Does it really matter? Does it matter if we have free will? Does it matter if Calvinism is true? And does what you think about it matter? No and yes. No, it doesn't matter because God is who he is and does what he does regardless of what we think of him, just as the solar system keeps spinning around the sun even if we're convinced it spins around the earth. Our opinions about God will not change God, but they can change us. And so yes, it does matter because the conversations about free will and Calvinism confront us with perhaps the only question that really matters: who is God? This is a book about that question--a book about the Bible, black holes, love, sovereignty, hell, Romans 9, Jonathan Edwards, John Piper, C. S. Lewis, Karl Barth, and a little girl in a red coat. You've heard arguments, but here's a story--Austin Fischer's story, and his journey in and out of Calvinism on a trip to the center of the universe.

This translation originally copyrighted in 2010.

Do you live for something? Or do you feel like you're just waiting to find your purpose? Many of us feel restless, but that might not be a bad thing. When our restlessness awakens our longing to be woven into God's story, it can launch us into living the life of purpose God designed for us. In Restless, Bible study teacher and bestselling author Jennie Allen will help you discover a practical plan to identify the loose threads of your life and how to weave them together for God's glory and purpose. Jennie uses the story of Joseph in the book of Genesis to explain how his suffering, gifts, story, and relationships fit into the greater tapestry of God's narrative—and how our story can do the same. In this book you will: Explore practical ways to identify the threads of your life. Learn how to intentionally weave those threads together. Discover how your gifts, passions, places, and relationships are deliberate and meaningful, not random. Speak the truth about your suffering: it's possible it has produced the very thing you want to give back to the world. What would happen if you spent the rest of your life running without reservation after His purposes for you? To dive deeper into the Restless message and further explore Threads, look for the Restless Study Guide and Video Study from HarperChristian Resources.

Why the modern world forgot how to sleep Why is sleep frustrating for so many people? Why do we spend so much time and money managing and medicating it, and training ourselves and our children to do it correctly? In Wild Nights, Benjamin Reiss finds answers in sleep's hidden history -- one that leads to our present, sleep-obsessed society, its tacitly accepted rules, and their troubling consequences. Today we define a good night's sleep very narrowly: eight hours in one shot, sealed off in private bedrooms, children apart from parents. But for most of human history, practically no one slept this way. Tracing sleep's transformation since the dawn of the industrial age, Reiss weaves together insights from literature, social and medical history, and cutting-edge science to show how and why we have tried and failed to tame sleep. In lyrical prose, he leads readers from bedrooms and laboratories to factories and battlefields to Henry David Thoreau's famous cabin at Walden Pond, telling the stories of troubled sleepers, hibernating peasants, sleepwalking preachers, cave-dwelling sleep researchers, slaves who led nighttime uprisings, rebellious workers, spectacularly frazzled parents, and utopian dreamers. We are hardly the first people, Reiss makes clear, to chafe against our modern rules for sleeping. A stirring testament to sleep's diversity, Wild Nights offers a profound reminder that in the vulnerability of slumber we can find our shared humanity. By peeling back the covers of history, Reiss recaptures sleep's mystery and grandeur and offers hope to weary readers: as sleep was transformed once before, so too can it change today.

"No one seems to be happy with the present. That loathing of the present is understandable. The present moment, in modern life, is hard to love, or even to grasp. For the modern present is a state of constant motion. Perpetual moral, social, and psychic revolution is the price we pay for our unprecedented liberty, equality, and prosperity. Though we rightly prize those great political goods, having our world turned upside down every morning makes us all of us uneasy and some of us miserable. We exacerbate our unease by our failure to recognize it. With our ritual insistence that we are perfectly content to "go with the flow," we deny even the existence of our disquiet. We refuse to see what time it is, and we refuse to see ourselves"--

