Stuck is a guide for understanding how and why a traditional approach to ministry does not align with the modern realities facing pastors, congregations, and seminaries. More than simply describing findings from their firsthand research, however, Todd W. Ferguson and Josh Packard offer a new understanding of why professional ministry can be so alienating today. Stuck shifts the dominant narrative around calling, vocation, and ministry away from a focus on individual traits and characteristics of pastors and congregational leaders and toward a more structural understanding of the social forces that impact modern ministry. The authors focus on the nature of calling; the need for modern, flexible congregational supports; and a different approach to training professional clergy. Stuck lets pastors who feel stuck know that they're not alone, they're not crazy, and it's not their fault. It helps congregations be more supportive of their clergy. And it participates in the conversation for reshaping seminary training and professional development.
The reality of the exodus from church is bigger than you feared...and starting much closer to home.That’s what sociologist and author Josh Packard has confirmed in his just-released report, Exodus of the Religious Dones. Packard’s research confirms not only how many people have walked away from the church already, but how many are lined up to leave—and why. This groundbreaking study complements Packard’s best-selling Church Refugees, rounding out Packard’s in-depth profile of Religious Dones. Church leaders will discover the true scope of the challenge facing local churches—and the specific concerns prompting an ongoing exodus. With this information in hand, church leaders will know how to best slow the steady stream of church members inching toward the back door, and be equipped to better meet the needs of their congregations.
They’re called The Dones. After devoting a lifetime to their churches, they’re walking away. Why? Sociologists Josh Packard and Ashleigh Hope reveal the results of a major study about the exodus from the American church. And what they’ve discovered may surprise you... -Church refugees aren’t who you’d expect. Among those scrambling for the exits are the church’s staunchest supporters and leaders. -Leaving the church doesn’t mean abandoning the faith. Some who are done with church report they’ve never felt spiritually stronger. -The door still remains open—a crack. Those who’ve left remain hungry for community and the chance to serve—and they’re finding both. Sifting through hundreds of hours of in-depth interviews, Packard and Hope provide illuminating insights into what has become a major shift in the American landscape. If you’re in the church, discover the major reasons your church may be in danger of losing its strongest members—and what you can do to keep them. If you’re among those done with church, look for your story to be echoed here. You’re not alone—and at last you’re understood. Share your story at TheDones.com
Nearly 1/3 of young people say they have no trusted adults in their lives. 35% say they have no one to turn to when they feel stressed. How do we help young people find a place to belong--where they are noticed, named, and known? In Belonging: Reconnecting America's Loneliest Generation, Springtide(tm) Research Institute shares new research about the landscape of loneliness drawn from our national study. It revealed epidemic levels of isolation among young people and has shown why participation does not equate to belonging. Our research demonstrates how you can cultivate thriving, relationship-driven programs that truly connect with young people: Simply put, you are the solution. The presence of just one trusted adult in the life of a young person cuts severe isolation in half. Building this sense of true belonging in young people is a process you can easily weave into your work with them. Using our unique, research-based Belongingness Process, we'll show you how and what you can do to help young people feel noticed, named, and known so that you can turn the tide on the epidemic of loneliness for the newest generations. About Springtide(tm) Research Institute Springtide is listening to the inner and outer lives of young people ages 13 to 25. As an unbiased research institute, we seek to help those who care about young people care better, by amplifying and honoring young people's lived experiences through careful research and actionable insights.
Meaning Making: 8 Values That Drive America's Newest Generations is our investigation into the values that young people, ages 13 to 25, practice and uphold. What motivates them in their common quest to discover, create, and express significant meaning in their lives? What are the organizations and groups they choose to engage with and be a part of? How do those organizations exhibit and express those values? The values young people articulated comprise the chapters of this book. They emerged from surveys and interviews with young people, as well as other quantitative and qualitative research involving a range of resources, both scholarly and popular. As we collected our data early in 2020 through a nationally representative survey; looked at other data sources; and uncovered the practices, people, and organizations that were attracting intense commitment from young people; we made discoveries helpful to leaders trying to shape organizations, groups, institutions, and one-on-one relationships that better serve and care for young people today This is a rush request since publication is end of July...thank you in advance"--
No football team has won more NFL championships than the Green Bay Packers. Learn about their epic history, and find out why the league's championship trophy is named after one of Green Bay's former coaches.
