Journey through Struggles applies to church people and non-church people alike. Every man, woman, and child originates from the same God force; the Universal energy-source; and have in common the same - spiritual-human being-ness - uniquely formed by God who calls us individually (and collectively) into existence for His own purpose and pleasure. Every living soul experiences struggles. We share the same breath, the sunlight and rain, joy and pain; and are touched with unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind (of natural and man- created disasters) which caused echoes of cries of pain to reverberate in our hearts. However, though this book is written primarily with Black people as the target group [the reasons which no doubt will become clear throughout 'The Project', in God's grand design of his universe we should be mindful that all mankind have come short of the glory of God, therefore 'journey through struggles' also applies to every one of God's children, what ever his/her colour, culture, language or race, etc. On our 'Journey through Struggles' we are reminded that "The Road of Life" takes us on to highways of individual experiences. Therefore, let us remember that however long we might be in our storms, "It's the Journey that's Important, not just the getting there." Furthermore, our journey is ongoing, always. It is not just about climbing ladders to a higher level. In addition to the view 'as life's path' our journey may be viewed as a mountain; a forest, a beaten trail, our challenges and trials; or it may be a process of self discovery. Finally, when we reach the summit of our mountain, there we will make a wonderful and startling discovery that it's not the end of the journey. We are not just here to achieve our purpose; we are here to transcend it. In other words, when we reach the top of the mountain, we keep on rising. These are all ideas which we will come across time and again throughout this book.

The author of Not Counting Women and Children invites readers to listen again to the parables of Jesus. Like arrows, these stories pierce the heart of the listener, opening up new understanding of our lives as Christians. Interspersed with these familiar Gospel parables are other stories, traditional and contemporary, which draw the readers deeper into their challenges.

Who or What is controlling our lives? Western society is in the process of undergoing profound changes in moral ethos and in the structure of relationships as more and more areas of life are commodified. The Church is now having to grapple with the challenges to its authority-patterns posed by contemporary individualism, reductionism, consumerism and moral relativism, as the fierce debates over issues of abortion and sexuality show. This book seeks to address theologically the question of authority in terms of the poles of freedom and form. The tendency of each pole is to dominate. When freedom dominates we have chaos but when form dominates we have control (as exemplified in Islamic societies). Thus the choice facing the West looks like one between chaos and control. Bradshaw argues that this is a false choice. He suggests that Christ is the form for human freedom and diversity and that the Church has sufficient apostolic guides and practices to chart its way ahead in faith. The book maintains that Western, liberal, capitalist democracy needs to recover a Christian ethical basis to avoid the dangers of both chaos and of control.

Hayyim Schauss taught for more than twenty-five years at the Jewish Teachers Seminary in New York and at the College of Jewish Studies and the University of Judaism in Los Angeles. He was the author of many books and articles on the Jewish religion and its customs, ceremonies and folklore.

This book is an insight into the life and thoughts of a busy priest, punctuated with frequent reminiscences and amusing stories. Some basic questions are touched on - the nature of God, the Trinity, his love for us and how Christ leads us to respond to this. This is an entertaining and yet profound book which shows Christianity as the answer to life's whys and hows.

Translated by Aylmer Maude, V. Tchertkoff, and A.C. Fifield.

Ranson's Folly is the title story in a collection of novellas. The author was an American journalist whose vivid wartime accounts made him one of the leading reporters of his day.

Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2019, a powerful, well-researched, fictional account exploring the trokosi tradition for the curious and the open-minded. Abeo Kata lives a comfortable, happy life in West Africa as the privileged nine-year-old daughter of a government employee and stay-at-home mother. But when the Katas' idyllic lifestyle takes a turn for the worse, Abeo's father, following his mother's advice, places the girl in a religious shrine, hoping that the sacrifice of his daughter will serve as atonement for the crimes of his ancestors. Unspeakable acts befall Abeo for the fifteen years she is enslaved within the shrine. When she is finally rescued, broken and battered, she must struggle to overcome her past, endure the revelation of family secrets, and learn to trust and love again. In the tradition of Chris Cleave's Little Bee, Praise Song for the Butterflies is a contemporary story that offers an educational, eye-opening account of the practice of ritual servitude in West Africa. Spanning decades and two continents, Praise Song for the Butterflies is an unflinching tale of the devastation that children are subject to when adults are ruled by fear and someone must pay the consequences. "Abeo is unrelenting - a fiery protagonist who sparks in every scene. Bernice L. McFadden has created yet another compelling story, this time about hope and freedom." Nicole Dennis-Benn, author of Here Comes the Sun

Novo Clavis Esoterika contains copiously illustrated and expanded versions of Timothy Hogan's critically acclaimed The Alchemical Keys to Masonic Ritual and The 32 Secret Paths of Solomon, as well several key texts on Martinism, Gnosticism, alchemy, and the Hermetic Tradition. Originally published as a limited edition book, this new second edition version contains all of the same material, but in a new format. Novo Clavis Esoterika contains the following works by author Timothy Hogan: The Alchemical Keys to Masonic ritual; Ethiopia in Freemasonry; The 32 Secret Paths of Solomon; Gnostic Reflections in Freemasonry; What of Health? What of Healing?; Parzival and Martinism; The Transmutation of Fear; Performing the Great Work; The Production of the True Philosopher's Stone This book is sure to be thoughtful reading for anyone interested in the esoteric tradition!

In the tumultuous decades of rapid expansion and change between the American Founding and the Civil War, Americans confronted a cluster of overlapping crises whose common theme was the difficulty of finding authority in written texts. The issue arose from several disruptive developments: rising challenges to the traditional authority of the Bible in a society that was intensely Protestant; persistent worries over America’s lack of a “national literature” and an independent cultural identity; and the slavery crisis, which provoked tremendous struggles over clashing interpretations of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, even as these “parascriptures” were rising to the status of a kind of quasi-sacred secular canon. At the same time but from the opposite direction, new mass media were creating a new, industrial-scale print culture that put a premium on very non-sacred, disposable text: mass-produced “news,” dispensed immediately and in huge quantities but meant only for the day or hour. Perpetual Scriptures in Nineteenth-Century America identifies key features of the writings, careers and cultural politics of several prominent Americans as responses to this cluster of challenges. In their varied attempts to vindicate the sacred and to merge the timeless with the urgent present, Joseph Smith, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Theodore Parker, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Martin Delany, Abraham Lincoln, and other religious and political leaders and men and women of letters helped define American literary culture as an ongoing quest for new “bibles,” or what Emerson called a “perpetual scripture.”

A compelling account of how race and politics have affected Iranian immigrants in the United States and Germany Iranians have a complex and contradictory relationship with race. Though categorized as “white” by the US census, many Iranian Americans remain marginalized, and experience racial and political stigma daily. On the other hand, Iranian Germans who have been in Germany for decades, and are typically regarded as 'good foreigners,' continue to experience marginality and discrimination illustrating the limitations of integration and citizenship. Conditional Belonging explores these apparent contradictions through a comparative analysis of the Iranian diasporic experience in the United States and Germany, focusing particularly on the different processes of racialization of the immigrants. Drawing from eighty-eight interviews with first- and second-generation Iranians living in California and Hamburg, Sahar Sadeghi illuminates how international events, global political policy, and national social climates influence the extent to which Iranians define themselves as members of their adopted nations. All these factors lead to radically different experiences of belonging, or more specifically “conditional belonging,” for Iranians living in Western nations—while those in America might have situational access to whiteness, this is not always available to Iranians in Germany. The combination of these experiences results in perceptions, narrations, and experiences of what the author calls “being but not belonging.” Conditional Belonging is an important and timely book that broadens our understanding of how unpredictable and fluid a sense of belonging to a country can be.