“Hilariously details the inner workings of the cable news network.” —The Daily Beast After college, Joe Muto—a self-professed bleeding-heart, godless liberal—took an entry-level position at Fox News. Joe kept quiet about his political views and initially enjoyed the newsroom camaraderie. But after he began working for Bill O’Reilly—Fox’s number one talking head—Joe just couldn’t take it anymore. He went rogue by becoming Gawker’s Fox Mole, and was outed (and fired) in thirty-six hours. Reminiscent of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, An Atheist in the FOXhole is filled with hilarious, untold tales that will appall and delight the millions who love to hate FOX news.
Experience gripping wartime stories and honest prayers by this Camp David chaplain now serving in Iraq. When words mean less and less, but money talks more and more; when blasphemy is a best seller, and eternal war has replaced hopeful diplomacy; in times like these is prayer even possible? Patrick J. McLaughlin thinks so. McLaughlin is an active duty Navy Chaplain who has ministered to heads of state and to soldiers living and dying in the heat of Iraq. No Atheists in Foxholes assembles Chaplain McLaughlin's experiences and prayers from e-mails, private notes, and personal conversations that take us real-time into realms of duty and spirit: from the quiet darkness of his infant son's New England bedroom on September 11, 2001, to the bomshelled medical tents and blistered Army Humvees of Anbar Province. Chaplain McLaughlin believes that prayer is not only possible, but critical. "We must all learn to pray for peace," he says, "and then become an answer to that prayer."
From the battlefields of the American Civil War through World Wars I and II, from Korea and Vietnam to the front lines in Iraq and Afghanistan, soldiers of all faiths have struggled for understanding and called on a higher power when faced with the realities of combat.God in the Foxholeis a stunning collection of true personal accounts from generations of American soldiers whose faith, in the words of author Charles W. Sasser, "has been born, reborn, tested, sustained, verified, or transformed under fire."A renowned master of combat journalism and a former Green Beret, Sasser has gathered an immensely moving collection of war stories like no other -- stories of spirituality, conversion, and miracles from the battlefield. Be they Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or atheist, churched since childhood or touched by the divine for the first time, here are the riveting experiences of army privates, bomber pilots, navy lieutenants, marines, prisoners of war, medics, nurses, chaplains, and others who, under desperate circumstances and with every reason to fear for their lives, found unknown strength, courage, and heroism through their remarkable faith.These inspiring accounts transcend the explainable to become stunning portraits of survival and belief: the angelic vision that brought inner peace to an exhausted helicopter door gunner in Vietnam...the makeshift full-immersion baptisms of eleven soldiers on Palm Sunday in Iraq, 2004...two enemies -- a Nazi priest and an American G.I. -- who served Communion Mass in a Belgian sanctuary in 1944...the prescient letter from a Civil War army major to his beloved wife, one week before his death at Bull Run...the 21st-century toddler with a jaw-dropping spiritual connection to a war hero of Iwo Jima...and dozens more.A war chronicle like no other,God in the Foxholeaffirms, for military buffs and readers from all walks of life, the power of faith in the face of adversity.
Uncertainty is the essence of the human condition, and nothing is more uncertain than God. Yet passions run hot when it comes to God, both among believers and non-believers. God is a Question, Not an Answer aims to unsettle readers on both sides of the issue. William Irwin argues that because belief occurs along a continuum of doubt and we can never reach full certainty, believers and non-believers can find common ground in uncertainty. Beginning with the questions of what we mean when we talk about God and faith, Irwin shows that from a philosophical perspective, the tendency to doubt is a virtue, and from a religious perspective there is no faith without doubt. Rather than avoid uncertainty as an uncomfortable state of emotional despair, we should embrace it as an ennobling part of the human condition. We do not have to agree about the existence of God, but we do need to practice intellectual humility and learn to see doubt as a gift. By engaging in civil discourse we can see those who disagree with us as not only fully human but capable of teaching us something.