This book lets pastors who feel stuck know that they're not alone or crazy, and it's not their fault. It helps congregations better support their clergy. And it joins in the conversation about reshaping seminary training and professional development.
In 1964 an Urban League survey ranked Los Angeles as the most desirable city for African Americans to live in. In 1965 the city burst into flames during one of the worst race riots in the nation's history. How the city came to such a pass—embodying both the best and worst of what urban America offered black migrants from the South—is the story told for the first time in this history of modern black Los Angeles. A clear-eyed and compelling look at black struggles for equality in L.A.'s neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces from the Great Depression to our day, L.A. City Limits critically refocuses the ongoing debate about the origins of America's racial and urban crisis. Challenging previous analysts' near-exclusive focus on northern "rust-belt" cities devastated by de-industrialization, Josh Sides asserts that the cities to which black southerners migrated profoundly affected how they fared. He shows how L.A.'s diverse racial composition, dispersive geography, and dynamic postwar economy often created opportunities—and limits—quite different from those encountered by blacks in the urban North.
“A clear, comprehensive look at a murky business.” —The Wall Street Journal Your favorite band has just announced their nationwide tour. Should you pay to join their fan club and get in on the pre-sale? No, you decide to wait. But the on-sale date arrives, and the site is jammed. You can’t get on—and the concert is sold out in six minutes. What happened? What now? Music journalists Dean Budnick and Josh Baron chronicle the behind-the-scenes history of the modern concert industry. Filled with entertaining rock-and-roll anecdotes about The Rolling Stones, The Grateful Dead, Pearl Jam, and more—and charting the emergence of players like Ticketmaster, StubHub, Live Nation, and Outbox—Ticket Masters will transfix every concertgoer who wonders just where the price of admission really goes. This edition has an updated epilogue that covers recent industry developments.
Addressing one of the most difficult challenges in corporate learning and development - the topic of measurement - this book explains the specific best practices identified through the author's research process.
Walter Schmidt's life isn't simple: His wife Nadine wants to live next door to her dead first husband's mother, the Mississippi River is three blocks down the street and rising dangerously, FDR is dead, and the war seems like it will never end -- but for the most part, things are going Walter's way. Then one bright April morning in 1945, Walter comes home early from work to find Nadine in bed with his best friend, Sammy. Shocked into silence, when she then calls him a "kraut," Walter becomes even more confused. True, he's a German immigrant, but he's lived in New Orleans for almost twenty years, and an hour before, he thought he was a happy American---baseball fan, reader of pulp novels, lover of gangster movies. Suddenly Walter wonders if Nadine's right, if he's more German than American, more enemy than friend. When Sammy later offers him $1,000 as an apology for sleeping with his wife, Walter accepts, desperately hoping to hurt his friend, but instead setting in motion a series of events more dangerous than betrayal and petty revenge. Set against a backdrop of a nation exhausted by war, in a decadent city that for years has been denied its butter, sugar, and Mardi Gras, My Bright Midnight is a novel about the complications of loyalties to country, to friends, and to those we love.
