Religious Life

Drawing on history and popular culture, biblical research and everyday beliefs, Lisa Miller offers a new understanding of one of the most cherished—and shared—ideals of spiritual life. She raises debates and discussions not just about our visions of the afterlife, but about how our beliefs have influenced the societies we have built and the lifestyles to which we have subscribed.

Jenna, Livvy, Heather, and Manda strive for their best in their respective sports: gymnastics, figure skating, ice dancing, and downhill skiing. Their ultimate goal: the Olympics.

Jenna, Livvy, Heather, and Manda strive for their best in their respective sports: gymnastics, figure skating, ice-dancing, and downhill skiing. Their ultimate goal: the Olympics. As each girl struggles with life's challenges and rejoices with each triumph, the encouragement of the other Girls Only club members and their faith in God give the girls the moral support needed to push their limits and learn important lessons. In this book, Manda is concentrating so hard on winning the Dressel Hills Downhill Classic that she's turned her back on everyone that matters to her: her family, her friends....even God.

Energetic pre-teen Carmen Browne is determined to live her life to please God as she faces life issues such as an unexpected family move, her big brother's search for his birth family, and the tragedy of domestic violence. Carmen's learned a lot about herself, too: being popular doesn't guarantee you true friends, honesty up front saves a lot of hurt, and sometimes self-confidence is just bossiness in disguise. In this fifth and final volume, Carmen enters the uncharted waters of adolescence, discovering that her changing moods and growing body bring new challenges....

Carmen Browne is a 10-year-old African-American girl beginning fifth grade. With her family moving to a new city, Carmen is anguished to give up her friends and comfortable home. As her family adapts to a new location, Carmen learns that finding new friends and fitting in is not easy. Part of her doesn't even want to try. Family issues become complicated when Carmen's brother learns he is adopted.

In his signature style of stand-up comedy bits, Jeff Allen shares the inspirational and at times laugh-out-loud story of how God rescued him from alcoholism and despair through the book of Ecclesiastes. At times, his story is tragic and even tear-jerking—but in the end, it demonstrates that God takes a customized approach to reaching each of His children. Known as “the King of Clean Comedy,” Allen’s memoir won’t disappoint.

In Reposition Yourself, best-selling author T.D. Jakes shares insights that will help you adjust to the many changes that life brings. This is a shrill wake-up call to take charge of your life now, confronting areas where subtle passivity, or even poor choices, may have stifled your creativity. It's also a how-to for managing change and maximizing life now. Covering financial, relational, and spiritual creativity, Jakes shows how adapting to transitional moments is the path to an enriched existence.

As director of the world's largest abortion clinic and the nation's most prominent abortionist, Dr. Bernard Nathanson presided over 60,000 abortions. As co-founder of the National Abortion Rights Action League, he helped make abortion legal. Then, in a conversion that made headkines and astonished both sides of the abortion debate, he renounced his profession to become a pro-life advocate. But Dr. Nathanson's journey was not over.

As Elsie Dinsmore grows up and becomes a young woman, her family undergoes major changes. Her father, Horace Dinsmore, falls in love and marries sweet Rose Allison, whom Elsie has loved since childhood. Soon two new members, Horace Jr. and Rosebud, join the happy family.

A Chance to Die is a vibrant portrayal of Amy Carmichael, an Irish missionary and writer who spent fifty-three years in south India without furlough. There she became known as "Amma," or "mother," as she founded the Dohnavur Fellowship, a refuge for underprivileged children. Amy's life of obedience and courage stands as a model for all who claim the name of Christ. She was a woman with desires and dreams, faults and fears, who gave her life unconditionally to serve her Master.

The profoundly inspiring and fully documented saga of Joan of Arc, the young peasant girl whose "voices" moved her to rally the French nation and a reluctant king against British invaders in 1428, has fascinated artistic figures as diverse as William Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Voltaire, George Bernard Shaw, Bertolt Brecht, Carl Dreyer, and Robert Bresson. Was she a divinely inspired saint? A schizophrenic? A demonically possessed heretic, as her persecutors and captors tried to prove?

Religious liberty isn't a principle for Americans alone, though it certainly has played an important role in the history of the United States. Religious liberty is a matter of authority and allegiance for people of every land. To whom one owes ultimate allegiance is a matter of the conscience, and one that should be protected in every nation. But what if religious liberty gives way, and churches are faced with the difficult decision between allegiance to their country and allegiance to their conscience?

Ron Dunn was an international itinerate Bible teacher whose life still inspires many of today’s most influential pastors. In this new biography, fellow disciple Ron Owens passes along the spirit and passion of this man who, from his mother’s womb, was called to preach the Word of God. You will learn this calling had to be worked out in the context of some of the highest peaks and deepest valleys a person can experience, from great success in ministry to the tragic suicide of Dunn’s son and a 10-year battle with clinical depression that followed.

The entire family is thrown into turmoil, however, when a carriage accident threatens the life and sanity of Grandpa Dinsmore and Aunt Enna, and Violet is burned with a troublesome secret. Everyone in the family is thrilled as young Elsie blossoms under the warmth of new love, but sorrow strikes as Lily is gathered into the arms of the Good Shepherd despite all the efforts to save her life.

The lessons taught by ancient Chinese philosophers surprisingly still apply, and they challenge our fundamental assumptions about how to lead a fulfilled, happy, and successful life. Self-discovery, it turns out, comes through looking outward, not inward. Power comes from holding back. Good relationships come from small gestures. Spontaneity comes from practice. And excellence comes from what you choose to do, not your "natural" abilities.

All Christians read the Bible differently, pray differently, value their traditions differently, and give different weight to individual and corporate judgment. These differences are the basis of conflict. The question Christian ethics must answer, then, is, "What does the good life look like in the context of conflict?"

This is the powerful story of Gladys Aylward. Without formal education or a missionary organization to back her, Gladys raised her own finances for the overland trip that would bring her to the country and people that God had etched so deeply on her heart.... China! What follows is an amazing adventure of faith and determination. Gladys Aylward, a housemaid from England, dared to trust God in the face of dire and seemingly hopeless circumstances. Her amazing adventure of faith and determination is one of the truly great missionary stories of our era.

George Müller was a Christian evangelist and director of the Ashley Down orphanage in Bristol, England. The Life of Trust contains his diary up to 1860, supplemented by autobiographical notes at the start and throughout the text. Mueller founded a number of orphanages in England in the 19th century whilst refusing to personally benefit in any way, fully trusting that God would provide in his financial needs. Throughout his life, he relied on God’s goodness in order to feed, clothe, and house thousands of English children under his care.

This book is a memoir of an unlikely relationship between the author, Karen Hall — a television writer and producer of hit shows like M*A*S*H, Hillstreet Blues, Moonlighting and The Good Wife — and conservative Jesuit biblical scholar Fr. Paul Mankowski, SJ, who died in September 2020. It exposes the silencing of Fr. Mankowski by his religious order for airing its dirty laundry and for upholding the two-thousand-year magisterium of the Catholic Church.

In this “jewel of a novel” (The Observer), Hilary Byrd flees his demons and the dark undercurrents of contemporary life in England for a former British hill station in south India. Charmed by the foreignness of his new surroundings and by the familiarity of everything the British have left behind, he finds solace in life’s simple pleasures, travelling by rickshaw around the small town with his driver Jamshed and staying in a mission house beside the local presbytery where, after a chance meeting, the Padre and his adoptive daughter Priscilla take Hilary under their wing.