'Behind God's Back'


Book Description




Behind God's Back


Book Description

In gripping, vivid prose crafted over 15 years of healing from trauma, Behind God's Back: Finding Hope in Hardship, is an unforgettable story of both suffering and redemption, dramatizing the protagonist's experiences of poverty, food insecurity, abuse, addiction, recovery, and, eventually, a commitment to sustained community service. While exploring childhood and early adult hardships endured in the Arlington Heights projects of Pittsburgh, Miller moves forward to model a path of sober living and transformational leadership that includes the creation of a regional recovery center for women suffering from substance abuse - a former convent turned sanctuary that prioritizes trauma-informed care and women's health. Miller's award-winning memoir is relayed with realism and humor, featuring a diverse cast of wise and "imperfect" mentors who make her transformation possible. In an artistically distinct, compelling, and direct voice, she invites readers to identify their sameness within the work: their own capacity for resilience, healing, and sober recovery. Her book also demonstrates a path of recovery that hinges on outward contributions to family, friends, community, and society, rather than solely documenting personal trauma. This dramatized progression from individual recovery to a commitment to social welfare, community outreach, and servant leadership, distinguishes the book among traditional memoirs exploring trauma, promoting participation rather than isolation. Behind God's Back illuminates the beauty and healing that can come out of adversity and pain. While offering a story about trauma in childhood, dysfunctional family circumstances, and recovery from addiction, the memoir highlights the importance of forming meaningful human relationships to heal personally, while cultivating the resources to be of service to others, when we are ready, and sometimes, even when we are still healing. Ultimately, Behind God's Back shows us all how we can all participate in the creation of a more humane society, embark on a deep healing process for ourselves and our loved ones, and embrace a leadership role in our own families, our own communities, and our own society.




Behind God's Back


Book Description

The murder of a fellow Jew throws Helsinki detective Ariel Kafka into a maelstrom of international intrigue and high-level corruption.




Behind God's Back


Book Description

There are two Jewish cops in all of Helsinki. One of them, Ariel Kafka, a lieutenant in the Violent Crime Unit, identifies himself as a policeman first, then a Finn, and lastly a Jew. Murky circumstances surround his investigation of a Jewish businessman's murder. Neo-Nazi violence, intergenerational intrigue, shady loans - predictable lines of investigation lead to unpredictable culprits. But a second killing strikes closer to home, and the Finnish Security Police soon come knocking.




God is Back


Book Description

On the street and in the corridors of power, religion is surging worldwide. From Russia to Turkey to India, nations that swore off faith in the last century--or even tried to stamp it out--are now run by avowedly religious leaders. This book examines this new world, from exorcisms in São Paulo to religious skirmishing in Nigeria, to televangelism in California and house churches in China. Since the Enlightenment, intellectuals have assumed that modernization would kill religion--and that religious America is an oddity. As these authors argue, religion and modernity can thrive together, and America is becoming the norm. The failure of communism and the rise of globalism helped spark the global revival, but, above all, 21st century religion is being fueled by a very American emphasis on competition and a customer-driven approach to salvation, and its destabilizing effects can already be seen far from Iraq or the World Trade Center.--From publisher description.




The Parish Behind God's Back


Book Description

For this latest edition, the authors returned to Barbados to update the changing face of life in St. Lucy, the parish behind Gods backthe islands most rural district. After discussing Barbadoss colonial history as a plantation society based on slavery and the economys recent conversion from sugar to tourism, they turn to everyday life in St. Lucy: patterns of work, gender relations, religion, and the meaning of community. The book concludes by examining the global forces and mediatelevision, tourism, travel, and the Internetthat connect villagers to the outside and most directly affect their lives. Written with students in mind, this highly readable, illustrated, and thought-provoking account is ideal for courses in cultural anthropology and Caribbean studies. An appendix describes the changes North American students experienced as a result of participating in the anthropology field schools the authors ran in Barbados over a twenty-year period.