The definitive account of the decade-long pursuit and capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the terrorist mastermind of 9/11. Only minutes after United 175 plowed into the World Trade Center's South Tower, people in positions of power correctly suspected who was behind the assault: Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. But it would be 18 months after September 11 before investigators would capture the actual mastermind of the attacks, the man behind bin Laden himself. That monster is the man who got his hands dirty while Osama fled; the man who was responsible for setting up Al Qaeda's global networks, who personally identified and trained its terrorists, and who personally flew bomb parts on commercial airlines to test their invisibility. That man withstood waterboarding and years of other intense interrogations, not only denying Osama's whereabouts but making a literal game of the proceedings, after leading his pursuers across the globe and back. That man is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and he is still, to this day, the most significant Al Qaeda terrorist in captivity. In The Hunt for KSM, Terry McDermott and Josh Meyer go deep inside the US government's dogged but flawed pursuit of this elusive and dangerous man. One pair of agents chased him through countless false leads and narrow escapes for five years before 9/11. And now, drawing on a decade of investigative reporting and unprecedented access to hundreds of key sources, many of whom have never spoken publicly -- as well as jihadis and members of KSM's family and support network -- this is a heart-pounding trip inside the dangerous, classified world of counterterrorism and espionage.
President Barack Obama’s first trip abroad in his second term took him to Israel and the Palestinian West Bank, where he despondently admitted to those waiting for words of encouragement, “It is a hard slog to work through all of these issues.” Contrast this gloomy assessment with Obama’s optimism on the second day of his first term, when he appointed former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell as his special envoy for Middle East peace, boldly asserting that his administration would “actively and aggressively seek a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians.” How is it that Obama’s active and aggressive search for progress has become mired in the status quo? Writer and political analyst Josh Ruebner charts Obama’s journey from optimism to frustration in the first hard-hitting investigation into why the president failed to make any progress on this critical issue, and how his unwillingness to challenge the Israel lobby has shattered hopes for peace. Written in a clear and accessible style by the advocacy director of a national peace organization and former Middle East analyst for the Congressional Research Service, Shattered Hopes offers an informed history of the Obama administration’s policies and maps out a true path forward for the United States to help achieve Israeli-Palestinian peace.
Read the Bible for the first time – again. In Bible Stories for Grown-Ups: Reading Scripture with New Eyes pastor Josh Scott looks at familiar Bible stories and reveals new details and interpretations for an adult audience. This six-week Bible study will consider stories many read as children including Noah's Ark, the binding of Isaac, Jonah and the big fish, Jesus and Zacchaeus, Jesus healing a blind man, and the parable of the talents. Scott reimagines these stories and opens new visions for readers to understand well known pieces of Scripture in our current cultural environment. The book can be read alone or used by small groups, and can be used anytime throughout the year. Additional components include video teaching sessions featuring Josh Scott, and a comprehensive leader guide, making this perfect as a six-week group study done throughout the year.
An argument that social, political, and economic systems maintain power by discarding certain people, places, and things. Discard studies is an emerging field that looks at waste and wasting broadly construed. Rather than focusing on waste and trash as the primary objects of study, discard studies looks at wider systems of waste and wasting to explore how some materials, practices, regions, and people are valued or devalued, becoming dominant or disposable. In this book, Max Liboiron and Josh Lepawsky argue that social, political, and economic systems maintain power by discarding certain people, places, and things. They show how the theories and methods of discard studies can be applied in a variety of cases, many of which do not involve waste, trash, or pollution. Liboiron and Lepawsky consider the partiality of knowledge and offer a theory of scale, exploring the myth that most waste is municipal solid waste produced by consumers; discuss peripheries, centers, and power, using content moderation as an example of how dominant systems find ways to discard; and use theories of difference to show that universalism, stereotypes, and inclusion all have politics of discard and even purification—as exemplified in “inclusive” efforts to broaden the Black Lives Matter movement. Finally, they develop a theory of change by considering “wasting well,” outlining techniques, methods, and propositions for a justice-oriented discard studies that keeps power in view.
