From the outside, it seems like Sam Davis has it all: a successful actress, singer, and songwriter, she's earned the respect and adoration of Hollywood and legions of fans. But her parents' recent deaths have left her devastated and with the responsibility of raising her elevenyear-old brother. Not to mention the return of her childhood love, who's come back to town intent on picking up where they left off. While her career is taking off, it appears as if Sam's personal life is falling apart. Danny Gallo, famous movie star, director, and producer - charming and gallant - sweeps Sam off her feet and teaches her about love, trust, and faith. But trusting Danny with her tragic past is not easy for Sam, and she can't help but push him away. Leaning on her friends, Sam tries to heal her heart. But in the face of such unspeakable grief and loss, will Sam be able to let her guard down and finally trust again?...

A teenage girl wonders if she's inherited more than just a heart from her donor in this compulsively readable debut. Seventeen-year-old Chloe had a plan: work hard, get good grades, and attend a top-tier college. But after she collapses during cross-country practice and is told that she needs a new heart, all her careful preparations are laid to waste. Eight months after her transplant, everything is different. Stuck in summer school with the underachievers, all she wants to do now is grab her surfboard and hit the waves--which is strange, because she wasn't interested in surfing before her transplant. (It doesn't hurt that her instructor, Kai, is seriously good-looking.) And that's not all that's strange. There's also the vivid recurring nightmare about crashing a motorcycle in a tunnel and memories of people and places she doesn't recognize. Is there something wrong with her head now, too, or is there another explanation for what she's experiencing? As she searches for answers, and as her attraction to Kai intensifies, what she learns will lead her to question everything she thought she knew--about life, death, love, identity, and the true nature of reality.

Dr Francis S. Collins, head of the Human Genome Project, is one of the world's leading scientists, working at the cutting edge of the study of DNA, the code of life. Yet he is also a man of unshakable faith in God. How does he reconcile the seemingly unreconcilable? In THE LANGUAGE OF GOD he explains his own journey from atheism to faith, and then takes the reader on a stunning tour of modern science to show that physics, chemistry and biology -- indeed, reason itself -- are not incompatible with belief. His book is essential reading for anyone who wonders about the deepest questions of all: why are we here? How did we get here? And what does life mean?

Find lasting freedom from difficult emotions with skills grounded in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and emotional schema therapy. If you struggle with difficult emotions, you should know that you aren’t alone. Many people feel sad, worried, or stressed out—whether as a result of depression, anxiety, or simply dealing with the common struggles of daily life. Emotions are a natural and healthy part of being human. It’s how we cope with these difficult emotions that reveal our true capacity for happiness, love, and joy. Don’t Believe Everything You Feel offers a groundbreaking approach blending CBT and emotional schema therapy to help you explore your own deeply held personal beliefs about emotions, determine if these beliefs are helpful or harmful, and find the motivation to adopt alternative, healthier coping strategies. Each chapter contains exercises such as self-assessment, expressive writing, or guided questioning to help you manage your emotions more productively. There’s no such thing as a “bad,” emotion. But if you’re experiencing sadness, anger, or anxiety most of the time, you need to find balance. This book will show you how to better cope with your emotions and live a full, meaningful life.

If you are an Expert, professional, bureaucrat, teacher, professor, Democrat or Republican, liberal, progressive or conservative, consider yourself in any way in the educated classes, the odds are high that everything you believe is wrong. Not everything. Not simple things. Only the most important things. If you are in the majority, then a great deal of what you hold true about the world and of life is false. Here is a small sample of things that majority of educated believe are false, but which are instead true: Science cannot answer every question put to it; It is not always right to correct a wrong; There is no wisdom in crowds; A consensus among elite academics does not prove the belief of the elite academics is true; That you are offended is irrelevant to whether a proposition is true or false; Defining yourself as your sexual desire is nonsensical; Voting does not make the majority position right and the minority position wrong; Voting is a leading cause of discord; Democracy is rarely to be desired; You cannot choose to believe you do not have free will; God exists. These are only some of the ideas and arguments explored in this book. The majority, and that means likely you, are wrong about all of them. This is no idle claim. It will be proved chapter by chapter. Every bad or invalid or unsound argument contains a fallacy or mistake in thinking. Nobody knows the complete list of ways thought can go wrong, and it has even been surmised such a list is endless. History supports this contention. There is ample reason to believe the human race is congenitally insane. Some mistakes are more common than others. Every age has its own favorite forays into fiction, driven by fashion, fad, and fantasy, all of which are enforced by the culture's self-appointed Watchers. The balance of truth versus error shifts in time, yet the current age is more eager than average to ferret away any shiny object it finds and call it precious. Fallacies therefore have tremendous inertia. Some mental misconstructions are permanent fixtures. I have evocative and memorable nicknames, at least for speakers of English, of the most popular and important fallacies of our day. We step through each, showing how it is false. Here are just a few of our age's favorite fallacies: Controversial Fallacy, Non-Fallacy Fallacy, Appeal to Non-Authority, So Yer's Old Man, Bluff & Bluster Fallacy, You Bigot Fallacy, Hate Speech Fallacy, Bureaucrat Fallacy, One True Spartacus Fallacy, Wisdom of Crowds Fallacy, I Can't See Another Way Fallacy; many, many others, including the ever-popular Meta Fallacy. This is a fallacy that says a thing is true because it is a fallacy. Strange as it seems, it is most convincing. More at https: //wmbriggs.com

