View from the Back Pew
View from the Back Pew

Author: Raquel Eldridge

Publisher: AuthorHouse

Published: 2011-05-19

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 1456767321

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Malone Harris has wanted to leave The Shelter from the Storm Church in Christ for a long time, but even more so after she and her best friend, Alanna, had a falling out regarding Alannas affair with their pastor. As her love for the place begins to diminish, she changes her point of view by sitting in the back pew where she does more people-watching than lesson-learning. In silent observation, she discovers there is more going on than praise and worship amongst the congregation of the Houston-area mega church. The young and trendy congregation flock into the sanctuary to see and be seenbut its what the members arent seeing that is putting their very souls in jeopardy. Alanna Crawford makes a hasty retreat from The Shelter after it becomes painfully obvious she cant count on Pastor Wilson McKinney to leave his wife and make her his First Lady like hed been promising he would for years. In search of a new church, a new man, and hopefully the new title of First Lady, she sets her sights on the handsome new pastor of a newly emerging church in town. Her feminine wiles are no match for the nave preacher and soon, shell be well on her way to getting everything she wants, but will the freaky skeletons in her closet cause her to lose it all? For Malone and Alanna, what started as a journey for peace and a spiritual relationship with God, ended as a journey through a sinners paradise when they find out they were surrounded by schemers, liars and hypocritesand that they were being led by the biggest Charlatan of them all! Will they ever find whatever it was they were looking for that fateful day years ago when they joined hands and joined ranks with the worldly masses at The Shelter from the Storm Church in Christ?

A View from the Back Pew
A View from the Back Pew

Author: Tim O'Donnell

Publisher: SCB Distributors

Published: 2011-02-10

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 0984534407

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Engages with the taboo questions of Christianity as investigative reportage, exploring the "mysteries of faith". Is America becoming preoccupied with religion? In a country with a tradition of keeping matters of creed private, we are now seeing religion in the headlines almost daily, while ironically, escalating numbers of Americans are abandoning organized religion altogether. A recent Pew survey of Americans show: 91% believe in God, 44% have switched religions, 71% of 18-30 year-olds are “spiritual but not religious” and the Catholic Church estimates at least one third of Catholics are lapsed. We are a nation under God, a country of believers it seems, but one undergoing a collective shift in our allegiance to organized religion. But, before the individual shifts they are aided by looking at what they were taught to believe in the first place. A View from the Back Pew: God, Religion & Our Personal Quest for Truth investigates the mysteries of faith in a no-holds-barred exposé into the very core of the Christianity. Candid, humorous and controversial, Tim O’Donnell takes us on a powerful search for balance – between faith and personal experience, between the roots of Christianity and layers of doctrine and between ritual and the connection to the entity we call God. A View from the Back Pew is not written for theologians or the so-called spiritual illuminati, but for ordinary people who are asking deeper questions about their faith. Before one can venture from the safe harbor of organized religion to the open water of spirituality, it helps to be clear about what causes our quandary. This book helps deal with the imprint religion has made while leaving out the guilt commonly linked to asking such questions. “My hope” writes O’Donnell “is that if you are drawn to the Divine but labor over dogma and ritual, you will find a fresh perspective in my view from the back pew”.

The Three Wise Guys
The Three Wise Guys

Author: Mike Thaler

Publisher: Zondervan

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 34

ISBN-13: 0310715938

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A wise-cracking boy is recruited to play one of the wise men in the Christmas pageant.

Walking the Plank to the Baptism Tank
Walking the Plank to the Baptism Tank

Author: Mike Thaler

Publisher: Zondervan

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 34

ISBN-13: 0310715946

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A young boy who is ready to dedicate his life to Christ is not nearly so ready to be baptized in a deep, cold tank that may have sharks in it.

From the Pews in the Back
From the Pews in the Back

Author: Kate Dugan

Publisher: Liturgical Press

Published: 2009-07-01

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 081463902X

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From the Pews in the Back is a book filled with questions about Catholic identity. How do young Catholic women see or define themselves? What is their relationship to the church? What are their struggles and joys? In a church that often consigns them to the pews in the back, what place are young women claiming? This collection of twenty-nine essays approaches these questions from a multitude of angles. These brief memoirs, to 'her with the insights of editors Kate Dugan and Jennifer Owens, offer a glimpse into what it means to be young, Catholic, and female in today's church. These women wrestle with the Catholic faith and with the church. They ask hard questions of the institution and are not willing to take easy answers. From the Pews in the Back is a new chapter in the dialogue about the role of women in the church. The voices of these women range from inspiring and energetic to challenging and wounded. Ultimately, though these women are stubbornly hopeful. They are claiming a place in the church and are calling other Catholics to talk with them about this claim.

The View from a Back Pew
The View from a Back Pew

Author: Don Elkins

Publisher: America Star Books

Published: 2011-12

Total Pages: 48

ISBN-13: 9781462658442

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Have you ever done battle with a reflection? Do you argue with God? If people were tress, what kind would you be? What could new Christians and new golfers possibly have in common? Are you in a dead end job and thinking about quitting? Why shouldn't you? Which is more important to God, the letter of the law or the intent? The answers to these questions might surprise you. Listen as Don attempts to answer these questions and others from his perspective in the back pew.

Pew
Pew

Author: Catherine Lacey

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2020-07-21

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 0374720134

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WINNER of the 2021 NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award. Finalist for the 2021 Dylan Thomas Prize. Longlisted for the 2021 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. One of Publishers Weekly's Best Fiction Books of 2020. One of Amazon's 100 Best Books of 2020. “The people of this community are stifling, and generous, cruel, earnest, needy, overconfident, fragile and repressive, which is to say that they are brilliantly rendered by their wise maker, Catherine Lacey.” --Rachel Kushner, author of The Flamethrowers A figure with no discernible identity appears in a small, religious town, throwing its inhabitants into a frenzy In a small, unnamed town in the American South, a church congregation arrives for a service and finds a figure asleep on a pew. The person is genderless and racially ambiguous and refuses to speak. One family takes in the strange visitor and nicknames them Pew. As the town spends the week preparing for a mysterious Forgiveness Festival, Pew is shuttled from one household to the next. The earnest and seemingly well-meaning townspeople see conflicting identities in Pew, and many confess their fears and secrets to them in one-sided conversations. Pew listens and observes while experiencing brief flashes of past lives or clues about their origin. As days pass, the void around Pew’s presence begins to unnerve the community, whose generosity erodes into menace and suspicion. Yet by the time Pew’s story reaches a shattering and unsettling climax at the Forgiveness Festival, the secret of who they really are—a devil or an angel or something else entirely—is dwarfed by even larger truths. Pew, Catherine Lacey’s third novel, is a foreboding, provocative, and amorphous fable about the world today: its contradictions, its flimsy morality, and the limits of judging others based on their appearance. With precision and restraint, one of our most beloved and boundary-pushing writers holds up a mirror to her characters’ true selves, revealing something about forgiveness, perception, and the faulty tools society uses to categorize human complexity.

Preaching from the Pew
Preaching from the Pew

Author: Patricia G. Brown

Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press

Published: 1998-01-01

Total Pages: 168

ISBN-13: 9780664500191

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In this deeply spiritual and prophetic collection of sermons, meditations, and prayers, Pat Brown takes the reader on a personal journey into and out of some of the most critical challenges facing the church in these turbulent and confusing times. She unveils her story of God's handiwork in shaping her life as a child of the Reformed tradition and as the mother of a special needs son. In a time when the call for justice withers on the vine as the church struggles with itself, this book is required reading for every perplexed servant of Jesus Christ.