These challenging times demand that Christian churches and their leaders faithfully and effectively address diverse global situations with Gospel-rooted compassion and justice. These essays argue that public theology provides the trinitarian theological framework which fuels wise and compassionate public participation in God's mission within the world today. Public church leaders from the Global South and Global North join their voices to explore the global implications of public theology ...

Seven-year-old Kai is a gentle, imaginative boy trying to survive in a home dominated by his stepmother Terri, a bodybuilder whose escalating steroid use fuels violent mood swings, paranoia, and abuse. While his father works long hours and his biological mother Desiree battles her own illness from a distance, Kai learns to make himself invisible - memorizing creaky floorboards, hoarding stashed snacks, and reading his stepmother's moods like a survival code - all while hiding the bruises a...

Some lives disappear quietly not with dramatic endings, but with small *moments that go unnoticed until it is too late. Behind the ordinary routines of a nursing home, where days blur into one another and silence lingers in the hallways, one woman's story unfolds through forgotten memories, unfinished conversations, and the echoes of a life that refuses to be completely erased.When Melly, an elderly widow living in the Shady Pines care home, finds herself increasingly isolated from...

The chapters in this book present a snapshot of the state of knowledge of air pollution effects at the beginning of the 21st century. From their different disciplines, a distinguished collection of authors document their understanding of how leaves, trees, and forests respond to air pollutants and climate change. Scenarios of global change and air pollution are described. The authors describe responses of forests to climate variability, tropospheric ozone, rising atmospheric CO2, the combi...

An interfaith guide to planned giving.Planned gifts are typically the largest gifts received by a charity and can transform religious organizations and congregations to become more sustainable, impactful, and vibrant entities for decades to come. Encouraging planned gifts to congregations and religious organizations is essential at this time of tremendous generational wealth transfer; these gifts also provide an opportunity to enhance relationships between supporte...

Hiding just behind the fragile skin of reality, like a parasite beneath the flesh, festers a world where nothing makes sense. Time doesn't move—it twitches, stalls, reverses in spasms, dragging you through the same moment again and again with subtle, sickening differences. Space twists into unnatural shapes, folding in on itself like a body contorted in agony, corridors stretching into infinity before snapping shut behind you. The very laws that govern existence—gravity, light, sound—fract...

The battle is upon us, and the old gods are waking.Within these pages gods of fable, creatures of lore, and ancient rituals have been brought back to life in over two hundred drabbles of exactly one hundred words each.Tremble as you rediscover the darkness that came before, the darkness that could eat the world. Delve into the madness created by award-winning horror and fiction authors from around the world. We dare you to remember the fear of the unknown, ...

One of the most important questions of our previous common volumes about affective, schizoaffective, and schizophrenic disorders was the question of what connects and what separates psychotic disorders (Marneros and Tsuang, Schizo affective Psychoses, Springer-Verlag, 1986; Marneros and Tsuang Affective and Schizoaffective Disorders, Springer-Verlag, 1990; Marneros, Andreasen, and Tsuang, Negative and Positive Schizophrenia, Springer-Verlag 1993). The boundaries between various psychotic d...

Today's protracted asymmetrical conflicts confuse efforts to measure progress, often inviting politics and wishful thinking to replace objective evaluation.In Assessing War, military historians, social scientists, and military officers explore how observers have analyzed the trajectory of war in American conflicts from the Seven Years’ War through the war in Afghanistan. Drawing on decades of acquired expertise, the contributors examine wartime assessment in both theory an...

Your climate control is broken, the engine is overheating again, and the traffic has come to a dead stop amidst a swarm of horns. To top it off you're late for work. In a heartbeat, you find yourself in another place, another time. Just for a moment, your mind takes a break. Your subconscious decides to get out of the traffic and set sail along a coast of white sand beaches and palm trees. Later that night, you wake with a jolt but don’t remember what startled you. Your thoughts are racing...

Across the U.S. immigrants, laborers, domestic workers, low-income tenants, indigenous communities, and people experiencing homelessness are conducting research to fight for justice. Collaborating for Change: A Participatory Action Research Casebook documents the stories of a dozen community-based research projects. Academics and their partners share authorship about the importance of gathering credible evidence, both for organizing and persuading. The emphasis is on community org...

The Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah is the location of one of the best-known terrestrial records for the late Cretaceous. A major effort in the new century has documented over 2,000 new vertebrate fossil sites, provided new radiometric dates, and identified five new genera of ceratopsids, two new species of hadrosaur, a probable new genus of hypsilophodontid, new pachycephalosaurs and ankylosaurs, several kinds of theropods (including a new genus of oviraptor and a new ...