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Our sexuality is a key part of who we are and how we live as God's people. Many have yearned for a resource on this matter that is helpful and useful to lay people, seekers, and ministers. The stories included here come from singles, marrieds, gays, lesbians, parents, teens, young adults, and senior citizens, people of faith who struggle with their feelings and behavior around sexual matters. What honors God? What is acceptable to Jesus? How do the Scriptures inform and shape us? This is not a dogmatic or a denominational treatise but a minister's own personal and pastoral reflections on the implications of God's call in the life of faith. It's a chance to talk out loud with you and provide a resource for living and a catalyst for conversation on what it means to live in God's light and reflect God's love in a holy and hopeful community.

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In the tumultuous spirit of the American South, A Carolina Psalter offers an outspoken conversation with King David's Psalms, great outcries to a personal God. The Psalms, as a transformational work, sing out in the confident voice of a people unafraid to address the deity almost as an equal, and in some cases, as a friend. The poems in A Carolina Psalter address the God of the Psalms with questioning, irreverence, and occasional confrontation as we move into new understandings of Spirit. If we wish, we can experience the Psalms, indeed all the Bible, as living poetry, its metaphors breathing vibrant new life into our souls. Tony Scully's poems challenge what he calls «the war God of tradition,» often questioning whether that God, so often on the front lines of revenge and destroying one's enemies, if not altogether absent during periods of loss and disaster, can possibly be God at all. His poems, although reflecting current thought and practice concerning the omnipresence of Spirit, spring from a well-founded history of believers, indeed, from the Bible itself, acknowledging the divine presence within. They assert the authority of the individual voice in a search for a God beyond accepted boundaries and definitions.

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In this companion volume to The Word in the Wind: Sermons for the Lectionary, Year A, Advent through Eastertide, Bruce Taylor provides a collection of theologically rich, sacramentally sensitive, and biblically centered sermons for the Sundays and feast days for Pentecost and the remainder of the liturgical year commonly referred to as «Ordinary Time.» The compilation includes a sampling of story sermons and, in an appendix to the lectionary-based homilies, a sermon that was delivered at the invitation of the Presbyterian Church (USA) as part of the preparation for the denomination's General Assembly in 2008, challenging the church to remember and remain faithful to its prophetic heritage. Using the full range of Old Testament, epistle, and Gospel readings commended by the Common Lectionary (Revised), this collection encourages preachers to use the lectionary as an opportunity to explore homiletically the whole range of scriptural themes for their congregations, and offers all readers thoughtful reflections on living faithfully in regular engagement with Word and Sacrament.

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The saving grace of God in Christ as a liberating experience of faith lies at the heart of The Prisoner's Cross. The message is timeless and has its source in Jesus's ministry and mission. Both Jop, a former POW, and Don, a graduate student, at different times and in different ways are in desperate need of this liberation. Jop serves as a witness to the power that grace has to liberate one from the worst possible tragedies and trauma they can experience in life. Don serves as one who desperately needs to hear this message. Don stands in for many Christians and spiritual seekers in our time. Like them, Don finds himself grappling with the lasting issues of injustice, suffering, and evil. Shaped by the influences of modern secularism and repulsed by the idolatry of church institutionalism, Don feels he has had the rug of a vital and relevant faith pulled out from underneath him. Like many, Don feels an unresolved anger, even rage, over the senseless injustices in his life that neither the institutional Christianity he encounters, or the secular culture that marginalizes and pervades it, have an antidote for.

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Nothing that God created is the source of our human temptation. To the contrary! The human body is the crown of God's creation–consummated by his declaration that it was good. That God's people are unable to view the body without sinning is not an indictment of the body itself, but of the immaturity of the post-modern evangelical mind. We live in a culture whose inhabitants spend billions of dollars a year to see each other naked on internet sites and in pornographic films, yet are often uncomfortable changing in front of each other in locker rooms or even being seen in a swimsuit on the beach. Could it be that we have so profoundly fused the image of the exposed body with sexual gratification that there is no context left for it to be laid bare without evoking either shame or arousal? In That Famous Fig Leaf, Chad Thompson explores the spiritual implications of the physical body and, surprisingly, uncovers a new kind of freedom from sexual addiction along the way. Chad critiques the Christian purity movement for conflating purity with prudery, and reveals that changing how we esteem our bodies has the power to heal the hypersexualized body consciousness of our culture.

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This book is an extraordinarily unique thriller documenting one man's struggle to escape his past mistakes. Set in contemporary London, England, and the picturesque Highlands of Scotland, our story follows David, on the run from the London mob, on a trail of murder, mystery, and mayhem from the hard streets of London to the dark alleyways of Inverness. The stories of an East-End gangster, a street evangelist, an Islamic terrorist, and a police markswoman collide in a story of loss, discovery, and ultimate redemption. It is a gripping thriller interlaced with biblical and historical revelations which can only lead to one inescapable conclusion: «You Have Been Murdered!»

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By the grace of God, every human being, at the proper time–that is, «in God's timing»–can become a Christian, irrespective of ethnicity, race, or gender (male or female). «Becoming a Christian» means «a spiritual transformation» from within our inner-being, as we are «born anew» in the spirit when we accept the loving sacrifice of Christ as atonement for our sins and believe in his resurrection from the dead as the empowering act of love that guides our present lives, as well as our lives in the world to come. Christianity is the only religion that imparts a spiritual rebirth or transformation to the human being without regard to ethnicity, race, or gender. We are all equal from the womb to the tomb; but we are not apes in the jungle! We are «spirit-beings» temporarily indwelling a mortal bodily vessel, until the time when we return to the very living original Source from whence we came: our heavenly inheritance, as prophesied, promised, and fulfilled in Christ Jesus by God our loving Creator and heavenly Father! God's living word of truth, life, peace, justice, love, and liberty came down to us from people, human beings like us, who wrote it as «moved» and «inspired» by God's Holy Spirit, through our only Savior, God, King of kings and Lord of lords, the living «Word of God made flesh» for humanity whose name is Jesus Christ (Acts 4:12).

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