In Mandate to Difference, renowned theologian Walter Brueggemann sets forth a new vision of the Christian church in today's world. Based on speaking engagements surrounding his critical passion and conviction that the church in this moment must set itself in tension with the rest of the world, these essays call the church to courageously defy political polarization, consumerism, and militarism.

Examining democracies from a comparative perspective helps us better understand why politics—or “who gets what, when, and how”—differs among democracies. In American Difference: American Politics from a Comparative Perspective, authors Lori M. Poloni-Staudinger and Michael R. Wolf take the reader through different aspects of democracy—political culture, institutions, interest groups, political parties and elections—and explore how the US is both different from and similar to other democracies. Used in conjunction with a textbook for courses in Introduction to American Politics, Introduction to Comparative Politics, or Introduction to Politics, this book will provide additional context and deepen students’ understanding of key political concepts.

Starting in the 1990s, San Francisco launched a series of bold but relatively unknown public policy experiments to improve wages and benefits for thousands of local workers. Since then, scholars have documented the effects of those policies on compensation, productivity, job creation, and health coverage. Opponents predicted a range of negative impacts, but the evidence tells a decidedly different tale. This book brings together that evidence for the first time, reviews it as a whole, and considers its lessons for local, state, and federal policymakers.

In this book, Richard D. Phillips cuts through the cultural confusion, highlights Gods mandate for men, and encourages readers to join him on a journey of repentance and renewal. Phillips begins in the Garden of Eden, drawing foundational teaching for men from the earliest chapters of Gods Word. This is teaching that reaches into all of life. Christian men today need to examine their hearts and embrace their God-given mandate. Only then will they be able to recognize their high calling, and by Gods grace, serve faithfully in whatever context God has placed them.

Yes, it makes a lot of sense. This paper studies how to design simple loss functions for central banks, as parsimonious approximations to social welfare. We show, both analytically and quantitatively, that simple loss functions should feature a high weight on measures of economic activity, sometimes even larger than the weight on inflation. Two main factors drive our result. First, stabilizing economic activity also stabilizes other welfare relevant variables. Second, the estimated model features mitigated inflation distortions due to a low elasticity of substitution between monopolistic goods and a low interest rate sensitivity of demand. The result holds up in the presence of measurement errors, with large shocks that generate a trade-off between stabilizing inflation and resource utilization, and also when ensuring a low probability of hitting the zero lower bound on interest rates.