A lonely mouse living in a church with only a friendly, sleepy cat for company, devises a plan to get all the mice in town to move in with him.

Curl up with this cosy story and rediscover Graham Oakley's classic series. After hopeless attempts to raise money for the Christmas party, Arthur, Humphrey and Sampson decide to raise the mice's spirits by dressing up as Father Christmas and his reindeer. Little do they know that their actions will lead to the capture of a burglar and a reward hamper filled with all a mouse could ever dream of!

A wonderful story of good versus evil set in amongst the church mice and their friend the church cat, Sampson. Good wins through; the rats come to a very sticky end (finding a new home in a glue factory) and the church mice and Sampson get their home back. Other titles in the series won the New York Times Best Illustrated Children's Book award and were nominated for the Kate Greenaway Medal. AGES: 5 and up AUTHOR: Graham Oakley started illustrating books in the late 1950s, and became a full time author and illustrator after leaving his position as a set designer at the BBC. In 1972 he published 'The Church Mouse', the first title in this highly successful series. SELLING POINTS: * 'The Church Mice Adrift' won New York Times Best Illustrated Children's Book * Series nominated for two Kate Greenaway medals ('The Church Mice Adrift' and 'The Church Mice in Action') * Appeals to existing fans as well as a whole new generation

Midnight Louie and his human companion, Temple Barr try to discover who is trying to wreck the annual las Vegas cat show, and prevent mass cat murder.

International best-selling author and theologian Tomáš Halík shares for the first time the dramatic story of his life as a secretly ordained priest in Communist Czechoslovakia. Inspired by Augustine's candid presentation of his own life, Halík writes about his spiritual journey within a framework of philosophical theology; his work has been compared to that of C. S. Lewis, Thomas Merton, and Henri Nouwen. Born in Prague in 1948, Halík spent his childhood under Stalinism. He describes his conversion to Christianity during the time of communist persecution of the church, his secret study of theology, and secret priesthood ordination in East Germany (even his mother was not allowed to know that her son was a priest). Halík speaks candidly of his doubts and crises of faith as well as of his conflicts within the church. He worked as a psychotherapist for over a decade and, at the same time, was active in the underground church and in the dissident movement with the legendary Cardinal Tomášek and Václav Havel, who proposed Halík as his successor to the Czech presidency. Since the fall of the regime, Halík has served as general secretary to the Czech Conference of Bishops and was an advisor to John Paul II and Václav Havel. Woven throughout Halík’s story is the turbulent history of the church and society in the heart of Europe: the 1968 Prague Spring, the occupation of Czechoslovakia, the self-immolation of his classmate Jan Palach, the “flying university,” the 1989 Velvet Revolution, and the difficult transition from totalitarian communist regime to democracy. Tomáš Halík was a direct witness to many of these events, and he provides valuable testimony about the backdrop of political events and personal memories of the key figures of that time. This volume is a must-read for anyone interested in Halík and the church as it was behind the Iron Curtain, as well as in where the church as a whole is headed today.

With the plight of escalating numbers of refugees around the world growing more desperate every year, the American religious organizations dedicated to helping them are faced with an increasingly complicated relationship with the U.S. government. In this groundbreaking new book, J. Bruce Nichols uncovers some disturbing facts and trends to demonstrate that the traditional separation of church and state in this country is not easily applied to the conduct of American foreign policy. Government has become increasingly dependent on the services of religious relief agencies for the implementation of refugee assistance. These agencies are for their part equally dependent on the government for funds, for strategic assistance, and for the freedom to function in many parts of the world. National security and foreign policy considerations often overwhelm humanitarian concerns. A number of hard questions emerge. Do certain religious groups receive preferential treatment for political reasons? Is the church/state relationship abroad compatible with constitutional guarantees of religious freedom? Have the refugees--and the religious groups helping them--become mere political pawns in the global power struggle? After reviewing the history of U.S. government relations with religious relief agencies, the author closely examines three politically explosive refugee situations: Honduras, Thailand, and the Sudan. As the Sanctuary trials in the United States have demonstrated, treatment of Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees has been greatly complicated by the conflicting attitudes of liberal religious groups and the U.S. and Honduran governments. By contrast, an evangelical group working with Laotian refugees in Thailand found itself inadvertently embroiled in U.S. policy debates over Laos and Vietnam. While in the Sudan, Nichols discovers close ties between religious relief organizations and the U.S. government in the surreptitious and extra-legal manueverings to remove the Falashas (Ethiopian Jews) to Israel. Nichols concludes that increasing political and moral disagreement between the government and the religious community now threatens the American tradition of worldwide humanitarian assistance and at the same time mirrors the wider loss of consensus in American foreign policy. He ends on a note of cautious optimism with a proposal for guidelines for responsible future coexistence and cooperation between church and state abroad.

I guess I always felt even if the world came to an end, McDonald's still would be open. High school sophomore Miranda's disbelief turns to fear in a split second when an asteroid knocks the moon closer to Earth, like "one marble hits another." The result is catastrophic. How can her family prepare for the future when worldwide tsunamis are wiping out the coasts, earthquakes are rocking the continents, and volcanic ash is blocking out the sun? As August turns dark and wintery in northeastern Pennsylvania, Miranda, her two brothers, and their mother retreat to the unexpected safe haven of their sunroom, where they subsist on stockpiled food and limited water in the warmth of a wood-burning stove. Told in a year's worth of journal entries, this heart-pounding story chronicles Miranda's struggle to hold on to the most important resource of all--hope--in an increasingly desperate and unfamiliar world. An extraordinary series debut Susan Beth Pfeffer has written several companion novels to Life As We Knew It, including The Dead and the Gone, This World We Live In, and The Shade of the Moon.

With Sampson, the church cat, as a reluctant protector, the church mice set out on a country outing that is almost disastrous