A noir you'd think was written by James M. Cain. Geoffrey Webb--once a con man, always a con man--has talked himself into a cushy job as a youth minster in a small Baptist church in Arkansas. Unfortunately for him he shows the preacher's underage daughter a little too much attention, and when their relationship is discovered by the corrupt local sheriff, Webb's easy life begins to fall apart.

Powerful, heart-pounding, and all true! Chuckie Dudrey is nearly beaten to death at age seven. After he gets out of the hospital, his mother is shot to death in her own kitchen while her children are sleeping. With their mother no longer there to protect them, Chuckie and his brothers and sisters endure years of horrific, sometimes unspeakable abuse, suffering things so awful that a polygraph test is administered to reveal the truth; then the court record is ordered sealed! When police and social workers finally intervene, the stench and squalor is so overpowering that officials gag when they enter the house where the Dudrey children are living. After years in prison and on the run from the law, Chuck becomes a Bounty Hunter and Enforcer. Beating up and assaulting people for pay becomes an occupation. He loves the excitement of life in the fast lane, but finds that drugs and easy money can come with a steep price tag. Author Bill Sizemore shares the entire story in the first person. Seeing events through Chuckie's eyes takes you right to the epicenter of the drama. You sense the fear an abused child feels when he is beaten to within an inch of his life. You feel his confusion and panic when the brain injuries brought on by his dad's abuse result in uncontrollable grand mal seizures. You feel the hopelessness and despair a career criminal feels when the police finally catch up with him and prison doors slam shut behind him. You get an inside look at prison life through the eyes of a real convict. But you also hope with Chuck when he makes two decisions so big that they change his life forever! Hell on Church Street is a powerful, compelling story, and one book you will never forget.

Millions of Christians have struggled with how to reconcile God's love and God's judgment: Has God created billions of people over thousands of years only to select a few to go to heaven and everyone else to suffer forever in hell? Is this acceptable to God? How is this "good news"? Troubling questions—so troubling that many have lost their faith because of them. Others only whisper the questions to themselves, fearing or being taught that they might lose their faith and their church if they ask them out loud. But what if these questions trouble us for good reason? What if the story of heaven and hell we have been taught is not, in fact, what the Bible teaches? What if what Jesus meant by heaven, hell, and salvation are very different from how we have come to understand them? What if it is God who wants us to face these questions? Author, pastor, and innovative teacher Rob Bell presents a deeply biblical vision for rediscovering a richer, grander, truer, and more spiritually satisfying way of understanding heaven, hell, God, Jesus, salvation, and repentance. The result is the discovery that the "good news" is much, much better than we ever imagined. Love wins.

On growing up in the American South of the 1960s—an all-American white boy—son of a long line of Methodist preachers, in the midst of the civil rights revolution, and discovering the culpability of silence within the church. By the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and columnist for The Birmingham News. "My dad was a Methodist preacher and his dad was a Methodist preacher," writes John Archibald. "It goes all the way back on both sides of my family. When I am at my best, I think it comes from that sermon place." Everything Archibald knows and believes about life is "refracted through the stained glass of the Southern church. It had everything to do with people. And fairness. And compassion." In Shaking the Gates of Hell, Archibald asks: Can a good person remain silent in the face of discrimination and horror, and still be a good person? Archibald had seen his father, the Rev. Robert L. Archibald, Jr., the son and grandson of Methodist preachers, as a moral authority, a moderate and a moderating force during the racial turbulence of the '60s, a loving and dependable parent, a forgiving and attentive minister, a man many Alabamians came to see as a saint. But was that enough? Even though Archibald grew up in Alabama in the heart of the civil rights movement, he could recall few words about racial rights or wrongs from his father's pulpit at a time the South seethed, and this began to haunt him. In this moving and powerful book, Archibald writes of his complex search, and of the conspiracy of silence his father faced in the South, in the Methodist Church and in the greater Christian church. Those who spoke too loudly were punished, or banished, or worse. Archibald's father was warned to guard his words on issues of race to protect his family, and he did. He spoke to his flock in the safety of parable, and trusted in the goodness of others, even when they earned none of it, rising through the ranks of the Methodist Church, and teaching his family lessons in kindness and humanity, and devotion to nature and the Earth. Archibald writes of this difficult, at times uncomfortable, reckoning with his past in this unadorned, affecting book of growth and evolution.

