If you could point to one thing in your life and say, Lord, heal this. What would it be? Where does God's mercy most need to abide in your life? We all hold ourselves back from truly letting God love us, but what if today you let Him in? What would you lay down at the foot of the cross?

In this elegant edition, Merritt, author and editor of more than 20 books, chronicles how youth is rendered in photographs, as well as other art and literature, over the course of the last 150 years. Highlights include hand-colored photos from Lewis Carroll (including an image of his muse, young Alice Liddell) and masterpieces by Richard Avedon, Andre Kertesz, Sally Mann, Robert Mapplethorpe and Nan Goldin. Cutting no corners, Merritt tackles the usual suspects (children at play, children at rest, children and dogs) as well as the difficult issues: hunger and poverty, embodied in the chilling Great Depression work of Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans; war, including opposing quotations from Adolf Hitler and Anne Frank; and political oppression, as in Carl Iwasaki's shot of Linda Brown in her segregated Kansas classroom prior to her landmark case against the Board of Education. These sobering images are set beside thorough, concerned discussion of critical issues facing children today: AIDS, over-population and famine among them. The text, broken into modes of perception-"the innocent child," "the child assailed," "the child alone," etc.-is peppered with quotes from the likes of Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, Rainer Marie Rilke, Jack London, William Wordsworth, Victor Hugo and Herman Hesse. An eclectic, captivating study, this is a fine volume for anyone who works with children or children's welfare issues. 350 four-color and duotone photographs.

When Kristin Armstrong was in the pit of her divorce, she eagerly read every spiritual book and devotional she could get her hands on out of a hunger to connect with someone who knew exactly what she was going through and how she felt. Now, at a time when society offers so many conflicting messages about what it means to be a woman, Kristin invites readers to discover grace as a way of life. Using real-life anecdotes, biblical wisdom, and insight born of hard experience, Kristin teaches women the twelve traits of grace, inviting reflection and interaction. Warm, engaging, and practical, WORK IN PROGRESS examines what God has to say about being His kind of woman in the twenty-first century.

Few concepts are more important in Catholic theology than that of grace, but most adult Catholics never move beyond a schoolchild's understanding of grace. Charles Journet explores philosophy, revelation and history to explain grace fully. Journet lays out both the doctrinal development of grace and corrects persistent mistakes that Catholics make about grace. He covers habitual grace, actual grace, predestination, justification, merit, and much more. He even includes a revealing exploration of Adam's earthly paradise and how the nature of the Fall called forth God's response of grace.

Few teachings of the Puritans have provoked such strong reactions and conflicting interpretations as their views on preparing for saving faith. Many twentieth-century scholars dismissed preparation as a prime example of regression from the Reformed doctrine of grace for a man-centered legalism. In Prepared by Grace, for Grace , Joel Beeke and Paul Smalley make careful analysis of the Puritan understanding of preparatory grace, demonstrate its fundamental continuity with the Reformed tradition, and identify matters where even the Puritans disagreed among themselves. Clearing away the many misconceptions and associated accusations of preparationism, this study is sure to be the standard work on how the Puritans understood the ordinary way God leads sinners to Christ. Table of Contents: Introduction: The Question of Preparationism 1. Preparation and Modern Scholarship 2. Precedents to Puritan Preparation: Augustine to Calvin 3. Preparation and Early English Puritans: Perkins, Sibbes, and Preston 4. Preparation for Conversion: William Ames 5. Preparation in Early New England (I): Thomas Hooker 6. Preparation in Early New England (II): Shepard and Pemble 7. Preparation and the Antinomian Controversy: John Cotton 8. Preparation at the Pinnacle of Puritanism: Westminster, Burroughs, and Guthrie 9. Preparation under a Scholastic Lens: Norton 10. Preparation and Later Puritan Critiques: Goodwin and Firmin 11. Later Puritan Preparation: Flavel and Bunyan 12. Jonathan Edwards and Seeking God 13. Continental Reformed Perspectives: Zwingli to Witsius 14. The Grace of Preparation for Faith Appendix: William Ames's Theological Disputation on Preparation

During the Pilgrimage of Grace for a short time Henry VIII lost control of the North of England and there was a very real possibility of civil war. Protesting against the king's betrayal of the 'old' religion, his new taxes, and his threat to the rights of landowners, the poor and the powerful united against their king and his henchman Thomas Cromwell, raising an army of 40,000.The leader of the Pilgrimage was the charismatic, heroic figure of Robert Aske, a lawyer. Under his influence and persuasion most of the Northern nobility joined the rebellion and gathered for battle at Doncaster where they would have outnumbered the king's soldiers by 4 to 1. But Aske had an unshakeable belief in justice and fair dealing, which was to prove his undoing. He was persuaded by the king's men to abandon military force and negotiate terms in London. Once there he was arrested, charged with treason and hanged in chains. Another 200 'pilgrims' were executed in the North as a 'fearful spectacle'.

Bunyan was an English Baptist pastor whose influence through 'The Pilgrim's Progress' could be said to have shaped the British and American psyche. Bunyan was more than an imprisoned tinker with time on his hands, he wrote many other books and was a key figure in British history during momentous nation- changing events.