Once, the name Macalister Hale was uttered in the boardroom with respect. Now, it’s whispered in disgrace at cocktail parties hosted by Boston’s elite. Scandal nearly destroyed me, but the one thing larger than my infamy is my bank account, and I’ve learned money can solve anything. Well—almost anything. Sophia Alby’s preferred currency is secrets and the way she trades information puts Wall Street to shame. This girl charges into my life and claims a partnership can restore my reputation. My downfall was swift, but with her, my climb to redemption will be greater. Our arrangement is professional. Appropriate. It has to be, because she’s half my age. But it doesn’t stop me from wanting . . . To move on. To control and indulge in her. To hear the name Macalister Hale echo in her breathy moans. But I can’t. Giving in to temptation led to my undoing before, and I won’t survive it a second time.
The complete 5-book bestselling Christian fiction series that has sold nearly 2 million copies! These original Baxter Family books have captivated millions of readers and are currently being made into an original television series produced by Roma Downey and Will Packer. This collection bundles the five-book Redemption series from Karen Kingsbury, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of “heart-tugging and emotional” (Romantic Times) life-changing fiction, co-authored with Gary Smalley, which centers around the Baxter family. As readers follow the hopes and struggles of the family, they will explore key relationship themes as well as the larger theme of redemption, both in characters’ spiritual lives and in their relationships. In each book, fans will enjoy a personal note from Karen Kingsbury and Gary Smalley as well as discussion questions for book group use. Revisit the Baxter family in all their life-changing events, or share the series with someone who hasn’t discovered it yet. Share the Baxter family’s joys and struggles, triumphs and pain. #1 Redemption: When Kari Baxter Jacobs finds out that her husband is involved in an adulterous relationship and wants a divorce, she decides she will love him and remain faithful to her marriage at all costs. This book shows how God can redeem seemingly hopeless relationships, and it illustrates one of Gary Smalley’s key messages: Love is a decision. #2 Remember: Convinced she could make it on her own, Ashley Baxter has kept the most important people in her life at a distance—her family, the man who loves her, and the God she is sure can never forgive her. Now, just as she begins to open her heart, the events of September 11 rip into Ashley’s world and she is led to heartbreaking and hope-filled decisions that will forever change her life. This story vividly illustrates that we must value others more than ourselves, and it drives home one of Gary Smalley’s key messages: Honor one another. #3 Return: This touching novel reunites readers with the Baxter family and focuses on the only Baxter son, Luke. He is determined to leave his faith and his past behind and embrace a new, free-thinking future. But what he doesn’t realize is that his past holds a secret even he doesn’t know. When Luke finds out, his comfortable new life is turned upside-down, and he must turn back to his roots. #4 Rejoice: In the continuing saga of the Baxter family, Brooke Baxter has achieved everything this world has to offer—a prestigious career, a beautiful home, and two wonderful children. Her recent return to her faith is an encouragement to her family. But if she faces tremendous loss, can her fledgling faith and her rocky marriage survive? #5 Reunion: Plans are being made for a family reunion. Nearly all the adult Baxter children have a reason to celebrate—except one. As the preparations get underway, a deadly diagnosis sends shockwaves through the Baxter family and threatens to tear them apart. Winner of Christian Retailing’s Retailer’s Choice Award for Best Series
Jessie Heaton is a fearless, flame-haired computer hacker. Independent and feisty, she's relied on no-one but herself since the age of sixteen. Working for the Russians, she is finally close to getting the one thing she wants most in life, when she's stopped in her tracks by the notorious Ryan brothers. The Ryans are Irish Mafia. They are unstoppable. No-one stands in their way. And nothing comes between a Ryan and his family. That is, until the hurricane that is Jessie, crashes into their lives. With a world full of secrets and a past that she can't outrun, will she be their salvation or their downfall? Ryan Rule is Book 1 in the New York Ruthless series. A Reverse Harem/ Dark Mafia Romance full of heat and suspense that will keep you turning the pages. Publishers Note: this book deals with mature themes.
Detective Amos Decker discovers that a mistake he made as a rookie detective may have led to deadly consequences in this compelling Memory Man thriller by #1 New York Times bestselling author David Baldacci. Decker is visiting his hometown of Burlington, Ohio, when he's approached by a man named Meryl Hawkins. Hawkins is a convicted murderer. In fact, he's the very first killer Decker ever put behind bars. But he's innocent, he claims. Now suffering from terminal cancer, it's his dying wish that Decker clear his name. It's unthinkable. The case was open and shut, with rock solid forensic evidence. But when Hawkins turns up dead with a bullet in his head, even Decker begins to have doubts. Is it possible that he really did get it wrong, all those years ago? Decker's determined to uncover the truth, no matter the personal cost. But solving a case this cold may be impossible, especially when it becomes clear that someone doesn't want the old case reopened. Someone who is willing to kill to keep the truth buried, and hide a decades-old secret that may have devastating repercussions . . .
