Each year brings to light new scientific discoveries that have the power to either test our faith or strengthen it--most recently the news that scientists have created artificial life forms in the laboratory. If humans can create life, what does that mean for the creation story found in Scripture? Biochemist and Christian apologist Fazale Rana, for one, isn't worried. In Creating Life in the Lab, he details the fascinating quest for synthetic life and argues convincingly that when scientists succeed in creating life in the lab, they will unwittingly undermine the evolutionary explanation for the origin of life, demonstrating instead that undirected chemical processes cannot produce a living entity.

The passion for life lists has spawned an industry that includes thoughtful experts such as Caroline Miller, a life coach and motivational book author, and Dr. Michael Frisch, a positive psychology coach and clinical psychologist at Baylor University. Working together, they have fashioned the most useful, science-based, and up-to-date book on the topic of goal setting and accomplishment. Creating Your Best Life supplies dozens of interactive exercises and quizzes readers can use to identify their most cherished needs, ambitions, and wishes. The exercises are fun, making the process of self-discovery enjoyable and productive. The authors’ unique "life list coaching” program organizes life lists into 16 key areas that are universally known to make people happy--to help you actually achieve your aspirations. No other life list book offers research-validated information on why certain steps matter in goal accomplishment, or even how goals are connected with any type of life satisfaction. Readers will feel both educated and inspired to start writing goal-setting lists in order to live their lives more consciously, productively, and happily.

Clinical psychologists identify and describe the defensive process that constrains people from making positive changes in their lives. They summarize the insights they gained while developing a more decent and respectful way of living as a response to the destructiveness of society.

Creating a unique, immersive setting one life form at a time. CREATING LIFE (THE ART OF WORLD BUILDING, #1) is a detailed how-to guide on inventing the heart of every imaginary world - life. With chapters on creating gods, species/races, plants, animals, monsters, heroes, villains, and even undead, it draws on the author's quarter century of world building experience. Pointed questions, and an examination of answers and their repercussions, will help readers decide on goals, how to reach them, and whether they are even worth pursuing. Always practical, Creating Life will quickly improve the skills of beginners and experts alike, making a time consuming project more fun, easier, faster, and skillfully done. Unlike other world building guides, the series discusses how to use your inventions in stories while balancing narrative flow with the need for explaining your world. Tailored examples illustrate this. Extensive, culled research on life forms is provided to classify and understand options without overwhelming world builders with extraneous details. Storytellers, game designers, gamers, and hobbyists will benefit from seven free templates that can be downloaded and reused. CREATING LIFE will help your setting stand out from the multitude of fantasy and science fiction worlds audiences see. THE ART OF WORLD BUILDING is the only multi-volume series of its kind and is three times the length, depth, and breadth of other guides.

Inspired by artist Tamara Laporte’s popular online art classes (willowing.org), Create Your Life Book presents 18 step-by-step mixed-media drawing and painting projects that encourage self-fulfillment through the creative process. Tamara’s kind, non-judgmental voice guides your way. What is holding you back? Where do you want to go? Let go of the past! Use these expressive exercises to help you recognize your personal challenges and other obstacles, then work through them. Let go of limiting beliefs, find courage, feel gratitude, heal pain, and develop self-love as you playfully create. Each themed chapter presents four to five two-part projects. First, you will explore a common issue that hampers creativity and/or positive self-worth. The second portion is a step-by-step mixed-media art project designed to help you work through that issue. Just a few of the explorations: Let go of what no longer serves you by taking stock of what’s holding you back, then create a zentangle butterfly to symbolize you flying away from those limiting things. Embrace and love your inner quirky bird by taking an inventory of your quirky traits, then create a bird that celebrates them. Heal old wounds by writing a letter to yourself as a child, then create a house to keep your inner child safe. Adding rich variety to the messages and art inspiration, some of the project outlines have been contributed by Tamara's guest teachers: Roxanne Coble, Andrea Gomoll, Alena Hennessy, Mystele Kirkeeng, Ivy Newport, and Effy Wild, each of whom are noted mixed-media artists in their own right. The final chapter presents a simple binding method for creating a keepsake book of your Life Book projects. Steeped in inspirational images and uplifting affirmations, Create Your Life Book can help you achieve both personal and creative growth.

Professionals and business people in midlife are increasingly asking themselves "what's next?" in their careers and personal lives. Creating the Good Life draws on the wisdom of the ages to help contemporary men and women plan for satisfying, useful, moral, and meaningful second halves of their lives. For centuries, the brightest people in Western societies have looked to Aristotle for guidance on how to lead a good life and how to create a good society. Now James O'Toole--the Mortimer J. Adler Senior Fellow of the Aspen Institute--translates that classical philosophical framework into practical, comprehensible terms to help professionals and business people apply it to their own lives and work. His book helps thoughtful readers address some of the profound questions they are currently struggling with in planning their futures: • How do I find meaning and satisfaction? • How much money do I need in order to be happy? • What is the right balance between work, family, and leisure? • What are my responsibilities to my community? • How can I create a good society in my own company? Bridging philosophy and self-help, O'Toole's book shows how happiness ultimately is attainable no matter one's level of income, if one uses Aristotle's practical exercises to ask the right questions and to discipline oneself to pursue things that are "good for us." The book is the basis for O'Toole's new "Good Life" seminar, where thoughtful men and women gather to create robust and satisfying life plans.

