A chance meeting with a former US Army Special Forces officer AKA Candyman in war-torn Kabul sets Shiv, a disillusioned civil engineer, from the comforts of Mumbai on a journey to find his inner peace. The craggy peaks and troughs of the Karakoram Range echo the ups and downs of Shiv’s life as he seeks answers to questions of life, destiny and happiness. In a way, Shiv’s travails are no different from that of millions of others seeking answers to the apparent unfairness in life’s distribution of bounties and miseries. Keeping him company in this quest is Nasir, a dour-faced Pashtun, who struggles with his own torments as he despairs at the caprices of fate. But what is a former US army officer doing amidst the ruins of Kabul living in a tent house, and why does the American go by the moniker “Candyman”? The answer to this innocuous question hides in itself the purpose of life we seek and how and why happiness eludes most, despite religion, religious structures, gods and godmen and most important of all… why God won’t help! Or will He?

While his brother prepares to mount the throne of Egypt as the next member of the Twelfth Dynasty, the teenage prince Ameni is sealed in a secret tomb in a state of suspended animation, to be revived four thousand years later by the fourteen-year-old daughter of an archeologist.

One afternoon in February, Michael Movius, a thirty-six year old neurotic who had suffered a mild nervous breakdown and was recuperating at a small hospital in upstate New York, transported Edward Ortega, an unloved attendant at the hospital, from the physical world to an unused recess of his mind. Thus begins a strange and unusual book in a genre all its own, the story of an ordinary man who must assume the mantle of a god. To accommodate the people he brings into his mind from the real world, he must create a world within his imagination, make the sun rise and set, make rain nourish the land, create an environment that can feed and house the inhabitants of his mind, even lay down laws of conduct and morality. But events in the real world constantly impinge on the world within. And the people in Movius mind, a microcosm of a normal community, influence the world without. Movius switches back and forth between man and god, incompetence and omnipotence, pettiness and profundity. Despite its epic scope and philosophical underpinnings, exploring the farthest reaches of the imagination, "The Reluctant God" is an entertaining and eminently readable story of real people trying to cope with an unreal world.

Discover the New Testament’s Forgotten Jewish Origins

In his teens, a young man wrote, “I believe in no religion. There is absolutely no proof for any of them.” After serving in the trenches of WW1, the same young man said, “I never sank so low as to pray.” To a religious friend, he wrote impatiently, “You can’t start with God. I don’t accept God!” This young man was C. S. Lewis, the “foul-mouthed atheist” who would become one of the most eloquent Christian writers of the twentieth century. David C. Downing offers a unique look at Lewis’s personal journey to faith and the profound influence it had on his life as a writer and eventual follower of Christ. This is the first book to focus on the period from Lewis’s childhood to his early thirties, a tumultuous journey of spiritual and intellectual exploration. It was not despite this journey but precisely because of it that Lewis understood the search for life’s meaning so well.

Signs Wonders, and the Kingdom of God is a book for anyone who believes in God's supernatural power but who doubts that we can experience that power personally. This new book presents a fascinating, biblical theology of the Kingdom of God. Williams describes how God works to establish his reign now and in eternity and how we can demonstrate and proclaim, as Jesus did, the supernatural power of his kingdom. Signs, Wonders, and the Kingdom of God investigates the relationship between supernatural power and the ministry of the church today. As a community of love and faith under the reign of God, we continue Jesus' ministry of power evangelizing the poor, casting out demons, healing the sick, and setting free the captives.

"Quammen brilliantly and powerfully re-creates the 19th century naturalist's intellectual and spiritual journey."--Los Angeles Times Book Review Twenty-one years passed between Charles Darwin's epiphany that "natural selection" formed the basis of evolution and the scientist's publication of On the Origin of Species. Why did Darwin delay, and what happened during the course of those two decades? The human drama and scientific basis of these years constitute a fascinating, tangled tale that elucidates the character of a cautious naturalist who initiated an intellectual revolution.