From a woman tricking her father-in-law into having a child together, to a talking donkey and demons being cast into pigs, theologian John Alan Turner explains what these odd stories are doing in the Bible and why they matter.

An amazing story of a missionary couple's journey into the toughest places on earth is combined with stories about remarkable people of faith they encountered to challenge and inspire those curious about the sufficiency of God.

Shunned. Condemned. Controlled. Describing church, believers and nonbelievers deploy stinging terms to define an imperial, culturally privileged, and powerful American force. Church has become synonymous with shame, exclusion, and hostility. This is not the church of Jesus. American Christians are victims of a deliberate and shortsighted scheme designed to identify and defeat religious, cultural, and sexual Others. From the language of “makers and takers,” to “if you’re not for us, you’re against us,” to the continual suggestion that we are soldiers in a constant series of wars—the war on women, the war on the family, the war on Christians, the war on Christmas, the war on terror, and much more—Christians are near the heart of enmity. The New Testament, however, seeks to create an alternative community—a community devoid of fear, wherein God’s love and acceptance are mediated to all people through the grace of Jesus. In Unarmed Empire, Sean Palmer reclaims the New Testament’s vision of the church as an alternative community of welcome, harmony, and peace. Unarmed Empire is for everyone who’s been misled about church. It’s for everyone who feels blacklisted by believers, everyone who has been hurt. It’s for everyone longing for a purer experience of church.

In today's world, the basic building blocks of a Christian world view are often missing in people's lives. To help fill in this missing information, The 52 Greatest Stories of the Bible presents a foundational, clear synthesis of the most significant narratives of the Bible along with the implications and applications of these interrelated stories. It presents the big story in such a way that it will: Connect the dots for readers of the Bible, demonstrating how each individual story is really one chapter in the larger story; Show how Jesus is the point of the story, especially his death and resurrection; and Build a biblical world view by showing the reader how the Bible answers the ultimate questions of life.

Don’t settle for less than what God can do. We often face situations in life that are hard. Whether it be a job loss, a difficult marriage, or problems with the kids—harsh storms come, and we can quickly feel overwhelmed, even desperate. In the beginning of creation, God entered the darkness and void and displayed his turnaround nature. He spoke words that turned darkness into light and filled the emptiness with fruitfulness. His turnaround power brought order into the chaos. In the same way, God enters our lives with the power of his turnaround ability and offers not just a slight improvement but a complete turn around. Turnarounds by their nature are radical. They bypass nice and sensible, they freak out the orderly, and they do not line up with agendas. But turnarounds reveal our miraculous Savior to a messed-up world. Using examples from her own life and those of biblical characters, international speaker and teacher Charlotte Gambill offers that God is more than just a little bit of help, he’s all the help; we need. It’s time for us to fully understand that there is nothing that God can’t turn around!

Parenting is about more than molding the behavior of our kids. It's about influencing a child's heart and mind. Hearts and Minds shows parents the most effective way to influence a child's heart. This book applies the principles of Christian worldview in How Now Shall We Live to the process of raising children. It deals with issues like educational choices, how to handle the teaching of non-Christian worldview in secular schools, and how Christian worldview informs parenting choices.

A Riveting Spiritual Thrill Ride Like most seasoned psychiatrists, Dr. Richard Johnson thought he'd heard it all. His assuredness falters when a first-time client arrives at his office and announces that he is God. Listening intently to the man, who is obviously suffering from severe psychosis, he agrees to take the case. What transpires over the course of the next nine sessions will test everything in the doctor's bag of tricks. As he struggles to unravel the client's illness before he becomes a danger to himself, a chilling series of coincidences and events cause him to question everything he thought he knew about himself, his place in the world, and life after death. Was their time together the revelations of divinity or the ramblings of a delusional? What's possible? You decide . . . Ten sessions. A lifetime of answers. Under normal circumstances, the province of psychotherapy is practiced privately. What is said behind closed doors remains there. The patient can sing like a bird, but the therapist is ethically and legally bound by confidentiality. I can truthfully say that in all my years of practice, I only gave up two patients. The first involved serious child abuse and the second concerned an individual who was imminently suicidal. These were clearly based on a duty to warn and protect. What you will read in these pages is the third breach of my silence and has nothing to do with legalities or ethics. It has to do with a patient whose initial claims represented the most elaborate and complex delusional system I've ever encountered. I was given express permission to tell the story in a public forum. Indeed, I was encouraged to.

Everyone knows about the immaculate conception and the crucifixion. But what happened to Jesus between the manger and the Sermon on the Mount? In this hilarious and bold novel, the acclaimed Christopher Moore shares the greatest story never told: the life of Christ as seen by his boyhood pal, Biff. Just what was Jesus doing during the many years that have gone unrecorded in the Bible? Biff was there at his side, and now after two thousand years, he shares those good, bad, ugly, and miraculous times. Screamingly funny, audaciously fresh, Lamb rivals the best of Tom Robbins and Carl Hiaasen, and is sure to please this gifted writer’s fans and win him legions more.

