In Jewish Radical Ultra-Orthodoxy Confronts Modernity, Zionism and Women's Equality, Motti Inbari undertakes a study of the culture and leadership of Jewish radical ultra-Orthodoxy in Hungary, Jerusalem and New York. He reviews the history, ideology and gender relations of prominent ultra-Orthodox leaders Amram Blau (1894-1974), founder of the anti-Zionist Jerusalemite Neturei Karta, and Yoel Teitelbaum (1887-1979), head of the Satmar Hasidic movement in New York. Focussing on the rabbis' biographies, the author analyzes their enclave building methods, their attitude to women and modesty, and their eschatological perspectives. The research is based on newly discovered archival materials, covering many unique and remarkable findings. The author concludes with a discussion of contemporary trends in Jewish religious radicalization. Inbari highlights the resilience of the current generations' sense of community cohesion and their capacity to adapt and overcome challenges such as rehabilitation into potentially hostile secular societies.

'One of the world's great voices for moral, spiritual, and historical awareness and for global peace' - The John Templeton Foundation 'One of the great moral thinkers of our time' - Robert D. Putnam, author of Bowling Alone With a foreword by HRH The Prince of Wales Following his death in November 2020, voices from around the world celebrated Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks' incalculable contribution to the religious life of the Jewish community, as well as the global conversation on issues of ethics and morality. This volume brings together the most compelling selection of Jonathan Sacks' BBC Radio broadcasts, columns from The Times, and a range of articles published in the world's most respected newspapers, along with his House of Lords speeches and keynote lectures. First heard and read in many different contexts, these pieces demonstrate with striking coherence the developing power of Sacks' ideas, on faith and philosophy alike. In each instance he brings to bear deep insights into the immediate situation at the time - and yet it is as if we hear him speaking to us afresh, giving us new strength to face the challenges and complexities of today's world. His words of faith and wisdom shine as a beacon of enduring light in an increasingly conflicted cultural climate, and prove the timeless nature and continued relevance of his thought and teachings. The choice with which humankind is faced is between the idea of power and power of ideas.

Heaven: Our Reward

Is there life after death?

After a tragic accident, doctors pronounced Richard Sigmund legally dead. Eight hours later, God miraculously brought him back to life on the way to the morgue. During those hours, God allowed him to experience the glorious beauty, heavenly sounds, sweet aromas, and boundless joys of heaven that await every believer. God then returned him back to earth with a mission: to tell the world what he saw.

You will thrill to Sigmund's eyewitness accounts of strolling down heaven's streets of gold, seeing angels playing with children, talking with Jesus, meeting with people from the Bible, as well as departed family and friends, seeing the mansions, and much more!

Through Sigmund's testimony, God restored sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, and even raised several people from the dead.

Also, glimpse into the horrifying reality of "the other place"--a place where no one wants to go.

Fethullah Gulen is an enlightened person who knows well many issues related to literature, art, philosophy and science, he is a man of action who has not wasted his life, but struggled to serve humanity. He is tolerant of mankind and sensitive enough to cry when he sees an ant drown. He is a great person altruistic enough to say, "Regardless of where the fire falls, it burns my heart" instead of saying, "Fire burns where it falls." Since his childhood Fethullah Gulen has shown himself to be a unique person with his knowledge, morality and ideals. His life is full of service to others which he recommended and made in spite of the difficulties he endured for his people and all of humanity. Murat Alptekin (MA in Literature) is a researcher, based in Istanbul.

