God uses diverse friendships to fulfill his miraculous will in the world. In an increasingly polarized world, our collective ability to navigate friendships with people whose backgrounds, experiences, and views differ from our own has diminished. Along the way, valuing diversity has come to be seen by many Christians as a secular pursuit. However, we love and serve a diverse God (being three unique persons himself) who taught us to love those we tend to have a hard time loving: outsiders, enemies, foreigners, the poor, and the weak. In Friendship Can Save the World, Carrie and Morgan Stephens offer an invigorating retelling of Ruth, Boaz, and Naomi to help us love people unlike us. Weaving in real life stories from their multiethnic, multigenerational, and socioeconomically diverse church, they highlight the power of unique friendships in God’s greater missional story. Readers will find inspiration to love and be loved more courageously as we all forge a path into a more redemptive future.

With the constant connectivity of today’s world, it’s never been easier to meet people and make new friends, but it’s also never been harder to form meaningful friendships. In Frientimacy, award-winning speaker Shasta Nelson shows how anyone can form stronger, more meaningful friendships, marked by a level of trust she calls "frientimacy.” Shasta explores the most common complaints and conflicts facing female friendships today, and lays out strategies for overcoming these pitfalls to create deeper, supportive relationships that last for the long-term. Shasta is the founder of girlfriendcircles.com, a community of women seeking stronger, more fulfilling friendships, and the author of Friendships Don’t Just Happen. In Frientimacy, she teaches readers to reject the impulse to pull away from friendships that aren’t instantly and constantly gratifying. With a warm, engaging, and inspiring voice, she shows how friendships built on dedication and commitment can lead to enriched relationships, stronger and more meaningful ties, and an overall increase in mental health. Frientimacy is more than just a call for deeper connection between friends; it’s a blueprint for turning simple friendships into true bonds and for the meaningful and satisfying relationships that come with them.

Zahnd issues a challenge to Christians to discover new vitality through re-envisioning, reimagining, and reforming the church according to the pattern of the cruciform. Using stories from the lives of St. Francis of Assisi and from his own life, he teaches believers to stay on the journey to discover the kingdom of God in a fuller, richer way.

Here is the first book in an exciting new four-book series for younger readers featuring the beloved Zen panda, Stillwater -- star of the Caldecott Honor Book and New York Times bestseller, Zen Shorts, and of the Peabody Award and Emmy Award-winning Apple+ TV series. A Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection "Today feels full of opportunities," said Stillwater. "What would you like to do?" "Something important!" said his nephew, Koo. "Let us save the world!" But that's such a big job. The world is so big. And Koo is just a small panda. During the course of the day, Koo straightens his room, feeds his cat and the hungry fish outside, and he bakes a cake to welcome new neighbors. He even helps a family of ducklings to safely cross a street. But still, Koo wonders, how will HE ever save the world? At the end of the day, Uncle Stillwater has the answer: "You did so many things today that made the world a better place. And each time you do the right thing--you save the world a little bit." In a story brimming with love and light, Jon J Muth shows how we can all heal the world a little bit at a time -- just the right message for now -- and always!

You can go after the job you want…and get it! You can take the job you have…and improve it! You can take any situation you’re in…and make it work for you! Since its release in 1936, How to Win Friends and Influence People has sold more than 30 million copies. Dale Carnegie’s first book is a timeless bestseller, packed with rock-solid advice that has carried thousands of now famous people up the ladder of success in their business and personal lives. As relevant as ever before, Dale Carnegie’s principles endure, and will help you achieve your maximum potential in the complex and competitive modern age. Learn the six ways to make people like you, the twelve ways to win people to your way of thinking, and the nine ways to change people without arousing resentment.

Friendships are like flowers. If you take care of them, they grow and bloom until you have a beautiful garden! The Little Book of Friendship shows young readers what they need to know to make a friend and to be one too.

Can something as simple as friendship have a transformative impact in a divided world? Through a series of richly textured historical portraits and reflections on personal experience, this book shows that boundary-crossing friendships in Christian mission have shaped theologies, built organizations and partnerships, facilitated mission work, and changed attitudes and ways of thinking. This is true in settings as varied as eighteenth-century French women’s work, twentieth-century urban Boston, colonial India, the Jim Crow South, and twentieth-century rural Congo. In all these settings and more, friendship has mattered. Boundary-crossing friendships are, however, not easy. Despite their power, such friendships are complicated by race, gender, ability, class, nationality, and other elements of identity, as this book also demonstrates. Friendships are not immune from the divisions in the world, nor a simple cure-all for them. Still, friendship stands as a powerful testimony to the gospel. Therefore, the book calls for more attention to friendship in the study of mission history and more living out of friendship as a practice of mission. In this way, this book pays honor to Dr. Dana L. Robert as a pre-eminent mission scholar and exemplary friend and mentor to others in the fields of missiology and world Christianity.