Josh Dorfman’s perspective is a leading voice for anyone involved in new consumer-based environmentalism.†?—Tom Arnold, TerraPass We can’t all camp out in old-growth forests, lying down in front of the bulldozers. And it’s not only that we’re too busy: Some of us just don’t want our fabulous threads to get caked with mud. But that doesn’t mean we don’t care passionately about the environment. Luckily, the days when becoming environmentally aware entailed eating bread that tasted like dirt, wearing clothes that looked like frayed burlap sacks, and spending summer vacations assailing whaling ships with Greenpeace are passing away. It is now perfectly possible (and increasingly easy) to be well fed, well coiffed, well dressed, and well traveled while remaining deeply committed to an ecologically sustainable lifestyle. In The Lazy Environmentalist, Josh Dorfman—host of the Sirius Satellite Radio program of the same name—provides comprehensive guidance to fashion-forward consumers who are as concerned about the long-term health of our planet as they are about the design of their bathroom fixtures. Covering topics that range from clothing to electronic gadgetry, home decor to recreation, and gardening to financial investment, Dorfman lets us know which trends to watch and which eco-conscious products—cars, toothbrushes, cell phones, pet accessories—to buy. Green, it turns out, can be an extremely stylish color. Every day most of us have to choose between products that either look the same or do the same thing. So why not buy the product that causes the least harm to the planet? The Lazy Environmentalist is a useful guide toward making the right decisions." - Yvon Chouinard, founder and owner, Patagonia, Inc. "Everything you always wanted to know about greener living but were afraid to spend the rest of your life researching. Here's a great start." - Chris Paine, writer and director, Who Killed the Electric Car? “Instead of thinking about it ... DO IT. Buy this amazing book and get the scoop on products and ways to take care of this great planet. Become part of the movement that is loving the earth the way it truly deserves to be cared for!†? -Mariel Hemingway, actress and author of Healthy Living from the Inside Out
Discussing the complex history of Silicon Valley and other pioneering centres of venture capital, Lerner uncovers the extent of government influence in prompting growth. He examines the public strategies used to advance new ventures and reveals the common flaws undermining far too many programmes.
Donald Trump won election as the 45th President of the United States by studying American political stagecraft and learning what helped previous candidates succeed and doomed others to failure. A figure on the periphery of campaigns for decades, he glided down the Trump Tower escalator on June 16, 2015, declared his candidacy and took his place, permanently, as an actor in the country’s greatest spectacle. Twenty-eight years earlier, at the dawn of what Josh King calls “The Age of Optics” in OFF SCRIPT: An Advance Man’s Guide to White House Stagecraft, Campaign Spectacle and Political Suicide, Trump began to position himself for his eventual run for the Oval Office. Pictured at the foot of that same gilded escalator, he posed at the foot of that same escalator for a cover story profile in TIME magazine. “This Man May Turn You Green With Envy—Or Just Turn You Off,” read the first part of TIME’s headline in January 1989. “Flaunting It is the Game, and TRUMP is the name,” the headline concluded. The cover story came just after Massachusetts Governor Mike Dukakis lost in a landslide to Vice President George H.W. Bush, in part because Dukakis made the disastrous decision to ride in an M1A1 Abrams tank in Sterling Heights, Michigan less than two months before the election. Why did Dukakis make that ride, and why was it so deadly? Indeed, in each election that followed, why did George Bush, Bob Dole, Al Gore, John Kerry, John McCain and Mitt Romney make similar mistakes that cost them dearly at the polls? These are the questions that Josh King answers in OFF SCRIPT. King, who served as Director of Production in Bill Clinton’s White House and later was host of SiriusXM Satellite Radio’s long-running “Polioptics: The Theater of Politics,” brings readers on a wild ride over the last thirty years of the Age of Optics, from Ronald Reagan’s mastery of image to Barack Obama’s “Vanilla Presidency” to, ultimately, the faceoff between Hillary Clinton and Trump. As one of the White House’s most creative “advance men,” skilled at employing the tools to tell help tell the president’s daily story, and creating the scenes that the media can’t resist turning into news packages and front page photos, King pulls back the curtain on the behind-the-scenes alchemy of political stagecraft. King’s personal account, in-depth interviews, and detail-rich stories, and his unique angle on what drives headlines, makes news, and wins elections will serve as an indispensible companion to those keeping a close eye on the Trump presidency.
