This title provides a vivid account of the way the Crusade and its legacy turned and twisted for over a hundred years. It focuses on the personalities on sides, their motivations and objectives, creating for the modern reader an overwhelming impression of the powerful beliefs that drove persecutor and victim.

Burning Bodies interrogates the ideas that the authors of historical and theological texts in the medieval West associated with the burning alive of Christian heretics. Michael Barbezat traces these instances from the eleventh century until the advent of the internal crusades of the thirteenth century, depicting the exclusionary fires of hell and judicial execution, the purifying fire of post-mortem purgation, and the unifying fire of God's love that medieval authors used to describe processes of social inclusion and exclusion. Burning Bodies analyses how the accounts of burning heretics alive referenced, affirmed, and elaborated upon wider discourses of community and eschatology. Descriptions of burning supposed heretics alive were profoundly related to ideas of a redemptive Christian community based upon a divine, unifying love, and medieval understandings of what these burnings could have meant to contemporaries cannot be fully appreciated outside of this discourse of communal love. For them, human communities were bodies on fire. Medieval theologians and academics often described the corporate identity of the Christian world as a body joined together by the love of God. This love was like a fire, melting individuals together into one whole. Those who did not spiritually burn with God's love were destined to burn literally in the fires of Hell or Purgatory, and the fires of execution were often described as an earthly extension of these fires. Through this analysis, Barbezat demonstrates how presentations of heresy, and to some extent actual responses to perceived heretics, were shaped by long-standing images of biblical commentary and exegesis. He finds that this imagery is more than a literary curiosity; it is, in fact, a formative historical agent.

Table of Contents 1. Don’t You Know That Idolatry Is Heresy? (1 Kings 10:1-29) 2. God’s Curse on Heretics (1 Kings 15:25-34) 3. Today’s Heretics Who Are Like King Ahab (1 Kings 21:1-26) 4. There Are God’s Servants Still Remaining on This Earth (1 Kings 22:1-40) 5. Christians Must Now Turn around and Believe in the Gospel of the Water and the Spirit (1 Kings 22:51-53) 6. Who Are These Christian Leaders Seeking Only Mammon? (2 Kings 5:1-27) 7. By This Time Tomorrow, You Shall Know What True Salvation Is (2 Kings 7:1-20) 8. Who Are the False Prophets inside the Christianity of Today? (Matthew 7:15-27) 9. Let Us Lead to the Truth the Heretics Who Do Not Believe That Jesus Is the Christ! (1 John 5:1-12) 10. You Shall Not Kill the Lives of the Born-Again (Genesis 9:1-7) 11. What Should We Do to Avoid Worshipping Idols before God like Solomon the Idolater? (1 Kings 9:1-9) 12. There Are Mighty Hunters Who Aim at the Souls of Men (Genesis 10:1-14) 13. The Descendants of Ham, Mighty Soul-Hunters (Genesis 10:1-32) 14. The Lesson of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9) 15. You Must Live out Your Faith with a Pure Faith Like Stone and Mortar (Genesis 11:1-9) In the Bible, the people of Israel claim to worship God, but ultimately, following Jeroboam, they were worshipping the golden calves. In fact, more than 2/3 of the history of Israelites was a history of having worshipped the golden calves, thinking them to be God. Ultimately, even now, they continue to go on living without realizing the fact that Jesus Christ, who has come by the gospel of the water and the Spirit, is their true Savior. In spite of it all, there are many Jews who are waiting for their Savior, even now. Then, how is the faith of you who claim to be taking part in Christianity in this New Testament Era? Do you currently believe in and follow God with a proper understanding of Him? If not, aren't you perhaps worshipping golden calves with a misapprehension of them as God? If you are like that, then you must become aware of the fact that you are worshipping an idol before God like the people of Israel. Then, you must revert back and meet the Lord who has come by the gospel of the water and the Spirit. I am sure that you will be able to believe in the gospel Truth when you truly realize before God what the Truth of the salvation in the gospel of the water and the Spirit is, won't you? I wish to testify before you the true faith and the Truth under the title, "Heretics, Who Followers the sins of Jeroboam." By all means, I hope you will be a person of the same faith as that of mine. The New Life Mission https://www.bjnewlife.org