Discover the unexpected ways friends influence our personalities, choices, emotions, and even physical health in this fun and compelling examination of friendship, based on the latest scientific research and ever-relatable anecdotes. Why is dinner with friends often more laughter filled and less fraught than a meal with family? Although some say it’s because we choose our friends, it’s also because we expect less of them than we do of relatives. While we’re busy scrutinizing our romantic relationships and family dramas, our friends are quietly but strongly influencing everything from the articles we read to our weight fluctuations, from our sex lives to our overall happiness levels. Evolutionary psychologists have long theorized that friendship has roots in our early dependence on others for survival. These days, we still cherish friends but tend to undervalue their role in our lives. However, the skills one needs to make good friends are among the very skills that lead to success in life, and scientific research has recently exploded with insights about the meaningful and enduring ways friendships influence us. With people marrying later—and often not at all—and more families having just one child, these relationships may be gaining in importance. The evidence even suggests that at times friends have a greater hand in our development and well-being than do our romantic partners and relatives. Friends see each other through the process of growing up, shape each other’s interests and outlooks, and, painful though it may be, expose each other’s rough edges. Childhood and adolescence, in particular, are marked by the need to create distance between oneself and one’s parents while forging a unique identity within a group of peers, but friends continue to influence us, in ways big and small, straight through old age. Perpetually busy parents who turn to friends—for intellectual stimulation, emotional support, and a good dose of merriment—find a perfect outlet to relieve the pressures of raising children. In the office setting, talking to a friend for just a few minutes can temporarily boost one’s memory. While we romanticize the idea of the lone genius, friendship often spurs creativity in the arts and sciences. And in recent studies, having close friends was found to reduce a person’s risk of death from breast cancer and coronary disease, while having a spouse was not. Friendfluence surveys online-only pals, friend breakups, the power of social networks, envy, peer pressure, the dark side of amicable ties, and many other varieties of friendship. Told with warmth, scientific rigor, and a dash of humor, Friendfluence not only illuminates and interprets the science but draws on clinical psychology and philosophy to help readers evaluate and navigate their own important friendships.

God wants to use you right where you are. Jesus' command to "go and make disciples" can feel complicated and overwhelming. Do you wonder where to start, what it looks like, and how to fit this making-disciples thing into your busy schedule? You're not alone. Drawing on cutting-edge research from The Navigators and Barna Group, Alice Matagora invites you to enter Jesus' plan to save the world wherever you are. She understands your anxieties (because she's experienced them) and helps you to break down barriers, pointing you to the joy of engaged discipleship: knowing Christ, making him known, and helping others do the same. Her book includes plenty of support to equip you right where you are today! Scripture woven throughout to encourage you fascinating data based on Barna's disciplemaking research questions for deeper reflection at the end of each chapter seven relatable case studies of "everyday disciplemakers" No matter who you are, what you do, or where you are in your disciplemaking journey, How to Save the World will help you find joy and confidence as you discover practical ways to share your faith as you join God in saving the world right where you live.

Our best friends, Twitter followers, gal-pals, bromances, Facebook friends, and long distance buddies define us in ways we rarely openly acknowledge. But as a society, we are simultaneously terrified of being alone and already desperately lonely. We move through life in packs and friendship circles and yet, in the most interconnected age, we are stuck in the greatest loneliness epidemic of our time. It's killing us, making us miserable and causing a public health crisis. Increasingly, we don’t just die alone; we die because we are alone. What if meaningful friendships are the solution?Journalist Kate Leaver believes that friendship is the essential cure for the modern malaise of solitude, ill health, and anxiety and that, if we only treated camaraderie as a social priority, it could affect everything from our physical health and emotional well being. Her much-anticipated manifesto, The Friendship Cure, looks at what friendship means, how it can survive, why we need it, and what we can do to get the most from it. Why do some friendships last a lifetime, while others are only temporary? How do you “break up†? with a toxic friend? How do you make friends as an adult? Can men and women really be platonic? What are the curative qualities of friendship, and how we can deploy friendship to actually live longer, better lives?From behavioral scientists to besties, Kate draws upon the extraordinary research from academics, scientists, and psychotherapists, and stories from friends of friends, strangers from the Internet, and her “squad†? to get to the bottom of these and other facets of friendship. For readers of Susan Cain’s Quiet and Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic, The Friendship Cure is a fascinating blend of accessible “smart thinking,†? investigative journalism, pop culture, and memoir for anyone trying to navigate this lonely world, written with the wit, charm, and bite of a fresh voice.