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There's a Sheep in My Bathtub chronicles the adventures of the Hogan family as they try to follow God's leading into one of the world's most remote and mysterious enclaves. Disarmingly honest and charmingly humorous, their tale will thrill you and bring tears to your eyes. An intensely personal memoir, this book still manages to pack a powerful dose of missionary insight and biblical principles for seeing the Church explode into life among peoples that have never even heard of Jesus.

For the hermits and communal monks of antiquity, the desert was a place to flee the cacophony of ordinary life in order to hear and contemplate the voice of God. But these monks discovered something surprising in their harsh desert surroundings: far from empty and silent, the desert is richly reverberant. Sonorous Desert shares the stories and sayings of these ancient spiritual seekers, tracing how the ambient sounds of wind, thunder, water, and animals shaped the emergence and development of early Christian monasticism.

In A Most Peculiar Book, Kristin Swenson addresses the dirty little secret of biblical studies that the Bible is a weird book. It is full of surprises and contradictions, unexplained impossibilities, intriguing supernatural creatures, and heroes doing horrible deeds. It does not provide a simple worldview: What "the Bible says" on a given topic is multi-faceted, sometimes even contradictory.

Who would have thought that from its humble beginnings as a small group of followers of a Jewish man called Jesus that Christianity would become, less than 2,000 years later, the most widespread religion on Earth? Christianity’s birth and development is a vast, complex story filled with setbacks and contradictions but also with triumphs.

In this provocative tell-all, David Gushee gives an insider's look at the frictions and schisms of evangelical Christianity, based on his experiences that began with becoming a born-again Southern Baptist in 1978 to being kicked out of evangelicalism in 2014 for his stance on LGBT inclusion in the church. But Gushee's religious pilgrimage proves even broader than that, as he leads his listener through his childhood experiences in Roman Catholicism, his difficult days at the liberal Union Seminary in New York, his encounters with the Christian Right, and more. In telling his story, Gushee speaks to the cultural divisions of a generation.

In this magisterial work, leading cultural critic Mary Eberstadt delivers a powerful new theory about the decline of religion in the Western world. The conventional wisdom is that the West first experienced religious decline, followed by the decline of the family. Eberstadt turns this standard account on its head. Marshalling an impressive array of research, Eberstadt shows that the reverse has also been true: the undermining of the family has further undermined Christianity itself.

The Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), or Vatican II, is arguably the most significant event in the life of the Catholic Church since the Reformation. The Council initiated, intentionally or not, profound changes not simply within Catholic theology, but in the religious, social, and moral lives of the world's billion Catholics. It also reconfigured, intellectually and practically, the Church's engagements with those outside of it—most obviously with regard to other religions.

The Founding of the American Republic is on trial. Critics say it was a poison pill with a time-release formula; we are its victims. Its principles are responsible for the country's moral and social disintegration because they were based on the Enlightenment falsehood of radical individual autonomy. In this well-researched book, Robert Reilly declares: not guilty. To prove his case, he traces the lineage of the ideas that made the United States, and its ordered liberty, possible. America's decline, he claims, is not to be discovered in the Founding principles, but in their disavowal.

Luther’s 95 Theses, written in Latin, were famously posted by Martin Luther on the door of the Castle Church, Wittenberg, on October 31, 1517, an event that came to be considered as the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. The Theses focus on three main issues: selling forgiveness through indulgences, the pope’s claimed power of forgiveness, and the damage indulgences caused to sinners. The first thesis states, "When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, "Repent," he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance."

Warm, insightful, even at times amusing, Teems's depiction of King James has all the elements of a grand tale - conspiracy, kidnapping, witchcraft, murder, love, despair, loss. Majestie offers an engaging new look at the world's most cherished, revered, and influential translation of Sacred Writ and the king behind it.

Clarence Larkin was an important scholar of prophecy. In The Spirit World", published in 1921, he discusses the inhabitants of the spiritual world according to the Bible. Explaining the qualities of angels, he makes a distinction between the “fallen angels” and Satan’s demons and the realms which they inhabit. Larkin’s treatment of Satan and the Underworld, in the form of hell, Gehenna and Tartarus is thorough and vivid, and he explains issues like the state of the soul in death and the principles of resurrection.

Critics call it one of the greatest pieces of fraud in religious history. Believers call it one of the most important artifacts in Christianity. Everyone agrees that it's mysterious, interesting, and controversial. The Shroud of Turin has been a controversial relic from the time it was first publicly displayed in Northern France in the 14th century until the much-awaited carbon 14 tests were performed on the cloth in 1988.

The pope, the bishop of Rome, claims spiritual authority over more than a billion Catholics worldwide. He also exercises temporal authority over a tiny enclave of Rome consisting of the Vatican Palace, Saint Peter’s Basilica, and 44 hectares with the ancient Leonine Walls. As sovereign of the Vatican City States, he has around 1,000 subjects, mostly clerics.

Today, the Salem Witch Trials are often remembered as being a relic of a superstitious past. Salem has transformed itself into a tourist haven and Halloween destination by capitalizing off the Salem Witch trials. But it was deadly serious in 1692, when 19 men and women found themselves taken to "Gallows Hill" and hanged for being witches.

What if all the bad news you've been hearing about Christians isn't true? Here are some facts that may surprise you: Evangelicals are more respected by society today than they were 20 years ago. Divorce rates of Christian couples are lower than those of nonbelievers. The percentage of young people who attend church has held steady over the past 20 years. All these statements are true, yet we’ve been told the opposite time and time again. Why is the church being misled?

John and Betty Stam were a young Christian couple working for the Lord in China. The year was 1934, a turbulent time in history, and the Stams were right in the thick of it. Early one morning the call went out that communist soldiers were approaching their town. Betty was nursing their young baby girl when John decided that perhaps now was the time to leave.... As they began to make their plans, the rebel soldiers broke through the walls, and soon the sound of rifle butts was being heard as they knocked against the door.

The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs is an apocryphal work containing the final speeches and dying commands of the twelve sons of Jacob to their descendants. Each Testament consists of a brief overview of the patriarch’s life, admissions of sin, ethical teachings based on the patriarch’s experiences, and prophetic visions about the future of his descendants and the end of days.

Do you know the whole story of the House of Borgia—from their rise from obscurity to the highest echelons of European society? The family produced two popes and a saint, but they are more known for stories of murder, debauchery, and incest. What is accurate, and what is just slander? Were the Borgias worse than any other powerful family of the time? Was Rodrigo Borgia, who became Pope Alexander VI, a monster? Was his son Cesare a psychopath? Was his daughter Lucrezia a murderous temptress?

This year Christians worldwide will celebrate the 1700th anniversary of Constantine's conversion and victory at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge. No Roman emperor had a greater impact on the modern world than did Constantine. The reason is not simply that he converted to Christianity but that he did so in a way that brought his subjects along after him. Indeed, this major new biography argues that Constantine's conversion is but one feature of a unique administrative style that enabled him to take control of an empire beset by internal rebellions and external threats by Persians and Goths.

People get a thrill from hearing about knights in shining armor racing across the battlefield and doing all kinds of works of chivalry. This is an audiobook about some of the best-known knights of the Middle Ages. Best of all, this is not fiction. The Knights Templar were very real, and their story is amazing.