With 1.2 billion members, the Catholic Church is the world's largest organization and perhaps its most controversial. The Church's obstinacy on matters like clerical celibacy, the role of women, birth control, and the child abuse scandal has alienated many Catholics, especially in the West. Yet in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the Church is highly esteemed for its support of education, health, and social justice. In this deeply informed book, Robert Calderisi unravels the paradoxes of the Catholic Church's role in the developing world over the past 60 years. Has the Catholic Church on balance been a force for good? Calderisi weighs the Church's various missteps and poor decisions against its positive contributions, looking back as far as the Spanish Conquest in Latin America and the arrival of missionaries in Africa and Asia. He also looks forward, highlighting difficult issues that threaten to disrupt the Church's future social role. The author's answer to the question he poses will fascinate Catholic and non-Catholic readers alike, providing a wealth of insights into international affairs, development economics, humanitarian concerns, history, and theology.

A lively investigation of the Catholic Church and its controversial social mission in the developing world

The saving mission of Jesus constitutes the foundation for Christian mission, and the Christian gospel is its message. This second edition of a classic NSBT volume emphasizes how the Bible presents a continuing narrative of God's mission, providing a robust historical and chronological backbone to the unfolding of the early Christian mission.

In Jesus' walk to the cross and His subsequent resurrection, Dawson McAllister says, Jesus paid for our sins and gave hope and meaning to our lives; but in order to fully appreciate and apply these exciting truths, Christians must grasp the full significance of Christ's life and ministry. In looking more closely at the walk Christ took to the cross both literally and figuratively, readers will come to a dramatic and life-changing understanding of the great sacrifice Jesus made. Offering readers a startling and powerful look at the Passion, A Walk with Christ to the Cross is a pivotal read: those who take it to heart will never be the same.

It is 2058. Rebecca, a widow, receives an invitation to leave Earth and start over, but nature has evolved and is tagging along for the ride. Earthly Bodies is a dystopian eco-horror story that spans the ages, where strangers reveal their contribution to an extraordinary act of survival. An artist ahead of his time crafts a new way of painting portraits, causing outcry and claims of heresy. A military man becomes obsessed with growing something he found on manoeuvres far from home. A lonely geneticist helps her brother with his plan to save humanity; secretly selecting humans to join a mission and escape a ravaged Earth. Rebecca seeks a fresh start, away from her devastating loss. Harmony with Nature is everyone's wish, it's time to be careful what you wish for. Readers of speculative fiction and feminist horror will enjoy this novel. This book echoes the visionary environmental scope of The Overstory and Annihilation, with the horror of Naomi Booth's Sealed, and a structure more like Station Eleven

A feminist approach to the Anthropocene that recovers the relevance of sensation and phenomenology. Earthly Encounters develops a fuller account of the lived experience of racialized gender formation as it exists on this planet, earth. It analyzes sensations: the chill of winter, the warm embrace of the wind, the feeling of being immersed in water, and a stifling sense of containment. Through this analysis in settler colonial and colonial contexts, in twentieth-century North America and Africa, Stephanie D. Clare shows how sensation is unevenly distributed within social worlds and productive of racial, national, and gendered subjectivities. From revealing the relevance of phenomenology, especially in the writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Frantz Fanon, to debates concerning new materialism and affect theory, Clare shows how the phenomenology of race and gender must consider both the production of the body-subject and the environment. She concludes by making a case for the continued significance of sensation in the context of the Anthropocene. “This book charts a course that is simultaneously materialist and attentive to the politics of representation. It aims to hold on to the legacy of feminist theory and to develop a queer political strategy that on the one hand gives an account of the earth as an active, living organism and, on the other hand, holds on to the critique of the politics of representation.”— Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky, Ruhr-Universität Bochum

In Placing Outer Space Lisa Messeri traces how the place-making practices of planetary scientists transform the void of space into a cosmos filled with worlds that can be known and explored. Making planets into places is central to the daily practices and professional identities of the astronomers, geologists, and computer scientists Messeri studies. She takes readers to the Mars Desert Research Station and a NASA research center to discuss ways scientists experience and map Mars. At a Chilean observatory and in MIT's labs she describes how they discover exoplanets and envision what it would be like to inhabit them. Today’s planetary science reveals the universe as densely inhabited by evocative worlds, which in turn tells us more about Earth, ourselves, and our place in the universe.

Top-selling author Scott returns with his third blockbuster book on Jesus. This time, he shows readers exactly what Jesus wants from their lives. Christ completed 27 missions while on Earth; now readers can take up the four he assigned to them.

Contact between Islam and the West is 1400 years old. Both sides have had more than adequate time to become familiar with the other. Yet the world is still arguing about Islam’s teachings. Is Islam peaceful? Does it commend violence? Does Islam respect “the other”? Does Islam abuse women? Is Islam anti-Semitic? Does Islam teach the Torment of the Grave? Does Islam recommend the beating of wives? Do Muslim Scriptures commend Temporary Marriage of Pleasure? Did Zayd divorce Zaynab because he had no further need of her? All these questions are easy to settle for anyone who can read Islamic Scripture in Arabic. The author of this book is such a person. However, to answer all these questions in the affirmative would do the image of Islam much damage in the West, where Islam is keen to present a polished image, especially in the light of much violence committed in its name against westerners. Muslim leaders, and their allies in the West, have popularised a distinction between Muslims and Islamists, in order to distance Islam from thousands of heinous Muslim crimes such as the Charlie Hebdo massacre. Are the English translations of the Qur’an faithful to the original Arabic? Or are they part of the charm offensive Muslim Petro-dollars have financed for years, through sponsorship of university departments of Islamic studies, investing in western media and publishing, building Islamic centres and financing Islamic societies and pressure groups throughout the West. This work gives English readers the ability to access the original Arabic of the Qur’an and hadith, and see the true face of Islam, without its face powder. It is hoped that this work will assist free thinkers to form their own opinion of Islam, based on the true Qur’an, without interference from Muslim propaganda or any agenda driven discourses.