"Newspapers are filled with stories about poorly educated children, ineffective teachers, and cash-strapped school districts. In this greatly expanded treatment of a topic he first dealt with in Rediscovering the Lost Tools of Learning, Douglas Wilson proposes an alternative to government-operated school by advocating a return to classical Christian education with its discipline, hard work, and learning geared to child development stages. As an educator, Wilson is well-equipped to diagnose the cause of America's deteriorating school system and to propose remedies for those committed to their children's best interests in education. He maintains that education is essentially religious because it deals with the basic questions about life that require spiritual answers-reading and writing are simply the tools. Offering a review of classical education and the history of this movement, Wilson also reflects on his own involvement in the process of creating educational institutions that embrace that style of learning. He details elements needed in a useful curriculum, including a list of literary classics. Readers will see that classical education offers the best opportunity for academic achievement, character growth, and spiritual education, and that such quality cannot be duplicated in a religiously-neutral environment"--

Generalized approaches can never fully address distinct disciples. If every Christian is in a unique place surrounded by specific challenges, why do we think that a widespread approach will work for every single one of us? In the Distinctive Discipleship Bible Study, learn how to design a specific plan for Christian maturity.

Christian teachers have long been thinking about what content to teach, but little scholarship has been devoted to how faith forms the actual process of teaching. Is there a way to go beyond Christian perspectives on the subject matter and think about the teaching itself as Christian? In this book David I. Smith shows how faith can and should play a critical role in shaping pedagogy and the learning experience.

NEW 2010 B&W Edition Archbishop Desmond Tutu of Cape Town once said with regard to South Africa's Apartheid policy, "One of the ways of helping to destroy a people is to tell them that they don't have a history, that they have no roots." He recently described homophobic discrimination "as totally unacceptable and unjust as Apartheid ever was." Unfortunately, it has been particularly difficult for some gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered Christians to remain connected with and identified with their own faith traditions because some of these traditions not only treat them as people of secondary status but teach Christian history as though no people of same-gender attraction or opposite-gender identity had any noteworthy place in it and had made no significant contributions at all to Christian tradition.Passionate Holiness tries to remedy this situation by explaining why acquaintance with the stories of Sts. Polyeuct and Nearchus, Sts. Sergius and Bacchus, Christ/Holy Wisdom, Sts. Matrona, Perpetua and Felicity, Brigid and Darlughdach, and many others with whom gender minorities can identify can help them to connect with their own history and spiritual legacy and empower them to face a brighter future with a sense of optimism and inclusion. The story of the removal of the feast of Sts. Sergius and Bacchus from the liturgical calendar of the Roman Catholic Church in 1969 - ironically, the very year New York's Stonewall Riots launched the gay liberation movement - is a particularly revealing example of how far some religious authorities will go to keep gender minorities distanced from their own history. This is all explored in Passionate Holiness. "It's a marvelous, beautiful book." Ursula Vaughan Williams poet, novelist, and widow of composer Ralph Vaughan Williams "It was a fascinating study. Congratulations on a job well done." Andrew M. Greeley priest, sociologist, novelist "Many thanks for sending me your book Passionate Holiness, which I enjoyed very much. It is a fascinating account of the cult of Holy Wisdom, mixed with stories of various 'distinctive people' and the roles they have played in the history of the Church. It is full of saints, sinners, heretics, martyrs, and those who persecuted them. Some of these people, and the ideas they believed in, have featured in my novels, though there was much that I was not aware of. The material in the Russian and Irish chapters were new to me. You say at the beginning of Chapter VII that the reader may cry out "Too much information". Not me! Passionate Holiness is a work of remarkable scholarship, and I wish it had been published before I wrote my Byzantine novels, rather than afterwards. If I ever return to Byzantium as a subject, I am sure I will find your book invaluable. The icons that illustrate the book are beautiful. You are lucky to have access to works by such gifted artists. If only my publisher had commissioned something similar for the cover of Theodore. Maybe next time!" Christopher Harris English novelist, author of "Theodore," "Memoirs of a Byzantine Eunuch," and "False Ambassador" "Here's something the antigay modern Roman Catholic Church would like to forget: In the early years of Christianity, homosexual saints were worshipped too, as Dennis O'Neill reminds us. O'Neill is a Chicago-based Catholic pastor who 11 years ago founded The Living Circle, a spirituality center devoted to GLBT people and their friends. In 1995 the Circle hosted an art exhibit entitled "Passionate Holiness" that displayed such holy icons as Saint Boris and George the Hungarian and Saints Brigid and Darlughdach of Kildare. O'Neill's retelling of such stories, plus striking color illustrations, will surprise and inspire any reader, gay or not." Anne Stockwell Review from "The Advocate", May 24, 2005 issue, p. 82. "Passionate Holiness is indeed a remarkable book, unlike any other that I know of. Its scope

"Silly," "stupid," "irrational," "simple." "Wicked," "hateful," "obstinate," "anti-social." "Extravagant," "perverse." The Roman world rendered harsh judgments upon early Christianity--including branding Christianity "new." Novelty was no Roman religious virtue. Nevertheless, as Larry W. Hurtado shows in Destroyer of the gods, Christianity thrived despite its new and distinctive features and opposition to them. Unlike nearly all other religious groups, Christianity utterly rejected the traditional gods of the Roman world. Christianity also offered a new and different kind of religious identity, one not based on ethnicity. Christianity was distinctively a "bookish" religion, with the production, copying, distribution, and reading of texts as central to its faith, even preferring a distinctive book-form, the codex. Christianity insisted that its adherents behave differently: unlike the simple ritual observances characteristic of the pagan religious environment, embracing Christian faith meant a behavioral transformation, with particular and novel ethical demands for men. Unquestionably, to the Roman world, Christianity was both new and different, and, to a good many, it threatened social and religious conventions of the day. In the rejection of the gods and in the centrality of texts, early Christianity obviously reflected commitments inherited from its Jewish origins. But these particular features were no longer identified with Jewish ethnicity and early Christianity quickly became aggressively trans-ethnic--a novel kind of religious movement. Its ethical teaching, too, bore some resemblance to the philosophers of the day, yet in contrast with these great teachers and their small circles of dedicated students, early Christianity laid its hard demands upon all adherents from the moment of conversion, producing a novel social project. Christianity's novelty was no badge of honor. Called atheists and suspected of political subversion, Christians earned Roman disdain and suspicion in equal amounts. Yet, as Destroyer of the gods demonstrates, in an irony of history the very features of early Christianity that rendered it distinctive and objectionable in Roman eyes have now become so commonplace in Western culture as to go unnoticed. Christianity helped destroy one world and create another.