Becoming jaded by her hospital lab work and feeling estranged from her distant husband, Laura attends a conference in Boston and unexpectedly connects with a surprisingly complex man who is struggling to choose between his desires and obligations.
How would your life change if someone was willing to share just a little dose of encouragement every morning as you begin your day? Daily Reflections will do that for you. But you're probably pretty busy. So it won’t take up a ton of your time. You'll be able to read each day's devotion in about a minute. Easy peasy. In that minute you'll get one uplifting and encouraging idea to think about along with a related verse from the Bible. That's one daily Bible verse and a little bit of encouragement that you can read in less than one minute.
Thomas Nesbitt is a divorced writer in the midst of a rueful middle age. Living a very private life in Maine, in touch only with his daughter and still trying to recover from the end of a long marriage, his solitude is disrupted one wintry morning by the arrival of a box that is postmarked Berlin.
‘The best leave you with a renewed sense of how extraordinary it is that poetry can, over the course of one sentence, flood your circuit board with loss, or anger, or love’ Independent From J.J. Abrams to John le Carré, Salman Rushdie to Jonathan Franzen, Daniel Radcliffe to Nick Cave, Ian McEwan to Stephen Fry, Stanley Tucci to Colin Firth, and Seamus Heaney to Christopher Hitchins, 100 men confess to being moved to tears by poems that haunt them. This remarkable collection of poems, from the sixteenth century to the present day, delivers private insight into the souls of men whose writing, acting and thinking are admired around the world.
Through their teaching of early Christian history and theology, Elizabeth A. Clark contends, Princeton Theological Seminary, Harvard Divinity School, Yale Divinity School, and Union Theological Seminary functioned as America's closest equivalents to graduate schools in the humanities during the nineteenth century. These four Protestant institutions, founded to train clergy, later became the cradles for the nonsectarian study of religion at secular colleges and universities. Clark, one of the world's most eminent scholars of early Christianity, explores this development in Founding the Fathers: Early Church History and Protestant Professors in Nineteenth-Century America. Based on voluminous archival materials, the book charts how American theologians traveled to Europe to study in Germany and confronted intellectual currents that were invigorating but potentially threatening to their faith. The Union and Yale professors in particular struggled to tame German biblical and philosophical criticism to fit American evangelical convictions. German models that encouraged a positive view of early and medieval Christianity collided with Protestant assumptions that the church had declined grievously between the Apostolic and Reformation eras. Trying to reconcile these views, the Americans came to offer some counterbalance to traditional Protestant hostility both to contemporary Roman Catholicism and to those historical periods that had been perceived as Catholic, especially the patristic era.
Reluctantly agreeing to accompany her artsy intellectual husband during a month-long trip to Morocco, meticulous accountant Robin delights in regional culture and hopes to become pregnant only to be wrongly implicated in her husband's disappearance.
"They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world" (John 17:16). God has always had a people distinctly different from the peoples of the world""not better but different. The entire Bible is a cohesive, comprehensive canon of sanctification, culminating in the gospel of Jesus Christ and him crucified. What we commonly call the "high priestly" prayer of Jesus Christ is his prayer for all who believe in him. "Sanctify (or set apart) them through thy Truth: thy Word is Truth" (John 17:17). A Christian is one who lives by every Word that proceeds out of the mouth of God and not according to the standards of this world system. True Christianity is Christ consciousness. Only an awareness of the cross of Jesus Christ in the harrowing truth of its raw austerity can keep me loyal and accountable to God's gift of amazing grace in his only begotten Son, Jesus Christ. His cross is my cross, and it is your cross. Only the preaching of the cross of Jesus Christ can keep the miracle of redemption alive. Our identity with the death, burial, and resurrection of the LORD Jesus Christ is what makes us different. We are the continuity of the love of God in Christ extended to the worst of humanity; truly, a love not of the world. A Christian is one who lives to perpetuate this love of God in the earth. Conversely, what this book calls mainstream Christianity in America fundamentally lives for themselves. Someone must say so. Someone must tell contemporary, worldly conciliatory, and carnally compromised Christianity that God is a Holy Spirit whom the LORD Jesus Christ emphatically said the world cannot receive (see John 14:17). In this age of all-permissive grace, a Christian is identified by their living according to the truth of God's comprehensive Word and by a marked separation from this world system. "If any man loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him" (see 1 John 2:15). Indeed, and as this book without apology declares, the love of the Father is Christ.
Winner of the New Scholars Book Award from the American Educational Research Association Debates continue to rage over whether American university students should be required to master a common core of knowledge. In The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780–1910, Caroline Winterer traces the emergence of the classical model that became standard in the American curriculum in the nineteenth century and now lies at the core of contemporary controversies. By closely examining university curricula and the writings of classical scholars, Winterer demonstrates how classics was transformed from a narrow, language-based subject to a broader study of civilization, persuasively arguing that we cannot understand both the rise of the American university and modern notions of selfhood and knowledge without an appreciation for the role of classicism in their creation.
Proverbs 22:22 enjoins the reader, "Don't take advantage of the poor just because you can." Mammon's Ecology is a systematic investigation into the mysterious nature of modern money, which confronts us with the perplexing fact that, in the global economy as it is, we take advantage of the poor whether we want to or not. We destroy natural systems whether we want to or not. Ched Myers describes Mammon's Ecology as a "workbook" about "the secret life of money." Where Prather and others have shown that money is one of the perverse Powers described in Ephesians 6, Mammon's Ecology details precisely how money exercises this peculiar power and outlines suggestions for Christians who feel trapped in this complicity--not just as individuals, but as church. Mammon's Ecology is not a book about economics (which the author calls "the world's best antidote to insomnia"), but rather a book about the "deep ecology" of (post)modern power and injustice. Read individually or as a group, Mammon's Ecology will leave you unable to think about money the same way again.
"GRACE fights the lump RISING in her throat. For a MOMENT she is LOST in thought, remembering WHAT IT HAS TAKEN to get TO THIS POINT..."Grace Cambridge is a young Black Christian with a new husband, old friends, and a shocking moral dilemma. A proverbial "cat fight" opens the story and draws you into a complex relational web. The book peels through layers of dysfunction between Grace and Trina and follows their individual, sometimes intertwining, lives to reveal how they find their way back to Christ and to each other. Grace is intelligent, determined, well-spoken yet vulnerable. You want her to be happy, you want her to succeed. Grace's Christianity isn't sugar-coated. Her faith is real and so is her life---riddled with plenty of twists, turns, and conflicts. As Grace's relationship with God is challenged she questions her identity and is faced with a life-changing decision. She deals with everyday issues, sometimes successfully; sometimes not. Grace's experiences are not much different than yours---how she handles them might be.