After witnessing a terrifying spaceship that traveled from Mars, Nadya Cohan is haunted by her childhood memories when she starts having strange nightmares and flashbacks about alien abduction that she's unsure are just symptoms of false memory syndrome or an actual past experience. Marius Hayden, a mysterious man who appears after the incident just three weeks later, leaves Nadya in suspense. Nadya knows he's beyond different and, before long, starts having doubts that Marius is even human but instead an alien that she somehow develops emotions for. Strangely, Marius is attracted to her but thinks it was nothing more but a phase that will pass. Time passes on, and their trust is built stronger, and what is only left to explore is a forbidden divine love. The couple is aware that they could become the target to the treacherous government's plans if the relationship were to ever be discovered, and Marius is devastated to make a heartbreaking decision that will leave both lovers in turmoil of uncertainly that will only lead them down a road of destruction and affliction. Nadya must come to terms to the harsh reality of her own consequences by reckless decisions when she is forced to divulge the very secrecy that will become her new life.

The cross stirs intense feelings among Christians as well as non-Christians. Robin Jensen takes readers on an intellectual and spiritual journey through the two-thousand-year evolution of the cross as an idea and an artifact, illuminating the controversies—along with the forms of devotion—this central symbol of Christianity inspires. Jesus’s death on the cross posed a dilemma for Saint Paul and the early Church fathers. Crucifixion was a humiliating form of execution reserved for slaves and criminals. How could their messiah and savior have been subjected to such an ignominious death? Wrestling with this paradox, they reimagined the cross as a triumphant expression of Christ’s sacrificial love and miraculous resurrection. Over time, the symbol’s transformation raised myriad doctrinal questions, particularly about the crucifix—the cross with the figure of Christ—and whether it should emphasize Jesus’s suffering or his glorification. How should Jesus’s body be depicted: alive or dead, naked or dressed? Should it be shown at all? Jensen’s wide-ranging study focuses on the cross in painting and literature, the quest for the “true cross” in Jerusalem, and the symbol’s role in conflicts from the Crusades to wars of colonial conquest. The Cross also reveals how Jews and Muslims viewed the most sacred of all Christian emblems and explains its role in public life in the West today.

Why should the cross--an object of Roman distaste and Jewish disgust--be the emblem of our worship and the axiom of our faith? And what does it mean for us today? In this thoughtful, comprehensive study of Scripture, tradition and the modern world, John R. W. Stott brings you face to face with the centrality of the cross in God's plan of redemption.