Companies, communities, and individuals fall for many reasons, but one of the most common—and easily avoidable—is the failure to reinvent. When people and organizations rest on prior successes rather than driving purposeful transformation, they discover too late that they have lost their market position altogether to competitors and external forces. The most successful companies, brands, and individuals make reinvention a regular part of their business strategies. Transformation demands an ongoing process of discovery and imagination, and The Road to Reinvention lays out a systematic approach for continually challenging and reinventing yourself and your business. Venture capitalist and serial entrepreneur Josh Linkner identifies six elements in any business that are ripe for reinvention and shares examples, methods, and step-by-step techniques for creating deliberate, productive disruption. Throughout The Road to Reinvention, Linkner also explores the history—the great rise, unprecedented fall, and now rebirth—of his beloved hometown, Detroit. First rising to greatness as the result of breathtaking innovation, Detroit had generations of booming growth before succumbing to apathy, atrophy, and finally bankruptcy. Now, the city is rising from the ashes and driving sustainable success through an intense focus on reinvention. Linkner brings an insider's view of this incredible story of grit, determination, and creativity, sharing his perspective on Detroit's successes and setbacks as a profound example of large-scale organizational and personal transformation. Change is inevitable. You need to decide: Will you drive that change, or be driven away by it? Will you disrupt or be disrupted? By choosing to deliberately reimagine your own status quo, you can secure a strong future for both your company and your career.
Warren was founded in 1798 as an agricultural concern and, within two years, became the county seat of Trumbull County. By the early 20th century, the city was the Silicon Valley of the Midwest with the Packard brothers growing the community as a hub for technology and manufacturing. Warren's population more than doubled between 1910 and 1920 as steel production boomed, placing Warren on a track to be dubbed an All-American City by the National Civic League in 1954. Recreational options in neighborhood parks, local hotels, and eateries were abundant. Over 180 postcards in this book will illuminate the journey Warren took from the 19th century to the later decades of the 20th century.
Josh Pons, a third-generation horseman and owner of Country Life Farm, depicts a century of life inside the horse business, written from inside the fences of Maryland’s oldest Thoroughbred farm. In 2016, in the basement of his farmhouse, Josh Pons discovered thousands of letters from his grandfather’s life in the Thoroughbred horse business. The son of a French cook who came to New York City in 1894, Adolphe Pons got his start working in the Fifth Avenue mansion of Gilded Age banker August Belmont II. Adolphe became his personal secretary, and later played a major role in Belmont’s breeding and sale of the most famous horse in history: Man o’ War. During the Great Depression, Adolphe left New York and bought a hundred-acre horse farm in Maryland, naming it Country Life after the station stop on the Long Island Railroad nearest his Garden City home. In serial form, Josh Pons expands on the column he wrote for the leading horse publication The BloodHorse, inviting readers to once more step into the attic garret alongside him as he recovers long-lost voices speaking out of letters, telegrams, and photos. Upon the attic stage appear Gilded Age tycoons from whom the author’s grandfather bought and sold horses against the backdrop of World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II. As Josh draws from the farmhouse’s rich archive, he chronicles his grandfather’s life and times and shares his own candid reflections. The result is a fascinating and fresh look at the Golden Age of Horse Racing and how the past influences our present.
