Spiritual error is never a flat issue of doctrinal aberration or bad theology. It is at a deeper level a twist in our thinking about God, and a distortion in our views of ourselves and other people. Error is devious business precisely because it departs from the spirit and content of the Christian Scriptures while purporting to illuminate them. It force-fits the exegesis to get there and introduces its version of special revelation to jump the bumps in biblical interpretation. But the real evil lurks in recasting the package as God's message for the times. Every listener is pressed into the corner and compelled to make an ultimate decision: to remain faithful and embrace this fuller "truth," or reject it and be consigned to the margins of God's Kingdom. New truth becomes its own gospel, foisting a burden on ordinary believers, with God's pleasure or displeasure hovering over what they do with the new message. This device is shamelessly perpetuated in the contemporary Pentecostal-Charismatic world. Quite apart from the content, this methodology is devilish business and spiritual bullying....

Spiritual error is never a flat issue of doctrinal aberration or bad theology. It is at a deeper level a twist in our thinking about God, and a distortion in our views of ourselves and other people. Error is devious business precisely because it departs from the spirit and content of the Christian Scriptures while purporting to illuminate them. It force-fits the exegesis to get there and introduces its version of special revelation to jump the bumps in biblical interpretation. But the real evil lurks in recasting the package as God’s message for the times. Every listener is pressed into the corner and compelled to make an ultimate decision: to remain faithful and embrace this fuller “truth,” or reject it and be consigned to the margins of God’s Kingdom. New truth becomes its own gospel, foisting a burden on ordinary believers, with God’s pleasure or displeasure hovering over what they do with the new message. This device is shamelessly perpetuated in the contemporary Pentecostal-Charismatic world. Quite apart from the content, this methodology is devilish business and spiritual bullying.

From the acclaimed cultural historian Philip F. Gura comes Truth's Ragged Edge, a comprehensive and original history of the American novel's first century. Grounded in Gura's extensive consideration of the diverse range of important early novels, not just those that remain widely read today, this book recovers many long-neglected but influential writers—such as the escaped slave Harriet Jacobs, the free black Philadelphian Frank J. Webb, and the irrepressible John Neal—to paint a complete and authoritative portrait of the era. Gura also gives us the key to understanding what sets the early novel apart, arguing that it is distinguished by its roots in "the fundamental religiosity of American life." Our nation's pioneering novelists, it turns out, wrote less in the service of art than of morality. This history begins with a series of firsts: the very first American novel, William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy, published in 1789; the first bestsellers, Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple and Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette, novels that were, like Brown's, cautionary tales of seduction and betrayal; and the first native genre, religious tracts, which were parables intended to instruct the Christian reader. Gura shows that the novel did not leave behind its proselytizing purpose, even as it evolved. We see Catharine Maria Sedgwick in the 1820s conceiving of A New-England Tale as a critique of Puritanism's harsh strictures, as well as novelists pushing secular causes: George Lippard's The Quaker City, from 1844, was a dark warning about growing social inequality. In the next decade certain writers—Hawthorne and Melville most famously—began to depict interiority and doubt, and in doing so nurtured a broader cultural shift, from social concern to individualism, from faith in a distant god to faith in the self. Rich in subplots and detail, Gura's narrative includes enlightening discussions of the technologies that modernized publishing and allowed for the printing of novels on a mass scale, and of the lively cultural journals and literary salons of early nineteenth-century New York and Boston. A book for the reader of history no less than the reader of fiction, Truth's Ragged Edge—the title drawn from a phrase in Melville, about the ambiguity of truth—is an indispensable guide to the fascinating, unexpected origins of the American novel.

The epic conclusion to the fantasy trilogy that began with The Rise of Solamnia and Crown & the Sword continues the saga of the post-war era in Solmania, a central region in the Dragonlance world.

Eudora Welty and Walker Percy were friends but very different writers, even though both were from the Deep South and intensely interested in the relation of place to their fiction. This work explores in each the concept of home and the importance of home to the homo viator ("man on his way"), and anti-idealism and anti-romanticism. The differences between Welty and Percy and in their fiction were revealed in the habits of their lives. Welty spent her life in Jackson, Mississippi, and was very much a member of the community. Percy was a wanderer who finally settled in Covington, Louisiana, because it was, as he called it, a "noplace." The author also asserts that Percy somewhat envied Welty and her stability in Jackson, and that for him, place was such a nagging concern that it became a personal problem to him as homo viator.

The national news media, as now practiced, were born in the 1950s, revealed their strength in the 1960s (Vietnam), asserted it in the 1970s (Watergate), and were hammered for it in the 1980s. By the mid- and late 1980s, after historic libel suits, with the press knocking off presidential candidates and Supreme Court nominees, unraveling the Reagan presidency, and in a position to overwhelm any individual or institution, a new era in press-public tension had arisen from the depths of America's civic religion: fair play.In this account of the media mandarins' rise to uneasy domination, Richard M. Clurman gives an intimate critical report of the media in the 1980s, the stormiest years in press history until the present time, and a harbinger of the present day. Beginning with the invasion of Grenada, he takes his readers - event by event - through the biggest uproars in history, raising questions from both the media's and the public's perspective on the key troubling press issues of our time. Why is the press accused of being so negative, so biased, so left-wing, so anti-establishment? Whenever people read or see something they know about, why is it so often wrong, naive, unfair, or all of the above? Why do the media arrogantly try to tell people what to think? Is there no line between privacy and the people's "right to know"? How can the public and government answer back after the media have spoken?Using the Westmoreland v. CBS and the Sharon v. Time trials as emblematic of how things go wrong, the author draws graphic lessons for improved press conduct and wiser public perception. This is an insider's look at what is right and what is wrong with the media's attitudes toward their work played against public and government expectations.