Dreaming is easy. Making it happen is hard. With a fresh perspective, Carol Lloyd motivates the person searching for two things: the creative life and a life of sanity, happiness and financial solvency. Creating a Life Worth Living is for the hundreds of thousands of people who bought Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way, but who are looking for more down-to-earth solutions and concrete tasks for achieving their goals. Creating a Life Worth Living helps the reader search memory for inspiration, understand his or her individual artistic profile, explore possible futures, design a daily process and build a structure of support. Each of the 12 chapters, such as "The Drudge We Do For Dollars" and "Excavating the Future," contains specific exercises and daily tasks that help readers to clarify their desires and create a tangible plan of action for realizing dreams. The book also provides inspiring anecdotes and interviews with people who have succeeded in their chosen fields, such as performance artist Anna Devere Smith, writer Sally Tisdale and filmmaker R. J. Cutler. The pursuit of one's dreams is one of the great joys in life but also one of the most terrifying. Creating a Life Worth Living is an invaluable road map for this journey, guiding readers as they take the first tentative steps that are necessary before they can fly.

So many of us postpone pursuing our goals and dreams because we think we'll get to them later, when we have more time or feel we're worthy of them. As a result, many of us go through life feeling weighed down by daily responsibilities and our own self-doubts, entirely disconnected from a sense of real purpose. Based in acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) and powerful mindfulness practices,Your Life on Purpose is about doing what matters to you every day instead of waiting for the perfect time to feel fulfilled and alive. With this book as your guide, you'll learn to move past daily distractions, fear of failure, and self-judgment, and zero in on the passions that connect you with your true self. You deserve to live a life of purpose, aligned with your deepest values. It's time. With this book, you'll discover how to: • Find and do what you are passionate about • Keep mental obstacles, fears, and daily demands from blocking your path to fulfillment • Find your way when values conflict • Focus on what truly matters to make your dreams a reality • Make a lasting impact on the world So what are you waiting for? Start changing your life today.

Conversations with Joseph Goldstein, one of today’s most renowned meditation teachers who taught ABC news anchor Dan Harris (author of 10% Happier) to meditate, on the topic of integrity. Creating a Life of Integrity is our personal trainer for strengthening our integrity muscles. When we don’t speak or act from our own sense of integrity, we feel lousy. Find out how you can live with more integrity—and subsequently more joy—as you follow these lively conversations between Joseph Goldstein, a founder of the modern mindfulness movement, and Gail Stark, a businesswoman and his student and friend of twenty-five years. As Joseph and Gail unpack the components of integrity—generosity, virtue, renunciation, wisdom, courage, patience, truthfulness, resoluteness, loving-kindness, and equanimity—we discover each is a step on a path that transports us to an empowered place of clarity, commitment, and, consequently, more joy. As we strengthen and weave these qualities into our daily lives they become our trusted first response in a world that needs our integrity now. “A lovely, practical, intimate, and wise book. Read and you can enjoy an intimate conversation with a great teacher, and learn how to lovingly refine the study your own mind.”—Jack Kornfield, author of A Path with Heart

An intentional community is a group of people who have chosen to live or work together in pursuit of a common ideal or vision. An ecovillage is a village-scale intentional community that intends to create, ecological, social, economic, and spiritual sustainability over several generations. The 90s saw a revitalized surge of interest in intentional communities and ecovillages in North America: the number of intentional communities listed in the Communities Directory increased 60 percent between 1990 and 1995. But only 10 percent of the actual number of forming-community groups actually succeeded. Ninety percent failed, often in conflict and heartbreak. After visiting and interviewing founders of dozens of successful and failed communities, along with her own forming-community experiences, the author concluded that "the successful 10 percent" had all done the same five or six things right, and "the unsuccessful 90 percent" had made the same handful of mistakes. Recognizing that a wealth of wisdom were contained in these experiences, she set out to distill and capture them in one place. Creating a Life Together is the only resource available that provides step-by-step, practical "how-to" information on how to launch and sustain a successful ecovillage or intentional community. Through anecdotes, stories, and cautionary tales about real communities, and by profiling seven successful communities in depth, the book examines "the successful 10 percent" and why 90 percent fail; the role of community founders; getting a group off to a good start; vision and vision documents; decision-making and governance; agreements; legal options; finding, financing, and developing land; structuring a community economy; selecting new members; and communication, process, and dealing well with conflict. Sample vision documents, community agreements, and visioning exercises are included, along with abundant resources for learning more.