Have you ever wondered what Jesus wants your church to do? It can be disorienting to sort through the many ministry models available today, as well as the ever-present cultural expectation to grow. Claiming the Corner looks to Jesus’ own teaching for how to make impact for the Kingdom of God. Each chapter focuses on one of the six Kingdom parables of Jesus in Matthew 13, interpreting them as instructions on serving and working Jesus’ way. Discussion questions are included, as well as examples of diverse congregations that are fulfilling each parable in unique and creative ways. Join the Kingdom Impact Jesus’ Way community at www.claimingthecorner.net and on Facebook. If your call is to grow the Kingdom of God, serve sacrificially, and push the boundaries for discipleship in Jesus Christ, you need to read this book – cover to cover – with your entire leadership team. Pastor Mark dares to re-examine the Kingdom parables of Jesus as recorded in Matthew 13 through the missional lens of leaving your church walls. You will be challenged. You will be stretched. And you will be blessed as the Holy Spirit moves through your ministry to the dark corners in your community. Fasten your seatbelt for real Kingdom Impact! —Pastor Brian Goke, Faith Lutheran Church, Bloomington, Illinois
Have you ever wondered what Jesus wants your church to do? It can be disorienting to sort through the many ministry models available today, as well as the ever-present cultural expectation to grow. Claiming the Corner looks to Jesus’ own teaching for how to make impact for the Kingdom of God. Each chapter focuses on one of the six Kingdom parables of Jesus in Matthew 13, interpreting them as instructions on serving and working Jesus’ way. Discussion questions are included, as well as examples of diverse congregations that are fulfilling each parable in unique and creative ways. Join the Kingdom Impact Jesus’ Way community at www.claimingthecorner.net and on Facebook. If your call is to grow the Kingdom of God, serve sacrificially, and push the boundaries for discipleship in Jesus Christ, you need to read this book – cover to cover – with your entire leadership team. Pastor Mark dares to re-examine the Kingdom parables of Jesus as recorded in Matthew 13 through the missional lens of leaving your church walls. You will be challenged. You will be stretched. And you will be blessed as the Holy Spirit moves through your ministry to the dark corners in your community. Fasten your seatbelt for real Kingdom Impact! —Pastor Brian Goke, Faith Lutheran Church, Bloomington, Illinois
The emergence of China as a dominant regional power with global influence is a significant phenomenon in the twenty-first century. Its origin could be traced back to 1949 when the Chinese Communist Party under Mao Zedong came to power and vowed to transform China and the world. After the ‘century of humiliation’, China was in constant search of a new identity on the world stage. From alliance with the Soviet Union in the 1950s, China normalized relations with America in the 1970s and embraced the global economy and the international community since the 1980s. This book examines China’s changing relations with the two superpowers, Asian neighbours, Third World countries, and European powers. China and the World since 1945 offers an overview of China’s involvement in the Korean War, the Sino-Soviet split, Sino-American rapprochement, the end of the Cold War, and globalization. It assess the roles of security, ideology, and domestic politics in Chinese foreign policy and provides a synthesis of the latest archival-based research on China’s diplomatic history and Cold War international history This engaging new study examines the rise of China from a long-term historical perspective and will be essential to students of Chinese history and contemporary international relations.
Stanley Milgram is one of the most influential and widely-cited social psychologists of the twentieth century. Recognized as perhaps the most creative figure in his field, he is famous for crafting social-psychological experiments with an almost artistic sense of creative imagination – casting new light on social phenomena in the process. His 1974 study Obedience to Authority exemplifies creative thinking at its most potent, and controversial. Interested in the degree to which an “authority figure” could encourage people to commit acts against their sense of right and wrong, Milgram tricked volunteers for a “learning experiment” into believing that they were inflicting painful electric shocks on a person in another room. Able to hear convincing sounds of pain and pleas to stop, the volunteers were told by an authority figure – the “scientist” – that they should continue regardless. Contrary to his own predictions, Milgram discovered that, depending on the exact set up, as many as 65% of people would continue right up to the point of “killing” the victim. The experiment showed, he believed, that ordinary people can, and will, do terrible things under the right circumstances, simply through obedience. As infamous and controversial as it was creatively inspired, the “Milgram experiment” shows just how radically creative thinking can shake our most fundamental assumptions.
Mark Cosman's message speaks to mothers and fathers everywhere; this is a beautiful and sensitive book." - Mrs. Nancy Reagan My daughter. Berlyn, was asleep on a fold-out couch at her high school prom party when a former classmate and high school dropout shot her in the head for no apparent reason. Her murder prompted me to leave the rubble of my beliefs and assumptions to go in search of answers to the most profound questions we ask ourselves. "A Flower in the Snow" is the result of that odyssey.