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A profoundly funny romp through religion, spirituality, and the contemporary clash of cultures of belief, with special attention to the human obsession with knowing what can't be known. Nosirrah provokes just about everyone as he describes a world where God is on the run from Islamic extremists, the Pope announces he shares a bed with Richard Dawkins, and Buddha's son disappoints by getting enlightened instead of becoming a doctor. To say this novella is strange might give the reader a way to relate to it, but in fact, nothing will shift the burden away from the reader. In its pages, the world is bent around the reader's mind until either the mind itself begins to bend, or indeed, breaks. A book without plot, characters, structure, or obvious purpose, this is an endless descent into the netherworlds of a dystopian mind. If a thousand monkeys typing endlessly would eventually produce all great works of literature, then God Is an Atheist is their first draft.
In Catching Hell, longtime seafood mogul Allen Ricca and author Joe Muto take readers behind the scenes of the high-end restaurant world and the international market for seafood, and how that industry has been impacted perhaps like no other due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This book exposes the fact that the American diner is being lied to on a regular basis. The culprit varies – sometimes it’s a chef or restaurant owner trying to cut corners to save money; other times it’s an unscrupulous supplier looking to pass off poor product to an unwitting receiver. And the cost of that scam eventually gets passed on to the consumer, whether it be in the form of higher prices at restaurants and markets, lower quality (or even counterfeit) product getting delivered onto your plate, or – God forbid – food poisoning. Furthermore, Ricca argues, the pandemic has only increased corruption in this industry. This book serves as both an exposé and a call to arms, empowering consumers with the knowledge to make more informed choices when dining out. Some of the things this explosive book reveals: The one fish you should never order, one that’s always a rip-off. (And the one fish that’s always a delicious, virtually-unknown bargain.) Why restaurants that advertise “fresh” fish are almost always lying. How to get your favorite restaurant to treat you like royalty – without dropping thousands of dollars. How the covid-19 pandemic has impacted our food supply chain and what it has meant for the everyday worker.
“Most of the serious thinking I have done over the past twenty years has been done while running,” says philosophy professor Mark Rowlands, who has run for most of his life. And for him, running and philosophizing, are inextricably connected.In Running with the Pack, he reveals the most significant runs of his life—from the entire day he spent running as a boy in Wales, to the runs along French beaches and up Irish mountains with his beloved wolf, Brenin, and through Florida swamps with his husky-mix, Nina. Intertwined with this honest, passionate and witty memoir are the fascinating meditations that those runs triggered, from mortality, midlife, and the meaning of life. A highly original and moving book that will make the philosophically inclined want to run, and those who love running become intoxicated by the beauty of philosophy.
A bold and provocative interpretation of one of the most religiously vibrant places in America—a state penitentiary Baraka, Al, Teddy, and Sayyid—four black men from South Philadelphia, two Christian and two Muslim—are serving life sentences at Pennsylvania's maximum-security Graterford Prison. All of them work in Graterford's chapel, a place that is at once a sanctuary for religious contemplation and an arena for disputing the workings of God and man. Day in, day out, everything is, in its twisted way, rather ordinary. And then one of them disappears. Down in the Chapel tells the story of one week at Graterford Prison. We learn how the men at Graterford pass their time, care for themselves, and commune with their makers. We observe a variety of Muslims, Protestants, Catholics, and others, at prayer and in study and song. And we listen in as an interloping scholar of religion tries to make sense of it all. When prisoners turn to God, they are often scorned as con artists who fake their piety, or pitied as wretches who cling to faith because faith is all they have left. Joshua Dubler goes beyond these stereotypes to show the religious life of a prison in all its complexity. One part prison procedural, one part philosophical investigation, Down in the Chapel explores the many uses prisoners make of their religions and weighs the circumstances that make these uses possible. Gritty and visceral, meditative and searching, it is an essential study of American religion in the age of mass incarceration.
"Science can't explain the complexity and order of life; God must have designed it to be this way.""God's existence is proven by scripture.""There's no evidence that God doesn't exist.""God has helped me so much. How could none of it be true?""Atheism has killed more people than religion, so it must be wrong!" How many times have you heard arguments like these for why God exists? Why There Is No God: Simple Responses to 20 Common Arguments for the Existence of God provides simple, easy-to-understand counterpoints to the most popular arguments made for the existence of God. Each chapter presents a concise explanation of the argument, followed by a response illustrating the problems and fallacies inherent in it. Whether you're an atheist, a believer or undecided, this book offers a solid foundation for building your own inquiry about the concept of God.
