The Bible is filled with many familiar stories of mystical experiences -- Moses and the burning bush, Samuel in the temple, the angel's visit to Mary, and Paul's Damascus road experience are just a few examples -- and many modern Christians have equally powerful experiences of the Lord's life-changing power and presence. In this follow-up volume to Vision Stories, 84 contributors share their authentic, intensely personal accounts of encountering the divine, including visions, healing miracles, and answers to prayer. Each vignette manifests the indescribable joy, comfort, and peace we experience in God's presence. And because each personal story also illustrates a scripture passage from Cycle C of the Revised Common Lectionary, Sharing Visions is an especially valuable resource for lectionary preaching. But even more, it's inspiring reading for personal devotion and spiritual growth. Praise for Vision Stories and Sharing Visions: I am rejoicing as I read the testimonies in Sharing Visions and Vision Stories. What an inspiration! Richard B. Wilke Author of the Disciple Bible Study series Storytelling has long been a deep, rich resource for sharing our faith with one another. In Sharing Visions, John Sumwalt connects readers with the power of stories for recognizing and celebrating God's presence in the midst of our daily lives. Through reading and reflecting on these stories, readers are invited into God's ongoing story of creation, redemption, and empowerment. Carol F. Krau Director of Christian Formation and Spiritual Leadership General Board of Discipleship, United Methodist Church This dynamic, moving, and deeply authentic collection of true stories will carry readers on a powerful journey of healing and inspiration. Sharing Visions will appeal to Catholic and Protestant alike. Deacon Eddie Ensley Author of Visions: The Soul's Path To The Sacred At long last someone has demonstrated the courage to lift the veil of silence that so often covers the mystical experiences of ordinary people. By denying the reality of these experiences we have denied spiritual sustenance and growth to many. Vision Stories is a forerunner of the feast that is to come for all who earnestly seek to walk with God. Reuben P. Job Author of A Guide to Spiritual Discernment This wonderful collection of stories reminds us of a fact our world desperately needs to know -- that God is alive and well and ready to be at work in our daily lives. J. Ellsworth Kalas Author of New Testament Stories from the Back Side A noted storyteller, John E. Sumwalt is the pastor of Wauwatosa Avenue United Methodist Church in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The author of CSS' acclaimed Lectionary Stories series, Sumwalt leads seminars and retreats on sharing and understanding visions. He and his wife Jo Perry-Sumwalt also are the editors of the online service StoryShare.

Continue Your Leadership Journey With a Deep Dive into Inspire a Shared Vision Over the last twenty-five years, The Leadership Challenge established a reputation as a research-driven, evidence-based leadership development model with a simple, yet profound, principle at its core: leadership is a measurable and learnable set of behaviors. The Challenge Continues program offers you the opportunity to take a deeper dive into the Inspire a Shared Vision leadership practice. Designed for leaders familiar with The Leadership Challenge principles and its Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership foundational model, this new program addresses the important question: "What's Next?" The second of bestselling authors Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner's Five Practices, Inspire a Shared Vision is about: Envisioning the future by imagining exciting and ennobling possibilities Enlisting others in a common vision by appealing to shared aspirations Your Participant Workbook is a hands-on tool, designed to accompany you on the next phase of your personal leadership development journey. Beginning with a focus on what you have already accomplished and what has gone well with this Practice, the pages then guide you through several interactive exercises and a practical process for expanding and refining your Inspire a Shared Vision skills. You will also explore ways in which can develop your team members and influence the broader spheres of you work unit or organization. Finishing up the module with a detailed action plan, you will leave the session with a detailed map for continuing your journey toward exceptional leadership.

The fifteen "communards" from all corners of the globe whose stories appear in this collection have lived in communal groups thirty years on average. Some of the communities they call home are based on spiritual or religious principles, others have secular or economic reasons for being. What separates them are the details of everyday life; what unites them is the dream of a better life and a better future for our planet.

