When FBI profiler Kaely Quinn's mother is diagnosed with cancer, Kaely takes time off work to go to Dark Water, Nebraska, to help her brother care for their mother. Upon her arrival, she learns of a series of fires in the small town, attributed by the fire chief to misuse of space heaters in the frigid winter. But Kaely is skeptical, and a search for a pattern in the locations of the fires bolsters her suspicions.

After yet another blaze devastates a local family, Kaely is certain a serial arsonist is on the loose. Calling upon her partner from St. Louis, Noah Hunter, and her brother's firefighter neighbor who backs Kaely's suspicions, Kaely and her team begin an investigation that swiftly leads them down a twisted path.

When the truth is finally revealed, Kaely finds herself confronting a madman who is determined his last heinous act will be her death.

Artist Amylee Weeks trademark simple and whimsical drawings and creative designs are combined with uplifting Scripture and inspired words to offer calm and stress-relieving joy in colourful self-expression.

Share the joy and invite others to join you - the perforated pages make this a shareable pastime. When you're finished, hang your artwork for constant inspiration.

The glossy hardcover volume features embossed text and designs and a 2.5 cm coil binding.

• Perforated One-Side Printed Sturdy Pages
• Designed for Fun, Serenity, Calmness & Quiet Inspiration
• Includes Gift Tags, Bookmarks & Cards to Colour
• Presentation Page for Gift-Giving
• Bible Scripture & Christian Content
• 18 x 26 cm
• 50 Designs Plus Extras

Journalist Lesley Mofokeng investigates the life of his remarkable grandfather, Mongangane Wilfred Mofokeng, a prominent Dutch Reformed Church evangelist, who built a thriving community out of the dust of the far Northwest.

The journey takes him from Joburg’s Marabi-soaked townships of the 1930s to his childhood home of Gelukspan near Lichtenburg and then to the rural Free State and the remote mountain kingdom of Lesotho. In what becomes a spiritual quest, he traces the inspirational footsteps of his ancestors and the legendary King Moshoeshoe.

In the process, Mofokeng proudly claims his heritage and also uncovers a long-lost chapter of South African history and the church of the apartheid regime.

Do you like the direction your decisions are taking you?

Most of us make choices we regret—choices that have moved our lives in a direction we don't want to go. But you have the ability to break the cycle of bad decisions and form better habits.

Drawing on Scripture, story, and the latest psychological research into human behavior, pastor Craig Groeschel reveals the power of "pre-deciding"—the key to consistently making choices that will lead you out of a downward spiral and into the joy and freedom God has for you.

With thought-provoking exercises and questions for reflection, Think Ahead will help you:

• Understand the science behind your decision-making habits.
• Overcome decision fatigue and debilitating fears.
• Diminish the role of emotions in decision-making.
• See how your small choices shape the kind of person you become.

Perfect Worship Aid for Personal or Parish Use...A Missal with a Rich History Meets Today's Need

For over 50 years, the New...St. Joseph Sunday Missal Prayerbook and Hymnal has accompanied countless Catholics in countless parishes as they approach the table of the Lord each Sunday.

This Missal serves as a welcome companion to help the faithful participate more fully in the Mass--our greatest prayer.

With this compact, personal Missal, the faithful will have at their fingertips the complete readings and prayers for all the Masses celebrated on the Sundays and Holydays of the Church Year. In addition, this Missal includes all the celebrations of the Sacred Paschal Triduum.

