The Midwest has produced a robust literary heritage. Its authors have won half of the nation's Nobel Prizes for Literature plus a significant number of Pulitzer Prizes. This volume explores the rich racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity of the region. It also contains entries on 35 pivotal Midwestern literary works, literary genres, literary, cultural, historical, and social movements, state and city literatures, literary journals and magazines, as well as entries on science fiction, film...

For more than forty years, pastor R. Kent Hughes has shared the gospel with thousands of people and raised the standard of expository preaching in North America and beyond.To celebrate his legacy and pay tribute to his years of ministry, fifteen of Hughes's friends and colleagues from across the globe, including J. I. Packer, Wayne Grudem, John MacArthur, Peter Jensen, and D. A. Carson, examine what it means to be an expository preacher. Among the contributors are professors, a uni...

The focus of this book is future global climate change and its implications for agricultural systems which are the main sources of agricultural goods and services provided to society. These systems are either based on crop or livestock production, or on combinations of the two, with characteristics that differ between regions and between levels of management intensity. In turn, they also differ in their sensitivity to projected future changes in climate, and improvements to increase climat...

Map Use: Reading, Analysis, Interpretation, eighth edition is a comprehensive, foundational textbook designed for the college curriculum. Now updated with a new section on map interpretation, Map Use provides students with the knowledge and skills to read and understand maps, and offers professional cartographers a thorough reference resource. Nearly 600 full-color maps, photographs, and graphs illustrate the concepts behind communicating with maps, while lecture slides (available...

Many find it difficult to take words that were written thousands of years ago and apply them to twenty-first-century life in the Western world. How do we read God's unchanging Word in a world that is increasingly defined by change?How to Read the Bible in Changing Times shows everyday Christians how to interpret and apply the Scriptures regardless of time and culture. Rather than seeing the Bible as a magic answer book, a list of commands to obey, or a series of promises t...

“What is at stake is authenticity. . . . Sooner or later Christians tire of public meetings that are profoundly inauthentic, regardless of how well (or poorly) arranged, directed, performed. We long to meet, corporately, with the living and majestic God and to offer him the praise that is his due.”—D. A. CarsonWorship is a hot topic, but the ways that Christians from different traditions view it vary greatly. What is worship? More important, what does it look like in action, both in our co...

Of all the teachings of Christianity, the doctrine of hell is easily the most troubling, so much so that in recent years the church has been quietly tucking it away. Rarely mentioned anymore in the pulpit, it has faded through disuse among evangelicals and been attacked by liberal theologians. Hell is no longer only the target of those outside the church. Today, a disturbing number of professing Christians question it as well. Perhaps more than at any other time in history, hell is under f...

The Easter Moment tells the moving story of Spong's friendship with a young physician dying of cancer and how that relationship shed new light on the years of study the author has devoted to the great mystery of what actually happened on that long-ago Easter when the whole history of the human race was changed. Spong is willing to ask tough and searching questions and to come up with startling and significant answers to what happened after death that first fateful Easter, and what that mea...

Why do even the sincerest students of God's Word sometimes find it dry or confusing? Too often, Robertson McQuilkin suggest, it's because they don't know how to read it.In his classic introduction to Bible study, McQuilkin shows everyday believers how to navigate the Bible's genres and plumb its thought structures with accuracy, experiencing afresh living encounters with the inspired Word.Newly revised and updated, Understanding and Applying the Bible also examines...

Over the centuries the church developed a number of metaphors, such as penal substitution or the ransom theory, to speak about Christ's death on the cross and the theological concept of the atonement. Yet too often, says Scot McKnight, Christians have held to the supremacy of one metaphor over against the others, to their detriment. He argues instead that to plumb the rich theological depths of the atonement, we must consider all the metaphors of atonement and ask whether they each serve a...

The NIV Application Commentary helps you communicate and apply biblical text effectively in today's context.To bring the ancient messages of the Bible into today's world, each passage is treated in three sections:Original Meaning. Concise exegesis to help readers understand the original meaning of the biblical text in its historical, literary, and cultural context.Bridging Contexts. A bridge between the worl...

Emphasizing the historical distance between the New Testament and our contemporary culture, The Sermon on the Mount offers helpful contextual insights for those seeking to discern how to live out the Bible in today's world.This sermon is the moral portrait of Jesus' own people—yet the contrast between his vision and our lives is so stark that many theologians have tried to soften the demands it makes on us until it's been skewed beyond recognition in the m...