Can be used both as an introduction to reading Scripture or as a tool to help readers understand Scripture from a new perspective. In conversational style, bestselling author Father Bill Bausch discusses revelation, truth wrapped in story, the difference between print and oral stories, and the chasm between biblical and contemporary culture.

In his teens, a young man wrote, “I believe in no religion. There is absolutely no proof for any of them.” After serving in the trenches of WW1, the same young man said, “I never sank so low as to pray.” To a religious friend, he wrote impatiently, “You can’t start with God. I don’t accept God!” This young man was C. S. Lewis, the “foul-mouthed atheist” who would become one of the most eloquent Christian writers of the twentieth century. David C. Downing offers a unique look at Lewis’s personal journey to faith and the profound influence it had on his life as a writer and eventual follower of Christ. This is the first book to focus on the period from Lewis’s childhood to his early thirties, a tumultuous journey of spiritual and intellectual exploration. It was not despite this journey but precisely because of it that Lewis understood the search for life’s meaning so well.

Hailed as "the most radical repackaging of the Bible since Gutenberg", these Pocket Canons give an up-close look at each book of the Bible.

An expert on early Christianity reveals how the early church invented stories of Christian martyrs—and how this persecution myth persists today. According to church tradition and popular belief, early Christians were systematically persecuted by a brutal Roman Empire intent on their destruction. As the story goes, vast numbers of believers were thrown to the lions, tortured, or burned alive because they refused to renounce Christ. But as Candida Moss reveals in The Myth of Persecution, the “Age of Martyrs” is a fiction. There was no sustained 300-year-long effort by the Romans to persecute Christians. Instead, these stories were pious exaggerations; highly stylized rewritings of Jewish, Greek, and Roman noble death traditions; and even forgeries designed to marginalize heretics, inspire the faithful, and fund churches. The traditional story of persecution is still invoked by church leaders, politicians, and media pundits who insist that Christians were—and always will be—persecuted by a hostile, secular world. While violence against Christians does occur in select parts of the world today, the rhetoric of persecution is both misleading and rooted in an inaccurate history of the early church. By shedding light on the historical record, Moss urges modern Christians to abandon the conspiratorial assumption that the world is out to get them.

The final book of the Bible, Revelation prophesies the ultimate judgement of mankind in a series of allegorical visions, grisly images and numerological predictions. According to these, empires will fall, the "Beast" will be destroyed and Christ will rule a new Jerusalem. With an introduction by Will Self.

The NIV is the world's best-selling modern translation, with over 150 million copies in print since its first full publication in 1978. This highly accurate and smooth-reading version of the Bible in modern English has the largest library of printed and electronic support material of any modern translation.

“Complex and gripping. . . . Newcomers to Arcadia will be captivated by the rich history, while those familiar with it will find that Sophia’s legend grants them a new perspective on the earlier tales.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “[The Lizard Princess] encourages big-picture thinking. . . . The combination of a straightforward quest complicated by hindsight, with magic, science, and meditations on the building of myths and the role of stories, makes for a book not like much else out there. . . . Gorgeously written and complex.” —New York Journal of Books “This fantasy quest lends a hand toward making our contemporary world a little better.”—Foreword Reviews “The impressive The Lizard Princess continues Tod Davies' imaginative History of Arcadia series with her trademark brilliant storytelling.”—Largehearted Boy "Look inside this world and find wonder."—Kate Bernheimer, editor of Fairy Tale Review "Blending the magic of fairy tales with the great existential mysteries, Tod Davies leads us into a phantasmagorical world that resurrects the complex lore of times past with vibrant narrative energy."—Maria Tatar, editor of The Cambridge Companion to Fairy Tales "Imaginative."—Jack Zipes, author of The Irresistible Fairy Tale "Innovative form and spellbinding content . . . Stories, as Tod Davies's History of Arcadia novels ultimately suggest, serve as a civilization's backbone, and it is therefore in stories too that we can discover the potential for fundamental change and a better society."—Marvels & Tales Bittersweet. Lush. Human. The Lizard Princess crosses mountains, oceans, deserts, and the Moon Itself to meet her fate and the fate of Arcadia on the Road of the Dead. Her reward is the Key that opens the door to the Domain of Life where wisdom trumps knowledge, as it should in all good tales about the world, whether Arcadia's, or our own. Tod Davies is the author of Snotty Saves the Day and Lily the Silent, the first two books in The History of Arcadia series, as well as the cooking memoirs Jam Today: A Diary of Cooking With What You've Got and Jam Today Too: The Revolution Will Not Be Catered. Unsurprisingly, her attitude toward literature is the same as her attitude toward cooking—it's all about working with what you have to find new ways of looking and new ways of being.

An erudite and accessible survey of Jewish life and culture in the twentieth century, as reflected in seminal texts. Following The People and the Books, which "covers more than 2,500 years of highly variegated Jewish cultural expression" (Robert Alter, New York Times Book Review), poet and literary critic Adam Kirsch now turns to the story of modern Jewish literature. From the vast emigration of Jews out of Eastern Europe to the Holocaust to the creation of Israel, the twentieth century transformed Jewish life. The same was true of Jewish writing: the novels, plays, poems, and memoirs of Jewish writers provided intimate access to new worlds of experience. Kirsch surveys four themes that shaped the twentieth century in Jewish literature and culture: Europe, America, Israel, and the endeavor to reimagine Judaism as a modern faith. With discussions of major books by over thirty writers—ranging from Franz Kafka to Philip Roth, Elie Wiesel to Tony Kushner, Hannah Arendt to Judith Plaskow—he argues that literature offers a new way to think about what it means to be Jewish in the modern world. With a wide scope and diverse, original observations, Kirsch draws fascinating parallels between familiar writers and their less familiar counterparts. While everyone knows the diary of Anne Frank, for example, few outside of Israel have read the diary of Hannah Senesh. Kirsch sheds new light on the literature of the Holocaust through the work of Primo Levi, explores the emergence of America as a Jewish home through the stories of Bernard Malamud, and shows how Yehuda Amichai captured the paradoxes of Israeli identity. An insightful and engaging work from "one of America’s finest literary critics" (Wall Street Journal), The Blessing and the Curse brings the Jewish experience vividly to life.