'Gripping ... An exquisite conversation between two people who know each other, like each other, and have mutual respect for one another' - Catholic Times Since resigning from the papacy in 2013, the first Pope in over 700 years to do so, Pope Benedict has lived quietly in a convent in the Vatican gardens in Rome. He has devoted himself to a life of prayer and study and has vowed to remain silent, until now. So much controversy still surrounds Pope Benedict's time in office - in this book, written with bestselling German author Peter Seewald, he addresses the issues of his papacy and reveals how, at his late age, governing and reforming the Church was beyond him. Last Testament is also an autobiography, recalling Pope Benedict's childhood in Germany under Nazism, his early development as a priest, and eventually his appointment as Archbishop of Munich. After becoming Pope, his account deals with the controversies that rocked the Catholic world - how he enraged Muslims with his Regensburg speech, what he did and did not do to stamp out the clerical sexual abuse of children, the 'Vatileaks' scandal and how he broke up a gay cabal within the Vatican itself. At all times, we see a man who is shy and retiring and modest being exceptionally open and frank with the outside world. In this Last Testament, a unique book insofar as no other living Pope has had the opportunity to write an account having left office, Benedict gives in his own words an unprecedented view of the difficulties, the achievements and the consequences of his time as head of the Catholic Church worldwide.

In this new edition of a successful book (over 120,000 copies sold), now updated throughout, a leading expert on the social world of the Bible offers students a reliable guide to the manners and customs of the ancient world. From what people wore, ate, and built to how they exercised justice, mourned, and viewed family and legal customs, this illustrated introduction helps readers gain valuable cultural background on the biblical world. The attractive, full-color, user-friendly design will appeal to students, while numerous pedagogical features--including fifty photos, sidebars, callouts, maps, charts, a glossary of key terms, chapter outlines, and discussion questions--increase classroom utility. Previously published as Manners and Customs in the Bible.

Ships of Mercy tells the riveting true story of Mercy Ships, the astonishing fleet of hospital ships that sail the globe, bringing dramatic change to the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in the most impoverished and disease-stricken corners of the world. Ships of Mercy is a page-turner of the highest quality, an inspiring testimony both to the essence of the human spirit and God's amazing providence. It tells the story of a teenager's extraordinary vision brought to reality in the form of a multi-million dollar life-saving mission. It also tells the story of a family of people from diverse backgrounds who have sacrificed their comfort and security in order to perform remarkable acts of grace and kindness.

Sangharakshita read the Diamond Sutra for the first time the summer he turned seventeen. It seemed to awaken him to something whose existence he had forgotten, and he joyfully embraced those profound teachings 'with an unqualified acceptance'. This experience decided the whole future direction of his life.In this first volume of memoirs he describes how, from a working-class childhood in the London suburb of Tooting, he came, a twenty-four-year-old Buddhist novice monk, to Kalimpong in the eastern Himalayas. Sangharakshita paints a vivid picture of the people, the places and the experiences that shaped his life: his childhood, his army days, and the gurus he met during his years as a wandering ascetic staying in the caves and ashrams of India. He moves between the ordinary and the extraordinary, from the mundane to the sublime; his narrative takes in the psychological and aesthetic, the philosophical and spiritual. His experiences are both universal - love and loss, comedy and tragedy - and unique to what is an exceptional life.

In The Pastor, Eugene H. Peterson, the translator of the multimillion-selling The Message and the author of more than thirty books, offers his life story as one answer to the surprisingly neglected question: What does it mean to be a pastor?

When Peterson was asked by his denomination to begin a new church in Bel Air, Maryland, he surprised himself by saying yes. And so was born Christ Our King Presbyterian Church. But Peterson quickly learned that he was not exactly sure what a pastor should do. He had met many ministers in his life, from his Pentecostal upbringing in Montana to his seminary days in New York, and he admired only a few. He knew that the job's demands would drown him unless he figured out what the essence of the job really was. Thus began a thirty-year journey into the heart of this uncommon vocation--the pastorate.

The Pastor steers away from abstractions, offering instead a beautiful rendering of a life tied to the physical world--the land, the holy space, the people--shaping Peterson's pastoral vocation as well as his faith. He takes on church marketing, mega pastors, and the church's too-cozy relationship to American glitz and consumerism to present a simple, faith-filled job description of what being a pastor means today. In the end, Peterson discovered that being a pastor boiled down to "paying attention and calling attention to 'what is going on right now' between men and women, with each other and with God." The Pastor is destined to become a classic statement on the contemporary trials, joys, and meaning of this ancient vocation.

