A roadmap for spiritual formation In Mansions of the Heart, author R. Thomas Ashbrook begins with his personal story of frustration and confusion while serving as a pastor of the church. He tells of discovering a new path of spiritual transformation and offers seekers a way to move forward on their own spiritual paths. Written for anyone who wants to develop a deeper, more meaningful relationship with God, Mansions of the Heart offers a step-by-step guide through a spiritual-formation road map based on Teresa of Avila's seven mansions. This spiritual classic reveals various phases of spiritual formation, for which Ashbrook offers a personal guide to spiritual transformation. Mansions debunks commonly held myths that lead to spiritual dead ends and describes a clear pathway to a deepening love relationship with God. The book also offers church leaders a process for helping people in their faith communities grow as disciples of Christ.

Mansions of the Heart Study Guide provides an individual and group study for Mansions of the Heart: Exploring the Seven Stages of Spiritual Growth by R. Thomas Ashbrook, Jossey-Bass 2009

Presence is a novel about the ongoing appearances of Jesus to three people in a fictional town in America, and the resulting transformation in their lives, church, and community. The story addresses the common misperception that Jesus resides somewhere far from us and only offers a long-distance relationship. Presence invites its readers to experience Jesus Present to them in everyday life.

The author, the father of a prodigal son, shares how he moved through guilt, frustration, anger, and grief to hope, forgiveness, trust, comfort, and love.

4e de couv.: Chungking Mansions, a dilapidated seventeen-story commercial and residential structure in the heart of Hong Kong's tourist district, is home to a remarkably motley group of people. Traders, laborers, and asylum seekers from all over Asia and Africa live and work there, and even backpacking tourists rent rooms in what is possibly the most globalized spot on the planet. But as Ghetto at the center of the world shows us, the Mansions is a world away from the gleaming headquarters of multinational corporations -instead it epitomizes the way globalization actually works for most of the world's people. Through candid stories that both instruct and enthrall, Gordon Mathews lays bare the building's residents' intricate connections to the international circulation of goods, money, and ideas.

There are many ways to show our devotion to an author besides reading his or her works. Graves make for popular pilgrimage sites, but far more popular are writers' house museums. What is it we hope to accomplish by trekking to the home of a dead author? We may go in search of the point of inspiration, eager to stand on the very spot where our favorite literary characters first came to life—and find ourselves instead in the house where the author himself was conceived, or where she drew her last breath. Perhaps it is a place through which our writer passed only briefly, or maybe it really was a longtime home—now thoroughly remade as a decorator's show-house. In A Skeptic's Guide to Writers' Houses Anne Trubek takes a vexed, often funny, and always thoughtful tour of a goodly number of house museums across the nation. In Key West she visits the shamelessly ersatz shrine to a hard-living Ernest Hemingway, while meditating on his lost Cuban farm and the sterile Idaho house in which he committed suicide. In Hannibal, Missouri, she walks the fuzzy line between fact and fiction, as she visits the home of the young Samuel Clemens—and the purported haunts of Tom Sawyer, Becky Thatcher, and Injun' Joe. She hits literary pay-dirt in Concord, Massachusetts, the nineteenth-century mecca that gave home to Hawthorne, Emerson, and Thoreau—and yet could not accommodate a surprisingly complex Louisa May Alcott. She takes us along the trail of residences that Edgar Allan Poe left behind in the wake of his many failures and to the burned-out shell of a California house with which Jack London staked his claim on posterity. In Dayton, Ohio, a charismatic guide brings Paul Laurence Dunbar to compelling life for those few visitors willing to listen; in Cleveland, Trubek finds a moving remembrance of Charles Chesnutt in a house that no longer stands. Why is it that we visit writers' houses? Although admittedly skeptical about the stories these buildings tell us about their former inhabitants, Anne Trubek carries us along as she falls at least a little bit in love with each stop on her itinerary and finds in each some truth about literature, history, and contemporary America.

Experienced spiritual director Alice Fryling presents an overview of what group spiritual direction is and how it is practiced, offering practical step-by-step guidance for those who would like to start, lead or particpate in group spiritual direction.

Almost everyone would agree that there's some point where enough jewelry is enough. Well, what is that point? In this book, Doug Batchelor challenges you to find out for yourself what God's Word says on this fascinating subject.