We all make choices. This book will help us please God and learn to live every day with eternity in mind, rather than seek the applause of people.

Most evangelical Christians believe that those people who are not saved before they die will be punished in hell forever. But is this what the Bible truly teaches? Do Christians need to rethink their understanding of hell? In the late twentieth century, a growing number of evangelical theologians, biblical scholars, and philosophers began to reject the traditional doctrine of eternal conscious torment in hell in favor of a minority theological perspective called conditional immortality. This view contends that the unsaved are resurrected to face divine judgment, just as Christians have always believed, but due to the fact that immortality is only given to those who are in Christ, the unsaved do not exist forever in hell. Instead, they face the punishment of the "second death"--an end to their conscious existence. This volume brings together excerpts from a variety of well-respected evangelical thinkers, including John Stott, John Wenham, and E. Earl Ellis, as they articulate the biblical, theological, and philosophical arguments for conditionalism. These readings will give thoughtful Christians strong evidence that there are indeed compelling reasons for rethinking hell.

James Rogers lived in a small Midwest Village attending grade school and high school during the depression years. Turning eighteen before he finishes High School, he was drafted to serve in WWII. After serving two years in the Pacific and then eight months in the Army as a occupation, James returns homes and enters college on the GI Bill. These are very endearing times this writer has experienced and will share with others who may have known a "James Rogers"

Combines professional insights along with the author's own experience and insights to speculate on how believers can make sense of their Christian faith when confronted with tragedy and suffering.

This book is perhaps one of the most misunderstood works of Catholic theology of our time. Critics contend that von Balthasar espouses universalism, the idea that all men will certainly be saved. Yet, as von Balthasar insists, damnation is a real possibility for anyone. Indeed, he explores the nature of damnation with sobering clarity. At the same time, he contends that a deep understanding of God’s merciful love and human freedom, and a careful reading of the Catholic tradition, point to the possibility—not the certainty—that, in the end, all men will accept the salvation Christ won for all. For this all-embracing salvation, von Balthasar says, we may dare hope, we must pray and with God’s help we must work. The Catholic Church’s teaching on hell has been generally neglected by theologians, with the notable exception of von Balthasar. He grounds his reflections clearly in Sacred Scripture and Catholic teaching. While the Church asserts that certain individuals are in heaven (the saints), she never declares a specific individual to be in hell. In fact, the Church hopes that in their final moments of life, even the greatest sinners would have repented of their terrible sins, and be saved. Sacred Scripture states, “God ... desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all” (1 Tim 2:4–5).

A stubborn teenager and her estranged uncle descend into the Arkansas underworld to track down her missing fiancé, in a riveting literary noir perfect for fans of Daniel Woodrell and "Mare of Easttown". Up until now, 18-year-old Lily Stevens has always been the perfect daughter of a Pentecostal preacher, but her insular Arkansas congregation is scandalized when Lily announces she’s pregnant with the baby of Peter Cutchin, a young man in the church. When Peter disappears before they can get married, Lily’s life is thrown into even greater turmoil. Everyone in their small town, including Peter’s furious mother, thinks the boy has simply run off and abandoned her, but Lily, furiously headstrong and determined to find the father of her child, refuses to believe it. Help comes in the unlikely form of Allan Woodson, an uncle that her family will not acknowledge but a man who may know where to begin looking for Peter. Their search will lead them out of Lily’s safe world of the church and into the darkest corners of the criminal underworld on the Arkansas/Tennessee border, where neither Allan nor Lily can foresee the unsettling secrets they will uncover.