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.

Edgar Award–winning novelist Frances O’Roark Dowell explores the shifting terrain of middle-school friendship in this follow-up to the beloved The Secret Language of Girls. Kate and Marylin are smack dab in the middle of middle school—seventh grade—and they know they can never be best friends like they used to be. Marylin is a middle school cheerleader obsessed with popularity and hairstyles, and Kate is the exact opposite with her combat boots and hankering to learn guitar and write her own songs. Still, Kate and Marylin yearn to find some middle ground for their friendship—but it’s harder than they ever imagined.

God made you for friendship. Friendship is one of the deepest pleasures of life. But in our busy, fast-paced, mobile world, we've lost this rich view of friendship and instead settled for shallow acquaintances based on little more than similar tastes or shared interests. Helping us recapture a vision of true friendship, pastor Drew Hunter explores God's design for friendship and what it really looks like in practice—giving us practical advice to cultivate the kinds of true friendships that lead to true and life-giving joy.

We sometimes say that Muslims and Christians are part of Abraham's family, but while you can choose your friends, you cannot choose your family. In a world filled with conflict, can Christians be friends with Muslims? When it comes to medical ethics, the economy, the environment, media, the arts, the place of women in society, political engagement, do Christians and Muslims have any views in common? Utilizing the writings of respected Muslim reformer Tariq Ramadan, Tom Wilson asks questions about what kind of friendship Christians and Muslims might have. While we disagree as to who Jesus is or how we can be saved, can we agree in our concern for a fairer, more just society? Can we work together for the common good as friends who disagree but remain respectful?

For so many of us, our friends are like family members--we lean on them through our highest highs and our lowest lows--but sometimes those friendships don't turn out quite as we hoped. Bible teacher Kelly Needham debunks our world's constricted, narrow view of friendship and casts a richer, more life-giving, biblical vision for friendship. In Friend-ish, Kelly Needham reminds us that we were called to more than halfhearted friendships and lukewarm connections. We need something more stable, secure, and sacred. We were designed for real friendship--but the difficult truth is that too many of us are settling for less. Kelly deconstructs what Scripture says about the gift of friendship and takes a closer look at the distorted view that most of us have instead. As she shares the lessons she's learned from experience, Kelly paints her own glorious vision of what Christian friendship could look like. With hard-fought wisdom, a clear view of Scripture, and a been-there perspective, Friend-ish teaches us how to: Recognize symptoms of idolatry and toxic dependency Boldly ask for what we need from our community of friends Understand and address the problems that arise in friendship--from neediness to discord Recognize when it's time to end an unhealthy friendship Reorient toward the purposeful, loving relationships we all crave that ultimately bring us closer to God Find the friends you need and start to become that friend for others Join Kelly as she challenges you to view your chosen family in a new light, gain a vision of friendship according to Jesus, and finally enjoy friendships as God intended.

Offers a unique approach to becoming a better friend to FIND better friendships We know that our friendships increase our happiness, our health, and our longevity, yet people in the U.S. have fewer close confidantes today than we did three decades ago. Even though there’s a huge amount of information in the media discussing these relationships, and our social media feeds run 24/7, most of us haven’t come up with a constructive approach to friendship. But learning to BE a better friend is the first step to acquiring and cultivating better, more rewarding friendships. At her own birthday celebration, Glenda Shaw found herself questioning the friends and the friendships there to help her. It dawned on her that she did not feel truly connected to most of them. Something felt terribly wrong. She realized that what she shared with her birthday guests was proximity: they worked together, they lived close to each other, they went to the same networking events and movies. There were, however, other friends with whom she shared more fundamental qualities: the disposition of being encouraging to people, an attitude of looking for purpose in life, a spirit of adventure. Those were the friendships that meant something, the ones that felt truly deep and real. Friendship is voluntary; it’s not legally binding; and it usually has no economic consequences. Yet, friendship, true friendship, is important and comes with challenges the can make or break a relationship. Each chapter of Better You, Better Friends: A Whole New Approach to Friendship explores and addresses a particular kind of challenge—envy, money, honesty—and discusses ways to overcome them or to know when to bow out of a relationship that brings more stress than happiness. Through expert input and personal stories, including her own, Shaw offers a new level of understanding of what makes a good friendship and a good friend.

Written by Lisa-Jo Baker of the (in)courage women's community, Never Unfriended, is a step-by-step guide to friendships you can trust with personal stories and practical tips to help you make the friends, and be the friend, that lasts.

From the 100-part Penguin Great Ideas series comes a rumination on relationships, courtesy of one of the most influential French Renaissance philosophers. Michel de Montaigne was the originator of the modern essay form; in these diverse pieces he expresses his views on friendship, contemplates the idea that man is no different from any animal, argues that all cultures should be respected, and attempts, by an exploration of himself, to understand the nature of humanity. Penguin Great Ideas: Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves—and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war, and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked, and comforted. They have enriched lives—and destroyed them. Now Penguin Great Ideas brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals, and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are. Other titles in the series include Niccolò Machiavelli's The Prince, Thomas Paine's Common Sense, and Charles Darwin's On Natural Selection.

In this new accessible philosophy of friendship, Mark Vernon links the resources of the philosophical tradition with numerous illustrations from modern culture to ask what friendship is, how it relates to sex, work, politics and spirituality. Unusually, he argues that Plato and Nietzsche, as much as Aristotle and Aelred, should be put centre stage. Their penetrating and occasionally tough insights are invaluable if friendship is to be a full, not merely sentimental, way of life for today.