Gathering At The Hearth

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  Render Unto Caesar

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  The revered Bible scholar and author of The Historical Jesus explores the Christian culture wars–the debates over church and state–from a biblical perspective, exploring the earliest tensions evident in the New Testament, and offering a way forward for Christians today.

  Leading Bible scholar John Dominic Crossan, the author of the pioneering work The Historical Jesus, provides new insight into the Christian culture wars which began in the New Testament and persist strongly today.

  For decades, Americans have been divided on how Christians should relate to government and lawmakers, a dispute that has impacted every area of society and grown more rancorous over the past forty years. But as Crossan makes clear, this debate isn’t new; it can be found in the New Testament itself, most notably in the tensions between Luke-Acts and Revelations.

  In the texts of Luke-Acts, Rome is considered favorably. In the book of Revelations, Rome is seen as the embodiment of evil in the world. Yet there is an alternative to these two extremes, Crossan explains. The historical Jesus and Paul, the earliest Christian teachers, were both strongly opposed to Rome, yet neither demonized the Empire.

  Crossan sees in Jesus and Paul’s approach a model for Christians today that can be used to cut through the acrimony and polarization roiling our society and dividing us.

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  Great By Choice

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  The new question
  Ten years after the worldwide bestseller Good to Great, Jim Collins returns with another groundbreaking work, this time to ask: Why do some companies thrive in uncertainty, even chaos, and others do not? Based on nine years of research, buttressed by rigorous analysis and infused with engaging stories, Collins and his colleague, Morten Hansen, enumerate the principles for building a truly great enterprise in unpredictable, tumultuous, and fast-moving times.

  The new study
  Great by Choice distinguishes itself from Collins’s prior work by its focus not just on performance, but also on the type of unstable environments faced by leaders today.

  With a team of more than twenty researchers, Collins and Hansen studied companies that rose to greatness-beating their industry indexes by a minimum of ten times over fifteen years-in environments characterized by big forces and rapid shifts that leaders could not predict or control. The research team then contrasted these “10X companies” to a carefully selected set of comparison companies that failed to achieve greatness in similarly extreme environments.

  The new findings
  The study results were full of provocative surprises. Such as:

  The best leaders were not more risk taking, more visionary, and more creative than the comparisons; they were more disciplined, more empirical, and more paranoid.
  Innovation by itself turns out not to be the trump card in a chaotic and uncertain world; more important is the ability to scale innovation, to blend creativity with discipline.
  Following the belief that leading in a “fast world” always requires “fast decisions” and “fast action” is a good way to get killed.
  The great companies changed less in reaction to a radically changing world than the comparison companies.
  The authors challenge conventional wisdom with thought-provoking, sticky, and supremely practical concepts. They include: 10Xers; the 20 Mile March; Fire Bullets, Then Cannonballs; Leading above the Death Line; Zoom Out, Then Zoom In; and the SMaC Recipe.

  Finally, in the last chapter, Collins and Hansen present their most provocative and original analysis: defining, quantifying, and studying the role of luck. The great companies and the leaders who built them were not luckier than the comparisons, but they did get a higher Return on Luck.

  This book is classic Collins: contrarian, data-driven, and uplifting. He and Hansen show convincingly that, even in a chaotic and uncer

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  7 Last Words

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  Based on his talks at New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Good Friday 2015, the New York Times bestselling author and editor at large of America magazine offers a portrait of Jesus, using his last words on the cross to reveal how deeply he understood our predicaments, what it means to be fully human, and why we can turn to Christ completely, in mind, heart, and soul.

  Each meditation is dedicated to one of the seven sayings:
  *”Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do.”
  *”Today you will be with me in Paradise.”
  *”Woman, this is your son” . . . “This is your mother.”?
  *”My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”?
  *”I thirst.”?
  *”It is finished.”?
  *”Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.”

  With the warmth, wisdom, and grace that infuse his works, Father James Martin explains why Jesus’s crucifixion and death on the cross is an important teaching moment in the Gospels. Jesus’s final statements, words that are deeply cherished by his followers, exemplify the depth of his suffering but also provide a key to his empathy and why we can connect with him so deeply.

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  Ruthless Trust : The Ragamuffins Path To God

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  We are made for the love of God, and nothing less will ever satisfy us. In his acclaimed bestseller, The Ragamuffin Gospel, Brennan Manning showed us the powerful truth that the divine gifts of love is ever present for us regardless of the state of our lives. Now in this challenging sequel, he turns to our primary obstacle to living fully within this divine love — the lack of “ruthless trust.”

  Through rich stories and deep insights, Manning shows us how true and radical trust can transform everything in our lives. No matter where we are on our path of discipleship, he offers encouragement to shed the limitations of fear, shame, and doubt through complete reliance upon God. The way of Ruthless Trust is not an abstract theory; it is that very practical and demanding path that each of us must follow in response to God’s love.

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