Valuable Features

• Clear, Easy-to-Read Type
• Two-color Order of Mass with Complete Prayers and Short Explanatory Texts
• Over 50 Illustrations
• Treasury of Prayers, including Illustrated Rosary and Stations of the Cross
• Pastoral Help: Christ's Presence in Liturgical Celebrations
• Major Practices

Early Americans have long been considered "A People of the Book" Because the nickname was coined primarily to invoke close associations between Americans and the Bible, it is easy to overlook the central fact that it was a book-not a geographic location, a monarch, or even a shared language-that has served as a cornerstone in countless investigations into the formation and fragmentation of early American culture. Few books can lay claim to such powers of civilization-altering influence. Among those which can are sacred books, and for Americans principal among such books stands the Bible. This Handbook is designed to address a noticeable void in resources focused on analyzing the Bible in America in various historical moments and in relationship to specific institutions and cultural expressions. It takes seriously the fact that the Bible is both a physical object that has exercised considerable totemic power, as well as a text with a powerful intellectual design that has inspired everything from national religious and educational practices to a wide spectrum of artistic endeavors to our nation's politics and foreign policy. This Handbook brings together a number of established scholars, as well as younger scholars on the rise, to provide a scholarly overview-rich with bibliographic resources-to those interested in the Bible's role in American cultural formation.

In Union Made, Heath W. Carter advances a bold new interpretation of the origins of American Social Christianity. While historians have often attributed the rise of the Social Gospel to middle-class ministers, seminary professors, and social reformers, this book places working people at the very center of the story. The major characters-blacksmiths, glove makers, teamsters, printers, and the like-have been mostly forgotten, but as Carter convincingly argues, their collective contribution to American Social Christianity was no less significant than that of Walter Rauschenbusch or Jane Addams. Leading readers into the thick of late-19th-century Chicago's tumultuous history, Carter shows that countless working-class believers participated in the heated debates over the implications of Christianity for industrializing society, often with as much fervor as they did in other contests over wages and the length of the workday. Throughout the Gilded Age the city's trade unionists, socialists, and anarchists advanced theological critiques of laissez faire capitalism and protested "scab ministers" who cozied up to the business elite. Their criticisms compounded church leaders' anxieties about losing the poor, such that by the turn-of-the-century many leading Christians were arguing that the only way to salvage hopes of a Christian America was for the churches to soften their position on "the labor question." As denomination after denomination did just that, it became apparent that the Social Gospel was, indeed, ascendant-from below.

Tending Adam's Garden describes and explains the way in which our immune system works from a novel perspective. The book uses metaphors and examples to bring the immune system to life and explores the fundamental miracle of nature. Written in plain language for a broad audience, this book encompasses much more than just immunology, exploring more fundamental matters such as causality, information, energy, evolution, cognition and individuality, as well as the strategy of the immune system and its role in health and disease.
* Provides a unique perspective on the immune system from one of the keenest scientific and philosophical brains in the world
* Uses metaphors and case histories to explore themes in an accessible manner
* Written in plain language requiring no specialized vocabulary or specific scientific background in the subject

This volume focuses on Catholic Church history in Australia by lookimg at certain figures (Archdeacon John McEencroe, Lwesi Harding, Bishop Chalres Henry Davis, Cardonal Gilroy) as well as themes: Catholc Social Justice and parliamentary politics, humanae vitae and Tridentine clericalism, and the emergence of Catholic education offices.

Scholars disputing the identity of the Church of England during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries describe it as either forming a Calvinist consensus or partaking of an Anglican middle way steeped in an ancient catholicity. Debating Perseverance argues that these conversations have given insufficient attention to the doctrine of the perseverance of the saints (the belief that a person who is saved can never be lost), which became one of the most distinctive doctrines of the Reformed tradition. In this book, Jay Collier sheds light on the influence of the early church and the Reformed churches on the fledgling Church of England by surveying several debates on perseverance in which readings of Augustine were involved. Collier begins with a reassessment of the Lambeth Articles (1595) and the heated Cambridge debates in which they were forged, demonstrating how readings of Augustine on perseverance influenced the final outcome of that document. He then investigates the failed attempt of the British delegation to the Synod of Dort to achieve solidarity with the international Reformed community on perseverance in a way that was also respectful of different readings of Augustine and the early church. The study returns to English soil to evaluate the Synod of Dort's effect on the supposedly Arminian Richard Montagu and his strategy to distance the Church of England from the consensus of the Reformed churches. It finishes by surveying a Puritan debate that occurred following England's civil war in which Augustine's teachings on perseverance continued to influence the way the English made policy and drafted confessional statements. In surveying these debates, Collier uncovers competing readings and receptions of Augustine on perseverance within the English church-one favoring the perseverance of the saints and the other denying it. Debating Perseverance recognizes England's struggles with perseverance as emblematic of its troubled pursuit of a Reformed and ancient catholicity.

