Teach children about two extraordinary events in history when the God of the Bible proved himself to be the one true God. Kids today are faced with a huge range of different views on who God is (or isn't). How can they be sure who's got it right? This beautifully illustrated hardback storybook for children aged 3-6 is written by the team behind The Garden, the Curtain and the Cross. It retells two extraordinary events in history when the God of the Bible proved himself to be the one true God. First it takes children back to Elijah's time and the gripping "God contest" between the God of the Bible, Yahweh, and the false god Baal. Then it fast-forwards to a different mountain and another "God contest" at an empty tomb. Once the evidence is examined, it invites kids, in a world of so many options, to decide with confidence to join Team Jesus.

Teach kids how to pray with this beautifully illustrated Bible storybook.

Many people would be surprised to hear that a playful attitude towards God and the world lies at the heart of Christian faith. Traditionally Christians have focused on the serious responsibilities of service, sacrifice, and commitment. But the prophets say that the future kingdom is full of people laughing and playing, which has implications for Christians who are called to live out the future kingdom in the present. Play is not trivial or secondary to work and service--only a playful way of living does justice to the seriousness of life! Play is the essential and ultimate form of relationship with God, which is why Jesus told people to learn from children. Indeed, a playful attitude is an important part of all significant relationships. This book explores grace, faith, love, worship, redemption, and the kingdom from the perspective of a playful attitude. It describes how to create a "play ethic" to match the "work ethic" and discusses play as a virtue, Aquinas's warning against the sin of not playing enough, and Bonhoeffer's claim that in a world of pain it is only the Christian who can truly play.

In the Tournament of the Gods fantasy series, three mortals--a resurrected mage, a spoiled princess, and a man from a war-torn nation--are chosen to compete in a tournament for the ultimate prize of ascending to godhood. But a darker force schemes in the background to kill them all and destroy the world before they can stop it. For the first time, readers can get all four books in the Tournament of the Gods series--Gathering of the Chosen, Betrayal of the Chosen, Invasion of the Chosen, and Ascension of the Chosen--in one convenient package for one low price! KEYWORDS: epic fantasy adventure series, epic fantasy dragons, epic fantasy magic, epic fantasy sword and sorcery, sword and sorcery adult fantasy, sword and sorcery series, sword and sorcery series magic

This collection is about writing contests, a vibrant rhetorical practice traceable to rhetorical performances in ancient Greece. In their discussion of contests’ cultural work, the scholars who have contributed to this collection uncover important questions about our practices. For example, educational contests as epideictic rhetoric do indeed celebrate writing, but does this celebration merely relieve educators of the responsibility of finding ways for all writers to succeed? Contests designed to reward single winners and singly-authored works admirably celebrate hard work, but do they over-emphasize exceptional individual achievement over shared goals and communal reward for success? Taking a cultural-rhetorical approach to contests, each chapter demonstrates the cultural work the contests accomplish. The essays in Part I examine contests and riddles in classical Greek and Roman periods, educational contests in eighteenth-century Scotland, and the Lyceum movement in the Antebellum American South. The next set of essays discusses how contests leverage competition and reward in educational settings: medieval universities, American turn-of-the-century women’s colleges, twenty-first century scholarship-essay contests, and writing contests for speakers of other languages at the University of Portsmouth. The last set of essays examines popular contests, including poetry contests in Youth Spoken Word, popular American contests designed by marketers, and twenty-first century podcasting competitions. This collection, then, takes up contests as a cultural marker of our values, assumptions, and relationships to writing, contests, and competition.

Secular humanists and other “progressives” have been predicting the demise of religion for the past 250 years. But they keep running into a problem: those who were supposed to be liberated by the secular gospel that God is Dead aren’t buying it. Except for some parts of western Europe and in countries culturally destroyed by Communism, secularization in the radical sense has not occurred. While it has not obliterated the religious impulse, however, the drive towards “progressive irreligion” has, Robert Royal believes, encouraged ignorance of religion’s central role in the development of the West. In The God That Did Not Fail, Royal offers an original reading of religion in ancient Greece and Rome, of Christianity and Judaism, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and Reformation, the several modern Enlightenments, culminating with a profound assessment of our current postmodern moment. He concludes that since religion is a permanent part of human nature and of the particular character of the West, our efforts should be directed not into a quixotic effort to deny the undeniable, especially as we face challenges from Islamic fundamentalism, but into promoting a well thought out and dynamic interplay of faith, reason, and modern freedoms.