"I can't imagine a college student—skeptic, doubter, Christian, struggler—who wouldn't benefit from this book." —Kevin DeYoung For many young adults, the college years are an exciting period of selfdiscovery full of new relationships, new independence, and new experiences. Yet college can also be a time of personal testing and intense questioning— especially for Christian students confronted with various challenges to Christianity and the Bible for the first time. Drawing on years of experience as a biblical scholar, Michael Kruger addresses common objections to the Christian faith—the exclusivity of Christianity, Christian intolerance, homosexuality, hell, the problem of evil, science, miracles, and the reliability of the Bible. If you're a student dealing with doubt or wrestling with objections to Christianity from fellow students and professors alike, this book will equip you to engage secular challenges with intellectual honesty, compassion, and confidence—and ultimately graduate college with your faith intact.

Most contemporary interpretations of the biblical book of Lamentations focus on the figure of the "suffering man" as a role model for submission in the face of God's punishment for sin. Yet such a model offers small consolation to survivors of the Holocaust or other mass atrocities and also ignores chapters 1 and 2 of Lamentations, in which the personification of Zion laments her sufferings and demands a response on behalf of her dying children. In Surviving Lamentations, Tod Linafelt offers an alternative reading of Lamentations in light of the "literature of survival" (works written by survivors of catastrophe) as well as literary and philosophical reflections on "the survival of literature." He refocuses attention on the figure of Zion as a manifestation of a basic need to give voice to suffering, and traces the afterlife of Lamentations in Jewish literature, in which text after text attempts to provide the response to Zion's lament that is lacking in Lamentations itself. Seen through Linafelt's eyes, Lamentations emerges as uncannily relevant to contemporary discourse on survival.

The author provides a solid teaching tool for church leaders who are facing not only their own struggles but also reaping the fallout of recent moral failings of nationally well-known church leaders. The author addresses the very real issues of how and wh

Do others look to you for leadership? Do you face a major task or shoulder heavy responsibilities? Do you want to take your leadership skills to a higher level? When Nehemiah confronted the task of rebuilding Jerusalem's wall, he was heartbroken by the damage he saw and nearly overwhelmed by the task that lay before him. Yet through the application of timeless leadership principles, Nehemiah completed this nearly impossible project, and laid a pattern for success which is just as valid for us today. Charles Swindoll brings his sensible and straightforward style to offer a deeply spiritual approach to the role of leader. Whatever the context, secular or ministerial, he demonstrates how to size up a task, organize and motivate a team, and respond to inevitable obstacles such as these: Unforeseen setbacks Unrelenting deadlines Criticism and outside resistance Personality conflicts Financial pressures and temptations The insights that Swindoll draws from Nehemiah's wise administration will change your approach to leadership forever.

The Book of Job functions as literature of survival where the main character, Job, deals with the trauma of suffering, attempts to come to terms with a collapsed moral and theological world, and eventually re-connects the broken pieces of his world into a new moral universe, which explains and contains the trauma of his recent experiences and renders his life meaningful again. The key is Job's death imagery. In fact, with its depiction of death in the prose tale and its frequent discussions of death in the poetic sections, Job may be the most death-oriented book in the bible. In particular, Job, in his speeches, articulates his experience of suffering as the experience of death. To help understand this focus on death in Job we turn to the psychohistorian, Robert Lifton, who investigates the effects on the human psyche of various traumatic experiences (wars, natural disasters, etc). According to Lifton, survivors of disaster often sense that their world has "collapsed" and they engage in a struggle to go on living. Part of this struggle involves finding meaning in death and locating death's place in the continuity of life. Like many such survivors, Job's understanding of death is a flashpoint indicating his bewilderment (or "desymbolization") in the early portions of his speeches, and then, later on, his arrival at what Lifton calls "resymbolization," the reconfiguration of a world that can account for disaster and render death - and life - meaningful again.

"A manual of methods, principles and formulas for classical, computer, games, stop motion and internet animators"--Cover.