This title was first published in 2003. When did churches start to appear more empty than full - and why? The very physicality of largely empty churches and chapels in Britain plays a powerful role in popular perceptions of 'religion'. Empty churches are frequently cited in the media as evidence of large scale religious decline. The Empty Church Revisited presents a systematic account of British churchgoing patterns over the last two hundred years, uncovering the factors and the statistics behind the considerable process of decline in church attendence. Dispelling as myth the commonly held views that the process of secularization in British culture has led to the decline in churchgoing and resulted in the predominantly empty churches of today, Gill points to physical factors, economics and issues of social space to shed new light on the origins of empty churches. This thoroughly updated edition of Robin Gill's earlier work, The Myth of the Empty Church, presents new data throughout to explore afresh the paradox of church building activity in a context of decline, the patterns of urbanisation followed by sub-urbanisation affecting churches, changes in patterns of worship, and changes within the sociology of religion in the last decade.

In September, 1219, as the armies of the Fifth Crusade besieged the Egyptian city of Damietta, Francis of Assisi went to Egypt to preach to Sultan al-Malik al-Kamil.
Although we in fact know very little about this event, this has not prevented artists and writers from the thirteenth century to the twentieth, unencumbered by mere facts, from portraying Francis alternatively as a new apostle preaching to the infidels, a scholastic theologian proving the truth of Christianity, a champion of the crusading ideal, a naive and quixotic wanderer, a crazed religious fanatic, or a medieval Gandhi preaching peace, love, and understanding. Al-Kamil, on the other hand, is variously presented as an enlightened pagan monarch hungry for evangelical teaching, a cruel oriental despot, or a worldly libertine.
Saint Francis and the Sultan takes a detailed look at these richly varied artistic responses to this brief but highly symbolic meeting. Throwing into relief the changing fears and hopes that Muslim-Christian encounters have inspired in European artists and writers in the centuries since, it gives a uniquely broad but precise vision of the evolution of Western attitudes towards Islam and the Arab world over the last eight hundred years."

So much is at stake in the abortion debate. If pro-choicers are right, precious freedoms are in jeopardy. If pro-lifers are right, innocent children are being robbed of their most basic freedom- life. Though bumpersticker slogans prevail, the facts are rarely presented. We need clear and credible answers to the central questions of the abortion debate. For those who have had abortions or are currently considering one, for pro-choicers and fence-straddlers alike, Why Pro-Life? provides answers to these questions in a concise, straightforward, and nonabrasive manner. Human Life Begins... When? No issue is more divisive or troubling than abortion. Many believe that we have to choose between helping women and helping children. This book shows how critical it is that we help both. In a concise, nonabrasive fashion, Randy Alcorn offers compassionate, factual answers to the central issues of the abortion debate.

