Download or read book Pew written by Catherine Lacey and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2020-07-21 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER of the 2021 NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award. Finalist for the 2021 Dylan Thomas Prize. Longlisted for the 2021 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. One of Publishers Weekly's Best Fiction Books of 2020. One of Amazon's 100 Best Books of 2020. “The people of this community are stifling, and generous, cruel, earnest, needy, overconfident, fragile and repressive, which is to say that they are brilliantly rendered by their wise maker, Catherine Lacey.” --Rachel Kushner, author of The Flamethrowers A figure with no discernible identity appears in a small, religious town, throwing its inhabitants into a frenzy In a small, unnamed town in the American South, a church congregation arrives for a service and finds a figure asleep on a pew. The person is genderless and racially ambiguous and refuses to speak. One family takes in the strange visitor and nicknames them Pew. As the town spends the week preparing for a mysterious Forgiveness Festival, Pew is shuttled from one household to the next. The earnest and seemingly well-meaning townspeople see conflicting identities in Pew, and many confess their fears and secrets to them in one-sided conversations. Pew listens and observes while experiencing brief flashes of past lives or clues about their origin. As days pass, the void around Pew’s presence begins to unnerve the community, whose generosity erodes into menace and suspicion. Yet by the time Pew’s story reaches a shattering and unsettling climax at the Forgiveness Festival, the secret of who they really are—a devil or an angel or something else entirely—is dwarfed by even larger truths. Pew, Catherine Lacey’s third novel, is a foreboding, provocative, and amorphous fable about the world today: its contradictions, its flimsy morality, and the limits of judging others based on their appearance. With precision and restraint, one of our most beloved and boundary-pushing writers holds up a mirror to her characters’ true selves, revealing something about forgiveness, perception, and the faulty tools society uses to categorize human complexity.
Download or read book Parenting in the Pew written by Robbie F. Castleman and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2012-11-14 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this upbeat book Robbie Castleman shows parents how to guide their toddlers and teenagers to participate more fully in the worship of the church. This significantly revised and updated edition includes a new preface and new appendices with ideas for children's sermons and intergenerational community.
Download or read book The Next America written by Paul Taylor and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2016-01-26 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The America of the near future will look nothing like the America of the recent past. America is in the throes of a demographic overhaul. Huge generation gaps have opened up in our political and social values, our economic well-being, our family structure, our racial and ethnic identity, our gender norms, our religious affiliation, and our technology use. Today's Millennials -- well-educated, tech savvy, underemployed twenty-somethings -- are at risk of becoming the first generation in American history to have a lower standard of living than their parents. Meantime, more than 10,000 Baby Boomers are retiring every single day, most of them not as well prepared financially as they'd hoped. This graying of our population has helped polarize our politics, put stresses on our social safety net, and presented our elected leaders with a daunting challenge: How to keep faith with the old without bankrupting the young and starving the future. Every aspect of our demography is being fundamentally transformed. By mid-century, the population of the United States will be majority non-white and our median age will edge above 40 -- both unprecedented milestones. But other rapidly-aging economic powers like China, Germany, and Japan will have populations that are much older. With our heavy immigration flows, the US is poised to remain relatively young. If we can get our spending priorities and generational equities in order, we can keep our economy second to none. But doing so means we have to rebalance the social compact that binds young and old. In tomorrow's world, yesterday's math will not add up. Drawing on Pew Research Center's extensive archive of public opinion surveys and demographic data, The Next America is a rich portrait of where we are as a nation and where we're headed -- toward a future marked by the most striking social, racial, and economic shifts the country has seen in a century.
