The healthy Christian life is one of continuing spiritual, emotional, and relational growth. But so many of us feel stuck or stagnated at one stage of the journey. It's not always clear to us where or why we are stuck, making it difficult to take the next step on our journey of the soul. That's where Bill and Kristi Gaultiere come in. After decades in private practice as counselors and therapists, they have developed a unique model for growing in grace. In Journey of the Soul, they draw on more than 70,000 hours of providing therapy and spiritual direction to show you how to identify your current stage of faith and the next steps to take based on your unique needs and struggles. With Scripture, self-assessments, and soul care practices to support your progress along the way, this insightful and inspiring book will be a treasured companion on your journey no matter where you are or how long you've been following Jesus.

What do Jonah and Jesus have in common? More than you think! In this delightfully illustrated children's book, Maura Roan McKeegan tells the story of Jonah and Jesus. Both were given special missions by God. And both have something very important to teach about obedience to His plan. See biblical typology--the Old Testament people, symbols, and events that foreshadow the New Testament--come to life in "Into the Sea, Out of the Tomb: Jonah and Jesus." Recommended for ages 3 and up. About the Series What do the Old and New Testaments have in common? To answer this question, Maura Roan McKeegan presents biblical typology for children. Taking familiar stories from the Old and New Testaments and placing them side by side, children can easily understand at an early age what St. Augustine meant when he said that "the New Testament lies hidden in the Old and the Old Testament is revealed in the New." About the Author Maura Roan McKeegan is a former elementary and middle school teacher who also studied graduate theology and reading education. She is the author of "The End of the Fiery Sword: Adam & Eve and Jesus & Mary, " the award-winning first book in the Old and New series, which introduces children to biblical typology. "Children have a particular sensitivity to the work of the Holy Spirit," she says."Their pure hearts are able to understand Scripture in great depth." Maura grew up in Potomac, Maryland, and now lives in Steubenville, Ohio, with her husband Shaun and their four children. About the Illustrator Ted Schluenderfritz is the illustrator of several books including "A Life of Our Lord for Children, The Book of Angels, " and "Darby O'Gill and the Good People." He is a freelance graphic designer and the art director for "Catholic Digest" and "Gilbert Magazine." He lives in Littleton, Colorado with his wife Rachel and their six children. You can view more of his work at www.5sparrows.com.

The NIV is the world's best-selling modern translation, with over 150 million copies in print since its first full publication in 1978. This highly accurate and smooth-reading version of the Bible in modern English has the largest library of printed and electronic support material of any modern translation.

As news reports of the horrific December 2004 tsunami in Asia reached the rest of the world, commentators were quick to seize upon the disaster as proof of either God s power or God s nonexistence, asking over and over, How could a good and loving God if such exists allow such suffering? In The Doors of the Sea David Bentley Hart speaks at once to those skeptical of Christian faith and to those who use their Christian faith to rationalize senseless human suffering. He calls both to recognize in the worst catastrophes not the providential will of God but rather the ongoing struggle between the rebellious powers that enslave the world and the God who loves it wholly.

Christians know that God loves them, but can easily feel that he is perpetually disappointed and frustrated, maybe even close to giving up on them. As a result, they focus a lot—and rightly so—on what Jesus has done to appease God’s wrath for sin. But how does Jesus Christ actually feel about his people amid all their sins and failures? This book draws us to Matthew 11, where Jesus describes himself as “gentle and lowly in heart,” longing for his people to find rest in him. The gospel flows from God’s deepest heart for his people, a heart of tender love for the sinful and suffering. These chapters take readers into the depths of Christ’s very heart for sinners, diving deep into Bible passages that speak of who Christ is and encouraging readers with the affections of Christ for his people. His longing heart for sinners comforts and sustains readers in their up-and-down lives.

Jovinianus, about whom little more is known than what is to be found in Jerome's treatise, published a Latin treatise outlining several opinions: That a virgin is no better, as such, than a wife in the sight of God. Abstinence from food is no better than a thankful partaking of food. A person baptized with the Spirit as well as with water cannot sin. All sins are equal. There is but one grade of punishment and one of reward in the future state. In addition to this, he held the birth of Jesus Christ to have been by a "true parturition," and was thus refuting the orthodoxy of the time, according to which, the infant Jesus passed through the walls of the womb as his Resurrection body afterwards did, out of the tomb or through closed doors.

Challenging the formidable tradition that places early New England Puritanism at the center of the American religious experience, Yale historian Jon Butler offers a new interpretation of three hundred years of religious and cultural development. Butler stresses the instability of religion in Europe where state churches battled dissenters, magic, and astonishingly low church participation. He charts the transfer of these difficulties to America, including the failure of Puritan religious models, and describes the surprising advance of religious commitment there between 1700 and 1865. Through the assertion of authority and coercion, a remarkable sacralization of the prerevolutionary countryside, advancing religious pluralism, the folklorization of magic, and an eclectic, syncretistic emphasis on supernatural interventionism, including miracles, America emerged after 1800 as an extraordinary spiritual hothouse that far eclipsed the Puritan achievement--even as secularism triumphed in Europe. Awash in a Sea of Faith ranges from popular piety to magic, from anxious revolutionary war chaplains to the cool rationalism of James Madison, from divining rods and seer stones to Anglican and Unitarian elites, and from Virginia Anglican occultists and Presbyterians raised from the dead to Jonathan Edwards, Joseph Smith, and Abraham Lincoln. Butler deftly comes to terms with conventional themes such as Puritanism, witchcraft, religion and revolution, revivalism, millenarianism, and Mormonism. His elucidation of Christianity's powerful role in shaping slavery and of a subsequent African spiritual "holocaust," with its ironic result in African Christianization, is an especially fresh and incisive account. Awash in a Sea of Faith reveals the proliferation of American religious expression--not its decline--and stresses the creative tensions between pulpit and pew across three hundred years of social maturation. Striking in its breadth and deeply rooted in primary sources, this seminal book recasts the landscape of American religious and cultural history.