The Oxford Handbook of John Donne presents scholars with the history of Donne studies and provides tools to orient scholarship in this field in the twenty-first century and beyond. Though profoundly historical in its orientation, the Handbook is not a summary of existing knowledge but a resource that reveals patterns of literary and historical attention and the new directions that these patterns enable or obstruct.
Part I -- Research resources in Donne Studies and why they they matter -- emphasizes the heuristic and practical orientation of the Handbook, examining prevailing assumptions and reviewing the specialized scholarly tools available. This section provides a brief evaluation and description of the scholarly strengths, shortcomings, and significance of each resource, focusing on a balanced evaluation of the opportunities and the hazards each offers.
Part II -- Donne's genres -- begins with an introduction that explores the significance and differentiation of the numerous genres in which Donne wrote, including discussion of the problems posed by his overlapping and bending of genres. Essays trace the conventions and histories of the genres concered and study the ways in which Donne's works confirm how and why his "fresh invention" illustrates his responses to the literary and non-literary contexts of their composition.
Part III -- Biographical and historical contexts -- creates perspective on what is known about Donne's life; shows how his life and writings epitomized and affected important controversial issues of his day; and brings to bear on Donne studies some of the most stimulating and creative ideas developed in recent decades by historians of early modern England.
Part IV -- Problems of literary interpretation that have been traditionally and generally important in Donne Studies -- introduces students and researchers to major critical debates affecting the reception of Donne from the 17th through to the 21st centuries.

Bishop Harvey Spencer never thought he'd witness a pandemic-just as he never expected to see the election of a Black president, the election of a female vice president (Black or otherwise), or an insurrection. But all of those things have happened, and our lives have been forever altered. In this book, he seeks to discover what God is trying to reveal to us by letting COVID-19 run rampant. By studying the Bible, he discovered it is not silent when it comes to fighting an infectious disease. He answers questions such as: - How did ancient Israel fight the spread of another infectious disease-leprosy? - What does the Bible tell us about quarantining individuals who are sick or may be sick? - Why do some elected officials continue to display a lack of leadership amid the pandemic? The author also examines what the Bible says about using face coverings, what the world has done to fight other outbreaks of disease, and similarities between COVID-19 and other deadly viruses. Get simple, practical explanations from the Bible that will help you understand the spread of COVID-19-and how to protect yourself-with A Biblical Response to COVID-19.

The role of religion in the founding of America has long been a hotly debated question. Some historians have regarded the faith of a few famous founders, such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Thomas Paine, as evidence that the founders were deists who advocated the strict separation of church and state. Popular Christian polemicists, on the other hand, have attempted to show that virtually all of the founders were orthodox Christians in favor of state support for religion. As the essays in this volume demonstrate, a diverse array of religious traditions informed the political culture of the American founding. Faith and the Founders of the American Republic includes studies both of minority faiths, such as Islam and Judaism, and of major traditions, such as Calvinism. It also includes nuanced analysis of specific founders-Quaker John Dickinson, prominent Baptists Isaac Backus and John Leland, and Federalist Gouverneur Morris, among many others-with attention to their personal histories, faiths, constitutional philosophies, and views on the relationship between religion and the state. This volume will be a crucial resource for anyone interested in the place of faith in the founding of the American constitutional republic, from political, religious, historical, and legal perspectives.

This book examines how Christian faith has historically impacted the notion of Nous or divine mind in Western thought up to and including the present. Christian faith is seen to have inaugurated an essential transformation over time of the ancient notion of divine mind and of thought in general. Beginning with an examination of Aristotle's notion of essence, Plato's creation myth in the Timaeus, and Plotinus' One, it is shown how faith in the hands of Augustine and Aquinas fundamentally reshaped Western thought and made possible in the modern period the radical subjectivity of Descartes brought to perfection by Kant and Hegel. The strenuous counter-thinking of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Levinas is closely compared to its disarming alternative, the thinking of Jefferson, Emerson, and C. S. Peirce, the father of American pragmatism.

