Individuals who are in religious leadership positions will immediately recognize the dilemmas or paradoxes described in this book. The good news is that Malony offers sound practical advice on how to deal with them. This book is accurately descriptive and helpfully prescriptive.
--Douglas Lewis, Wesley Theological Seminary

Malony suggests ways to turn destructive conflict into creative tension. A helpful guide for every religious leader struggling to make sense out of the colliding interests that buffet many congregations and other not-for-profit institutions.
--William E. Hull, Samford University

As a leader you must also challenge individuals to make uncomfortable choices in the service of doing God's work in the world.

Maloney identifies eight central paradoxes that all religious leaders--both lay and ordained--must confront. The author shows how these paradoxes, when viewed as either/or choices or struggled against, can whipsaw the leader, tearing the ministry apart. However, embracing paradox and accepting it as a gift allows religious leaders to deal successfully with conflict in their roles, and in so doing, break through to a more powerful connection with those to whom they minister.

H. Newton Malony is senior professor of psychology at Fuller Theological Seminary, a licensed psychologist, and an ordained United Methodist minister.

The American fixation with marriage, so prevalent in today's debates over marriage for same-sex couples, owes much of its intensity to a small group of reformers who introduced Americans to marriage counseling in the 1930s. Today, millions of couples seek help to save their marriages each year. Over the intervening decades, marriage counseling has powerfully promoted the idea that successful marriages are essential to both individuals' and the nation's well-being.

Rebecca Davis reveals how couples and counselors transformed the ideal of the perfect marriage as they debated sexuality, childcare, mobility, wage earning, and autonomy, exposing both the fissures and aspirations of American society. From the economic dislocations of the Great Depression, to more recent debates over government-funded "Healthy Marriage" programs, counselors have responded to the shifting needs and goals of American couples. Tensions among personal fulfillment, career aims, religious identity, and socioeconomic status have coursed through the history of marriage and explain why the stakes in the institution are so fraught for the couples involved and for the communities to which they belong.

Americans care deeply about marriages their own and other people's because they have made enormous investments of time, money, and emotion to improve their own relationships and because they believe that their personal decisions about whom to marry or whether to divorce extend far beyond themselves. This intriguing book tells the uniquely American story of a culture gripped with the hope that, with enough effort and the right guidance, more perfect marital unions are within our reach.

In this study of the manner in which medieval nuns lived, Penelope Johnson challenges facile stereotypes of nuns living passively under monastic rule, finding instead that collectively they were empowered by their communal privileges and status to think and act without many of the subordinate attitudes of secular women. In the words of one abbess comparing nuns with monks, they were "different as to their sex but equal in their monastic profession."
Johnson researched more than two dozen nunneries in northern France from the eleventh century through the thirteenth century, balancing a qualitative reading of medieval monastic documents with a quantitative analysis of a lengthy thirteenth-century visitation record which allows an important comparison of nuns and monks. A fascinating look at the world of medieval spirituality, this work enriches our understanding of women's role in premodern Europe and in church history.

This second volume is for the seasons of the Christian year (Advent through Pentecost). Its distinctive Anabaptist flavor is evident in the predominance of Jesus' voice, space for communal reflection on Scripture, and the choices of Bible readings it offers a way of prayer that lets the voice of Jesus pervade the whole day.

With a biblically based approach, this groundbreaking textbook for life coaching explores a new coaching model, how-to sections field-tested for more than eight years, custom forms coaches can use, and more.

Diana Lewis has been a devotee of the spiritual leader and philanthropist Sai Baba for more than twenty years and supports his mission to lead humanity back on to the spiritual path by teaching us who we really are, where we have come from and why we are here. She has written My Mission is to Spread Happiness to help disseminate Sai Baba's teachings to the rest of the world.

In 16th and 17th century Ireland religion and nationality fused together in a people’s struggle to survive.  In that struggle the country’s links with Europe provided a life line.  Members of religious orders, with their international roots, played an important role. Among them were the Irish Jesuits, who adapted to a variety of situations – from quiet work in Irish towns to serving as an emissary for Hugh O’Neill in the south of Ireland and in the courts of Rome and Spain, and then founding seminary colleges in Spain and Portugal from which young Irishmen returned to keep faith and hope alive. In the seventeenth century persecution was more haphazard.  There were opportunities for preaching and teaching and, at time, especially during the Confederation of Kilkenny in the 1640s, for the open celebration of one’s religion. This freedom gave way to the savage persecution under Cromwell, which resulted in the killing of some Jesuits and others being forced to find shelter in caves, sepulchres, and bogs, the Jesuit superior dying alone in a shepherd’s hut on an island off Galway. There followed a time of more relaxed laws during which Irish Jesuits publicly ran schools in New Ross and, for Oliver Plunkett, in Drogheda, but persecution soon resumed and Oliver Plunkett was arrested and martyred. At the end of the century, as the forces of King James II were finally defeated, some Jesuits lived and worked through the sieges of Limerick and then nerved themselves to face the Penal Laws in the new century.

The prominent Buddhist religious leader and advocate for peace, Daisaku Ikeda, has placed dialogue at the centre of his efforts towards securing global justice and conflict resolution. However, far from constituting abstract plans for the future of the world, Ikeda's dialogues represent very concrete and focused activity. He concentrates on one significant individual (such as Joseph Rotblat, Linus Pauling and Mikhail Gorbachev) at a time, or sometimes small groups, in order to attempt the transformation of thinking and society through intense discussion. This book offers detailed exploration of this crucial aspect of Ikeda's philosophy of peace. Contributors examine topics such as: the background to Ikeda's dialogic thinking as found in the Lotus Sutra; Buddhism as a practical philosophy of dialogue; Ikeda's use of dialogue, specifically in the field of education; and dialogue in relation to the abolition of nuclear weapons. Ikeda's concept of dialogue emerges as a paradoxical movement towards common ground based on respectful difference. This study will appeal to students of peace, politics and modern Buddhism.

How are we to think about religion and violence in the contemporary world, especially in the wake of the events of September 11, 2001? In this collection of essays, nearly a dozen scholars, including some of the leading voices in the field of academic religious thought, offer a theoretical and theological response to the 9/11 attacks as well as a broader and more interdisciplinary reflection on the issues surrounding religion and violence, politics and terrorism, in the world today. Drawing on Continental philosophy as a methodology, the contributors provide insights from and implications for the Western monotheistic traditions of Judaism and Christianity and their engagement with the secular world. Here, religion and secularity are understood not in opposition to one another but rather in interrelationship, religion being seen as both implicated in and providing resources for the overcoming of violence. Raising questions that are timely as well as urgent, Religion and Violence in a Secular World eschews easy solutions in an effort to foster critical and constructive attempts to understand these complex and ambivalent phenomena.

Contributors: John D. Caputo (Syracuse Universty) * Clayton Crockett (University of Central Arkansas) * James J. DiCenso (University of Toronto) * Martin Kavka (Florida State University) * Richard Kearney (Boston College) * Eleanor Pontoriero (University of Toronto) * B. Keith Putt (Samford University) * Carl A. Raschke (University of Denver) * Jeffrey W. Robbins (Lebanon Valley College) * Noelle Vahanian (Lebanon Valley College) * Edith Wyschogrod (Rice University)