A warmly funny, intensely moving and startlingly personal account of the lives of an urban parish priest and his parishioners. Father Alex Frost was not always a man of the cloth. He found his calling while running an Argos store in his native Burnley, moonlighting as a stand-up comedian and die-hard fan of The Clarets and Depeche Mode. But having achieved his profession, Fr Alex quickly recognised the 17,000 inhabitants of his new parish were in dire need of help. Burnley is typical of many towns across Britain: a place of run-down council estates, severe poverty litter, crime and drugs, but also a place where the sacred sits alongside the secular in an intimate and personal way. And so it was that he found himself running a food bank from a car park, helping the desperate amid his flock as the pandemic raged. Fr Alex's down-to-earth style of ministry struck a chord with people of all faiths, cultures and class at a time when the divide between rich and poor is widening cataclysmically. But amid the tragedy, addiction, appalling loss, illness and neglect, there also lies hope, joy and moments of comedy. Our Daily Bread is as much the story of the rich cast of characters that cross the threshold of any church as it is our vicar's. Through them it shows the continued relevance of the church for those in peril: the poor and the marginalised. This heartfelt and moving book seeks to give a voice to the voiceless, charting the tragedy and pain, humour and hope which are ever-present in his community. It is ultimately about modern poverty - and how we all can, and should, espouse Christian virtues of love, kindness, tolerance.

Herman Mendoza built his kingdom in Queens, New York. He made a fortune selling cocaine with his brothers up and down the Eastern Seaboard. He had apartments around the city for his mistresses and a home in the Poconos for his beautiful nuclear family. But when he and his brothers were busted in a large-scale crackdown, his kingdom crumbled. Ready to kill himself rather than live behind bars, Herman instead came face-to-face with the all-consuming love of God. He would never be the same. Today, Herman shares his story at every opportunity, knowing that it may play a part in someone else's journey into a relationship with Jesus. An engaging and fast-paced read, Shifting Shadows offers hope to those in despair, and shows all of us the lengths to which God will go to bring a troubled soul home. Also available in Spanish as Sombras cambiantes.

The life and many afterlives of one of the most enduring mystical testaments ever written The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila is among the most remarkable accounts ever written of the human encounter with the divine. The Life is not really an autobiography at all, but rather a confession written for inquisitors by a nun whose raptures and mystical claims had aroused suspicion. Despite its troubled origins, the book has had a profound impact on Christian spirituality for five centuries, attracting admiration from readers as diverse as mystics, philosophers, artists, psychoanalysts, and neurologists. How did a manuscript once kept under lock and key by the Spanish Inquisition become one of the most inspiring religious books of all time? National Book Award winner Carlos Eire tells the story of this incomparable spiritual masterpiece, examining its composition and reception in the sixteenth century, the various ways its mystical teachings have been interpreted and reinterpreted across time, and its enduring influence in our own secular age. The Life became an iconic text of the Counter-Reformation, was revered in Franco's Spain, and has gone on to be read as a feminist manifesto, a literary work, and even as a secular text. But as Eire demonstrates in this vibrant and evocative book, Teresa's confession is a cry from the heart to God and an audacious portrayal of mystical theology as a search for love. Here is the essential companion to the Life, one woman's testimony to the reality of mystical experience and a timeless affirmation of the ultimate triumph of good over evil.

In his important evaluation of the theological leader of the English Reformation, G.W. Bromiley charts Cranmer's doctrinal views, scriptural interpretation and liturgical composition. His nuanced position on various controversial issues of the day, not least baptism, is articulated with clarity and care, and his ecumenical sensitivity is foregrounded. While arguably more adept as a scholar than as a creative theologian in his own right, Cranmer's writing nevertheless formed the cornerstone of future Anglican theology. Through his Articles of Religion (42, later reduced to 39) and the Book of Common Prayer, he set the parameters within which the Church of England was to operate. Perhaps most significantly, as Bromiley shows, his extensive citation of patristic sources established a precedent for his successors that continues today. Written by one of the great ecclesiastical historians of the twentieth century, Thomas Cranmer, Theologian is the essential starting point for understanding Cranmer's influence and legacy in the Anglican church.

