This collection of 101 essays from some of today's most notable thinkers and leaders focuses on the large problems of society, as well as every day challenges, and encourages readers to envision a positive change. The essays explore the themes of peace, democracy, prosperity, racial harmony, ecology, and health, encouraging readers to find meaning in their own lives and share it with others.

Exploring the Bible's teaching on heaven Mitigating popular views of life after death Showing the joys of this wonderful doctrine

Key Bible verses, quotes from the book, reflective readings, and questions for self-discovery accompany the reader on the most crucial pilgrimage of all.

The future hope of heaven is pulled into the here-and-now in this illuminating description of the kingdom of God. Popular teacher and author R. Alan Streett exposes half-truths about the kingdom that many believers have unwittingly accepted. He contrasts these with the testimony of Scripture: Jesus inaugurated the kingdom of God on the earth—it has already begun. As ambassadors of the kingdom, we are to fulfill our responsibilities and enjoy its benefits here and now. Salvation does not culminate with the soul escaping the body and living forever in heaven. Our bodies will eventually be transformed, and we will live with God on a restored earth. The church is like an embassy of heaven in a foreign country. In their life together, believers demonstrate kingdom realities to the world. Readers will find hope and direction in this fresh presentation of the historic teaching on the kingdom.

6 lectures and an essay, 1919-1920 (CW 297) World War I destroyed the structures, values, and self-confidence that created the seeming greatness of the nineteenth century. In its place stood ruins and the shards of a civilization. In response to this, Emil Molt--the director of the Waldorf-Astoria Cigarette Factory and a student of Rudolf Steiner--decided to establish a school to educate people who could create a new culture. Thus, the Waldorf school movement was begun. Rudolf Steiner agreed to act as the school's consultant, and his insights guided the school in accomplishing this ambitious task. The goal of this education was that, through living inner work guided by the insights of Rudolf Steiner, the teachers would develop in the children such power of thought, depth of feeling, and strength of will that they would emerge from their school years as full members of the human community, able to meet and transform the world. These lectures occurred around the opening of the first Waldorf school. They serve as an excellent, inspiring introduction to Waldorf education as a whole. Here Steiner outlines--with freshness, immediacy, and excitement--the goals and intentions of a new form of education and speaks to parents of prospective students. He explains the school's guiding principles and describes how parents must participate, with understanding and interest, in the awakening of their children's creative forces so that a healthier society can come about. German sources: Die Waldorfschule und ihr Geist (GA 297); "Die pädagogische Zielsetzung der Waldorfschule in Stuttgart," from Soziale Zukunft, Feb. 1920 (GA 24).

You Can Help Bring Heaven to Earth God so loved the world, and he still does. He values his creation too much to destroy it. If you know where to look, you can see that the coming of a new heaven and a new earth already has begun. Life on earth is renewed every time you live out Jesus’s prayer that God’s ways will be followed on earth. The work of God’s Kingdom involves restoring what has been broken. This includes people, unjust systems, relationships, anything that has been separated from God and needs to be healed, reconciled, and set right. This is how heaven collides with earth—not following fiery destruction but in the power of restoring to life everything that God created. What you believe about God’s plan for humanity and for his creation determines how you will invest your life. God calls all of us to this renewing work. You can help bring heaven to earth, starting today.

So often, our view of the good life is the busy, exhausted, driven, and unhappy life. But what if there was a different way to live--now, not when we get to heaven, but now? A short list of “blessings” called the Beatitudes is Jesus’ declaration of what “the good life” is, and an invitation to immerse ourselves in it. If we understand the Beatitudes, we realize they are less about what we do and more about what God is doing--what God values, how he operates, and what’s he’s up to in our (actually his) world. Authors Seidman and Graves offer a practical guide to changing our course to realize the good life now.

This is an ascension manual heralding the golden age of enlightenment, activating the divinely intended plan of heaven on earth and restoring each being’s intended birthrights as divinely powerful, loving, and peace-conscious cocreators of heaven on earth, magically and easily, just for being. Only love is real.

"The search for the Promised Land took socialists in diverse directions: revolution, communes and kibbutzim, social democracy, communism, fascism, Third Worldism. But none of these paths led to the prophesied utopia. Nowhere did socialists succeed in creating societies of easy abundance or in midwifing the birth of a "New Man," as their theory promised. Some socialist governments abandoned their grandiose goals and satisfied themselves with making slight modifications to capitalism, while others plowed ahead doggedly, often inducing staggering human catastrophes. Then, after two hundred years of wishful thinking and fitful governance, socialism suddenly imploded in the 1990s in a fin du siecle drama of falling walls, collapsing regimes and frantic revisions of doctrine."--BOOK JACKET.

New York Times bestselling author John Eldredge offers readers a breathtaking look into God’s promise for a new heaven and a new earth. This revolutionary book about our future is based on the simple idea that, according to the Bible, heaven is not our eternal home--the New Earth is. As Jesus says in the gospel of Matthew, the next chapter of our story begins with "the renewal of all things," by which he means the earth we love in all its beauty, our own selves, and the things that make for a rich life: music, art, food, laughter and all that we hold dear. Everything shall be renewed "when the world is made new." More than anything else, how you envision your future shapes your current experience. If you knew that God was going to restore your life and everything you love any day; if you believed a great and glorious goodness was coming to you--not in a vague heaven but right here on this earth--you would have a hope to see you through anything, an anchor for your soul, "an unbreakable spiritual lifeline, reaching past all appearances right to the very presence of God" (Hebrews 6:19). Most Christians (most people for that matter) fail to look forward to their future because their view of heaven is vague, religious, and frankly boring. Hope begins when we understand that for the believer nothing is lost. Heaven is not a life in the clouds; it is not endless harp-strumming or worship-singing. Rather, the life we long for, the paradise Adam and Eve knew, is precisely the life that is coming to us. And that life is coming soon.