Religious Ebooks

Foreword by Michael W. Smith..................................7 Testimony by Rich Mullins.....................................10 Acknowledgments...............................................12 A Word Before.................................................13 1. Something Is Radically Wrong...............................15 2. Magnificent Monotony.......................................33 3. The Ragamuffin Gospe.......................................151 4. Tilted Halos...............................................73 5. Cormorants and Kittiwakes..................................89 6. Grazie,

Ten days after the attacks on the World Trade Center Towers, I stood in the rubble at Ground Zero, overwhelmed by the aftermath of one of the most horrific events in history.

On that world-changing morning of September 11, 2001, Manhattan, New York, became a war zone. The terrorists took no prisoners, held no hostages. Death was the only option they offered, so three thousand ordinary people died that day, most without an opportunity for a final embrace or even a last good-bye.

In 1948, when I was born, most of Afghanistan might as well have been living in Neolithic times. It was a world of walled villages, each one inhabited by a few large families, themselves linked in countless ways through intermarriages stretching into the dim historical memories of the eldest elders. These villages had no cars, no carts even, no wheeled vehicles at all; no stores, no shops, no electricity, no postal service, and no media except rumors, storytelling, and the word of travelers passing through. Virtually all the men were farmers. Virtually all the women ran the households and raised the children. Virtually all boys grew up to be like their fathers and all girls like their mothers. The broad patterns of life never changed, never had as far as any living generation could remember, and presumably never would. People lived pretty much as they had eight thousand years ago.

So often, someone will come to me for advice and prayer, and when I tell them what the Word of God says, or what I think the Holy Spirit is saying, their response is, "I know that's right; God has been showing me the same thing. But, Joyce, it's just too hard." It is one of the most commonly expressed excuses I hear from people.

When I initially began to see from the Word of God how I was supposed to live and behave, and compared it to where I was, I also said, "I want to do things Your way, God, but it is so hard." God graciously showed me this is a lie the enemy tries to inject into our minds to get us to give up. God's commandments are not too difficult or too far away.

The Wisdom of Wilderness
Tap into the Awe-Inspiring Power of Nature

In this deeply moving book of reflection and recollection, Frederick Buechner once again draws us into his deeply textured life and experience to illuminate our own understanding of home as both our place of origin and our ultimate destination.

The Bible is one of the two or three oldest books in the world, but unlike most of the ancient books, it is found not only in great libraries, but in almost every home of the civilized world; and it is not only studied by learned scholars, but read by the common people; and its many stories grasp and hold the attention of little children. Happy is that child who has heard, over and over again, the Bible stories until they have become fixed in his mind and memory, to become the foundations of a noble life.

"Orientalism and Religion" offers us a timely discussion of the implications of contemporary post-colonial theory for the study of religion. Drawing on a variety of post-structuralist and post-colonial thinkers, including Foucault, Gadamer, Said, and Spivak, Richard King examines the way in which notions such as mysticism, religion, Hinduism and Buddhism are taken for granted, and shows us how religion needs to be redescribed along the lines of cultural studies.

"What is work, truly? In its widest sense, work is not just a job. It is the sum of all our purposeful activities. Seen in this light, work is our whole life. In a continuation of his national bestseller, Work as a Spiritual Practice, Lewis Richmond's latest effort, A Whole Life's Work, explores the many facets of work as a means to cultivate inner life and contribute to the developing consciousness of all humanity. A Whole Life's Work defines eight important modes of work -- the Earner, the Hobbyist, the Creator, the Monk, the Helper, the Parent, the Learner, and the Elder -- along with their corresponding eight modes of inner work: Precepts, Vitality, Patience, Calm, Equanimity, Giving, Humility, and Wisdom. These inner modes are drawn from the author's Buddhist training, but in some form they can be found in most other spiritual traditions, demonstrating the recognition throughout history that our whole life's work has inner as well as outer dimensions. Here Lewis Richmond addresses a primary struggle of contemporary life: how to strike a balance between achievement and ambition on the one hand, and happiness and fulfillment on the other.

Authored by Celtic priests when the first Gospels of the New Testament were being created, the Celtic Texts of the Coelbook (the last five books of The Kolbrin Bible) documents the fusion of Celtic and Druid mysticism, Judaism and Egyptian anthropology. Some regard it as a key Celtic wisdom text because it includes a revealing biography of Jesus with several never-before published first-person quotes.

This work is rooted in a 3600-year-old Egyptian text (the first six books of The Kolbrin Bible) written following the Exodus. It describes how Noah's Flood and the Ten Plagues of Exodus were caused by a planet (also known as Nibiru or Planet X) that orbits our sun every 3600 years. The Egyptians called it the "Destroyer" and the Celtic priests called it the "Frightener."