Download or read book From Pew to Pulpit written by Clifton Floyd Guthrie and published by Abingdon Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A down-to-earth, practical introduction to the ins and outs of preaching for lay preachers, bivocational pastors, and others newly arrived in the pulpit. Recent years have seen a considerable increase in the amount of financial resources required to support a full-time pastor in the local congregation. In addition, large numbers of full-time, seminary trained clergy are retiring, without commensurate numbers of new clergy able to take their place. As a result of these trends, a large number of lay preachers and bivocational pastors have assumed the principal responsibility for filling the pulpit week by week in local churches. Most of these individuals, observes Clifton Guthrie, can draw on a wealth of life experiences, as well as strong intuitive skills in knowing what makes a good sermon, having listened to them much of their lives. What they often don't bring to the pulpit, however, is specific, detailed instruction in the how-tos of preaching. That is precisely what this brief, practical guide to preaching has to offer. Written with the needs of those for whom preaching is not their sole or primary occupation in mind, it begins by emphasizing what every preacher brings to the pulpit: an idea of what makes a sermon particularly moving or memorable to them. From there the book moves into short chapters on choosing an appropriate biblical text or sermon topic, learning how to listen to one's first impressions of what a text means, moving from text or topic to the sermon itself while keeping the listeners needs firmly in mind, making thorough and engaging use of stories in the sermon, and delivering with passion and conviction. The book concludes with helpful suggestions for resources, including Bibles, commentaries, other print resources and websites.
Download or read book The Pew and the Picket Line written by Christopher D. Cantwell and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2016-02-11 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Pew and the Picket Line collects works from a new generation of scholars working at the nexus where religious history and working-class history converge. Focusing on Christianity and its unique purchase in America, the contributors use in-depth local histories to illustrate how Americans male and female, rural and urban, and from a range of ethnic backgrounds dwelt in a space between the church and the shop floor. Their vivid essays show Pentecostal miners preaching prosperity while seeking miracles in the depths of the earth, while aboveground black sharecroppers and white Protestants establish credit unions to pursue a joint vision of cooperative capitalism. Innovative and essential, The Pew and the Picket Line reframes venerable debates as it maps the dynamic contours of a landscape sculpted by the powerful forces of Christianity and capitalism. Contributors: Christopher D. Cantwell, Heath W. Carter, Janine Giordano Drake, Ken Fones-Wolf, Erik Gellman, Alison Collis Greene, Brett Hendrickson, Dan McKanan, Matthew Pehl, Kerry L. Pimblott, Jarod Roll, Evelyn Sterne, and Arlene Sanchez Walsh.
Download or read book Pew Sisters written by Katie Schuermann and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Every woman in the pew has a story of God's faithfulness, and women love nothing better than to revel in one another's experiences and celebrate the sisterhood of believers. Pew Sisters helps get that celebration started. Devotional in both tone and form, this twelve-session study tells what God is doing in the lives of real women today. From depression to grief to cancer, women from all over the Church share their stories here for the consolation and encouragement of their sisters in faith. We are all one in the Body of Christ, so these beautiful women are your pew sisters. Their joys are your joys, and their sorrows are your sorrows. They share the same faith as you, eat at the same table as you, and inherit the same paradise as you. Join them in the pages of this study and in your own small group. Book jacket.
Download or read book Sittin in the Front Pew written by Parry Ann Brown and published by Villard. This book was released on 2002 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Returning to Baltimore from Los Angeles to bury her late father, Glynda Naylor and her three sisters celebrate their father's life and search for answers about who the real Edward Naylor, who had raised them after their mother's death, was. Original. 35,000 first printing.
Download or read book Preaching from the Pew written by Patricia G. Brown and published by Westminster John Knox Press. This book was released on 1998-01-01 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this deeply spiritual and prophetic collection of sermons, meditations, and prayers, Pat Brown takes the reader on a personal journey into and out of some of the most critical challenges facing the church in these turbulent and confusing times. She unveils her story of God's handiwork in shaping her life as a child of the Reformed tradition and as the mother of a special needs son. In a time when the call for justice withers on the vine as the church struggles with itself, this book is required reading for every perplexed servant of Jesus Christ.
