The Abandoned Generation


Book Description

A broken family throws formidable stumbling blocks onto the path of life that a society as a whole must traverse. But the stones under the feet of the children in these situations are the most hurtful and most in need of redress. Gabriele Kuby answers the call and does so with an acute sense of responsibility. As a child of divorce and later divorcee, Kuby speaks to herself when she urges the men and women of her generation to consider how failing as spouses we fail as parents, and as such cause the most trouble for our children. Reading Kuby's analysis of cultural, sociological and biological data, the danger is clear and present. Yet Kuby asserts that, generally, our plight goes unnoticed and is veiled from our eyes. We need to see children for who and what they really are to us, to the family, and society at large. In the words of Fulton Sheen, "Children play a redeemer role in the family. The represent the victory of love over the insatiable ego. They symbolize the defeat of selfishness and the triumph of giving love." Tragically, children are increasingly less a part of Western culture. This leaves the family, in the best case scenario, an artifact, and in the worst case, a casualty. The topics addressed by Kuby cover towering influences in postmodern family life: Gender politics, the abortion mentality, daycare ("Socialism 2.0"), premature stress, rights of children, digital distractions, pornography, and divorce. A native German, Kuby's work is, heartbreakingly, as relevant to American society as her own. This European perspective drives home the urgent need to recognize our situation as global and embedded, and one that requires more than political mobilization of mainstream efforts and responses. What really is good and normal, and how to we realize it? Listen to the heartstrings that yearn for true knowledge of oneself, Kuby implores, of God, and how in the surprise of God's mercy we are guided through life. Kuby backs up this invitation to personal conversion and betterment with hard data.




A Generation Abandoned


Book Description

A Generation Abandoned explores the disruptive cultural events especially of the past half century as these have undermined the confidence of the young in themselves and in civil society, and finally in our place in the universe. The overall theme is the contrast between this sense of abandonment and our inborn and neglected orientation toward personal worth and the common good (the natural law). Much of what is peddled as “social evolution” today is shown to be a throwback to darker times. The analysis submits to a refreshingly conversational tone, but also draws incisively from a very broad pallet of history, literature, theater, theology, and simplifying and illuminating anecdotes (some of them first hand). An early chapter outlines the “perfect storm” of the 1960s. Later chapters expose the word games of the cultural elite, the saga of the family through history and now its abrupt erosion, and the difference between any meandering “arc of history” and a more grounded arc of relations—our rationalized “culture of death” versus a flourishing “human ecology.”




The Abandoned Generation


Book Description

Henry Giroux continues his critique of American culture and the way it impinges on the lives of our children. This time, Henry goes further, looking at the 'Bush Restoration' years, the attacks of September 11th and the way the world has been transformed for our children and young adults.




The War on Truth


Book Description

We live in a culture where people genuinely believe there are over 300 genders; where gay marriage is legal; traditional values are discriminated against; transgender men win awards for being women; children as young as six-years-old are being given gender reassignment surgery; radical Islam terrorises and is pandered to in the media; Christians meanwhile live peacefully and are reviled; abortion is celebrated; students are given 'safe spaces' and 'trigger warnings' to allow them to avoid challenging worldviews; parts of the church have fallen away; 52-year-old men identify as 6-year-old girls; and the truth is criminalised as 'hate speech.' How did people get so confused? How did life get so absurd? In 'The War On Truth', we explore through the lens of the Bible how extreme Liberalism has pulled Western culture into a pit of confusion, examine where this path will eventually take us, and reassert the truths that this generation doesn't want to hear.




A $500 House in Detroit


Book Description

A young college grad buys a house in Detroit for $500 and attempts to restore it—and his new neighborhood—to its original glory in this “deeply felt, sharply observed personal quest to create meaning and community out of the fallen…A standout” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). Drew Philp, an idealistic college student from a working-class Michigan family, decides to live where he can make a difference. He sets his sights on Detroit, the failed metropolis of abandoned buildings, widespread poverty, and rampant crime. Arriving with no job, no friends, and no money, Philp buys a ramshackle house for five hundred dollars in the east side neighborhood known as Poletown. The roomy Queen Anne he now owns is little more than a clapboard shell on a crumbling brick foundation, missing windows, heat, water, electricity, and a functional roof. A $500 House in Detroit is Philp’s raw and earnest account of rebuilding everything but the frame of his house, nail by nail and room by room. “Philp is a great storyteller…[and his] engrossing” (Booklist) tale is also of a young man finding his footing in the city, the country, and his own generation. We witness his concept of Detroit shift, expand, and evolve as his plan to save the city gives way to a life forged from political meaning, personal connection, and collective purpose. As he assimilates into the community of Detroiters around him, Philp guides readers through the city’s vibrant history and engages in urgent conversations about gentrification, racial tensions, and class warfare. Part social history, part brash generational statement, part comeback story, A $500 House in Detroit “shines [in its depiction of] the ‘radical neighborliness’ of ordinary people in desperate circumstances” (Publishers Weekly). This is an unforgettable, intimate account of the tentative revival of an American city and a glimpse at a new way forward for generations to come.