The Illusion of God's Presence


Book Description

An essential feature of religious experience across many cultures is the intuitive feeling of God's presence. More than any rituals or doctrines, it is this experience that anchors religious faith, yet it has been largely ignored in the scientific literature on religion.Starting with a vivid narrative account of the life-threatening hike that triggered his own mystical experience, biologist John Wathey takes the reader on a scientific journey to find the sources of religious feeling and the illusion of God's presence. His book delves into the biological origins of this compelling feeling, attributing it to innate neural circuitry that evolved to promote the mother-child bond. Dr. Wathey argues that evolution has programmed the infant brain to expect the presence of a loving being who responds to the child's needs. As the infant grows into adulthood, this innate feeling is eventually transferred to the realm of religion, where it is reactivated through the symbols, imagery, and rituals of worship. The author interprets our various conceptions of God in biological terms as illusory supernormal stimuli that fill an emotional and cognitive vacuum left over from infancy. These insights shed new light on some of the most vexing puzzles of religion, like the popular belief in a god who is judgmental and punishing, yet also unconditionally loving; the extraordinary tenacity of faith; the greater religiosity of women relative to men; religious obsessions with sex; the mysterious compulsion to pray; the seemingly irrepressible feminine attributes of God, even in traditionally patriarchal religions; and the strange allure of cults. Finally, Dr. Wathey considers the hypothesis that religion evolved to foster reproductive success, arguing that, in an age of potentially ruinous overpopulation, magical thinking has become a luxury we can no longer afford, one that distracts us from urgent threats to our planet.Deeply researched yet elegantly written in a jargon-free and accessible style, this book presents a compelling interpretation of the evolutionary origins of spirituality and religion.




Almost Hemingway


Book Description

Would it surprise you to learn that there was a contemporary of Ernest Hemingway’s who, in his romantic questing and hell-or-high-water pursuit of life and his art, was closer to the Hemingwayesque ideal than Hemingway himself? Almost Hemingway relates the life of Negley Farson, adventurer, iconoclast, best-selling writer, foreign correspondent, and raging alcoholic who died in oblivion. Born only a few years before Hemingway, Farson had a life trajectory that paralleled and intersected Hemingway’s in ways that compelled writers for publications as divergent as the Guardian and Field & Stream to compare them. Unlike Hemingway, however, Farson has been forgotten. This high-flying and literate biography recovers Farson’s life in its multifaceted details, from his time as an arms dealer to Czarist Russia during World War I, to his firsthand reporting on Hitler and Mussolini, to his assignment in India, where he broke the news of Gandhi’s arrest by the British, to his excursion to Kenya a few years before the Mau Mau Uprising. Farson also found the time to publish an autobiography, The Way of a Transgressor, which made him an international publishing sensation in 1936, as well as Going Fishing, one of the most enduring of all outdoors books. F. Scott Fitzgerald, a fellow member of the Lost Generation whose art competed with a public image grander than reality, once confessed that while he had to rely on his imagination, Farson could simply draw from his own event-filled life. Almost Hemingway is the definitive window on that remarkable story.




The Return


Book Description

It's easy to go through days, weeks, even years on autopilot, moving from one activity to another, rarely taking the time to consider what it's all for anyway. Why did God make us? What does he want us to do with the time he has given us? And how can we find out? In her bestselling story-driven style, Christian rocker Lacey Sturm shares with readers the beautiful struggle of learning what one's unique gifts are and pursuing them wholeheartedly. She helps them see each day as a gift from God, find balance in their busy lives, and discover the joy of giving God's gifts back to him by using them to bring him glory. Young people especially will love this openhanded and openhearted take on what to do with their lives, as will those who feel like they've been coasting or heading down the wrong path.




The Book of Mysteries


Book Description

New York Times Best Seller! 1500 5-Star Reviews! From the author that brought you NEW YORK TIMES best selling books The Harbinger, The Mystery of the Shemitah, and The Paradigm selling over 3 MILLION copies Imagine if you discovered a treasure chest in which were hidden ancient mysteries, revelations from heaven, secrets of the ages, the answers to man’s most enduring, age-old questions, and the hidden keys that can transform your life to joy, success, and blessing…This is The Book of Mysteries.