Download or read book Blood on a Pew written by W. S. Gaines and published by Tate Publishing. This book was released on 2011-07 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On June 18, 2003, at two thirty in the morning, my eldest son, Billy, fell through the tile ceiling of a church, crashing into a hard, wooden pew thirty feet below. At the time, he was temporarily staying in the shuttered convent of this Catholic church located just outside Pittsburgh and was attending a late-night party in the church rectory with a few of his University of Pittsburgh football teammates and the parish priest. The priest hosted the event and provided the alcohol. Every one of the football players in attendance, including my son, was underage. Tragically, later the same day, Billy was pronounced brain dead at Mercy Hospital in Pittsburgh. He was nineteen years old. Billy Gaines was a gifted athlete and promising wide receiver on the University of Pittsburgh football team. His untimely death shook his father, Bill Gaines, to the core. He felt grief as any parent would after the loss of a child. He also felt anger, not just toward the priest who provided alcohol to Billy that tragic night, but also toward God for letting Billy die. As the details surrounding his son's death surfaced, Bill faced some tough questions: What was Billy doing in a church crawlspace at two thirty in the morning? Who was responsible for Billy's death? What could he as a father have done to prevent Billy's death? Why did God allow Billy to die? As Bill Gaines puts the pieces together and tries to find answers to his questions, he finds himself on a spiritual journey. Join him as he finds healing and forgiveness in his faith and learns what led to Blood on a Pew.
Download or read book The Last Pew written by Sophia Sunshine Vilceus and published by . This book was released on 2015-10-12 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Last Pew is the story of a young, single Christian woman who for most of her life lived a pure, wholesome, spiritual, and obedient existence. Upon moving to a new city and beginning her career as an educator, on the job she encounters a young unhappily married man who also happens to be a minister at a local Baptist church. Throughout a 2 year period of the two working together, she is courted; they fall in love, and commit to a life and relationship of immorality and sin. The narrative essentially tells the love story of the two. It shows how two people who know God intimately and have been doing God's will for so long can eventually walk down a path of spiritual destruction. The story illustrates the reasons that enabled the young woman's spiritual judgment to decline in order for this relationship to even take place. Moreover, the story shows the spiritual steps that the young woman had to take in order to be freed from the affair. The story clearly shows the power of God's Grace, Mercy, Forgiveness, and the true capacity of Prayer and Fasting. The Last Pew is an important story because it is an account on adultery which certainly is a muzzled issue within the Christian community. The story is an honest, transparent and appropriate narrative written with the hopes of providing its reader with a different take of who the other woman is. It is proof that the other woman can in fact be a woman of God who got lost while on her walk with Christ. At its core, The Last Pew is a story of redemption and finding purpose after sin. The title, The Last Pew, symbolizes how far the narrator was from God's altar and His will. But the story is a reminder that God's love can always allow for any lost soul to move back to the front of His altar. The end of the book serves as a workbook for struggling women coming out of their affair. There is a chapter devoted to points and scriptures to guide women through the process of their healing. The end of the book closes with an open letter to any woman who has had to deal with infidelity within her own marriage. A riveting testimony and a biblical based workbook, TLP is a resource for all women. Though adultery is a silent story within the Church, it certainly is a reality for many Christians, making this a conversation one that needs to be had. Whether the person reading this story is a woman trying to come out of an affair, a wife trying to heal from learning about an extra-marital affair, or a man of God that is caught in the middle---this book will minister.
Download or read book Jew in the Pew written by Jenny Chandler and published by . This book was released on 2013-10-12 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jew in the Pew is a memoir of a year of my life as a Jew in a church... When we moved to a quaint little seaside town in Florida, away from the traffic and sinus pressure of Philadelphia, it never occurred to me that in the midst of that subtropical paradise some spiritual genetic time bomb would go off. I was no longer okay with going to church and raising our kids the way we had been. More than ever I missed all the Jewish things with which I had been raised. The white bread, mayonnaise Christian world began to chafe like corduroy on sunburn, which is seriously unfortunate since my husband was Baptist. It was time to face my past, what we were doing in our present and decide who I wanted to be in the future. The only way I knew how to do that was to spend a year writing furiously.