This is a beautifully crafted and clearly written introduction to Christianity over its 2000 year history, concentrating on the interaction between the sacred and the secular. This book is a practical response to the experience of teaching in a variety of different settings from university undergraduates, through WEA, to parish groups. This book will thus adopt an approach radically different to that of many general Church histories in terms of length, structure and presentation. The broad underlying theme of the book will be the interaction between Christianity and the secular world, exploring how one has shaped and been shaped by the other, reflecting the title of the book. In order to achieve this, the book will not attempt to cover the whole of Christian history (this has been done frequently by others), but rather it will focus on a number of specific themes and chronological periods. The four themes will be Belief, Practice, Organisation and Propagation. There will be four chronological divisions, chosen as pivotal in the development of Christianity, and reflecting the conventional divisions of history into ancient, medieval, early and later modern. This will enable the book to be used as either a general introduction to Christian history or as a starting point for further investigation of one or more periods. The periods are: The Imperial Church (300-500) The Medieval Church (1050-1250), The Reformation Church (1450-1650) The Modern Church (1800-2000). There will be included maps, timelines, quotations from primary source material, a glossary and a further reading section.

Something Old, Something New: Contemporary Entanglements of Religion and Secularity offers a fresh perspective on debates surrounding a significant if underappreciated relationship between religious and secular interests. In entanglement, secularity competes with religion, but neither side achieves simple dominance by displacing the other. As secular ideas and practices entangle with their religious counterparts, they interact and alter each other in a contentious but oddly intimate relationship. In each chapter, Wayne Glausser focuses on a topic of contemporary relevance in which something old-e. g., the sacrament of extreme unction, Greek rhetorical tropes, scholastic theology-entangles with something new: psilocybin therapy for the dying, new atheism, cognitive science. As traditional religious knowledge and values come into conflict with their secular counterparts, the old ideas undergo stress and adaptation, but the influence works in both directions. Those with primary allegiance to secular interests find themselves entangled with aspects of religious thinking. Whether they do it intentionally or without knowing, entangled secularists engage with and sometimes borrow from older paradigms they believe they have surpassed. Glausser's approach offers a new perspective in the conversation between believers and secularists. Something Old, Something New is a book that theists, atheists, agnostics, and everyone still searching for the right label will find respectful but provocative.

For Kahlil Gibran, re-telling the story of Jesus had been the ambition of a life time. He had known it from childhood, when as a poor boy in the Middle-East, he'd been taught by a priest reading the bible with him. Now, in his maturity - and a successful writer in the USA - he wanted tell the story as no one had told it before. With 'Jesus, the Son of Man', (1928) he did just that; set alongside Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, here is 'The Gospel according to Gibran.' Gibran's approach is to allow the reader to see Jesus through the eyes of a large and disparate group of people. Some of these characters will be familiar: amongst others, we hear from Peter; Mary his mother; Luke; Pontius Pilate, Thomas and Mary Magdalene. But many other characters are new, created by Gibran, including a Jerusalem cobbler, an old Greek shepherd - and the mother of Judas. 'My son was a good man and upright,' she tells us. 'He was tender and kind to me, and he loved his kin and his countrymen.' What connects these people is the fact that they all have an opinion about Jesus; though no two opinions are the same. 'The Galilean was a conjuror, and a deceiver,' says a young priest. But then a woman caught in adultery experienced him in a different way. 'When Jesus didn't judge me, I became a woman without a tainted memory, and I was free and my head was no longer bowed.' Not all the women like him, however. A widow in Cana, whose son is a follower, remains furious: 'That man is evil! For what good man would separate a son from his mother?' While a lawyer has mixed feelings: 'I admired him more as a man than as a leader. He preached something beyond my liking; perhaps beyond my reason.' A philosopher is in awe, however: 'His senses were continually made new; and the world to him was always a new world.' With each fresh voice, a different aspect of Jesus' character is explored; and a different reaction named. Gibran concludes by reminding us that all the characters and attitudes presented in the story live on in the world today, with nothing different now from then. The Logician is clear in his distrust: 'Behold a man disorderly, against all order; a mendicant opposed to all possessions; a drunkard who would only make merry with rogues and castaways.' But for Gibran himself, whose Lebanese roots placed him close to the original steps of the Galilean, Jesus is worth rather more; and is present still: 'But Master, Sky-heart, knight of our fairer dream, You do still tread this way. No bows nor spears shall stray your steps; You walk through all our arrows. You smile down upon us, And though you are the youngest of us all, You father us all. Poet, Singer, Great Heart! May our God bless your name.'

