A broad-based coalition of conservative southern politicians, countercultural activists, environmental scientists, sportsmen, devout Christians, garden clubs in Atlanta, and others came together to push the Coastal Marshlands Protection Act of 1970 through the Georgia state legislature. The law was a first-in-the-nation bill to save the marshes of a state from mining and aggressive development and was a political watershed that reflected the changing nature of the state. It set a foundation that would lead to the thoughtful use of the state’s coastal resources still relevant today. And the Coastlands Wait is the history of this legislative act, as told by St. Simons lawyer and leader of the coalition, Reid Harris. Harris served as head of the environmental section of Governor Jimmy Carter’s Goals for Georgia program and later as chairman of the governor’s State Environmental Council. The coastlands coalition he led backed a groundbreaking act that, when instated, set up a permitting process to control development and to protect five hundred thousand acres of precious Georgia marshland. That coalition did not survive for long and is now seen as an unusual moment in the history of conservation, when allies as deeply diverse as conservative governor Lester Maddox and Atlanta liberals stood together.

Fifty years ago Georgia chose how it would use the natural environment of its coast. The General Assembly passed the Coastal Marshlands Protection Act in 1970, and, surprisingly, Lester Maddox, a governor who had built a conservative reputation by defending segregation, signed it into law. With this book, Paul Bolster narrates the politics of the times and brings to life the political leaders and the coalition of advocates who led Georgia to pass the most comprehensive protection of marshlands along the Atlantic seaboard. Saving the Georgia Coast brings to light the intriguing and colorful characters who formed that coalition: wealthy island owners, hunters and fishermen, people who made their home on the coast, courageous political leaders, garden-club members, clean-water protectors, and journalists. It explores how that political coalition came together behind governmental leaders and traces the origins of environmental organizations that continue to impact policy today. Saving the Georgia Coast enhances the reader’s understanding of the many steps it takes for a bill to become a law. Bolster’s account reviews state policy toward the coast today, giving the reader an opportunity to compare yesterday to the present. Current demands on the coastal environment are different—including spaceports and sea rise from climate change—but the political pressures to generate new wealth and new jobs, or to perch a home on the edge of the sea, are no different than fifty years ago. Saving the Georgia Coast spotlights the past and present decisions needed to balance human desires with the limits of what nature has to offer.

Jesus used his parables to teach ordinary persons with ordinary quandaries; yet because these simple stories contain universal truths that transcend time and culture, they still provide us with powerful lessons. Preaching the Parables provides a gold mine of background material on each of the fourteen parables appearing in Cycle A of the Revised Common Lectionary. Dallas Brauninger brings a fresh, imaginative approach to these familiar texts, probing them to reveal what they tell us about God and inviting further reflection on what they mean for modern living. Much more than just a sermon preparation resource, Preaching the Parables explores questions like: * What dimension of the soul that needs tending does the parable address? * What is the parable's surprise? * What moves us into hope? * How does its point become obvious? * How do its characters relate to us today? Brauninger identifies points of action, examines significant terms, and engages in imaginary exchanges with a variety of characters. The complete text of each parable is also included, along with an analysis highlighting similarities and differences in parallel passages. Modeled on the format of Brauninger's popular Preaching the Miracles series, each chapter includes five sections: - Text - What's Happening? - Spadework - Parallel Scripture - Chat Room What a refreshingly helpful way to exegete the text. The succinct but substantive "Spadework," "Parallel Scripture," and "Chat Room" sections provide the preacher with an exciting array of ways to understand and give meaning to the parables. Brauninger's writing will afford the reader many "Ahas." Diana Coberly Pastor, First Congregational United Church of Christ Great Bend, Kansas Dallas A. Brauninger, a cum laude graduate of Albion College, received her Master of Divinity degree and an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree from Chicago Theological Seminary. She is the author of numerous CSS worship resources, including the Preaching the Miracles series and the Lectionary Worship Aids series. Co-pastor with her husband Robert of a congregation in Burwell, Nebraska, Brauninger is currently engaged in the Pastoral Excellence Program of the United Church of Christ's Nebraska Conference.

This book is an integration of the Old and New Testaments, and it is intended to demonstrate that there should be only one Testament. Together they form the Bible of the Jewish people. They unfold the long journey that Abram and Sarai were summoned by God to initiate. As migrants without a country and without an ethnic identity, they personified the Truth of God by incarnating “the Lord God’s” being of presence and transcendent possibility. Incorporated into an eternal covenant as Abraham and Sarah, they established the birthright of God’s elect people as the embodiment of the integration of universality and ethnicity. The journey continued through their descendants, vacillating between the union of universality and ethnicity and mere ethnicity, and, in the course of Israel’s history, it separated the prophets from the priests. The journey traverses the Yahwist Strand of the Pentateuch, the four prophetic divisions of the Book of Isaiah, Book 1 of I Enoch, the Apocalypse of Daniel, John the Baptist, and it climaxes in the ontological termination of the moral order of separation through the death of Jesus of Nazareth and the inauguration of a New Creation and its New Humanity through his resurrection from the dead. The journey is concluded by Paul the Apostle who, as an ethnically determined Pharisee, is called by God to proclaim the moral order of integration as a gift to the nations of the Gentiles.

The Prophets is widely recognized as a masterpiece of biblical scholarship. Heschel attempts to understand the thoughts, feelings, and impressions of each of the prophets, presenting the reader with a sense of their very being. He effectively achieves a balance between the objective supernatural and the subjective human situation, and presents a unique discussion of Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Micah, Jeremiah, and Habakkuk and their particular challenges and journeys. In the second part of the book, Heschel addresses such subjects as pathos, wrath, sympathy, ecstasy, psychosis, and prophetic and poetic inspiration, and in so doing offers a new contribution to the philosophy of religion. The Prophets is both scholarly and devotional, an indispensable part of an in-depth understanding of the Hebrew Bible.