Embedded Faith explores the way Christian faith journeys of young adults are embedded within church communities. It discusses why young adults go to church, why they change churches, why some are involved in the practice of church two-timing, and what they are looking for in a church. Embedded Faith also provides valuable insight into the relationship between geographic mobility and belonging to a faith community in a transient age. Embedded Faith discusses areas where young adults are engaging and disengaging with church life, such as preaching and worship. It addresses how stage of life transitions and life experience impact on one's experience and involvement in church. This book will enable anyone working with young adults in a church context to give shape to a ministry that is more sensitive and connected to the realities faced by young adults, and will call you to the importance of listening to the lived experience of young adults as it relates to faith and church.
As societies across the globe rethink and often discard the institutions of marriage and religion, interfaith marriages continue to grow in number. These unions, usually committed to seeing past the traditional sectarian labels, often struggle when the traditional sources of support for marital life—faith community, family support—are not available. Still, the determination of interfaith couples to negotiate and cross boundaries gives hope to a fractured world. Bonni-Belle Pickard draws from her personal and professional experience to suggest ways of addressing the challenges of interfaith couples and their families.
Standing Under the Wrong Rainbow entwines insights from the Bible with the opinions of the author, G. Deon Thompson, to make the case for the durability of the traditional view of marriage as the lifelong union of one woman and one man, while exposing the shortcomings of modern arguments that speak in favor of gay marriage. Chapters treat a variety of topics, including the history of the notion of "rights," the scriptural grounding for the traditional morality of marriage, philosophies of truth, the challenges of modern life, the sacrificial nature of godly love, and the essence of marriage as God intends it for human life. If you have found yourself struggling with contemporary debates over the nature of marriage, if you wonder whether the church's traditional teachings still apply in the twenty-first century, and if you feel a growing divide between the practice of your faith and the life of the wider community, then Standing Under the Wrong Rainbow serves as a wake-up call and a guide to reclaiming the power of longstanding tradition.
Political systems across much of the West are now subject to populist disruption, which often takes an anti-Constitutional form. This interdisciplinary book argues that the current analysis of anti-Constitutional populism, while often astute, is focused far too narrowly. It is held here that due to an obscured complex of dynamics that has shaped the history of the West since its inception and which remains active today, we do not understand the present. This complex not only explains the current disruptions across the fields of contemporary religion, politics, economics and emerging artificial intelligence but also how these disruptions derive each from originary sources. This work thereby explains not only the manner in which this complex has functioned across historical time but also why it is that its inherent, unresolvable flaws have triggered the shifts between these key fields as well as the intractability of these present disruptions. It is this flawed complex of factors that has led to current conflicts about abortion reform, political populism, the failure of neoliberalism and the imminent quantum shift in generative artificial intelligence. It is argued that in this, law is heavily implicated, especially at the constitutional level. Presenting a forensic examination of the root causes of all these disruptions, the study provides a toolbox of ideas with which to confront these challenges. This is a book of originality and significance, which will make fascinating reading for academics and researchers working in the areas of Socio-legal Studies, Legal Philosophy, Political Science, Theology, AI and Neuroscience.
We live in turbulent times, our world is changing at accelerating speed. Information is everywhere, but wisdom appears in short supply when trying to address key inter-related challenges of our time such as; runaway climate change, the loss of biodiversity, the depletion of natural resources, the on-going homogenization of culture, and rising inequity. Living in such times has implications for education and learning. This book explores the possibilities of designing and facilitating learning-based change and transitions towards sustainability. In 31 chapters contributors from across the world discuss (re)emerging forms of learning that not only assist in breaking down unsustainable routines, forms of governance, production and consumption, but also can help create ones that are more sustainable. The book has been divided into three parts: re-orienting science and society, re-connecting people and planet and re-imagining education and learning. This is essential reading for educators, educational designers, change agents, researchers, students, policymakers and entrepreneurs alike, who are concerned about the well-being of the planet and convinced of our ability to do better. The content and related issues can be discussed on the blog by editor Arjen Wals: Transformative learning. 'We are living in times of incertitude, complexity, and contestation, but also of connectivity, responsibility, and new opportunities. This book analyses the consequences of these times for learning in formal, non-formal, and informal education. It explores the possibilities offered by the concept of sustainability as a central category of a holistic paradigm which harmonizes human beings with Earth. To change people and to change the world are interdependent processes - this book contributes to both.' Moacir Gadotti, Director of Paulo Freire Institute, São Paulo, Brazil 'I hope you share my excitement about the innovations for sustainability that this book catalogues and analyses. While the ecological news is grim, the human news is not. Even in a time of accelerating change, people are showing their enormous capacities to learn, adapt, restore and protect.' From the Foreword by Juliet Schor, author of ‘True Wealth: how and why millions of Americans are creating a time-rich, ecologically-light, small-scale high-satisfaction economy’ 'This book implies a ‘culture of critical commitment’ in educational thinking and practice - engaged enough to make a real difference to social-ecological resilience and sustainability but reflexively critical enough to learn constantly from experience and to keep options open in working for a sustainability transformation.' From the Afterword by Stephen Sterling, Professor of Sustainability Education, Centre for Sustainable Futures, Plymouth University, United Kingdom
From comedian and journalist Faith Salie, of NPR's Wait Wait…Don't Tell Me! and CBS News Sunday Morning, a collection of daring, funny essays chronicling the author's adventures during her lifelong quest for approval Faith Salie has done it all in the name of validation. Whether she’s trying to impress her parents with a perfect GPA, undergoing an exorcism to save her toxic marriage, or baking a 3D excavator cake for her son’s birthday, Salie is the ultimate approval seeker—an “approval junkie,” if you will. In this collection of daring, honest essays, Salie shares stories from her lifelong quest for gold stars, recounting her strategy for winning (very Southern) high school beauty pageant; her struggle to pick the perfect outfit to wear to her divorce; and her difficulty falling in love again, and then conceiving, in the years following her mother’s death. With thoughtful irreverence, Salie reflects on why she tries so hard to please others, and herself, highlighting a phenomenon that many people—especially women—experience at home and in the workplace. Equal parts laugh-out loud funny and poignant, Approval Junkie is one woman’s journey to realizing that seeking approval from others is more than just getting them to like you—it's challenging yourself to achieve, and survive, more than you ever thought you could.
Human actions are often deeply intertwined with religion and can be understood in a strictly religious context. Yet, many volumes and articles pertaining to discussions of religion in the archaeological past have focused primarily on the sociopolitical implications of such remains. The authors in this volume argue that while these interpretations certainly have a meaningful place in understanding the human past, they provide only part of the picture. Because strictly religious contexts have often been ignored, this has resulted in an incomplete assessment of religious behavior in the past. This volume considers exciting new directions for considering an archaeology of religion, offering examples from theory, tangible archaeological remains, and ethnography.
