Community Houses

Our bodies are designed to heal. But while our skinned knees easily heal, it can sometimes feel like our emotional and relational wounds are left gaping open, broken beyond repair. If our bodies instinctively know how to heal physical injuries, could they also help us understand how to restore painful emotional and relational ruptures? Physician Jennie McLaurin and scientist Cymbeline T. Culiat present Designed to Heal: a fascinating look at how the restorative processes of the body can model patterns we may adapt to heal the acute and chronic wounds of our social bodies.

Your experiences and expertise can make a profound difference in someone else's life. But to create a profitable business from your stories, you need to say good-bye to rapid strategy switching and hello to a simple plan for growing your audience. In this entertaining how-to guide, marketing mentor Nikki Nash reveals a straightforward, three-step process for generating audience growth and consistent revenue.

After a harrowing voyage from Italy, during which his mother died, seven-year-old Vittorio arrives in Canada with his newborn half sister and is reunited with his estranged father, a dark, isolated, and angry figure he hardly knows. The story that follows spans two decades of Vittorio’s life within an immigrant Italian farming community in Southwestern Ontario, through his university years, and then into Africa where he goes to teach. At the center of Vittorio’s existence is his strained relationship with his father and with his half sister, Rita.

It’s the holy month of Ramadan, and twin sisters Amira and Lina are about to graduate high school in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. On the precipice of adulthood, they plan to embark on a summer of teenage revelry, trying on new identities and testing the limits of what they can get away with while still under their parents’ roof. But the twins' expectations of a summer of freedom collide with their older brother's return from prison, whose mysterious behavior threatens to undo the delicate family balance.

There Plant Eyes probes the ways in which blindness has shaped our ocularcentric culture, challenging deeply ingrained ideas about what it means to be “blind”. For millennia, blind­ness has been used to signify such things as thoughtlessness (“blind faith”), irrationality (“blind rage”), and unconsciousness (“blind evolution”). But at the same time, blind people have been othered as the recipients of special powers as compensation for lost sight (from the poetic gifts of John Milton to the heightened senses of the comic book hero Daredevil).

In the late 1950s, in a small New England town, Reverend Tyler Caskey has suffered a terrible loss and finds it hard to be the person he once was. He struggles to find the right words in his sermons and in his conversations with those facing crises of their own, and to bring his five-year-old daughter, Katherine, out of the silence she has observed in the wake of the family’s tragedy. Tyler’s usually patient and kind congregation now questions his leadership and propriety, and accusations are born out of anger and gossip.

From the author of Messy Grace, a former pastor raised by gay parents, comes a compassionate playbook to help Christians, church staff, and ministry leaders create a culture of belonging without sacrificing theological convictions.

Pastor David Platt believes we’ve gotten really good at following a really bad gospel—one that worships American ideas over biblical truth. It’s time for disillusioned, discouraged, and divided Christians, and the next generation, to follow Jesus into a different future.

In House Church: Embracing Authentic Community, you are invited on a transformative journey to the heart of true Christian living. This compelling guide illuminates the path to forming house churches, communities that mirror the intimate, service-driven life of Jesus Christ.

What is Ballroom? Not a song, a documentary, a catchphrase, a TV show, or an individual pop star. It is an underground subculture founded over a century ago by LGBTQ African American and Latino men and women of Harlem. Arts-based and intersectional, it transcends identity, acting as a fearless response to the systemic marginalization of minority populations.

When it comes to Christ-centered recovery, we, the church, have work to do. Our legalistic, box-checking, one-size-fits-all programs produce astonishingly high failure rates—which means far too many people are left to fight addiction, mental health problems, and suicidal thoughts on their own. The goal of The Uncovery is to help the church—and the world—see recovery through a grace-laced, gospel lens. Every single one of us has some trauma or issue from our past that may still be affecting our life today. This book offers listeners nudge to go deeper in the recovery space.

Carissa Halton and her young family move into a neighbourhood with a tough reputation. As they make their home in one of the oldest parts of the city, she reflects on the revitalization that is slowly changing the view from her little yellow house. While others worry about the area’s bad reputation, she heads out to meet her neighbours, and through them discovers the innate beauty of her community.

“The virus exposed how we live and work. It also revealed how we play, and what we lose when we have to stop.” For every kid who makes it to the NBA, thousands more seek out the pleasure and camaraderie of pick-up basketball in their local community centre or neighbourhood park. It’s a story that plays out in sport after sport–team and individual, youth and adult, men's and women's.

Segundo Villanueva was born in 1927 in a tiny farming village perched in the Andes; when he was seventeen, his father was murdered and Segundo was left with little more than a Bible as his inheritance. This Bible launched Segundo on a lifelong obsession to find the true message of God contained in its pages. He found himself looking for answers outside the Catholic Church, whose hierarchy and colonial roots embodied the gaping social and racial inequities of Peruvian society.

Michelle Sanchez has discovered through her own journey that it’s impossible to separate racial discipleship from our relationship with God. In fact, deeper racial discipleship catalyzes a deeper relationship with God. Whenever we choose to courageously resist racism, we will discover new opportunities to encounter Christ in fresh and exciting ways. Color-Courageous Discipleship is our guidebook to a deeper connection with God through the adventure of racial discipleship.

When Dr. Will Cooke, an idealistic young physician just out of medical training, set up practice in the small rural community of Austin, Indiana, he had no idea that much of the town was being torn apart by poverty, addiction, and life-threatening illnesses. But he soon found himself at the crossroads of two unprecedented health-care disasters: a national opioid epidemic and the worst drug-fueled HIV outbreak ever seen in rural America. Confronted with Austin’s hidden secrets, Dr. Cooke decided he had to do something about them.

A survival guide to being a guy. Lots of guys talk the big talk, but what's really going on with sex? That's what a group of young men sat down to figure out for The Little Black Book for Guys. To get behind the hype, they talked to other teens and collected stories, poems, essays and art about personal experiences. They also interviewed health professionals to get the facts they need to make healthy choices.

Imagine your family an image of God and your home a taste of heaven... Heaven in Your Home Letters and Guide has everything you need to lead your loved ones toward happiness and give them the very best things in life! Did you know that the family is a communion of persons in the image of the Holy Trinity? Starting with this scriptural insight and drawing from the riches of the Catholic faith, learn how your family can become an ever more radiant image of God by deepening your communion throughout the five levels of family life.

Radical Islam is an enduring global challenge that presents a national and international security threat. Instigation by hate preachers, inadequate government, societal attention, religious and reciprocal radicalization have allowed this threat to manifest into terrorist violence. Extremist ideologies have infiltrated religious, educational, and digital spaces and thus, terrorism’s shadow continues to shroud the safety and stability of countries and communities worldwide today.

Colleagues and neighbors of Samuel and Boots are more than willing to accept their married status, even though Samuel “dresses like a boy” and the pair’s relationship is one of convenience that will never be consummated. But when Samuel meets a new professor’s wife, Frances, at a faculty party, she soon falls in love, and learns the difficulty of discretion in a small town—with tragic consequences.