from a historical perspective, the vital question, "Why are American evangelicals moving Left?"“The great injunction to the Church was to preach the Gospel to the world, while not being of the world. Social justice neatly reverses this trend, preaching the ways of the world into the church. That is not its only critical reversal. The Gospel is about freedom from guilt and sin and bondage. Social justice seeks above all to apportion guilt and sin and bondage, enslaving entire demographics and requiring that they kneel before man in attrition. How important that a book of this nature should enter the fray right now. I applaud Mr. Harris for his excellent work in providing the practical means of identifying and repelling this fraudulent force, this ideological interloper, this dangerous false teaching.”—Douglas KrugerAuthor of Political Correctness Does More Harm Than Good: How to Identify, Debunk, and Dismantle Dangerous Ideas

    What can be done to stop this? Cardinal Timothy Dolan explains the need for all Americans to embrace a new culture rooted in what Blessed John Paul II called the Gospel of Life where the sacredness of all human life, and the freedoms that are their birthright, are upheld, respected and protected by law.