A gripping biography that brings together the most recent research to shed provocative new light on the life of Saint Patrick Saint Patrick was, by his own admission, a controversial figure. Convicted in a trial by his elders in Britain and hounded by rumors that he settled in Ireland for financial gain, the man who was to become Ireland's patron saint battled against great odds before succeeding as a missionary. Saint Patrick Retold draws on recent research to offer a fresh assessment of Patrick's travails and achievements. This is the first biography in nearly fifty years to explore Patrick's career against the background of historical events in late antique Britain and Ireland. Roy Flechner examines the likelihood that Patrick, like his father before him, might have absconded from a career as an imperial official responsible for taxation, preferring instead to migrate to Ireland with his family's slaves, who were his source of wealth. Flechner leaves no stone unturned as he takes readers on a riveting journey through Romanized Britain and late Iron Age Ireland, and he considers how best to interpret the ambiguous literary and archaeological evidence from this period of great political and economic instability, a period that brought ruin for some and opportunity for others. Rather than a dismantling of Patrick's reputation, or an argument against his sainthood, Flechner's biography raises crucial questions about self-image and the making of a reputation. From boyhood deeds to the challenges of a missionary enterprise, Saint Patrick Retold steps beyond established narratives to reassess a notable figure's life and legacy.

What happens when an abortion survivor finds her birth mother, who never knew her daughter was alive? Winner, 2018 Christianity Today Book Award, CT Women Silver Medal Winner, 2018 Illumination Book Awards, Biography & Memoir Melissa Ohden is fourteen when she learns she is the survivor of a botched abortion. In this intimate memoir she details for the first time her search for her biological parents, and her own journey from anger and shame to faith and empowerment. After a decade-long search Melissa finally locates her birth father and writes to extend forgiveness, only to learn that he has died without answering her burning questions. Melissa becomes a mother herself in the very hospital where she was aborted. This experience transforms her attitude toward women who have had abortions, as does the miscarriage of her only son and the birth of a second daughter with complex health issues. But could anything prepare her for the day she finally meets her birth mother and hears her side of their story? This intensely personal story of love and redemption illumines the powerful bond between mother and child that can overcome all odds.

John Habgood (1927-2019) was Archbishop of York from 1983-1995, and prior to that had served ten years as Bishop of Durham. 'Just John', the biography written at Lord Habgood's request and with his full cooperation while alive, is warm, witty and affectionate. Nonetheless, as its title implies, it is a truthful portrayal of the man that John Habgood was - guileless, flawed, just. 'Just John' is the authorised biography of the former Archbishop of York, John Habgood, by one of the people who knew him best, author and Bishop, David Wilbourne. Published on the first anniversary of John Habgood's death on 6 March 2019, this Christian biography by David Wilbourne offers an honest and insightful look into Lord Habgood's life as an Anglican theologian and former Archbishop of York. John Habdood's ability to mediate and solve what seemed impossible problems, both in the Church and modern society, is legendary. However, his formidable intellect and shy manner could make him seem a distant, enigmatic figure. 'Just John' is a biography written with meticulous detail and full of interesting personal history and anecdotes. This biography by David Wilbourne also features extracts from John Habgood's personal diary that he kept, reveals the story behind the issue of the fateful Crockford Preface and analyses Habgood's friendships with Bishops Peter and Michael Ball. Through reading this book about John Habgood, the reader will feel as if they know Habgood and have a greater understanding of the interesting yet guarded life he lived.

In the years before Andrew van der Bijl took the name Brother Andrew, he was no stranger to adventure and intrigue - in fact, he craved it. As a young lad, he was forever getting into mischief, and even risked his life during the Nazi occupation of Holland by setting off fireworks in the faces of German soldiers! Years later, God used this same thirst for danger and excitement as Andrew smuggled Bibles into Communist countries to help the persecuted, underground church and bring light to darkened hearts. Enemy lines and hostile borders mean nothing to God or to Andrew, who still works to assist the persecuted church across the world through the organization he founded, Open Doors.