Download or read book Witches Brew in the Pew written by Impact Christian Books and published by Impact Christian Books Incorporated. This book was released on 2000-06-01 with total page 113 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dr. Rousse helps you determine if someone is practicing witchcraft on you, and offers knowledge to counter this attack of the enemy. Learn How Witchcraft Operates, How To Expose And Break Its Power, About The Curses Caused By Witchcraft, About The Jezebel Spirit, and 25 Characteristics of Witchcraft. Specific Topics include: Introduction to Jezebel, Witchcraft Defined, Principal of a 'Brew,' The Activities of Witches in Churches (both near and from a distance), The Identifying Characteristics of a Brew (Excessive Control, Manipulation, Threats, Refusal to Submit to Authority, Fear), The Jezebel Brew, Deception and Failure to Acknowledge the True Enemy, The Root of Witchcraft & Rebellion, The Golden Keys To Deliverance From The Witch's Brew, Dealing With Dangerous People & Those Operating Under The Influence of Witchcraft, Vipers in the Vineyard, and more.
Download or read book The Comfortable Pew written by Pierre Berton and published by . This book was released on 1965 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Social Trends in American Life written by Peter V. Marsden and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2012-08-26 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Changes in American social attitudes and behaviors since the 1970s Social Trends in American Life assembles a team of leading researchers to provide unparalleled insight into how American social attitudes and behaviors have changed since the 1970s. Drawing on the General Social Survey—a social science project that has tracked demographic and attitudinal trends in the United States since 1972—it offers a window into diverse facets of American life, from intergroup relations to political views and orientations, social affiliations, and perceived well-being. Among the book's many important findings are the greater willingness of ordinary Americans to accord rights of free expression to unpopular groups, to endorse formal racial equality, and to accept nontraditional roles for women in the workplace, politics, and the family. Some, but not all, signs indicate that political conservatism has grown, while a few suggest that Republicans and Democrats are more polarized. Some forms of social connectedness such as neighboring have declined, as has confidence in government, while participation in organized religion has softened. Despite rising standards of living, American happiness levels have changed little, though financial and employment insecurity has risen over three decades. Social Trends in American Life provides an invaluable perspective on how Americans view their lives and their society, and on how these views have changed over the last two generations.
Download or read book The Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments and Other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church written by Church of England and published by . This book was released on 1865 with total page 556 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Devil in Pew Number Seven written by Rebecca Nichols Alonzo and published by Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.. This book was released on 2010-07-27 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2011 Retailers Choice Award winner! Rebecca never felt safe as a child. In 1969, her father, Robert Nichols, moved to Sellerstown, North Carolina, to serve as a pastor. There he found a small community eager to welcome him—with one exception. Glaring at him from pew number seven was a man obsessed with controlling the church. Determined to get rid of anyone who stood in his way, he unleashed a plan of terror that was more devastating and violent than the Nichols family could have ever imagined. Refusing to be driven away by acts of intimidation, Rebecca’s father stood his ground until one night when an armed man walked into the family’s kitchen . . . And Rebecca’s life was shattered. If anyone had a reason to harbor hatred and seek personal revenge, it would be Rebecca. Yet The Devil in Pew Number Seven tells a different story. It is the amazing true saga of relentless persecution, one family’s faith and courage in the face of it, and a daughter whose parents taught her the power of forgiveness.
Download or read book Parenting in the Pew written by Robbie Fox Castleman and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2002-02-21 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this upbeat book Robbie Castleman shows parents how to guide their children (from toddlers to teenagers) to participate as fully as possible in the worship of the church. Foreword by Ruth Bell Graham.