The first consumer credit bureaus appeared in the 1870s and quickly amassed huge archives of deeply personal information. Today, the three leading credit bureaus are among the most powerful institutions in modern life—yet we know almost nothing about them. Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion are multi-billion-dollar corporations that track our movements, spending behavior, and financial status. This data is used to predict our riskiness as borrowers and to judge our trustworthiness and value in a broad array of contexts, from insurance and marketing to employment and housing. In Creditworthy, the first comprehensive history of this crucial American institution, Josh Lauer explores the evolution of credit reporting from its nineteenth-century origins to the rise of the modern consumer data industry. By revealing the sophistication of early credit reporting networks, Creditworthy highlights the leading role that commercial surveillance has played—ahead of state surveillance systems—in monitoring the economic lives of Americans. Lauer charts how credit reporting grew from an industry that relied on personal knowledge of consumers to one that employs sophisticated algorithms to determine a person's trustworthiness. Ultimately, Lauer argues that by converting individual reputations into brief written reports—and, later, credit ratings and credit scores—credit bureaus did something more profound: they invented the modern concept of financial identity. Creditworthy reminds us that creditworthiness is never just about economic "facts." It is fundamentally concerned with—and determines—our social standing as an honest, reliable, profit-generating person.
Offering a strategy to winning in a world transformed by social technologies (blogs, podcasts, and social networking sites), the authors have designed a four-step process for building these technologies into a business.
Basic Photographic Materials and Processes describes the three crucial stages of creating the perfect photograph—capture, processing and output—by providing a thorough technical investigation of modern, applied photographic technologies. This new edition has been fully revised and updated to explore digital image capture, processing and output. It covers a wide range of topics including: the scientific principles of measuring and recording light, the inner workings of digital cameras, image processing concepts, color management and photographic output to screen and print media. With these topics come in-depth discussions of extending dynamic range, image histograms, camera characterization, display capabilities, printer and paper technologies. It also includes applied exercises that provide the reader with a deeper understanding of the material through hands-on experiments and demonstrations, connecting theoretical concepts to real-world use. This comprehensive text provides photography students, educators and working professionals with the technical knowledge required to successfully create images and manage digital photographic assets. It is an essential resource for mastering the technical craft of photography.
With practical examples of alternative building, renewable energy, holistic forestry, no-till gardening, hospitality management, community outreach, and more The Community-Scale Permaculture Farm describes not only the history of the D Acres project, but its evolving principles and practices that are rooted in the land, its inhabitants, and the joy inherent in collective empowerment. For almost twenty years, D Acres of New Hampshire has challenged and expanded the common definition of a farm. As an educational center that researches, applies, and teaches skills of sustainable living and small-scale organic farming, D Acres serves more than just a single function to its community. By turns it is a hostel for travelers to northern New England, a training center for everything from metal- and woodworking to cob building and seasonal cooking, a gathering place for music, poetry, joke-telling, and potluck meals, and much more. While this book provides a wide spectrum of practical information on the physical systems designed into a community-scale homestead, Trought also reviews the economics and organizational particulars that D Acres has experimented with over the years. The D Acres model envisions a way to devise a sustainable future by building a localized economy that provides more than seasonal produce, a handful of eggs, and green appliances. With the goal of perennial viability for humanity within their ecosystem, D Acres is attempting an approach to sustainability that encompasses practical, spiritual, and ethical components. In short: They are trying to create a rural community ecology that evolves in perpetuity. From working with oxen to working with a board of directors, no other book contains such a wealth of innovative ideas and ways to make your farm or homestead not only more sustainable, but more inclusive of, and beneficial to, the larger community. Readers will find information on such subjects as: Working with pigs to transform forested landscapes into arable land; Designing and building unique, multifunctional farm and community spaces using various techniques and materials; Creating and perpetuating diverse revenue streams to keep your farm organization solvent and resilient; Receiving maximum benefits and yields for the farm without denigrating resources or the regional ecology; Implementing a fair and effective governance structure; Constructing everything from solar dehydrators and cookers to treehouses and ponds; and, Connecting and partnering with the larger community beyond the farm. Emphasizing collaboration, cooperation, and mutualism, this book promises to inspire a new generation of growers, builders, educators, artists, and dreamers who are seeking new and practical ways to address today's problems on a community scale.
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