Her Beautiful Brain is Ann Hedreen’s story of what it was like to become a mom just as her beautiful, brainy mother began to lose her mind to an unforgiving disease. Arlene was a copper miner’s daughter who was divorced twice, widowed once, raised six kids singlehandedly, survived the turbulent ‘60s, and got her B.A. and M.A. at 40 so she could support her family as a Seattle schoolteacher—only to start showing signs of Alzheimer’s disease in her late fifties, taking Ann and her siblings on a long descent they never could have anticipated or imagined. For two decades—as Ann married, had a daughter and a son, navigated career changes and marital crises and built a life making documentary films with her husband—she watched her once-invincible mom disappear. From Seattle to Haiti to the mine-gouged Finntown neighborhood in Butte, Montana where she was born and grew up; from Arlene’s favorite tennis club to a locked geropsychiatric ward, Her Beautiful Brain tells the heartbreaking story of a daughter’s love for a mother who is lost in the wilderness of an unpredictable and harrowing illness.

Why do many popular songs positively reference God if our culture is widely viewed as secular? Why is it a challenge to tell the Christian story when many say they are spiritual and believe in God? Why do we draw so much meaning from the popular songs we listen to? And might a deeper understanding of popular-music culture help us to explore the bigger stories we listen to throughout our lives, such as the Christian story? Primarily using Zygmunt Bauman's understanding of "liquid modernity" we look at the social forces that shape Western society and consider why, while many are looking for "authentic," ontologically based stories to understand their life experiences, historic providers of the big stories that shape our lives, such as the church, favor a different, epistemological way of telling them. How do these different approaches to storytelling affect their reception and what insight might we draw from that? Whilst this book is written primarily with those in Christian ministry in mind, it will be of interest, too, to those who use music to explore life experiences through their work, who are interested in the social forces that shape society, or who simply enjoy listening to popular music.

‘Two young women plunging into post-war Bosnia like two Alices into Wonderland . . . smart, energetic, passionate, announcing a major talent.’ - Aleksandar Hemon Sara hasn’t seen or heard from her childhood best friend, Lejla, in years. She’s comfortable with her life in Dublin, with her partner, their avocado plant, and their naturist neighbour. But when Lejla calls her and demands she come home to Bosnia, Sara finds that she can’t say no. What begins as a road trip becomes a journey through the past, as the two women set off to find Armin, Lejla’s brother who disappeared towards the end of the Bosnian War. Presumed dead by everyone else, only Lejla and Sara believed Armin was still alive. Confronted with the limits of memory, Sara is forced to reconsider the things she thought she understood as a girl: the best friend she loved, the first experiences they shared, but also the social and religious lines that separated them, that brought them such different lives. Translated into English by author Lana Bastašic, Catch the Rabbit tells the story of how we place the ones we love on pedestals, and then wait for them to fall off, how loss marks us indelibly, and how the traumas of war echo down the years.

It is 1939. Eva Delectorskaya is a beautiful 28-year-old Russian émigrée living in Paris. As war breaks out she is recruited for the British Secret Service by Lucas Romer, a mysterious Englishman, and under his tutelage she learns to become the perfect spy, to mask her emotions and trust no one, including those she loves most. Since the war, Eva has carefully rebuilt her life as a typically English wife and mother. But once a spy, always a spy. Now she must complete one final assignment, and this time Eva can't do it alone: she needs her daughter's help.

The renowned actress who played Nikki Newman on The Young and the Restless opens up about her sixty-year career in this scintillating memoir. Melody Thomas Scott admits she is nothing like her character on The Young and the Restless, who’s seen it all in her forty-year tenure on America’s highest-rated daytime serial. But there’s plenty of drama beyond her character’s plotlines. In this captivating memoir, Melody reveals the behind-the-scenes saga of her journey to stardom and personal freedom. As Nikki went from impoverished stripper to vivacious heroine, Melody underwent her own striking transformation, becoming a household name in the process. Raised by her abusive grandmother, Melody acted in feature films with Alfred Hitchcock, John Wayne, and Clint Eastwood—and endured abuse of industry men before taking control of her life and career in a daring getaway move. Melody shares all this, plus juicy on-and-off-set details of what it’s like to be one half of the show’s most successful supercouple, “Niktor.” In witty, warm prose, readers meet the persevering heart of an American icon. Prepare to be moved by a life story fit for a soap opera star.