Advocacy organizations and collective action
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Item Fighting for Your Marriage Positive Steps for Preventing Divorce and Preserving a Lasting Love(JOSSEY-BASS, 2001-01-11) Howard J. MarkmanThings change. Because of that simple fact, we’ve updated our work in order to bring you what we consider to be an even more practi- cal and potent version of Fighting for Your Marriage. What you hold in your hand is a major revision of the book we published in 1994. We wrote the original version to help couples build and nurture happy and strong marriages. This book is based on PREP®, which stands for the Prevention and Relationship Enhancement Program. PREP is based on over twenty years of research at the University of Denver as well as on research from universities around the world. PREP is a program we developed to help couples beat the odds. PREP workshops use specific steps and exercises to teach couples the skills and attitudes associated with good relationships. Because of its roots in solid research and its straightforward approach, PREP has received a great deal of attention from couples across the coun- try, professionals in the field of marital counseling, and the media. PREP is one of the most extensively researched programs for cou- ples ever developed. The strategies in PREP are based on our study of the key risks couples face as well as the most promising avenues for helping couples lower the risks. Marriage in our culture is risky business, and the costs of marital failure are staggering. The good news is that there are proven strategies that can help you preserve a lasting love. Whether or not you ever take a PREP workshop, this book presents the core of our thinking and strategies for couples.Item Faith-Based Organizations and Legislative Advocacy: A Qualitative Inquiry(M. Lori Thomas, 2008-08-08) Marye LorelleA dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Virginia Commonwealth University. Virginia Commonwealth University, 2008 Major Director: F. Ellen Netting, Professor, School of Social Work Since the early 1990s, religion and matters of faith and spirituality have become a focal point in numerous arenas beyond the individual and traditionally sacred. With President George W. Bush’s White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives of 2001, the Charitable Choice provision of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act that preceded it in 1996, and the myriad of legal challenges that followed, matters of religion have become paramount in political discourse regarding social welfare. The viability of faith-based social service provision and the organizations providing the direct services have been the focus of speculation, debate, and a growing amount of research. Few studies, however, have explored the role of faith-based advocacy or lobbying organizations in shifting the social welfare climate, in proposing or opposing policy changes in the social welfare system, or in defining social welfare. Little is empirically known about the organizational dynamics of religious advocacy groups whose attempts at structural influence are, in part, affected by theological positions and religiously-informed values.Item CLASSICAL APOLOGETICS A Rational Defense of the Christian Faith and a Critique of Presuppositional Apologetics(Zondervan, 1984-04-04) R. C. SPROUL; JOHN GERSTNER and ARTHUR LINDSLEYChristianity is rational. But because it provokes passion, devotion, prayer, worship, and aspirations to obedience, its purely rational element can easily be submerged or concealed from view. It has been called variously a “religion,” a “way of life,” an “experience,” a “faith,” and an “ideology.” That Christianity involves more, much more than rationality, is evident. That it is eminently rational is not always evident. Throughout this work, the authors, John Gerstner, Arthur Lindsley, and R. C. Sproul, affirm the primacy of the mind in the Christian faith. To suggest the primacy of the mind is outrageous to some, particularly to those who equate rationality with rationalism. We also affirm the primacy of the heart. The scope of this volume focuses primarily on the rational aspect of Christianity. Our emphasis on this part, however, must not be misconstrued as a summary of the whole.Item Fervent: A Woman's Battle Plan for Serious Specific, and Stategic Prayer(B&H Publishing Group Nashville, Tennessee, 2015-05-05) Priscilla ShirerCouple of things to mention here, though, before we start to develop some intentional strategies of devil-busting prayer, designed to counteract his specific strategies against us. Whenever the conversation of demonic activity comes up in a book like this, most people scatter to one of two extremes. Either they overestimate Satan’s influence and power, living with an inflated, erroneous perspective of his abilities. Or they underestimate him. They don’t assign him any credit at all for the difficulties he’s stirring up beneath the surface of their lives. One extreme leaves you saddled with undue fear and anxiety; the other just makes you stupid—(too blunt to say it like that? sorry)—unaware and completely open to every single attack. Which of these categories do you fall into or lean toward? Either? Let’s be clear, no matter which way you gravitate, Satan is not God. And he is not God’s counterpart or peer. They’re not even on the same playing field. His influence, authority, and power don’t even touch the fringe of what our Lord is capable of doing. Read ahead to Revelation 19 and 20 sometime, the so-called titanic clash of end-time foes in what’s commonly known as the battle of Armageddon. Know what it really is? More like the devil and his demons getting all dressed up with no place to go. It’s over before it even starts. The only thing that makes it a war is that he becomes a prisoner of war. Satan is nothing but a copycat, trying desperately to convince you he’s more powerful than he actually is. Because remember: he does have limitations—boundaries he cannot cross no matter how much he desires or how hard he tries. For instance . . . He can’t be everywhere at once (only God is omnipresent). He can’t read your mind (only God is omniscient). He is merely an illusionist, using cunning trickery to deceive and mislead (only God can work flat-out, unmistakable miracles).Item Fighting for Your Marriage Positive Steps for Preventing Divorce and Preserving a Lasting Love(Jossey Bass, 2001-01-11) Howard J. MarkmanThings change. Because of that simple fact, we’ve updated our work in order to bring you what we consider to be an even more practi- cal and potent version of Fighting for Your Marriage. What you hold in your hand is a major revision of the book we published in 1994. We wrote the original version to help couples build and nurture happy and strong marriages. This book is based on PREP®, which stands for the Prevention and Relationship Enhancement Program. PREP is based on over twenty years of research at the University of Denver as well as on research from universities around the world. PREP is a program we developed to help couples beat the odds. PREP workshops use specific steps and exercises to teach couples the skills