In all the coverage of the priestly sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church, one story has been left untold: the story of the everyday lives of Catholic priests in America, which remain so little understood as to be a secret, even as one priestly sexual predation after another has come to light. In The Other Side of the Altar, Paul Dinter tells one priest's story--his own--in such a way as to reveal the lives of a generation of priests that spanned two very different eras. These priests entered the ministry in the 1960s, when Catholic seminaries were full of young men inspired by both the Church's ancient faith and the Second Vatican Council's promises of renewal. But by the early 1970s, the priesthood--and the celibate fraternity it depended upon--proved quite different from what the Council had promised. American society had changed, too, particularly in the area of sexuality. As a result, there emerged a clerical subculture of denial and duplicity, which all but guaranteed that the sexual abuse of children by priests would be routinely covered up by the Church's bishops. Dinter, now married and raising two stepdaughters, left the priesthood in 1994 over the issue of celibacy, but not before having occasion to reflect on the whole range of priestly struggles with celibacy and sexual life in general--in Rome and rural England, on an Ivy League campus, and in parish rectories of the archdiocese of New York. His candid and affecting account--written from the other side of the altar, so to speak--makes clear that celibacy, sexuality, and power among the clergy have long been intertwined, and suggests how much must change if the Catholic Church hopes to regain the trust of its people.

Christians have lived in Palestine since the earliest days of the Jesus movement, yet they are often unheard and ignored in the midst of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. With both lament and hope, Palestinian pastor Munther Isaac offers a theology of the land and a vision for a shared land that belongs to God, where there are no second-class citizens of any kind.

I wrote this book because it is a story that needs to be told. This is a story about a young girl, Martha, having to grow up in a world where she has to pay for her grandmother's sin--a sin that her grandmother made at an early age. It well tells how her mother also paid a heavy price for that same sin as she grow up. This book will take you on a ride through time and show you that evil is real in all walks of life. When you think good is at your door, evil will walk right in. Keep a lookout for my next book. It will be about how evil can go from state to state; how Martha has to survive in Chicago at a time when pimping is at its all-time high; and how she has to deal with homelessness, love, lost love, and drugs all because of her grandmother's lies and sin.

Pioneer woman Callie McGregor and her family are determined to survive the Indian massacres, prairie wildfires, droughts, and blizzards of the Montana territory in the 1800s with their faith intact.