Religious Wars

You've heard about the courageous young investigators who covertly videotaped officials of ACORN advocating illegal activities. Now, get ready for an undercover exposé even more daring: a six-month penetration of the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations that resulted in the collection of thousands of pages of smoking-gun documents from this terror-supporting front group for the dangerous, moblike Muslim Brotherhood.

The early modern era in Europe set the mold for the Western world today. It was a complex, tragic, yet pivotal time. It marked the transition between the dominance of the Catholic church throughout Western Europe and the present age of science, reason, and skepticism. The path through this transition was an exciting yet bloody and sorrowful one. The wars between Catholics and Protestants in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries rivaled those of the present in cruelty and atrocity. Durant takes us through the religious wars between Catholics and Protestants in France.

Armies know all about killing. It is what they do, and ours does it more effectively than most. We are painfully coming to realize, however, that we are also especially good at killing our own ''from the inside out,'' silently, invisibly. In every major war since Korea, more of our veterans have taken their lives than have lost them in combat. The latest research, rooted in veteran testimony, reveals that the most severe and intractable PTSD - fraught with shame, despair, and suicide - stems from "moral injury".

They believed they would live forever. So begins Mira Ptacin's haunting account of the women of Camp Etna - an otherworldly community in the woods of Maine that has, since 1876, played host to generations of Spiritualists and mediums dedicated to preserving the links between the mortal realm and the afterlife. Beginning her narrative in 1848 with two sisters who claimed they could speak to the dead, Ptacin reveals how Spiritualism first blossomed into a national practice during the Civil War, yet continues - even thrives - to this very day.

God is good, all the time. Jim Wilson was born in 1927 and raised in a Depression-era farming family. At the age of 16, at the height of World War II, he became the primary breadwinner for his parents and four younger siblings. At age 17, eager to fight for his country, he enlisted in the Navy. Germany surrendered while he was in the recruiting office, and the war was over by the time he entered boot camp. But God had a plan for Jim Wilson in the US Navy.

In Sacred Scripture, Sacred War, James Byrd offers the first comprehensive analysis of how American revolutionaries defended their patriotic convictions through scripture. Byrd shows that the Bible was a key text of the American Revolution. Indeed, many colonists saw the Bible as primarily a book about war. They viewed God as not merely sanctioning violence but actively participating in combat, playing a decisive role on the battlefield.

In Another Man's War, follow Sam Childer's remarkable transformation from violent thug to a man of faith, and his ongoing battle to save children in one of the world's most lawless areas.

Many years ago, the great British philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin urged Herman Wouk to write his autobiography. Wouk responded, "Why me? I'm nobody." Berlin answered, "No, no. You've traveled. You've known many people. You have interesting ideas. It would do a lot of good."

Christianity or Islam: which is the real religion of peace? Almost any liberal pundit will tell you that there's a religion bent on destroying our Constitution, stripping us of our liberties, and imposing religious rule on the U.S. And that religion is . . .Christianity! About Islam, however, the Left is silent--except to claim a moral equivalence between the two: if Islam has terrorists today, that's nothing compared to the Crusades, inquisitions, and religious wars in Christianity's past.

A mysterious billionaire, whose wealth was possibly made through immoral and unethical means, races to capture biblical relics to stop the rise of the Fourth Reich. This mysterious billionaire uses his wealth and power to try to stop a secret group of Nazi sympathizers, white supremacists, and descendants of former Nazis who are hellbent on using biblical relics and religious folklore to raise a monstrous and powerful creature to rule the world and turn the world into a Nazi white supremacist kingdom.

August 1572: Minou Joubert and her husband, Piet, travel to Paris to attend a royal wedding that, after a decade of religious wars, is intended to finally bring peace between the Catholics and the Huguenots. Also in Paris is their oldest enemy, Vidal, in pursuit of an ancient relic that will change the course of history. Within days of the marriage, thousands will lie dead in the street, and Minou’s family will be scattered to the four winds....

How did the Islamic State attract so many followers and conquer so much land? By being more ruthless, more apocalyptic, and more devoted to state building than its competitors. The shrewd leaders of the Islamic State combined two of the most powerful yet contradictory ideas in Islam - the return of the Islamic Empire and the end of the world - into a mission and a message that shapes its strategy and inspires its army of zealous fighters.

Garry Wills has spent a lifetime thinking and writing about Christianity. In What the Qur'an Meant, Wills invites listeners to join him as he embarks on a timely and necessary reconsideration of the Qur'an, leading us through perplexing passages with insight and erudition. What does the Qur'an actually say about veiling women? Does it justify religious war? There was a time when ordinary Americans did not have to know much about Islam. That is no longer the case.

Joan of Arc was born in a small French village during the worst period of the Hundred Years' War. For generations, France had been besieged by the British. At age 11, Joan began to see religious visions telling her to join forces with the King of France. By the time she was a teenager, she was leading troops into battle in the name of her country. Though she was captured and executed for her beliefs, Joan of Arc became a Catholic saint and has since captured the world's imagination.

In the wake of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, Fuller Seminary theologian William Pannell decried the then-popular sentiment among White evangelicals that racism was no longer an urgent matter. In The Coming Race Wars? he meticulously unpacked reasons why our nation - and the church - needed to come to terms with our complicity in America's racial transgressions before we face a more dire reckoning. Critics in 1993 dismissed him as alarmist. Here, Pannell revisits his provocative message with an expanded edition that connects its message to current events.

In little time, Loy has become one of the most powerful advocates of the Buddhist worldview, explaining like no one else its ability to transform the sociopolitical landscape of the modern world. In this, his most accessible work to date, he offers sharp and even shockingly clear presentations of oft-misunderstood Buddhist staples - the working of karma, the nature of self, the causes of trouble on both the individual and societal levels - and the real reasons behind our collective sense of "never enough", whether it's time, money, sex, security...even war.

Dr Kelsy Burke has spent the last five years researching and interviewing internet pornography’s opponents and its sympathizers. In The Pornography Wars, Burke does a deep dive into the long history of pornography in America and then turns her gaze on our present society to examine the ways this industry touches on the most intimate parts of American lives. She offers a complete understanding of the major players in the debates around porn's place in society.

CRETE 1941 - A LOST SECRET IS DISCOVERED During the German invasion of Crete, an air raid destroys a church revealing an ancient Christian scroll buried under its foundations. It is discovered by Callidora, a young Cretan shepherdess. She meets Hans, a German paratrooper who helps her understand the significance of the scroll. Callidora’s family accuse her of collaboration with the enemy and disown her. While Hans’ commanding officer, Captain Wolfgang Kohlenz, will stop at nothing to force Callidora to reveal the scroll’s secret. LONDON 2005 - A GLOBAL CONSPIRACY Richard Helford, an ...

Among all the various figures in 19th century America who left controversial legacies, it is hard to find one as influential as Joseph Smith (1805-1844), the founder of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Mormonism, and the Latter-Day Saint movement. Revered as a prophet on the level of Moses by some, reviled as a perpetrator of large-scale fraud by others, what everyone can agree on is that Joseph Smith founded a religious movement that played a crucial role in the settlement of the West, especially in Utah.

The Obama administration’s overreaching and pervasive secularist policies represent the greatest government-directed assault on religious freedom in American history. So argues conservative movement leader Phyllis Schlafly and journalist George Neumayr. In No Higher Power, Schlafly and Neumayr show how Obama is waging war on our religious liberties and actively working to create one nation under him rather than one nation under God.