Weasels in the workplace, colleagues in crisis, and bombastic bosses—we all know what it is like to have a “job from hell.” We also know that, despite our industriousness and integrity, many of us will someday have to choose between groceries, health care, and heating the apartment. The nuns who taught me in grade school said that all work, regardless of skills or status, was a ministry. By our helpfulness and kindness on the job, we contributed to the common good. Oh, to have those nuns in charge today! Our sense of social responsibility is eroding as the gap between the super-rich and everyone else grows, and as the rhetoric of leaders that is supposed to heal, deepen our humanity, and unite us is mean, shallow, and divisive. What are the spiritual to do in this material world, where social Darwinism and faith in God are joined at the hip? This book is about putting spirituality to work at work. It is about using spirituality to help us be in toxic places and not become toxic. It explores strategies for maintaining our humanity and moral compass, and it illuminates choices, prompts deep personal reflection, and chases demons from cubicles with humor.
God Bless America (Absurdities in American Life) is a humorous and thought provoking look at American Society today. After a brief history lesson the book explores the details of American life that most annoy and concern us as Americans. The book answers the all important question of paper or plastic, smoking or non, cash or credit, etc. Chapter headings include, retirement, debt, education, sexual preferences, the handicapped, success, critics and the movies, to name a few. God Bless America is a deliciously wicked view of Americans told in a style that also exudes the love and admiration the author feels for his country.
I am the Man - personified. A Maniac Manipulator locked in an empty shell with all the power in the world and not a clue on how to use it. For the moment, I had the Private Banking Society fooled, but my guts churned every time we touched and I didnt know if I could resist from telling these vampires to stop sucking on each other. Any second now, sharp insults and dull curses might just burst from my lips like so many sticks and stones breaking their bones as the truth rightfully should. At last, this was going to be my time to shine. To explode like a nuclear bomb and melt the lobby with radioactive words. After all these years spent serving their drinks, massaging their skin, dealing and blocking their cards - after all this wasted time, at last revenge was mine.
A collection of comic strips from the popular series skewering corporate life features the antics of the deadpan engineer and his clever menagerie of talking animals, including Dogbert, Catbert, and Ratbert
This is a business fiction, but . . . the stories are based on real life events. Michael, a young, enthusiastic engineer in his first full-time job, narrates life with this worker bee colleagues in the world of cubicles. The colleagues are a diverse group of individuals one is likely to find in such a setting. Early in the book a mysterious character appears to engage Michael in dialogues about what is going on in the Archangel Corporation. This mysterious individual provides perspective and occasional advice to Michael on what he is experiencing and how he might engage it going forward. Everyone who has worked in an American corporation can identify with Michaels and the groups experiences and gain some perspective on the alternatives during the journey.
Baba Schwartz’s story began before the Holocaust could have been imagined. As a spirited girl in a warm and loving Jewish family, she lived a normal life in a small town in eastern Hungary. In The May Beetles, Baba describes the innocence and excitement of her childhood, remembering her early years with verve and emotion. But then, unspeakable horror. Baba tells of the shattering of her family and their community from 1944, when the Germans transported the 3000 Jews of her town to Auschwitz. She lost her father to the gas chambers, yet she, her mother and her two sisters survived this concentration camp and several others to which they were transported as slave labour. They eventually escaped the final death march and were liberated by the advancing Russian army. But despite the suffering, Baba writes about this period with the same directness, freshness and honesty as she writes about her childhood. Full of love amid hatred, hope amid despair, The May Beetles is sure to touch your heart. ‘Put down whatever you are reading and read this book. Baba, a charming, gifted and lively young companion, will take you back to a luminous childhood in Hungary before the war, will show you the darkening, and finally lead you to the gates of Hell. The human perversity on the other side of those gates remains incomprehensible, impenetrable to reason. But what Baba and her family embody – their antidote – is the durability of ordinary love.’ —Robyn Davidson ‘Told with the tempered calm of a born writer, Baba Schwartz’s memoir evokes the world of a Jewish Hungarian childhood, and brings us one of the great survival stories of the Second World War.’ —Joan London ‘A calmly personal account of a mighty cataclysm; astonishing in its dignity and composure, unforgettable in its sweetness of tone’ —Helen Garner ‘This book is testament to two miracles. First, of Baba’s survival. And second, of the survival within her of the girl - now an old woman - who nevertheless perceives the world, utterly without sentiment, as a place of “inexhaustible sources of delight”. An important document of witness, survival and the quiet triumph of loving life despite what it has shown you.’ —Anna Funder ‘“Never again” was the promise. But are parents, politicians and teachers making sure this promise is kept? Reading and discussing The May Beetles and other equally fine and compelling recollections of the Holocaust, are powerful and immediate ways of honouring this promise.’ —Agnes Nieuwenhuizen, Weekend Australian ‘Her memory is astonishing and from the point of a reader, in its nuance and recall of detail, this makes the story utterly trustworthy throughout ... Baba’s love of life shines through at every moment.’ —Robert Manne ‘This story is full of genuinely heart-stopping moments – compulsive reading, especially towards the end’ —Australian Book Review ‘Baba Schwartz’s clean, classical style – she is a natural – is matched by the poise with which she relates her tale: almost in the way a novelist observes a character - A superior memoir.’ —Pick of the Week, The Age
New York Times bestselling author of The Prodigal Prophet Timothy Keller shows how God calls on each of us to express meaning and purpose through our work and careers. “A touchstone of the [new evangelical] movement.” —The New York Times Tim Keller, pastor of New York’s Redeemer Presbyterian Church and the New York Times bestselling author of The Reason for God, has taught and counseled students, young professionals, and senior leaders on the subject of work and calling for more than twenty years. Now he pulls his insights into a thoughtful and practical book for readers everywhere. With deep conviction and often surprising advice, Keller shows readers that biblical wisdom is immensely relevant to our questions about work today. In fact, the Christian view of work—that we work to serve others, not ourselves—can provide the foundation of a thriving professional and balanced personal life. Keller shows how excellence, integrity, discipline, creativity, and passion in the workplace can help others and even be considered acts of worship—not just of self-interest.
In America you are the king or the queen, we are blessed with these abilities because of our Constitution and our Bill of Rights the day has already came and went when these blessings were laid to the waste side, because of fear . . . . specific to the events of September 11th 2001, out of fear the laws that we hold dear and enables us “We the People” of the United States of America to be our kings and queens have been set aside, so the constitution and the Bill of Rights represent what we lost on that horrible day and the weeks that followed. The crown represents what “we the people lost that day.” Our Rights as American’s our Constitution our Charter, our right to be Kings and Queens.
This is the story of a Christian family whose life circumstances and experiences illustrate the will of God and the power of prayer. Walter Robertson (affectionately called Walt) and his wife, Rebecca, lived in Joshland, a prairie community. Walt strove to live his life as a devout Christian but on occasion, he doubted the existence of God, backslid, and questioned God's attributes. Rebecca, on the other hand, demonstrated unwavering faith in God. In 1945, a tornado tore down their riverfront home and carried off their baby girl, Samara. A woman found the infant and decided to keep it for herself. Growing up as Margaret and fatherless, Samara was told that her daddy had fallen off his sailboat in the Gulf of Mexico and drowned. In a miraculous twist of events, Rebecca and Walt ended up as the first clients in Margaret's retired couples' housing facility. Eight months after moving in, Rebecca was seen in the ER for a voiding problem. A few days later, she went with Walt to see her primary care physician to discuss the results of an investigative lab work. The doctor broke bad news. She had failing kidneys and required immediate transplant. She would be placed on the waiting list for a donor. The couple shared the unpleasant news with Margaret and asked for her support in prayers. Rebecca knew what she faced: too little time to wait for her turn on the deceased donor waiting list. Amid the seeming hopelessness, Margaret stunned the couple with her offer to donate a kidney. She said a prayer of gratitude in her heart for the privilege to help, little knowing that she was, in fact, thanking God for using her to save the life of her biological mother!
