Church Politics

At more than 78 million strong, the Millennials - those born between 1980 and 2000 - have surpassed the Boomers as the larger and more influential generation in America. Now, as its members begin to reach adulthood, where the traits of a generation really take shape, best-selling research author Thom Rainer (Simple Church) and his son Jess (a Millennial born in 1985) present the first major investigative work on Millennials from a Christian worldview perspective.

The 2015 Paris and San Bernardino terrorist attacks heralded the beginning of a new wave of terrorism - one rooted in the ongoing conflict in Syria and Iraq that shows the possibility of foreign attackers working with citizens of the country. As ISIS seeks to expand its reach in the Middle East, its territory serves as a training and operations base for a new generation of jihadis.

In A Time for Action, Rafael Cruz presents a simple underlying message: For Christians, Jesus Christ should be the foundation of the lives they build, and they should be active in making a difference in the world around them. In practical terms, that means that we should strive for a free society that respects each of God's children; we should embrace the Judeo-Christian values of love, joy, and peace; and we should seek relationships with the living God.

Here is an impassioned plea for reason in a world divided by faith. This important and timely work delivers a startling analysis of the clash of faith and reason in today's world. Harris offers a vivid historical tour of mankind's willingness to suspend reason in favor of religious beliefs, even when those beliefs are used to justify harmful behavior and sometimes heinous crimes.

Too often, political questions are framed in impossible ways for the faithful Christian: We're forced to choose between social justice and biblical values, between supporting women and opposing abortion. As a result, it's easy for Christians to grow disillusioned with civic engagement or fall back into tribal extremes. This state of affairs has damaged Christian public witness and divided the church. The authors of this book represent the AND Campaign, which exists to educate and organize Christians for faithful civic and cultural engagement.

America has a God-shaped hole in its heart, argues New York Times best-selling author Ben Shapiro, and we shouldn't fill it with politics and hate.

When high speed Internet became widely available a few years ago, growing numbers of people began to worry that their porn use was running out of control. Far from preparing them for fulfilling relationships, viewing an endless stream of porn videos led to unexpected symptoms.

In Jezebel Unhinged Tamura Lomax traces the use of the jezebel trope in the Black church and in Black popular culture, showing how it is pivotal to reinforcing men's cultural and institutional power to discipline and define Black girlhood and womanhood. Drawing on writing by medieval thinkers and travelers, Enlightenment theories of race, the commodification of women's bodies under slavery, and the work of Tyler Perry and Bishop T. D. Jakes, Lomax shows how Black women are written into religious and cultural history as sites of sexual deviation.

Two decades after the publication of The Black Book of Communism, nearly everyone is or at least should be aware of the immense evil produced by that devilish ideology first hatched when Karl Marx penned his Communist Manifesto two centuries ago. Far too many people, however, separate Marx the man from the evils wrought by the oppressive ideology and theory that bears his name.

Despite considerable press coverage and a lengthy trial, the full story of the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints has remained largely untold. Only one man can reveal the whole, astounding truth: Sam Brower, the private investigator who devoted years of his life to breaking open the secret practices of the FLDS and bringing Warren Jeffs and his inner circle to justice.

Using his unique lens as a critical race theorist and law professor, Khaled A. Beydoun captures the many ways in which law, policy, and official state rhetoric have fueled the frightening resurgence of Islamophobia in the US.

With the threat of the Third Reich looming, Eleanor Roosevelt employs the history of human rights to establish the idea that at the core of democracy is a spiritual responsibility to other citizens. Roosevelt then calls on all Americans, especially the youth, to prioritize the well-being of others and have faith that their fellow citizens will protect them in return. She defines this trust between people as a trait of true democracy. Roosevelt advances an optimistic model for the democracy of the future, and although we've taken some steps in the direction of her vision, it's still a long way from reality.

Past and present civilizations failed and fail for many reasons, but the number-one predictor of a civilization’s survival is its sense of religion—or lack thereof. So argues David Goldman in How Civilizations Die (and Why Islam Is Dying Too). The strength of a civilization’s religion affects its purpose, its fertility rate, and ultimately, its fate, says Goldman—who then argues that, contrary to popular belief, Islamic countries are in the last throes of death while Christian America is in a position to flourish.

A generation of young Christians are weary of the political legacy they've inherited and are hungry for a better approach. They're tired of seeing their faith tied to political battles they didn't start, and they're frustrated with leaders they thought they could trust. Kaitlyn Schiess grew up in this landscape and understands it from the inside. In The Liturgy of Politics, Schiess shows that the church's politics are shaped by its habits and practices, even when it's unaware of them.

The Bible remains the best-selling book of all time, believed by nearly two billion Christians and Jews to be divinely inspired. But in this hard-hitting new book, author Robert J. Hutchinson proposes that it is actually much more than this. The ideas enshrined in the Bible, he says, triggered a revolution in human thought and established the moral and philosophical foundation for Western civilization.

With vivid story-telling, extensive historical research, and on-the-ground reporting, Ghattas dispels accepted truths about a region she calls home. She explores how Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shia Iran, once allies and twin pillars of US strategy in the region, became mortal enemies after 1979. She shows how they used and distorted religion in a competition that went well beyond geopolitics. Feeding intolerance, suppressing cultural expression, and encouraging sectarian violence from Egypt to Pakistan, the war for cultural supremacy led to many events.

ISIS - the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria - has taken on the mantle of being the single most dangerous terrorist threat to global security since al-Qaeda. In Defeating ISIS, internationally renowned intelligence veteran, author, and counterterrorism expert Malcolm Nance gives an insider's view to explain the origins of this occult group, its violent propaganda, and how it spreads its ideology throughout the Middle East and to disaffected youth deep in the heart of the Western world.

Less and less Christian demographically, America is now home to an ever-larger number of people who say they identify with no religion at all. These non-Christians have increasingly been demanding their full participation in public life, bringing their arguments all the way to the Supreme Court. The law is on their side, but that doesn't mean that their attempts are not met with suspicion or outright hostility.

In this brilliantly analytical yet personal book, nondemocratic societies are put under a microscope to reveal the mechanics of tyranny that sustain them. In exposing the inner workings of a "fear society", the authors explain why democracy is not beyond any nation's reach, why it is essential for our security, and why there is much that can be done to promote it around the world.

As a psychotherapist and professor of marriage and family therapy and sexuality at a Christian University, Tina Schermer Sellers, PhD, has spent a career listening deeply to the often untold, most tightly held, shame-filled stories of people’s lives. Over the last 30 years in particular, these stories have revealed the devastating effects of abstinence education, the purity movement of the evangelical church, and the simultaneous removal of media regulations that allowed for an influx of sexual violence against women to enter all forms of commercial media beginning in the 1980s.