In Frenemies Mark L. Haas addresses policy-guiding puzzles such as: Why do international ideological enemies sometimes overcome their differences and ally against shared threats? Why, just as often, do such alliances fail? Alliances among ideological enemies confronting a common foe, or "frenemy" alliances, are unlike coalitions among ideologically-similar states facing comparable threats. Members of frenemy alliances are perpetually torn by two powerful opposing forces. Haas shows that shared material threats push these states together while ideological differences pull them apart. Each of these competing forces has dominated the other at critical times. This difference has resulted in stable alliances among ideological enemies in some cases but the delay, dissolution, or failure of these alliances in others. Haas examines how states' susceptibility to major domestic ideological changes and the nature of the ideological differences among countries provide the key to alliance formation or failure. This sophisticated framework is applied to a diverse range of critical historical and contemporary cases, from the failure of British and French leaders to ally with the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany in the 1930s to the likely evolution of the United States' alliance system against a rising China in the early 21st century. In Frenemies, Haas develops a groundbreaking argument that explains the origins and durability of alliances among ideological enemies and offers policy-guiding perspectives on a subject at the core of international relations.
The Soviet Union was one of the most secretive states that ever existed. Defended by a complex apparatus of rules and checks administered by the secret police, the Soviet state had seemingly unprecedented capabilities based on its near monopoly of productive capital, monolithic authority, and secretive decision making. But behind the scenes, Soviet secrecy was double-edged: it raised transaction costs, incentivized indecision, compromised the effectiveness of government officials, eroded citizens' trust in institutions and in each other, and led to a secretive society and an uninformed elite. The result is what this book calls the secrecy/capacity tradeoff: a bargain in which the Soviet state accepted the reduction of state capacity as the cost of ensuring its own survival. This book is the first comprehensive, analytical, multi-faceted history of Soviet secrecy in the English language. Harrison combines quantitative and qualitative evidence to evaluate the impact of secrecy on Soviet state capacity from the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Based on multiple years of research in once-secret Soviet-era archives, this book addresses two gaps in history and social science: one the core role of secrecy in building and stabilizing the communist states of the twentieth century; the other the corrosive effects of secrecy on the capabilities of authoritarian states.
Among the most intriguing questions of neurology is how conceptions of good and evil arise in the human brain. In a world where we encounter god-like forces in nature, and try to transcend them, the development of a neural network dramatizing good against evil seems inevitable. This critical book explores the cosmic dimensions of the brain's inner theatre as revealed by neurology, cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, psychoanalysis, primatology and exemplary Western performances. In theatre, film, and television, supernatural figures express the brain's anatomical features as humans transform their natural environment into cosmic and theological spaces in order to grapple with their vulnerability in the world.
In 1927, young airmail pilot Charles A. Lindbergh wowed the world by being the first to fly nonstop from New York to Paris. His daring accomplishment won him not only the $25,000 prize, but worldwide recognition. It also cost him his privacy that lasted a lifetime. In 1932, the son of Charles and Anne Lindbergh was kidnapped and later found dead-a crime that shocked America and the world. Bruno Hauptmann was tried, convicted, and executed for his role in the little boy's death. Their Fifteen Minutes is a unique collection of biographical essays filling in the blanks and providing background regarding the key figures involved in the case, such as: -Henry "Red" Johnson, the first "prime suspect" -Hans Kloppenburg, Hauptmann's best friend -Jafsie, also known as Dr. John F. Condon, who served as the intermediary between the kidnappers and the family -Betty Gow, a servant employed by the Lindberghs Until now, the lives of those touched by this case have gone virtually unrecorded. Known only for their brief encounter with history, Their Fifteen Minutes tells the rest of their story showing there was much more to them than their fifteen minutes of fame.
Research Paper (postgraduate) from the year 2011 in the subject Cultural Studies - Holocaust Studies, grade: A, Northern Arizona University, course: 20th Century American Literature, language: English, abstract: Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night was one of the two great competing postmodern analyses of the war against totalitarianism. Vonnegut saw World War II as an absurd and tragic consequence of mass schizophrenia in Nazi Germany, and the book’s main character epitomizes and enables this cultural flaw.
