Church Government

The most patriotic thing you can do for America is pray for America. In times of division and disaster, our country has a long history of turning to God. Robert Jeffress, the senior pastor of a 14,000-member church in Dallas, Texas, and a Fox News contributor, believes it should be no different today. "When we seek God's help and pray about the issues that affect our lives," writes Jeffress, "we influence the fate of our families, our churches, and our nation. It has happened before in history, and it can happen again."

Past and present civilizations failed and fail for many reasons, but the number-one predictor of a civilization’s survival is its sense of religion—or lack thereof. So argues David Goldman in How Civilizations Die (and Why Islam Is Dying Too). The strength of a civilization’s religion affects its purpose, its fertility rate, and ultimately, its fate, says Goldman—who then argues that, contrary to popular belief, Islamic countries are in the last throes of death while Christian America is in a position to flourish.

The Sunday collection in every Catholic church throughout the world is as familiar a part of the Mass as the homily and even Communion. There is no doubt that historically the Catholic Church has been one of the great engines of charity in history. But once a dollar is dropped in that basket, where does it go? How are weekly cash contributions that can amount to tens of thousands of dollars accounted for? Where does the money go when a diocese sells a church property for tens of millions of dollars?

The tenth parallel - the line of latitude seven hundred miles north of the equator - is a geographical and ideological front line where Christianity and Islam collide. More than half of the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims live along the tenth parallel; so do sixty percent of the world’s 2 billion Christians. Here, in the buzzing megacities and swarming jungles of Africa and Asia, is where the two religions meet; their encounter is shaping the future of each faith, and of whole societies as well.

In Unholy Alliance, Jay Sekulow and the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) tackle radical Islam head on. They expose the attempts by fundamentalist Muslims - both in the US and abroad - to destroy our legal system in favor of a system that would destroy our essential liberties. They bring attention to terrorism in today's world and reflect on the recent Paris and San Bernadino attacks as well as Russia, Syria, Iran, and continuous threats to our nation.

The 2016 election of Donald J. Trump exposed a deep divide in American politics and culture, one that pollsters and pundits didn't seem to realize was there. But Trump did, and he used it to his advantage in ways that surprised nearly everyone, even those who voted for him. Perhaps the biggest question on many people's minds is how, exactly, did a crass, unrepentant reality TV star and cutthroat business tycoon secure the majority of the religious conservative vote?

Being Black in America is not an easy task. Black people in America are faced with the task of surviving in a system predicated on the notion that Black people were less than human, policed and enforced by a system that is rooted in slavery and racism. All while trying to succeed in a capitalist society where we are discriminated against.

The "Heavenly Citizens" series serves as a tool to help the Christian understand not only what the Bible teaches us, but also how to study the Bible. Explaining what the Bible teaches is like giving someone a fish to eat. Teaching him how to study the Bible is like teaching someone how to fish so he can feed himself. Both approaches are essential to developing spiritual maturity. "2 Timothy" is the twentieth volume in the "Heavenly Citizens" series. The Apostle Paul begins this letter by presenting his credentials: he is an apostle of Christ Jesus. This is in accord with the authority which...

The "Heavenly Citizens" series serves as a tool to help the Christian understand not only what the Bible teaches us, but also how to study the Bible. Explaining what the Bible teaches is like giving someone a fish to eat. Teaching him how to study the Bible is like teaching someone how to fish so he can feed himself. Both approaches are essential to developing spiritual maturity. "Timothy" is the nineteenth volume in the "Heavenly Citizens" series. The Apostle Paul begins this letter by presenting his credentials: he is an apostle of Christ Jesus. This is in accord with the authority of God...

In What I Believe, Ramadan attempts to set the record straight, laying out the basic ideas he stands for in clear and accessible prose. He describes the book as a work of clarification, directed at ordinary citizens, politicians, journalists, and others who are curious (or skeptical) about his positions. Aware that that he is dealing with emotional issues, Ramadan tries to get past the barriers of prejudice and misunderstanding to speak directly, from the heart, to his Muslim and non-Muslim readers alike.

All Americans, liberal or conservative, religious or not, can agree that religious freedom, anchored in conscience rights, is foundational to the US democratic experiment. But what freedom of conscience means, what its scope and limits are, according to the Constitution - these are matters for heated debate.

Though they may seem to be dividing the country irreparably, today's heated cultural and political battles between right and left, progressives and the Tea Party, religious and secular are far from unprecedented. In this engaging and important work, Stephen Prothero reframes the current debate, viewing it as the latest in a number of flashpoints that have shaped our national identity.

On September 15, 1963, the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, AL, was bombed, killing four young girls. Who were the perpetrators? Due to reluctant witnesses and racial prejudice, the FBI closed the case without any indictments. But as Martin Luther King, Jr., claimed, "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." Bending Toward Justice is a detailed account of this key moment in our national struggle for equality and the long road to prosecuting those responsible for the tragedy, related by an author who played a major role in the investigation.

The first fundamental truth about the "Arab Spring" is that there never was one. The salient fact of the Middle East, the only one, is Islam. The Islam that shapes the Middle East inculcates in Muslims the self-perception that they are members of a civilization implacably hostile to the West. The United States is a competitor to be overcome, not the herald of a culture to be embraced.

In a May 2019 countrywide referendum, Ireland voted overwhelmingly to make abortion legal; three years earlier, it had done the same with same-sex marriage. With help from prominent Irish and Irish American voices like historian and best-selling author Tim Pat Coogan and the New York Times' Maureen Dowd, A New Ireland tells the story of a modern revolution against all odds.

The Bible remains the best-selling book of all time, believed by nearly two billion Christians and Jews to be divinely inspired. But in this hard-hitting new book, author Robert J. Hutchinson proposes that it is actually much more than this. The ideas enshrined in the Bible, he says, triggered a revolution in human thought and established the moral and philosophical foundation for Western civilization.

Despite the human race's extraordinary capacity for invention and progress, we clearly have a millennia-old blind spot in one all-important area: We don't understand evil -- what it is, how it works, and why it so routinely and effortlessly ruins our lives. Put another way, we don't understand ourselves.

The delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention blocked the establishment of Christianity as a national religion. But they could not keep religion out of American politics. From the election of 1800, when clergyman charged that deist Thomas Jefferson was unfit to lead a "Christian nation," to today, when some Democrats want to embrace the so-called Religious Left in order to compete with the Republicans and the Religious Right, religion has always been a part of American politics.

Already infamous for the arbitrary, paranoid persecution of its own citizens throughout much of the 20th century, the Soviet Union - as is revealed in John Koeher’s revelatory, eye-opening exposé - also waged a vicious espionage campaign against the Catholic Church and its followers. From the persecution of local priests to an assassination order against Pope John Paul II, the KGB viewed Catholicism as a threat to stability in Eastern Europe and treated the church as an enemy of the State. Lifetime journalist and former U.S. Army Intelligence Officer John Koehler has written the definitive book on this startling history.

In Blasphemy: How the Religious Right is Hijacking the Declaration of Independence, author Alan Dershowitz proves that no relation exists between the Declaration of Independences Creator and Natures God, on the one hand, and the Judeo-Christian God of the Old and New Testaments, on the other hand