In every moment, every situation, every relationship, every idea, or possibility, Christians have the upper hand. We are the ones who know the truth. We are the ones for whom death has lost its sting, rendering all threats empty. We are the ones with the ear of Him who holds all resource, all potential, all power, and authority, and who has seen the story to its end and called it “good.” We have all that every human being needs. We cannot truly be deceived, stolen from, humiliated, or killed. We are the upper dogs in the great story of the universe. Our God invites us to actively reign with him, to be powerful ambassadors and productive partners, but we’ve been confused about the mechanisms of partnership with him. We’ve underestimated our role in the story. What does it look like on a Tuesday morning to be an ambassador of the living God? What is happening when we pray? How does creation itself speak to the issue of faith and its development? Upper Dogs takes a convicting and inspiring ride through these questions. You will come away walking a little bit taller, and you will never pray the same way again.

The summary of this book is present in the title, Nonviolence or Nonexistence. I grew up knowing closely the violence of my father. He was violent with me and also with my stepmother (after my mother's early death). As a boy, I thought this was the life for men. I was living a lie. But I soon learned about nonviolence from Martin Luther King and, with much more detail, from Mohandas Gandhi of India. Later, I read the works of Gene Sharp of Harvard, who emphasized strongly that we must abandon violence. Early in my adult years, I became a devotee of nonviolence, especially after I learned that nuclear weapons were manufactured at the Rocky Flats Plant near Boulder, Colorado, where I lived. Achieving closure of Rocky Flats was a major accomplishment for devotees of nonviolence. In words I used as a visiting professor at the University of Denver, "I am a body in the body of the world." Drawing on a lifetime's experience of nonviolent thought and activism, this book emphasizes that to survive, we must end our devotion to violence.

Social scientists have convincingly documented soaring levels of political, legal, economic, and social inequality in the United States. Missing from this picture of rampant inequality, however, is any attention to the significant role of state law and courts in establishing policies that either ameliorate or exacerbate inequality. In Judging Inequality, political scientists James L. Gibson and Michael J. Nelson demonstrate the influential role of the fifty state supreme courts in shaping the widespread inequalities that define America today, focusing on court-made public policy on issues ranging from educational equity and adequacy to LGBT rights to access to justice to worker’s rights. Drawing on an analysis of an original database of nearly 6,000 decisions made by over 900 judges on 50 state supreme courts over a quarter century, Judging Inequality documents two ways that state high courts have crafted policies relevant to inequality: through substantive policy decisions that fail to advance equality and by rulings favoring more privileged litigants (typically known as “upperdogs”). The authors discover that whether court-sanctioned policies lead to greater or lesser inequality depends on the ideologies of the justices serving on these high benches, the policy preferences of their constituents (the people of their state), and the institutional structures that determine who becomes a judge as well as who decides whether those individuals remain in office. Gibson and Nelson decisively reject the conventional theory that state supreme courts tend to protect underdog litigants from the wrath of majorities. Instead, the authors demonstrate that the ideological compositions of state supreme courts most often mirror the dominant political coalition in their state at a given point in time. As a result, state supreme courts are unlikely to stand as an independent force against the rise of inequality in the United States, instead making decisions compatible with the preferences of political elites already in power. At least at the state high court level, the myth of judicial independence truly is a myth. Judging Inequality offers a comprehensive examination of the powerful role that state supreme courts play in shaping public policies pertinent to inequality. This volume is a landmark contribution to scholarly work on the intersection of American jurisprudence and inequality, one that essentially rewrites the “conventional wisdom” on the role of courts in America’s democracy.

Ideology in the Supreme Court is the first book to analyze the process by which the ideological stances of U.S. Supreme Court justices translate into the positions they take on the issues that the Court addresses. Eminent Supreme Court scholar Lawrence Baum argues that the links between ideology and issues are not simply a matter of reasoning logically from general premises. Rather, they reflect the development of shared understandings among political elites, including Supreme Court justices. And broad values about matters such as equality are not the only source of these understandings. Another potentially important source is the justices' attitudes about social or political groups, such as the business community and the Republican and Democratic parties. The book probes these sources by analyzing three issues on which the relative positions of liberal and conservative justices changed between 1910 and 2013: freedom of expression, criminal justice, and government "takings" of property. Analyzing the Court's decisions and other developments during that period, Baum finds that the values underlying liberalism and conservatism help to explain these changes, but that justices' attitudes toward social and political groups also played a powerful role. Providing a new perspective on how ideology functions in Supreme Court decision making, Ideology in the Supreme Court has important implications for how we think about the Court and its justices.