“A magnificent gift to those of us who love someone who has a mental illness…Earley has used his considerable skills to meticulously research why the mental health system is so profoundly broken.”—Bebe Moore Campbell, author of 72 Hour Hold Former Washington Post reporter Pete Earley had written extensively about the criminal justice system. But it was only when his own son—in the throes of a manic episode—broke into a neighbor's house that he learned what happens to mentally ill people who break a law. This is the Earley family's compelling story, a troubling look at bureaucratic apathy and the countless thousands who suffer confinement instead of care, brutal conditions instead of treatment, in the “revolving doors” between hospital and jail. With mass deinstitutionalization, large numbers of state mental patients are homeless or in jail-an experience little better than the horrors of a century ago. Earley takes us directly into that experience—and into that of a father and award-winning journalist trying to fight for a better way.

With his stunning debut novel, She's Come Undone, Wally Lamb won the adulation of critics and readers with his mesmerizing tale of one woman's painful yet triumphant journey of self-discovery. Now, this brilliantly talented writer returns with I Know This Much Is True, a heartbreaking and poignant multigenerational saga of the reproductive bonds of destruction and the powerful force of forgiveness. A masterpiece that breathtakingly tells a story of alienation and connection, power and abuse, devastation and renewal--this novel is a contemporary retelling of an ancient Hindu myth. A proud king must confront his demons to achieve salvation. Change yourself, the myth instructs, and you will inhabit a renovated world. When you're the same brother of a schizophrenic identical twin, the tricky thing about saving yourself is the blood it leaves on your bands--the little inconvenience of the look-alike corpse at your feet. And if you're into both survival of the fittest and being your brother's keeper--if you've promised your dying mother--then say so long to sleep and hello to the middle of the night. Grab a book or a beer. Get used to Letterman's gap-toothed smile of the absurd, or the view of the bedroom ceiling, or the influence of random selection. Take it from a godless insomniac. Take it from the uncrazy twin--the guy who beat the biochemical rap. Dominick Birdsey's entire life has been compromised and constricted by anger and fear, by the paranoid schizophrenic twin brother he both deeply loves and resents, and by the past they shared with their adoptive father, Ray, a spit-and-polish ex-Navy man (the five-foot-six-inch sleeping giant who snoozed upstairs weekdays in the spare room and built submarines at night), and their long-suffering mother, Concettina, a timid woman with a harelip that made her shy and self-conscious: She holds a loose fist to her face to cover her defective mouth--her perpetual apology to the world for a birth defect over which she'd had no control. Born in the waning moments of 1949 and the opening minutes of 1950, the twins are physical mirror images who grow into separate yet connected entities: the seemingly strong and protective yet fearful Dominick, his mother's watchful "monkey"; and the seemingly weak and sweet yet noble Thomas, his mother's gentle "bunny." From childhood, Dominick fights for both separation and wholeness--and ultimately self-protection--in a house of fear dominated by Ray, a bully who abuses his power over these stepsons whose biological father is a mystery. I was still afraid of his anger but saw how he punished weakness--pounced on it. Out of self-preservation I hid my fear, Dominick confesses. As for Thomas, he just never knew how to play defense. He just didn't get it. But Dominick's talent for survival comes at an enormous cost, including the breakup of his marriage to the warm, beautiful Dessa, whom he still loves. And it will be put to the ultimate test when Thomas, a Bible-spouting zealot, commits an unthinkable act that threatens the tenuous balance of both his and Dominick's lives. To save himself, Dominick must confront not only the pain of his past but the dark secrets he has locked deep within himself, and the sins of his ancestors--a quest that will lead him beyond the confines of his blue-collar New England town to the volcanic foothills of Sicily 's Mount Etna, where his ambitious and vengefully proud grandfather and a namesake Domenico Tempesta, the sostegno del famiglia, was born. Each of the stories Ma told us about Papa reinforced the message that he was the boss, that he ruled the roost, that what he said went. Searching for answers, Dominick turns to the whispers of the dead, to the pages of his grandfather's handwritten memoir, The History of Domenico Onofrio Tempesta, a Great Man from Humble Beginnings. Rendered with touches of magic realism, Domenico's fablelike tale--in which monkeys enchant and religious statues weep--becomes the old man's confession--an unwitting legacy of contrition that reveals the truth's of Domenico's life, Dominick learns that power, wrongly used, defeats the oppressor as well as the oppressed, and now, picking through the humble shards of his deconstructed life, he will search for the courage and love to forgive, to expiate his and his ancestors' transgressions, and finally to rebuild himself beyond the haunted shadow of his twin. Set against the vivid panoply of twentieth-century America and filled with richly drawn, memorable characters, this deeply moving and thoroughly satisfying novel brings to light humanity's deepest needs and fears, our aloneness, our desire for love and acceptance, our struggle to survive at all costs. Joyous, mystical, and exquisitely written, I Know This Much Is True is an extraordinary reading experience that will leave no reader untouched.