Longlisted for the National Book Award. Where did the ideas come from that became the cornerstone of American democracy? America’s founders intended to liberate us not just from one king but from the ghostly tyranny of supernatural religion. Drawing deeply on the study of European philosophy, Matthew Stewart brilliantly tracks the ancient, pagan, and continental ideas from which America’s revolutionaries drew their inspiration. In the writings of Spinoza, Lucretius, and other great philosophers, Stewart recovers the true meanings of “Nature’s God,” “the pursuit of happiness,” and the radical political theory with which the American experiment in self-government began.

A New York Public Library Best Book of the Year! Put an atheist in a strict Catholic school? Expect comedy, chaos, and an Inquisition. The Breakfast Club meets Saved! in debut author Katie Henry’s hilarious novel about a band of misfits who set out to challenge their school, one nun at a time. Perfect for fans of Becky Albertalli and Robyn Schneider. When Michael walks through the doors of Catholic school, things can’t get much worse. His dad has just made the family move again, and Michael needs a friend. When a girl challenges their teacher in class, Michael thinks he might have found one, and a fellow atheist at that. Only this girl, Lucy, isn’t just Catholic . . . she wants to be a priest. Lucy introduces Michael to other St. Clare’s outcasts, and he officially joins Heretics Anonymous, where he can be an atheist, Lucy can be an outspoken feminist, Avi can be Jewish and gay, Max can wear whatever he wants, and Eden can practice paganism. Michael encourages the Heretics to go from secret society to rebels intent on exposing the school’s hypocrisies one stunt at a time. But when Michael takes one mission too far—putting the other Heretics at risk—he must decide whether to fight for his own freedom or rely on faith, whatever that means, in God, his friends, or himself.

Over the past few years, John Pavlovitz's blog, Stuff That Needs To Be Said, has become a virtual hub for millions of people from all over the world, drawn there by his clear, compelling words on compassion, equity, love, and justice. This expansive, like-hearted community transcends race, orientation, gender, religious tradition, political affiliation, and nation of origin--and finds its affinity in the deeper place of our shared humanity, which is the True North of his writing. This collection lovingly pulls together some of John's most widely-read and most beloved essays on faith, politics, grief, and the elemental parts of being human. It is an encouraging, inspiring, challenging storehouse of "stuff that needs to be said."

A lively examination of the heretics who helped Christianity become the world’s most powerful religion. From Arius, a fourth-century Libyan cleric who doubted the very divinity of Christ, to more successful heretics like Martin Luther and John Calvin, this book charts the history of dissent in the Christian Church. As the author traces the Church’s attempts at enforcing orthodoxy, from the days of Constantine to the modern Catholic Church’s lingering conflicts, he argues that heresy—by forcing the Church to continually refine and impose its beliefs—actually helped Christianity to blossom into one of the world’s most formidable religions. Today, all believers owe it to themselves to grapple with the questions raised by heresy. Can you be a Christian without denouncing heretics? Is it possible that new ideas challenging Church doctrine are destined to become as popular as Luther’s once-outrageous suggestions of clerical marriage and a priesthood of all believers? A delightfully readable and deeply learned new history, Heretics overturns our assumptions about the role of heresy in a faith that still shapes the world. “Wright emphasizes the ‘extraordinarily creative role’ that heresy has played in the evolution of Christianity by helping to ‘define, enliven, and complicate’ it in dialectical fashion. Among the world’s great religions, Christianity has been uniquely rich in dissent, Wright argues—especially in its early days, when there was so little agreement among its adherents that one critic compared them to a marsh full of frogs croaking in discord.” —The New Yorker