Beginning with the first colonists and continuing down to the present, the dominant narrative of New England Puritanism has maintained that piety and prosperity were enemies, that the rise of commerce delivered a mortal blow to the fervor of the founders, and that later generations of Puritans fell away from their religious heritage as they moved out across the New England landscape. This book offers a new alternative to the prevailing narrative, which has been frequently criticized but heretofore never adequately replaced. The authors argument follows two main strands. First, he shows that commercial development, rather than being detrimental to religion, was necessary to sustain Puritan religious culture. It was costly to establish and maintain a vital Puritan church, for the needs were many, including educated ministers who commanded substantial salaries; public education so that the laity could be immersed in the Bible and devotional literature (substantial expenses in themselves); the building of meeting houses; and the furnishing of communion tables--all and more were required for the maintenance of Puritan piety. Second, the author analyzes how the Puritans gradually developed the evangelical impulse to broadcast the seeds of grace as widely as possible. The spread of Puritan churches throughout most of New England was fostered by the steady devotion of material resources to the maintenance of an intense and demanding religion, a devotion made possible by the belief that money sown to the spirit would reap divine rewards. In 1651, about 20,000 English colonists were settled in some 30 New England towns, each with a newly formed Puritan church. A century later, the population had grown to 350,000, and there were 500 meetinghouses for Puritan churches. This book tells the story of this remarkable century of growth and adaptation through intertwined histories of two Massachusetts churches, one in Boston and one in Westfield, a village on the remote western frontier, from their foundings in the 1660s to the religious revivals of the 1740s. In conclusion, the author argues that the Great Awakening was a product of the continuous cultivation of traditional religion, a cultural achievement built on New Englands economic development, rather than an indictment and rejection of its Puritan heritage.
2018 Book Award Winner, The Gospel Coalition (Academic Theology) A Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2019 Will all evil finally turn to good, or does some evil remain stubbornly opposed to God and God's goodness? Will even the devil be redeemed? Addressing a theological issue of perennial interest, this comprehensive book (in two volumes) surveys the history of Christian universalism from the second to the twenty-first century and offers an interpretation of how and why universalist belief arose. The author explores what the church has taught about universal salvation and hell and critiques universalism from a biblical, philosophical, and theological standpoint. He shows that the effort to extend grace to everyone undermines the principle of grace for anyone.
A century after Appomattox, the civil rights movement won full citizenship for black Americans in the South. It should not have been necessary: by 1870 those rights were set in the Constitution. This is the story of the terrorist campaign that took them away. Nicholas Lemann opens his extraordinary new book with a riveting account of the horrific events of Easter 1873 in Colfax, Louisiana, where a white militia of Confederate veterans-turned-vigilantes attacked the black community there and massacred hundreds of people in a gruesome killing spree. This was the start of an insurgency that changed the course of American history: for the next few years white Southern Democrats waged a campaign of political terrorism aiming to overturn the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and challenge President Grant'ssupport for the emergent structures of black political power. The remorseless strategy of well-financed "White Line" organizations was to create chaos and keep blacks from voting out of fear for their lives and livelihoods. Redemption is the first book to describe in uncompromising detail this organized racial violence, which reached its apogee in Mississippi in 1875. Lemann bases his devastating account on a wealth of military records, congressional investigations, memoirs, press reports, and the invaluable papers of Adelbert Ames, the war hero from Maine who was Mississippi's governor at the time. When Ames pleaded with Grant for federal troops who could thwart the white terrorists violently disrupting Republican political activities, Grant wavered, and the result was a bloody, corrupt election in which Mississippi was "redeemed"—that is, returned to white control. Redemption makes clear that this is what led to the death of Reconstruction—and of the rights encoded in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. We are still living with the consequences.
Alastair Reynolds pushes the boundaries of science fiction and “confirms his place among the leaders of the hard-science space-opera renaissance” (Publishers Weekly) in this novel in his Revelation Space universe. Late in the twenty-sixth century, the human race has advanced enough to accidentally trigger the Inhibitors—alien killing machines designed to detect intelligent life and destroy it. The only hope for humanity lies in the recovery of a secret cache of doomsday weapons—and a renegade named Clavain who is determined to find them. But other factions want the weapons for their own purposes—and the weapons themselves have another agenda altogether...
How Black Christians, Muslims, and Jews have used media to prove their equality, not only in the eyes of God but in society. The institutional structures of white supremacy—slavery, Jim Crow laws, convict leasing, and mass incarceration—require a commonsense belief that black people lack the moral and intellectual capacities of white people. It is through this lens of belief that racial exclusions have been justified and reproduced in the United States. Televised Redemption argues that African American religious media has long played a key role in humanizing the race by unabashedly claiming that blacks are endowed by God with the same gifts of goodness and reason as whites—if not more, thereby legitimizing black Americans’ rights to citizenship. If racism is a form of perception, then religious media has not only altered how others perceive blacks, but has also altered how blacks perceive themselves. Televised Redemption argues that black religious media has provided black Americans with new conceptual and practical tools for how to be in the world, and changed how black people are made intelligible and recognizable as moral citizens. In order to make these claims to black racial equality, this media has encouraged dispositional changes in adherents that were at times empowering and at other times repressive. From Christian televangelism to Muslim periodicals to Hebrew Israelite radio, Televised Redemption explores the complicated but critical redemptive history of African American religious media.
In the months after the end of the Civil War, there was one word on everyone’s lips: redemption. From the fiery language of Radical Republicans calling for a reconstruction of the former Confederacy to the petitions of those individuals who had worked the land as slaves to the white supremacists who would bring an end to Reconstruction in the late 1870s, this crucial concept informed the ways in which many people—both black and white, northerner and southerner—imagined the transformation of the American South. Beyond Redemption explores how the violence of a protracted civil war shaped the meaning of freedom and citizenship in the new South. Here, Carole Emberton traces the competing meanings that redemption held for Americans as they tried to come to terms with the war and the changing social landscape. While some imagined redemption from the brutality of slavery and war, others—like the infamous Ku Klux Klan—sought political and racial redemption for their losses through violence. Beyond Redemption merges studies of race and American manhood with an analysis of post-Civil War American politics to offer unconventional and challenging insight into the violence of Reconstruction.