Seduced, Abandoned, and Reborn


Book Description

Seduced, Abandoned, and Reborn exposes the fears expressed by elders about young people in the early American republic. Those authors, educators, and moral reformers who aspired to guide youth into respectable stations perceived new dangers in the decades following independence. Battling a range of seducers in the burgeoning marketplace of early America, from corrupt peers to licentious prostitutes, from pornographic authors to firebrand preachers, these self-proclaimed moral guardians crafted advice and institutions for youth, hoping to guide them safely away from harm and toward success. By penning didactic novels and advice books while building reform institutions and colleges, they sought to lead youth into dutiful behavior. But, thrust into the market themselves, these moral guides were forced to compromise their messages to find a popular audience. Nonetheless, their calls for order did have lasting impact. In urban centers in the Northeast, middle-class Americans became increasingly committed to their notions of chastity, piety, and hard work. Focusing on popular publications and large urban centers, Hessinger draws a portrait of deeply troubled reformers, men and women, who worried incessantly about the vulnerability of youth to the perils of prostitution, promiscuity, misbehavior, and revolt. Benefiting from new insights in cultural history, Seduced, Abandoned, and Reborn looks at the way the categories of gender, age, and class took rhetorical shape in the early republic. In trying to steer young adults away from danger, these advisors created values that came to define the emerging middle class of urban America.




Garden of the Lost and Abandoned


Book Description

The problem by most lights is overwhelming: at least 5,000 children live on the streets of Uganda’s capital city of Kampala. Some forget the names of their villages. The youngest may not know the names of their parents. But Gladys Kalibbala—part journalist, part detective, part Good Samaritan—does not hesitate to dive into difficult or even dangerous situations to aid a child. Author of a newspaper column called “Lost and Abandoned,” she is a resource that police and others turn to when they stumble across a stranded kid with a hidden history. Jessica Yu delivers an acutely observed story of this hardnosed and warmhearted woman, the children she helps, and the twists of fate they experience together. The subplot of Gladys’s garden—her precarious dream of providing a home and livelihood for her vulnerable charges—adds fascinating depth. Garden of the Lost and Abandoned chronicles one woman’s altruism, both ordinary and extraordinary, in a way that is impossible to forget, and impossible not to take to heart.




Abandoned to Ourselves


Book Description

In this extraordinary work, Peter Alexander Meyers shows how the centerpiece of the Enlightenment—society as the symbol of collective human life and as the fundamental domain of human practice—was primarily composed and animated by its most ambivalent figure: Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Displaying this new society as an evolving field of interdependence, Abandoned to Ourselves traces the emergence and moral significance of dependence itself within Rousseau’s encounters with a variety of discourses of order, including theology, natural philosophy, and music. Underpinning this whole scene we discover a modernizing conception of the human Will, one that runs far deeper than Rousseau’s most famous trope, the “general Will.” As Abandoned to Ourselves weaves together historical acuity with theoretical insight, readers will find here elements for a reconstructed sociology inclusive of things and persons and, as a consequence, a new foundation for contemporary political theory.




Hope Abandoned


Book Description

Hope Against Hoperecounted the last four years in the life of the great Russian poet, Osip Mandelstam, and gave a hair-raising account of Stalin's terror. Hope Abandonedcomplements that earlier masterpiece, and in it Nadezhda Mandelstam describes their life together from 1919, and her own after Mandelstam's death in a labour camp in 1938. She also sets out his system of values and beliefs, and provides striking portraits of many of their contemporaries including Boris Pasternak and their champion till his own downfall, Nikolai Bukharin, as well as an astonishingly candid picture of Anna Akhmatova.




Missions Abandoned


Book Description

What is your greatest priority? Followers of Jesus are called to be disciples who make disciples of all nations. Somewhere along the way global missions have slipped far too low as a priority for individuals and churches. Missions and outreach to the lost is not an option for any true follower of Jesus because if you are a disciple then missions is in your DNA. Jesus requires us all to make disciples and live on mission with Him daily. Missions Abandoned challenges you to refocus your life as Jesus' follower making it a priority to make disciples locally and globally. Jesus has been calling His disciples for centuries to be obedient to follow him and to engage in His mission. Now is your time to follow Jesus and to do what disciples of Jesus do; make disciples. Andrew and Owen confront you to get reacquainted with what it truly means to be His disciple by reintegrating missions and witnessing into your daily life. You will not only be inspired, but also be equipped with the tools to become an effective disciple-maker. "Missions Abandoned" does more than inform followers of Jesus, it challenges us to reevaluate our commitment to missions and our passion for the lost." - Kyle Idleman, teaching pastor at Southeast Christian Church.