Congregations cannot exist without finances, priorities, leadership, worship, and decision making, yet these five aspects breed the most conflict between church members and clergy. These conflicts unfortunately tend to bring about the most negative consequences: drops in giving, resignation of leaders, and, perhaps most pointedly, loss of members. The importance of congregations and their effect on our lives is clear, yet what is less clear is what makes conflicts in faith communities inevitable. In Promise and Peril: Understanding and Managing Change and Conflict in Congregations, David Brubaker brings the tools of organizational theory and research to the task of understanding the deeper dynamics of congregational conflict. With a doctorate in sociology and more than twenty years working with congregational conflicts, Brubaker helps to explore the causes and effects of conflicts on a wide range of congregations. This book will help congregations avoid the pitfalls of conflict and instead head toward a healthy relationship between and among church staff and members.

Merleau-Ponty and Buddhism explores a new mode of philosophizing through a comparative study of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology and philosophies of major Buddhist thinkers such as Nagarjuna, Chinul, Dogen, Shinran, and Nishida Kitaro. Challenging the dualistic paradigm of existing philosophical traditions, Merleau-Ponty proposes a philosophy in which the traditional opposites are encountered through mutual penetration. Likewise, a Buddhist worldview is articulated in the theory of dependent co-arising, or the middle path, which comprehends the world and beings in the third space, where the subject and the object, or eternalism and annihilation, exist independent of one another. The thirteen essays in this volume explore this third space in their discussions of Merleau-Ponty's concepts of the intentional arc, the flesh of the world, and the chiasm of visibility in connection with the Buddhist doctrine of no-self and the five aggregates, the Tiantai Buddhist concept of threefold truth, Zen Buddhist huatou meditation, the invocation of the Amida Buddha in True Pure Land Buddhism, and Nishida's concept of basho.

Merleau-Ponty and Buddhism explores a new mode of philosophizing through a comparative study of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology and philosophies of major Buddhist thinkers such as Nagarjuna, Chinul, Dogen, Shinran, and Nishida Kitaro. Challenging the dualistic paradigm of existing philosophical traditions, Merleau-Ponty proposes a philosophy in which the traditional opposites are encountered through mutual penetration. Likewise, a Buddhist worldview is articulated in the theory of dependent co-arising, or the middle path, which comprehends the world and beings in the third space, where the subject and the object, or eternalism and annihilation, exist independent of one another. The thirteen essays in this volume explore this third space in their discussions of Merleau-Ponty's concepts of the intentional arc, the flesh of the world, and the chiasm of visibility in connection with the Buddhist doctrine of no-self and the five aggregates, the Tiantai Buddhist concept of threefold truth, Zen Buddhist huatou meditation, the invocation of the Amida Buddha in True Pure Land Buddhism, and Nishida's concept of basho. In his philosophical project, Merleau-Ponty makes vigorous efforts to challenge the boundaries that divide philosophy and non-philosophy, the East and the West, experience and concepts, the subject and the object, and body and mind. Combining the Eastern philosophical tradition of Buddhism with Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty and Buddhism offers an intercultural philosophy in which opposites intermingle in a chiasmic relationship, and which brings new understanding regarding the self and the self's relation with others in a globalized and multicultural world.

This book is a revolutionary explanation of the book of Revelation as a serious resource for spiritual growth, not a book of doomsday predictions. The God of love is not plotting doomsday! A story of past, present, and future ("the things which thou hast seen, and the things which are, and the things which shall be hereafter" - Rev. 1:19), Revelation is an epic of our growing spiritual consciousness.