Finally, someone has explained and explored the kingdom of God in a way that enables us to understand the mission of the church in the world! Believers will be thrilled as they see God s special plan unfold for them regarding their particular vocation,whether they are in full-time church ministry or not! This book is an oasis for those thirsting to know how God s will should be practically fleshed out in the natural world! A must for pastors, leaders, and thinking Christians everywhere!

In this long-awaited work, Isaac mines the diary of a Revolutionary War-era Virginia planter--and many other sources--to reconstruct his interior world as it plunged into turmoil.

Ian Gentles provides a riveting, in-depth analysis of the battles and sieges, as well as the political and religious struggles that underpinned them. Based on extensive archival and secondary research he undertakes the first sustained attempt to arrive at global estimates of the human and economic cost of the wars. The many actors in the drama are appraised with subtlety. Charles I, while partly the author of his own misfortune, is shown to have been at moments an inspirational leader. The English Revolution and the Wars in the Three Kingdoms is a sophisticated, comprehensive, exciting account of the sixteen years that were the hinge of British and Irish history. It encompasses politics and war, personalities and ideas, embedding them all in a coherent and absorbing narrative.

PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST A New York Times Notable Book of 2022 What does it take to reinvent a language? After a meteoric rise, China today is one of the world’s most powerful nations. Just a century ago, it was a crumbling empire with literacy reserved for the elite few, as the world underwent a massive technological transformation that threatened to leave them behind. In Kingdom of Characters, Jing Tsu argues that China’s most daunting challenge was a linguistic one: the century-long fight to make the formidable Chinese language accessible to the modern world of global trade and digital technology. Kingdom of Characters follows the bold innovators who reinvented the Chinese language, among them an exiled reformer who risked a death sentence to advocate for Mandarin as a national language, a Chinese-Muslim poet who laid the groundwork for Chairman Mao's phonetic writing system, and a computer engineer who devised input codes for Chinese characters on the lid of a teacup from the floor of a jail cell. Without their advances, China might never have become the dominating force we know today. With larger-than-life characters and an unexpected perspective on the major events of China’s tumultuous twentieth century, Tsu reveals how language is both a technology to be perfected and a subtle, yet potent, power to be exercised and expanded.

This book explores the political ideas of the Belgian Revolution of 1830, which led to the break-up of the Restoration state of the ‘united’ Kingdom of the Netherlands. It uncovers the origins of liberalism and political Catholicism in the Southern Netherlands in the wake of the French Revolution, and traces the development of political language in the context of the tensions between the Northern and Southern part of the united Netherlands. It shows how differences in ‘Dutch’ and ‘Belgian’ political and intellectual history resulted in different understandings of essential political concepts such as ‘sovereignty’ and ‘balance of powers’, as well as of the nature of the constitutional order of 1815. Finally, it traces the emergence of Belgian nationalism within the discourse of opposition against the government. Stefaan Marteel therefore provides a fresh perspective on the intellectual background of the rise of the nation-state in the nineteenth century.

From the young Black teenager who built a bass guitar in woodshop to the musician building a solo career with Motown Records—Prince’s bassist BrownMark on growing up in Minneapolis, joining Prince and The Revolution, and his life in the purple kingdom In the summer of 1981, Mark Brown was a teenager working at a 7-11 store when he wasn’t rehearsing with his high school band, Phantasy. Come fall, Brown, now called BrownMark, was onstage with Prince at the Los Angeles Coliseum, opening for the Rolling Stones in front of 90,000 people. My Life in the Purple Kingdom is BrownMark’s memoir of coming of age in the musical orbit of one of the most visionary artists of his generation. Raw, wry, real, this book takes us from his musical awakening as a boy in Minneapolis to the cold call from Prince at nineteen, from touring the world with The Revolution and performing in Purple Rain to inking his own contract with Motown. BrownMark’s story is that of a hometown kid, living for sunny days when his transistor would pick up KUXL, a solar-powered, shut-down-at-sundown station that was the only one that played R&B music in Minneapolis in 1968. But once he took up the bass guitar—and never looked back—he entered a whole new realm, and, literally at the right hand of Twin Cities musical royalty, he joined the funk revolution that integrated the Minneapolis music scene and catapulted him onto the international stage. BrownMark describes how his funky stylings earned him a reputation (leading to Prince’s call) and how he and Prince first played together at that night’s sudden audition—and never really stopped. He takes us behind the scenes as few can, into the confusing emotional and professional life among the denizens of Paisley Park, and offers a rare, intimate look into music at the heady heights that his childhood self could never have imagined. An inspiring memoir of making it against stacked odds, experiencing extreme highs and lows of success and pain, and breaking racial barriers, My Life in the Purple Kingdom is also the story of a young man learning his craft and honing his skill like any musician, but in a world like no other and in a way that only BrownMark could tell it.

Building upon past insights, Dr. Rivkin moves forward in recognizing the unique contributions and reconstructing the obscure origins of the Pharisees. Through analysis of the writings of the Jewish historian Josephus, the New Testament, and the body of writings known as the Tannaitic literature, he arrives at a valid identity for the Pharisees: a scholar class dedicated to the supremacy of the twofold Law, the Written and the Oral, who opposed the Sadducees (exponents of the sole authority of the Written Law) and who ultimately made the twofold Law operative in Jewish society. Dr. Rivkin asserts that the essence of the Pharisaic "hidden revolution" was a firm and unwavering belief in a triadic doctrine that elevated the individual above the cultic system and made salvation an individual rather than a group matter. In this way, the Pharisees paved the way for Christianity and Islam.