Got a minute? Thanks to beloved Franciscan priest and retreat leader Fr. Albert Haase, that's all you need to stay in touch with the Gospel every Sunday through the Church year. Inspired by his early days in a busy urban parish, Sundays on the Go is Fr. Albert's gift to busy Catholics - just enough to keep you on track with Jesus, even when you're on the run! This first edition of Sundays on the Go features: A reading for every Sunday of Year A of the liturgical year Handy Scriptural references to each Gospel passage A brief, direct, and pithy homily from Fr. Albert A reflection question and a prayer Special readings for Solemnities and Feasts through the year Fr. Albert's words will help you to prepare for Sunday Eucharist, and stay in touch with the Gospel all week long. Sundays on the Go is the perfect gift for busy Catholics of all ages - professionals, parents, students, and anyone who's short on time - in need of spiritual wisdom, encouragement, and a strong connection with the Gospel.

According to legend, the language of the birds was a mystical language God used to talk with Adam and Eve when he walked with them in the garden of Eden. Amy Nemecek listens for this divine dialect as she communes with God on her walks along country roads and creek banks, through forests and hayfields. She observes the world around her with expectation, knowing that God still speaks to us as he is at work making all things new. If we have ears to hear, we can catch snippets of his grace in the watercolor silhouette of a bird, the thrum of a tractor engine, the tang of a grapefruit, the curvature of an ampersand. Amy doesn't want to miss any of it, so she remains attentive to the smooth grit of beach sand, the tendrils of a nebula, and the steady gaze of a fossil. She delights in the details, and you will too. In this collection of lyric and narrative poems, you are invited to walk with her as she reflects on larger themes of beauty, loss, motherhood, family, and vocation. She contemplates the sacredness of ordinary moments that we usually don't recognize except in hindsight. Twining through every line is an aching hopefulness that ties together her love of words, her devotion to scripture, and her deep gratitude for each of life's joys and griefs. "Rub dust on your palms, pluck the ripened sunshine, and taste this poetic grace." -Dwight Baker, president and CEO of Baker Publishing Group

"Remove your sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground." -Exodus 3:5 "The Holy Land is everywhere." -Black Elk The two epigraphs that preface Angela Alaimo O'Donnell's Holy Land introduce the reader to the central theme that permeates her poems: that holy places deserve to be regarded with reverence and that all places are holy places. In her afterward, the poet traces these foundational concepts to her Catholic childhood wherein religious instruction consisted largely of memorizing the Baltimore Catechism. "One of questions the Catechism poses is 'Where is God?' The answer is 'God is everywhere.' We believed this to be true. God was in church, but God was also in our house (a crucifix in every room), in the backyard, in our Buick (rosary beads swinging from the rearview mirror), at our birthday parties in the basement, and in our own bodies. And though those places may not sound very holy, they were. Because God was there. Is there." In addition to affirming this foundational belief, these poems extend the terrain, moving beyond the geographical and the physical to the temporal, the carnal, the intellectual, and the spiritual realms. They assert that our days are blessed, our bodies are blessed, our minds and souls are all blessed and sacred ground. The poet explores a broad spectrum of physical locations, beginning with poems set in the Holy Land and moving on to places closer to home, ranging from the west of Ireland to rural Minnesota, from New York City to the Texas border. She also probes the temporal spaces we occupy, experiences of death and birth, love and loss, desire and desolation that mark our human passage. The English word holy is related to the Germanic word heilig, a word that means blessed and also carries within it the idea of wholeness. Holy Land attempts to honor both the holiness and the wholeness of our world-from Gotham to Golgotha, the Bronx River to the Sea of Galilee-and to honor the holiness and wholeness of our blessed and broken humanity.