Mate selection is the second most important decision we make in life! This decision determines whether our life will be blessed and full of joy or if it will be a painful calamity. If it is a calamity, then it will bring disastrous effects on us, our mate, our children, and our extended family and friends. Who can best guide us through this decision? Parents frequently convey to their children that the only criteria for success in mate selection and marriage are money and education. Parents want their children to excel in marriage, but they give their children no specialized training or emphasis on preparing their lives and being the kind of person who can secure a godly mate and maintain a permanent, lasting relationship. I see churches striving to attract youths and young adults to the church. I see churches challenging youths to be exceptional in their faithfulness to Jesus. I want to see churches teaching teenagers and young adults to be intimate with one another while maintaining sexual purity. I want to see churches teaching youths how to build the skills that will make them an excellent mate and future parent. I want to see churches teaching youths and young adults how to find healing for the pains that are destroying their lives. I see churches teaching that God demands holiness, and I want to see them teaching that holiness is the most enjoyable, beneficial, and only lifestyle that can and will bring permanence to all of our relationships, including marriage.

How should one approach the notion of the precarious in art – its meanings and its outcomes? Its presence in artistic practices may be transient, yet it instigates permanent changes in the production, discourse, and perception of art. The Permanence of the Transient: Precariousness in Art gathers essays that examine the traces and implications of precariousness in contemporary art, and lays a foundation for a thoughtful study of its emergence in related fields throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. The different perspectives represented in this volume touch on art history and theory, curatorial practice, media art, philosophy, language, and transnational studies, and highlight artists’ narratives. Together, these interdisciplinary essays locate precariousness as an undercurrent in contemporary art and a connective tissue across diverse areas of knowledge and everyday life.

"[This work] explores the interplay between permanence and impermanence in cultural and artistic practices in the West and elsewhere ... [and] addresses particularly crucial artists, including Robert Smithson and Andy Goldsworthy, as well as a wide variety of historical epochs and cultures, from the destroyed Buddhas at Bamiyan through attempts at preservation and commemoration in the wake of historical catastrophes like 9/11 and the genocide in Cambodia to the current trend toward globalization in contemporary art."--Publisher's description.

Once a fringe phenomenon, tattooing is now a full-blown cultural fact. More than 40 million people in the U.S. alone have tattoos, all with unique stories about why they chose to indelibly mark their bodies. Permanence combines photographic tattoo portraits with these stories, told in the subjects' own words and handwriting. Kip Fulbeck brings together young and old of all races, religions, and political persuasions—from celebrities to suburban moms to Hells Angels. Including interviews with celebrity tattooers Kat Von D and Oliver Peck (Miami Ink), hardcore legend Evan Seinfeld, and some regular folks, Permanence is an entertaining and enlightening portrait of the tattooed population today.

Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Change, written by American literary theorist Kenneth Burke, was first published in 1935, at the height of the Great Depression. Burke followed this with Attitudes Toward History followed just two years later. His texts proved to be revolutionary in the theory of communication, and, as classics, retain their surcharge of energy. Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Change treats human communication in terms of ideal cooperation, and in this book, Burke establishes, in ground-breaking fashion, that form permeates society, just as it does poetry and the arts. This present volume is the Second Edition, first published in 1954, and includes an Introduction by Hugh Dalziel Duncan. “Unquestionably the most brilliant and suggestive critic now writing in America.”—W. H. Auden “One of the truly speculative American thinkers of his era.”—Malcolm Cowley “The foremost critic of our time and perhaps the greatest critic since Coleridge.”—Stanley Edgar Hyman “What Burke has done better than anyone else is to find a way of connecting literature to life without reducing either. He’s had far less attention than he deserves because he’d been so far ahead of his time. But he’s one of the major minds of the twentieth century, and he’s sure to be read in the future.”—Wayne Booth