Living Religions

The message of Created for Connection is simple: Forget about learning how to argue better, analyzing your early childhood, or making grand romantic gestures. Instead, get to the emotional underpinnings of your relationship by recognizing that you are attached to and dependent on your partner in much the same way that a child is on a parent and we are on the Heavenly Father for nurturing, soothing, and protection.

What is it like to be an Enneagram Two? Pastor, lawyer, and Enneagram speaker Hunter Mobley reflects on this question with a mix of self-compassion and hunger for personal growth. Using the metaphor of a welcoming Southern porch, he describes Twos this way: "We have well-curated our reputations as people who can be counted on."

“I’m sorry, Mr. Butts, but you have lymphoma and you are already in stage four.” Those words would rattle anyone. Those are the words Dave and Kim Butts heard just 10 days into Dave’s beginning to write this book on prayer and peace. God literally put Dave into a situation where Dave would have to live out what he was planning to teach others in his book. As believers, we know that we are supposed to walk in Christ’s peace day by day. But when the trials, struggles, and stresses of life come upon us, many of us do not appropriate or experience that peace.

This little treatise, conceived in great simplicity, was not originally intended for publication. It was put together for a few individuals, who were desirous of loving God with all of their heart. These people wished to obtain copies because of the profit they received from it. Their enthusiasm for Madame Guyon's sort work prompted its publication. It was created for those who are unqualified for intense research, but the result continues to bless learned and common Christians alike.

In The Interior Castle, Carmelite nun, mystic, and patron saint of Spain Teresa of Ávila uses the metaphor of a giant crystal castle to explain her theory of the soul and the various stages it passes through as it progresses towards God. Beginning in the outer rooms, where demons are fought and vices are purged, the soul must reach the inner chambers, where it will enter betrothal and intimate union with God. Prayer is central to the journey, as the soul is guided by its practice and each phase represents a different category of devotion.

Prayer combines the best of Tozer on prayer into one volume. Tozer was captured by the great wonder of God, and he regarded prayer as the primary means of coming into his presence. But if our everyday life is filled with the barrenness of busyness and there is no serious urgency to pray, we forfeit the wonder of being conformed to the image of Christ and knowing our God more intimately - the true Christian life.

If God is holy, then he can’t sin. If God can’t sin, then he can’t sin against you. If he can’t sin against you, shouldn’t that make him the most trustworthy being there is? Best-selling author Jackie Hill Perry, in her much anticipated follow-up to Gay Girl, Good God, helps us find the reason we don’t trust God - we misunderstand his holiness. In Holier Than Thou, Jackie walks us through Scripture, shaking the dust off of “holy” as we’ve come to know it and revealing it for what it really is: good news.

In Emotionally Healthy Discipleship, best-selling author Pete Scazzero combines three decades of wisdom with hard lessons from his own ministry journey. He lays out what is required for church leaders to multiply deeply changed people who are growing in relationship with God, themselves, and others. Scazzero begins with four beneath-the-surface, systemic gaps that undermine serious discipleship. He provides a clear vision for a church culture that deeply changes lives and then practically unpacks the seven biblical marks of emotionally healthy discipleship.

In the overlooked moments and routines of our day, we can become aware of God's presence in surprising ways. How do we embrace the sacred in the ordinary and the ordinary in the sacred? Framed around one ordinary day, this book explores daily life through the lens of liturgy, small practices, and habits that form us. Each chapter looks at something - making the bed, brushing her teeth, losing her keys - that the author does every day. Come and discover the holiness of your every day.

After being an atheist for a long time, the author was persuaded to change his mind by science. He is now an atheist author, journalist, and professor at Harvard. Despite his atheism in the past, he today holds the belief that religion is the ultimate power due to its centrality to science and its invulnerability to natural disasters.

We can’t always control what happens to us. But we can discover how to heal the hidden hurt it leaves behind. Not knowing what to do with your suffering and fearing you'll be hurt again, you’ve learned to cope, to numb and suppress the ache within. It doesn’t have to be this way. In Healing What’s Within, therapist and professor Chuck DeGroat invites you on a compassionate journey inward to return and retune to the life God created you to live.

How did the world arrive at its current, disorienting state of identity politics, and how should the church respond? Historian Carl R. Trueman discusses how influences ranging from traditional institutions to technology and pornography moved modern culture toward an era of "expressive individualism." Investigating philosophies from the Romantics, Nietzsche, Marx, Wilde, Freud, and the New Left, he outlines the history of Western thought to the distinctly sexual direction of present-day identity politics and explains the modern implications of these ideas.

The enlightenment you seek in other religions has been present in Christianity from the beginning. Richard Rohr, a global leader in spiritual awakening, helps you recognize the forces (such as ego resistance and dual thinking) that separate you from your deeper self. Then, drawing from Gospels and the greatest Christian contemplatives, he shows you what it means to be spiritually awake. You will learn why your ego resists change and growth, what is useful about popular ideas such as the law of attraction, what Jesus, the first mythical leader in the West, can teach you.

You've heard it all before. The promises for a better life get tiresome after awhile, because you know they don't deliver. However, they do touch on a profound and inescapable truth. You were created to live your life out of a rewarding, richly textured relationship with God and others - and deep down, you long to experience that kind of life. But how? Are you willing to devote 60 days to finding out? John Burke guides you on a journey of experiential discovery that has already made a profound impact on thousands who have discovered what it means to actually "do life" with God.

The Changed Life was originally intended to be given as a spoken address by the renowned 19-century Scottish evangelist Henry Drummond.

The Trinity is supposed to be the central doctrine grounding Christianity, yet we're often told that we shouldn't attempt to understand it because it's a mystery. But what if we breached that mystery? How might it transform our relationship with God?

We’ve never been more educated and entertained. We have technological tools our parents could only dream of, and we are saturated with information, amusement, and recreation. Yet more than ever, we are starving for hope. After 40 years of counseling and ministry, Max Lucado has learned that nothing lifts the desperate, weary heart like the promises of God. In a world full of despair, depression, anxiety, and instability, we do not need more opinions or hunches; we need the definitive declarations of our mighty and loving God.

Spring, summer, winter, fall. Marriages are perpetually in a state of transition, continually moving from one season to another—perhaps not annually, as in nature, but just as certainly and consistently. The seasons of marriage come and go. Each one holds the potential for emotional health and happiness, and each one has its challenges. The purpose of this book is to describe these recurring seasons of marriage, help you and your spouse identify which season your marriage is in, and show you how to enhance your marriage in all four seasons.

Freedom From Soul Wounds and Demons helps you understand what happens when you get your soul (mind, will, and emotions) wounded growing up by a parent, step-parent, adopted parent, relatives, siblings, friends, neighbors, et al., when they treat you in ways that hurt you or cause you wounds or trauma (being wounded emotionally, verbally, physically, or sexually) and the correlation of how you will have negative thoughts, memories, emotions, and reactions due to those wounds later in life.

Written with the intent of creating an entry-level report concerning the core principles of the Law of One and Confederation philosophy in general, this book takes the listener through a discussion of Law of One principles such as unity, free will, love, light, and polarity. It then works with the Confederation version of the concept that each person has an energy body with seven chakras. It discusses this concept and its implications for the seeker, chakra by chakra. It turns the player into a Player!