How do humans stop fighting? Where do the gods of myth come from? What does it mean to go mad? Mark R. Anspach tackles these and other conundrums as he draws on ethnography, literature, psychotherapy, and the theory of René Girard to explore some of the fundamental mechanisms of human interaction. Likening gift exchange to vengeance in reverse, the first part of the book outlines a fresh approach to reciprocity, while the second part traces the emergence of transcendence in collective myths and individual delusions. From the peacemaking rituals of prestate societies to the paradoxical structure of consciousness, Anspach takes the reader on an intellectual journey that begins with the problem of how to deceive violence and ends with the riddle of how one can deceive oneself.
Drawing on more than a quarter century of field and documentary research in rural North China, this book explores the contested relationship between village and state from the 1960s to the start of the twenty-first century. The authors provide a vivid portrait of how resilient villagers struggle to survive and prosper in the face of state power in two epochs of revolution and reform. Highlighting the importance of intra-rural resistance and rural-urban conflicts to Chinese politics and society in the Great Leap and Cultural Revolution, the authors go on to depict the dynamic changes that have transformed village China in the post-Mao era. This book continues the dramatic story in the authors’ prizewinning Chinese Village, Socialist State. Plumbing previously untapped sources, including interviews, archival materials, village records and unpublished memoirs, diaries and letters, the authors capture the struggles, pains and achievements of villagers across three generations of social upheaval.
During Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward, hundreds of thousands of famine refugees in the recently founded People's Republic of China set their sights on the agricultural promise of Inner Mongolia. Cheng Tiejun was one of those refugees, arriving in Inner Mongolia in 1959. In 1966, as the PRC plunged into the tumultuous events of the Cultural Revolution, he joined the millions of students and young intellectuals in the Red Guards, who saw in the early days of the Cultural Revolution an opportunity to shape a new nation embracing freedom and equality. In Inner Mongolia, however, that year saw the Party-led destruction of the Mongol-centered autonomous polity led by Ulanhu. In the years after the fall of Ulanhu's administration, the region descended into a living hell for Mongols. Even those among the rebels were accused of being Ulanhu sympathizers and tortured for information. At the heart of this book are Cheng's first-person recollections of his experiences as a rebel. These are supplemented by a close examination of the documentary record of the era--as patchwork and censored as it is--from co-authors Mark Selden and Uradyn E. Bulag. The final chapter offers a theoretical framework to understand such persecution. Its goal was not to destroy the Mongols as a people or as a culture--that is, it was not a genocide. It was, however, a "politicide," an attempt to destroy an officially and politically recognized nationality in possession of an autonomous region, forcing Mongols to assimilate as "ethnic minorities" within a "Chinese nation." This unusual narrative provides urgently needed primary material to understand the events of the Cultural Revolution, while at once offering a novel way to understand contemporary Chinese minority politics"--
In 1950 the British government accorded diplomatic recognition to the newly founded People's Republic of China. But it took 22 years for Britain to establish full diplomatic relations with China. How far was Britain's China policy a failure until 1972? This book argues that Britain and China were involved in the 'everyday Cold War', or a continuous process of contestation and cooperation that allowed them to 'normalize' their confrontation in the absence of full diplomatic relations. From Vietnam and Taiwan to the mainland and Hong Kong, China's 'everyday Cold War' against Britain was marked by diplomatic ritual, propaganda rhetoric and symbolic gestures. Rather than pursuing a failed policy of 'appeasement', British decision-makers and diplomats regarded engagement or negotiation with China as the best way of fighting the 'everyday Cold War'. Based on extensive British and Chinese archival sources, this book examines not only the high politics of Anglo-Chinese relations, but also how the British diplomats experienced the Cold War at the local level.
Triumph Regained: The Vietnam War, 1965–1968 is the long-awaited sequel to the immensely influential Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954–1965. Like its predecessor, this book overturns the conventional wisdom using a treasure trove of new sources, many of them from the North Vietnamese side. Rejecting the standard depiction of U.S. military intervention as a hopeless folly, it shows America’s war to have been a strategic necessity that could have ended victoriously had President Lyndon Johnson heeded the advice of his generals. In light of Johnson’s refusal to use American ground forces beyond South Vietnam, General William Westmoreland employed the best military strategy available. Once the White House loosened the restraints on Operation Rolling Thunder, American bombing inflicted far greater damage on the North Vietnamese supply system than has been previously understood, and it nearly compelled North Vietnam to capitulate. The book demonstrates that American military operations enabled the South Vietnamese government to recover from the massive instability that followed the assassination of President Ngo Dinh Diem. American culture sustained public support for the war through the end of 1968, giving South Vietnam realistic hopes for long-term survival. America’s defense of South Vietnam averted the imminent fall of key Asian nations to Communism and sowed strife inside the Communist camp, to the long-term detriment of America’s great-power rivals, China and the Soviet Union.
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