Using a variety of formats, collaborative art projects result in wonderfully complex pieces, and often provide the glue between artists within a community. Heavy on visual inspiration, Collaborative Art Journals and Shared Visions in Mixed Media covers various organizational structures for collaborative art projects, offers instructions and tips for organizing such ventures, and includes interviews with organizers and participants of collaborative projects, as well as a healthy smattering of techniques including how to create books that can be added to as they travel and how to devise various binding structures for different paper projects.

The first of its kind, this anthology of eighty international primary literary texts—poems, short stories, personal essays, testimonials, activist statements, and group-authored visions—illuminates Environmental Justice as a concept and a movement worldwide in a way that is accessible to students, scholars, and general readers. Also included are historical selections that ground contemporary pieces in a continuum of activist concern for the earth and human justice, a much-needed but seldom available perspective. Arts and humanities are crucial in the ongoing effort to achieve an ecologically sustainable and just world. Works of the human imagination provide analyses, articulations of experience, and positive visions of the future that no amount of statistics, data, charts, or graphs can offer because literature speaks not only to the intellect but also to our emotions. Creative literary work, which records human experience both past and present, has the power to warn, to persuade, and to inspire. Each is critical in the shared struggle for Environmental Justice.

Thomas Sowell’s “extraordinary” explication of the competing visions of human nature lie at the heart of our political conflicts (New York Times) Controversies in politics arise from many sources, but the conflicts that endure for generations or centuries show a remarkably consistent pattern. In this classic work, Thomas Sowell analyzes this pattern. He describes the two competing visions that shape our debates about the nature of reason, justice, equality, and power: the "constrained" vision, which sees human nature as unchanging and selfish, and the "unconstrained" vision, in which human nature is malleable and perfectible. A Conflict of Visions offers a convincing case that ethical and policy disputes circle around the disparity between both outlooks.

The first book to validate the meaningful dreams and visions that bring comfort as death nears. Christopher Kerr is a hospice doctor. All of his patients die. Yet he has cared for thousands of patients who, in the face of death, speak of love and grace. Beyond the physical realities of dying are unseen processes that are remarkably life-affirming. These include dreams that are unlike any regular dream. Described as "more real than real," these end-of-life experiences resurrect past relationships, meaningful events and themes of love and forgiveness; they restore life's meaning and mark the transition from distress to comfort and acceptance. Drawing on interviews with over 1,400 patients and more than a decade of quantified data, Dr. Kerr reveals that pre-death dreams and visions are extraordinary occurrences that humanize the dying process. He shares how his patients' stories point to death as not solely about the end of life, but as the final chapter of humanity's transcendence. Kerr's book also illuminates the benefits of these phenomena for the bereaved, who find solace in seeing their loved ones pass with a sense of calm closure. Beautifully written, with astonishing real-life characters and stories, this book is at its heart a celebration of our power to reclaim the dying process as a deeply meaningful one. Death Is But a Dream is an important contribution to our understanding of medicine's and humanity's greatest mystery.

MORE THAN ONE MILLION COPIES IN PRINT • “One of the seminal management books of the past seventy-five years.”—Harvard Business Review This revised edition of the bestselling classic is based on fifteen years of experience in putting Peter Senge’s ideas into practice. As Senge makes clear, in the long run the only sustainable competitive advantage is your organization’s ability to learn faster than the competition. The leadership stories demonstrate the many ways that the core ideas of the Fifth Discipline, many of which seemed radical when first published, have become deeply integrated into people’s ways of seeing the world and their managerial practices. Senge describes how companies can rid themselves of the learning blocks that threaten their productivity and success by adopting the strategies of learning organizations, in which new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, collective aspiration is set free, and people are continually learning how to create the results they truly desire. Mastering the disciplines Senge outlines in the book will: • Reignite the spark of genuine learning driven by people focused on what truly matters to them • Bridge teamwork into macrocreativity • Free you of confining assumptions and mindsets • Teach you to see the forest and the trees • End the struggle between work and personal time This updated edition contains more than one hundred pages of new material based on interviews with dozens of practitioners at companies such as BP, Unilever, Intel, Ford, HP, and Saudi Aramco and organizations such as Roca, Oxfam, and The World Bank.