and attitudes associated with good relationships. Because of its roots in solid research and its straightforward approach, PREP has received a great deal of attention from couples across the coun- try, professionals in the field of marital counseling, and the media. PREP is one of the most extensively researched programs for cou- ples ever developed. The strategies in PREP are based on our study of the key risks couples face as well as the most promising avenues for helping couples lower the risks. Marriage in our culture is risky business, and the costs of marital failure are staggering.Item An Expositional Commentary ACTS(Zondervan, 1996-06-26) James Montgomery BoiceIn the last few years I have come across a number of disturbing books that ring a loud alarm for the church establishment known as evangelicalism. Evangel means "good news," or "the gospel," and the evangelical churches are those that assume they know the gospel and are defending it in a day when liberal churches are not. The books I am referring to say that this is not so, that evangelicals are actually in the process of abandoning the gospel along with many other theological convictions on which the church has been built. One outstanding book is David F. Wells's No Place for Truth: Or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology? Michael Scott Horton edited Power Religion: The Selling Out of the Evangelical Church.Item A Survey of the New Testament(Zondervan, 2012-02-12) Robert H. GundryA textbook surveying the New Testament should bring together the most salient items from New Testament background, technical intro duction, and commentary. Nearly all surveys of the New Testament suffer, however, from a deficiency of comments on the biblical text. As a result, study of the survey textbook often nudges out a reading of the primary and most important text, the New Testament itself. Reading the New Testament Itself Since many beginning students have never read the New Testament sys tematically or thoroughly, if at all, the present survey prompts them to read it in its entirety, passage by passage, and carries on a dialogue with each passage in the form of brief commentary. By tracing the flow of thought from passage to passage, students will gain a sense of narratival and logical progression. Thus it has proved possible to move at least some of the background material concerning intertestamental history, Judaism, and other matters — which seem tortuous to many students — from the first part of the book to later parts, where such material elucidates the bib lical text directly. This procedure reduces the discouragingly long intro duction to the typical academic course in New Testament survey, better enables students to see how background material helps interpret the text, and above all keeps the textbook from supplanting the New Testament.Item A History of the Ancient Near East(Wiley Blackwell, 2016-06-16)In the year 334 BC, a young king from Macedon and his well-trained army crossed from Europe into Asia, confronted the vast empire of Persia, and conquered it in the course of a decade. Alexander's troops marched through an antique world that contained the remains of thousands of years of earlier history. Their previous encounter with Greece could not have prepared them for what they saw in the Near East and Egypt. They entered cities like Uruk that had existed for three millennia, and visited pyramids and temples that had stood for almost as many years. This was a world steeped in history, not a world in decline, waiting for fresh inspiration. The city-dwellers knew their traditions were so ancient that they claimed they dated from the beginning of time itself. People wrote in scripts that had been used for almost thirty centuries, they read and copied texts that were hundreds of years old. These were not idle claims, as for a long time their lands had indeed been home to the most advanced cultures in the world, well before Greece had developed its great classical civilization. It is in the Near East and northeast Africa that many of the elements we associate with advanced civilization first originated, including agriculture, cities, states, writing, laws, and many more. Because this region lies at the juncture of three continents, practices and concepts from numerous and diverse people came together there, inspired and complemented one another, and were used by the inhabitants to manipulate their surroundings. They created their environment rather than reacting to it.Item A hand book of New Testament Exegisis(Baker Academic, 2010-10-20) Craig L. Blomberg“This is how we know who the children of God are and who the children of the devil are: Those who do not do what is right are not God’s children; nor are those who do not love their brothers and sisters” (1 John 3:10). This sounds pretty cut and dried, but don’t most people fall somewhere in between doing what is right and not doing so? “Son though he [Jesus] was, he learned obedience from what he suffered and, once made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him” (Heb. 5:8–9). Christ had to learn to obey God? He was made perfect? Wasn’t he God from all eternity past and therefore always perfect? And doesn’t this passage, like the last one, clearly teach salvation through obedience to God’s commandments? Isn’t salvation entirely by grace through faith? “But women will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety” (1 Tim. 2:15). Good grief! Now half the human race is saved not only by good works but by one particular deed— having kids? What about all those women who can’t or don’t have children? “Peter replied, ‘Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit’” (Acts 2:38). Here it sounds like all people, including women and men alike, must be baptized to be saved. At least that’s easier than having children. Moreover, then we’ll receive a gift from the Spirit. Hmm, I wonder which gift it is. The Scriptures certainly seem confusing.Item Christian Ethics: An Introduction to Biblical Moral Reasonin(Crossway, 2018-08-28) Wayne GrudemI have written this book for Christians who want to understand what the Bible teaches about how to obey God faithfully in their daily lives. I hope the book will be useful not only for college and seminary students who take classes in Christian ethics, but also for all other Christians who seek, before God, to be “filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding,” with the result that they will live “in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him: bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God” (Col. 1:9–10). This book as a whole is an invitation to experience the great blessing of God that comes from walking daily in paths of obedience, knowing more of the joy of God’s presence, and experiencing his favor on our lives (see chap. 4). It is an invitation to delight in the goodness and beauty of God’s moral standards because we understand that delight in those standards is really delight in the infinitely good moral character of God himself (see chap. 2). To delight in God’s moral standards should lead us to exclaim with the psalmist, “Oh how I love your law! It is my meditation all the day” (Ps. 119:97).