This is a poignant story of how a tenacious group of seven individuals from a Philadelphia church transformed a modest initiative to serve food to those with HIV/AIDS into a vibrant, interfaith nonprofit organization called Manna (Metropolitan AIDS Neighborhood Nutrition Alliance) -- and in the process, revitalized their community, themselves, and their church.The book describes ten life-giving lessons they experienced during Manna's early years. These universal lessons include: -- The greatest insights came from the most vulnerable in our midst-- The leaps of faith we took filled our spirits with vitality-- To thrive in the midst of massive turbulence required deep roots and radical shifts carefully timed-- Manna both sharpened and healed the tensions between race and social class-- The miraculous was contained within the mundaneThe book depicts how Manna overcame tremendous obstacles -- namely, fear and ignorance of AIDS and a lack of funding to accomplish benevolent goodness.

The University of Pennsylvania School of Social Policy and Practice is an acknowledged leader in cultivating theoretical and practical social work knowledge. Celebrating the School's centennial, this volume heralds the progressive thinking of its leaders and students while setting the stage for the next century of work at the frontier of the field. Following the School's approach, the book upholds the core values of social work: a clear understanding and respect for the past; analysis of current and professional issues; a vision of the future that reflects a commitment to social change; and the dissemination of knowledge on local, national, and global issues. The intellectual history of the School's founders, faculty, and students is reconstructed through an extensive collection of articles on a variety of social work themes that employ both data-based research and theoretical analysis. The volume contains key contributions from practitioners affiliated with the School, from the early pioneers in 1908 to recent alumni and current faculty in 2008. A Century of Social Work and Social Welfare at Penn will be an enduring resource for scholars and historians of social work and social welfare as well as a point of reference and pride for those influenced by the achievements of the School's faculty and students.

Preparing to lead a congregation in worship each Sunday is a pressure-filled responsibility. That's why busy worship planners will love this all-new edition of a perennial favorite CSS reference. This resource is easy to use, with several prayers and a worship theme relating to the assigned scriptural passages for every Sunday and major observance in Cycle A of the Revised Common Lectionary. For each First Lesson, Second Lesson, and Gospel text there's a call to worship, a collect, a prayer of confession, and suggested hymns. This complete collection offers a wide selection of practical aids for creating sincerely reverent, meaningful worship experiences.

This book is for young adults and their parents striving to navigate the turbulent waters of this transformational epoch. We are partway through a period of change that probably began when a young Albert Einstein penned on a scrappy piece of paper e=mc2. In time this will most likely be characterized as among the most significant in history, perhaps even more impactful than the Renaissance. One feature of this reformation is sure to be the development of a deep appreciation for the place of abundance in both nature and our lives. Today most people, organizations and communities describe their existence as a struggle to survive. Rarely does anyone report on how much they are thriving. That is strange because never before has humanity as a whole been so wealthy, so bathed in abundance. One reason is that most of contemporary life is governed by economic systems predicated on scarcity. Because it is not possible to make money unless there are natural or artificially-induced shortages, we are prone to reason about tradeoffs using a scarcity logic. As with every reformation, this era is both exciting and taxing. Once this transformation has taken root we will come to recognize that all of life is predicated on abundance. And with that realization we will begin to make major shifts in our thinking and our prioritizing. Of special import will be the addressing of an ancient folly that still haunts us. In his famous economic text Adam Smith signaled this dilemma by rhetorically asking why we assign zero monetary value to water, which is essential for all lives, but pay a small fortune for diamonds whose utility is purely symbolic? Economists have mostly ignored this issue, although the British fiscal maestro, Maynard Keynes did gratituously dub it the water-diamond paradox. Given the current socio-political complexities, the global world cannot possibly be sustained by an economic system based solely on scarcity. It needs to be augmented by a new financial infrastructure centered on abundance. As a precursor to this anticipated economic shift we face a large task, to develop a coherent and collective sense of abundance. This will take time. Since we already know a great deal about scarcity it seems wise to prepare for this evolutionary inevitability by learning to describe every-day events using the principles of abundance. Abundance is a way of seeing, a method of thinking, a form of emoting and a manner of intuiting. So is scarcity. Diamandis and Kotler, in their book Abundance, present a compelling and optimistic case that the future is better than we think. In the past people have treated shortages as evidence of scarcity and have spoken about abundance in terms of excesses. Such notions are now being re-conceptualized. Abundance involves balancing consumption and replenishment, decay and regeneration, expired pasts and future dreams. It also depends on the restrictions and regulatory actions of Yin-Yang-like rheostats. As with a pregnancy approaching full-term, when the confining function of scarcity subsides, the landscape of what-is-to-be emerges. In an artful way this book shows how everyday events can be experienced as either awash with abundance or burdened by scarcity. If we so chose, we can all be guided by a self-created and communally-sustained sense of abundance. Learning how to see the best and the worst of times with an abundance rather than a scarcity lens is the special gift of this book.

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. ... As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others." - Nelson Mandela, 1994 inaugural address Yearning for Home in Troubled Times addresses the issues that prevent us from feeling "at home" in our world. It examines this "homelessness" and shows us how to develop and build a sense of home.