In the decades after World War II, evangelical Christianity nourished America’s devotion to free markets, free trade, and free enterprise. The history of Wal-Mart uncovers a complex network that united Sun Belt entrepreneurs, evangelical employees, Christian business students, overseas missionaries, and free-market activists. Through the stories of people linked by the world’s largest corporation, Bethany Moreton shows how a Christian service ethos powered capitalism at home and abroad. While industrial America was built by and for the urban North, rural Southerners comprised much of the labor, management, and consumers in the postwar service sector that raised the Sun Belt to national influence. These newcomers to the economic stage put down the plough to take up the bar-code scanner without ever passing through the assembly line. Industrial culture had been urban, modernist, sometimes radical, often Catholic and Jewish, and self-consciously international. Post-industrial culture, in contrast, spoke of Jesus with a drawl and of unions with a sneer, sang about Momma and the flag, and preached salvation in this world and the next. This extraordinary biography of Wal-Mart’s world shows how a Christian pro-business movement grew from the bottom up as well as the top down, bolstering an economic vision that sanctifies corporate globalization. The author has assigned her royalties and subsidiary earnings to Interfaith Worker Justice (www.iwj.org) and its local affiliate in Athens, GA, the Economic Justice Coalition (www.econjustice.org).

Discovering the Gospel in Everyday Living Walmart, Jesus and You is a challenging invitation to hear Jesus speak to you personally about the importance and significance of everyday events in your life. Today, many have failed to grasp the reality that Jesus has not changed His method of teaching. In the past, His use of parables helped people understand and apply Gods truth to their own life. Today, through Scripture and your own life experiences, Jesus can do the same. Have you read the Parable of the Buzzard, the Parable of Elvis, or the Parable of Walmart? You can find them and many more as the subject matter of this book. When Scripture is laid alongside a trip to Walmart, frustration with computers, ordering a hamburger, and other everyday experiences, you will know subject matter for parables is all around us. Then as you read the true life experiences of the author and what Jesus says about these experiences, you will recognize and learn how Jesus can speak to you using every day events in your life. You will develop a greater understanding of Gods word and grow closer to the master teacher. Walmart, Jesus, and You is easy to understand but will powerfully touch your spirit. With each chapter teaching a different life principle, the book is excellent for small groups and is useful to pastors, teachers, and others in the local church. Proceeds from the sale of this book will go to assist Southern Baptist international missions efforts through the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering.

Walmart is the largest employer in the world. It encompasses nearly 1 percent of the entire American workforce—young adults, parents, formerly incarcerated people, retirees. Walmart also presents one possible future of work—Walmartism—in which the arbitrary authority of managers mixes with a hyperrationalized, centrally controlled bureaucracy in ways that curtail workers’ ability to control their working conditions and their lives. In Working for Respect, Adam Reich and Peter Bearman examine how workers make sense of their jobs at places like Walmart in order to consider the nature of contemporary low-wage work, as well as the obstacles and opportunities such workplaces present as sites of struggle for social and economic justice. They describe the life experiences that lead workers to Walmart and analyze the dynamics of the shop floor. As a part of the project, Reich and Bearman matched student activists with a nascent association of current and former Walmart associates: the Organization United for Respect at Walmart (OUR Walmart). They follow the efforts of this new partnership, considering the formation of collective identity and the relationship between social ties and social change. They show why traditional unions have been unable to organize service-sector workers in places like Walmart and offer provocative suggestions for new strategies and directions. Drawing on a wide array of methods, including participant-observation, oral history, big data, and the analysis of social networks, Working for Respect is a sophisticated reconsideration of the modern workplace that makes important contributions to debates on labor and inequality and the centrality of the experience of work in a fair economy.

In this finely written study of demonology and Christian spirituality in fourth- and fifth-century Egypt, David Brakke examines how the conception of the monk as a holy and virtuous being was shaped by the combative encounter with demons. Drawing on biographies of exceptional monks, collections of monastic sayings and stories, letters from ascetic teachers to their disciples, sermons, and community rules, Brakke crafts a compelling picture of the embattled religious celibate.

Wal-Mart is under attack--from labor unions, urban planners, globalization critics, and community activists. Looking at Wal-Mart, the authors review conditions before and after Wal-Mart entered a local market and look more broadly at Wal-Mart's impact on wages, productivity growth and inflation. Vedder and Cox show that the retailer has been a force for good.

Schwartz's analysis of the Catechetical Homilies of Theodore of Mopsuestia explores the role of education and worship in the complex process of conversion and Christianization. Catechesis emerges here as invaluable for comprehending clergy's ability to initiate new members as Christianity gained increasing prominence within the late Roman world.

In book two of the Jesus at Walmart Trilogy, Malachi Marble is still working at Walmart.& ;& ;The former pastor, toils through the night while attempting to keep the desire of his heart alivehis passion to serve God and his coworkers at the store.& ;& ;Join Malachi as his life, his faith, and his yearnings become exposed to vulnerability's limit.& ;& ;Walk past the greeter, into the heart and soul of Walmart with Malachi. Another trip to Walmart like no other, awaits you.& ;& ;And may you enjoy the venue of fiction for exploring thoughts and ideas to new depths.