Church Government

As a child, Elias Chacour lived in a small Palestinian village in Galilee. When tens of thousands of Palestinians were killed and nearly one million forced into refugee camps in 1948, Elias began a long struggle with how to respond. In Blood Brothers, he blends his riveting life story with historical research to reveal a little-known side of the Arab-Israeli conflict, touching on questions such as: What behind-the-scenes politics touched off the turmoil in the Middle East?

Does America have a special mission, derived from God, to bring liberty and democracy to the world? How much influence does the Christian right have over U.S. foreign policy? And how should America deal with violent Islamist extremists? Madeleine Albright, the former Secretary of State and best-selling author of Madam Secretary, offers a thoughtful and often surprising look at the role of religion in shaping America's approach to the world.

Reaching out to listeners of all religious backgrounds, Desmond Tutu shows us how to transform suffering into joy both in our lives and in our world. He tells us that God dreams of a world where laughter, love, and peace reign, and where we realize that we are all members of one family, God's family. In this extremely personal and liberating message, Father Tutu helps us "see with the eyes of the heart" and cultivate the qualities of forgiveness, humility, generosity, and courage.

Writing in response to our current “constitutional crisis”, New York Times best-selling author and Christian activist Jim Wallis urges America to return to the tenets of Jesus once again as the means to save us from the polarizing bitterness and anger of our tribal nation.

A cosmic war is a religious war. It is a battle not between armies or nations, but between the forces of good and evil, a war in which God is believed to be directly engaged on behalf of one side against the other. The hijackers who attacked the United States on September 11, 2001, thought they were fighting a cosmic war. According to award-winning writer and scholar of religions Reza Aslan, by infusing the United States War on Terror with the same kind of religiously polarizing rhetoric and Manichean worldview, is also fighting a cosmic war - a war that can’t be won.

In The End of Power, award-winning columnist and former Foreign Policy editor Moisés Naím illuminates the struggle between once-dominant megaplayers and the new micropowers challenging them in every field of human endeavor. Drawing on provocative, original research and a lifetime of experience in global affairs, Naím explains how the end of power is reconfiguring our world.

Jeff Sharlet is the only journalist to have reported from inside the C Street House, the Fellowship residence known simply by its Washington, D.C., address. The house has lately been the scene of notorious political scandal, but more crucially, it is home to efforts to transform the very fabric of American democracy. And now, after laying bare its tenants' past in The Family, Sharlet reports from deep within fundamentalism in today's world.

In this powerful and prophetic audiobook, nationally syndicated columnist and trusted political commentator Cal Thomas offers a diagnosis of what exactly is wrong with the US by drawing parallels to once-great empires and nations that declined into oblivion. Citing the historically proven 250-year pattern of how superpowers rise and fall, he predicts America's expiration date is just around the corner and shows us how to escape their fate.

The Color of Compromise takes listeners on a historical journey: from America's early colonial days through slavery and the Civil War, covering the tragedy of Jim Crow laws and the victories of the Civil Rights era, to today's Black Lives Matter movement. Author Jemar Tisby reveals the obvious - and the far more subtle - ways the American church has compromised what the Bible teaches about human dignity and equality.

Marcantonio Colonna's The Dictator Pope has rocked Rome and the entire Catholic Church with its portrait of an authoritarian, manipulative, and politically partisan pontiff. Occupying a privileged perch in Rome during the tumultuous first years of Francis' pontificate, Colonna was privy to the shock, dismay, and even panic that the reckless new pope engendered in the Church's most loyal and judicious leaders.

"I thought the nation was coming to an end", wrote Khushwant Singh, looking back on the violence of Partition that he was witness to over half a century ago. He believed then that he had seen the worst that India could do to herself. But after the violence in Gujarat in 2002, he felt that the worst, perhaps, is still to come. Analysing the anti-Sikh riots of 1984, the burning of Graham Staines and his children, the targeted killings by terrorists in Punjab and Kashmir, Singh confronts the absolute corruption of religion that has made us among the most brutal people on earth.

In Hitler, God, and the Bible, international evangelist and bestselling author Ray Comfort exposes Adolf Hitler's theology and abuse of religion as a means to seize political power and ultimately instigate World War II and genocide.

This fascinating study mines the depths of Hitler's beliefs and convincingly argues that without Hitler's misuse of Christianity the Third Reich would not have had its legendary rise, resulting in the deaths of more than six million Jews.

Is a fight against equality and for privilege a fight for religious supremacy? Andrew L. Seidel, a constitutional attorney and author of the critically acclaimed book The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American, dives into the debate on religious liberty, the modern attempt to weaponize religious freedom, and the Supreme Court's role in that “crusade.”

Noll demonstrates how supporters and opponents of slavery and segregation drew equally on the Bible to justify the morality of their positions. He shows how a common evangelical heritage supported Jim Crow discrimination and contributed powerfully to the black theology of liberation preached by Martin Luther King Jr.

The first fundamental truth about the "Arab Spring" is that there never was one. The salient fact of the Middle East, the only one, is Islam. The Islam that shapes the Middle East inculcates in Muslims the self-perception that they are members of a civilization implacably hostile to the West. The United States is a competitor to be overcome, not the herald of a culture to be embraced.

In the aftermath of World War II, the United States stood at a precipice. The forces of modernity unleashed by the war had led to astonishing advances in daily life, but technology and mass culture also threatened to erode the country's traditional moral character. As award-winning historian George M. Marsden explains in The Twilight of the American Enlightenment, postwar Americans looked to the country's secular liberalelites for guidance in this precarious time, but these intellectuals proved unable to articulate a coherent common cause by which America could chart its course.

Evangelical Christianity and conservative politics are today seen as inseparable. But when Jimmy Carter, a Democrat and a born-again Christian, won the presidency in 1976, he owed his victory in part to American evangelicals, who responded to his open religiosity and his rejection of the moral bankruptcy of the Nixon Administration. Carter, running as a representative of the New South, articulated a progressive strand of American Christianity that championed liberal ideals, racial equality, and social justice - one that has almost been forgotten since.

Dr. Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, reveals this integral unity of the Declaration and the Constitution. Together, they form the pillars upon which the liberties and rights of the American people stand. United, they have guided history's first self-governing nation, forming our government under certain universal and eternal principles. Unfortunately, the effort to redefine government to reflect "the changing and growing social order" has gone very far toward success.

Why does church government matter? In this book, Guy Prentiss Waters offers a brief and accessible introduction to Presbyterianism that shows how a well-ordered church fosters Christian lives lived well. In making the case that church government is critical to Christian discipleship, Waters presents an overview of the nature of the church (the body and its member) and its structures of authority (officers, assemblies, and ordination). He concludes by answering common questions people raise about church government.

In Just Faith, progressive Christian activist and writer Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons explains how a strong religious left has accompanied every major progressive advance in our society, and he resurrects the long but forgotten history of progressive Christianity in the United States that can and must link arms with progressive Muslims and Jews to make the moral case for pluralism, human dignity, and the common good. Graves-Fitzsimmons provides a blueprint for this type of resurrection based on his advocacy work at the intersection of religion and American politics.