Hans Kung is one of the most celebrated theologians of the present day. His audience, which is strong within his own Roman Catholic Church, is equally solid among Christians of other denominations, among those outside the churches and indeed among those at the frontiers of organised religion. From the start, he has been a rebel, being Swiss and a lover of personal freedom. Many of his books such as Infallible? and On Being a Christian have rocked the Papal boat. Now after publishing two magnificent and acclaimed volumes of memoirs, Kung has written a much shorter and more personal book to explain his own beliefs. If one sets aside all scientific knowledge and learning, all formal theological language and the skilful construction of theories, what remains as the core of faith? What do we need for our lives? What is indispensable to us? Kung writes of trust in life, joy in life and suffering in life and in so doing gives us a summa of his own faith - and life.

It can be hard for those of us living in the twenty-first century to see how fourteenth-century Buddhist teachings still apply. When you’re trying to figure out which cell phone plan to buy or brooding about something someone wrote about you on Facebook, lines like “While the enemy of your own anger is unsubdued, though you conquer external foes, they will only increase” can seem a little obscure. Thubten Chodron’s illuminating explication of Togmay Zangpo’s revered text, The Thirty-seven Practices of Bodhisattvas, doesn’t just explain its profound meaning; in dozens of passages she lets her students and colleagues share first-person stories of the ways that its teachings have changed their lives. Some bear witness to dramatic transformations—making friends with an enemy prisoner-of-war, finding peace after the murder of a loved one—while others tell of smaller lessons, like waiting for something to happen or coping with a minor injury.

A fascinating introduction to the world of religion. Why are we here? What happens after we die? What Do You Believe?unpacks the big questions about life, God, morality and science vs. religion, presenting faith and religion in a totally unbiased way, allowing children to better understand some of the challenging questions we face today. Tracing the history of religion around the world and charting key events and theories, this book helps us to understand the motivation behind beliefs and why some people do or don't have faith. Tricky concepts are explained and broken down into manageable chunks, with clear, curriculum-based information, What Do You Believe?promotes understanding, tolerance and respect for people whatever they believe.

In 550 BC, or thereabouts, Buddha stated “I am the sum total of everything I thought”. This was divine wisdom that is inspiration for the book’s title; The Truth is what YOU Believe. Everything you think is based on a process of thought reaching a conclusion that becomes exactly what you are, as you traverse the complexities and opportunities of your life. The Truth of Religion reviews the position of the major Religions and influences they have in societies globally today, and how technological/social giants like Google, Facebook and YouTube threaten the loyalty to religion, and the values that came with those belief systems. The Truth of Sport examines whether money and greed have overtaken human integrity. Does the end justify the means today? The original endeavour of competitive sport started with the purest of ideologies in the Olympics rebirth in Greece in 1896 and is in stark contrast to the drug ridden corrupt fiasco that is prevalent in many professional sports today. Discover what makes top athletes really tick. If there are no rules there is no discernible truth. The section on the Truth of Business looks at how creating credibility in every moment of a company’s existence is the key ingredient to success and importantly how the leader and structure play a part. Commitment to strong ideals is paramount. Weak people tend to accept, and are happy to exist in a world of lies, as it is often easier and cheaper to delude yourself than confront reality head on. How people from all walks of life deal with the adversity of relationship failure and how absolutely critical the truth is, in all your relationships, is uncovered in its barest form in the Truth of Relationships. After the first betrayal, you have nothing. Living a true life means you will always have your integrity, a value beyond compare.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “A meditation on sense-making when there’s no sense to be made, on letting go when we can’t hold on, and on being unafraid even when we’re terrified.”—Lucy Kalanithi “Belongs on the shelf alongside other terrific books about this difficult subject, like Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air and Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal.”—Bill Gates NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY REAL SIMPLE Kate Bowler is a professor at Duke Divinity School with a modest Christian upbringing, but she specializes in the study of the prosperity gospel, a creed that sees fortune as a blessing from God and misfortune as a mark of God’s disapproval. At thirty-five, everything in her life seems to point toward “blessing.” She is thriving in her job, married to her high school sweetheart, and loves life with her newborn son. Then she is diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer. The prospect of her own mortality forces Kate to realize that she has been tacitly subscribing to the prosperity gospel, living with the conviction that she can control the shape of her life with “a surge of determination.” Even as this type of Christianity celebrates the American can-do spirit, it implies that if you “can’t do” and succumb to illness or misfortune, you are a failure. Kate is very sick, and no amount of positive thinking will shrink her tumors. What does it mean to die, she wonders, in a society that insists everything happens for a reason? Kate is stripped of this certainty only to discover that without it, life is hard but beautiful in a way it never has been before. Frank and funny, dark and wise, Kate Bowler pulls the reader deeply into her life in an account she populates affectionately with a colorful, often hilarious retinue of friends, mega-church preachers, relatives, and doctors. Everything Happens for a Reason tells her story, offering up her irreverent, hard-won observations on dying and the ways it has taught her to live. Praise for Everything Happens for a Reason “I fell hard and fast for Kate Bowler. Her writing is naked, elegant, and gripping—she’s like a Christian Joan Didion. I left Kate’s story feeling more present, more grateful, and a hell of a lot less alone. And what else is art for?”—Glennon Doyle, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Love Warrior and president of Together Rising