Showing results by narrator "Claton Butcher" in All Categories

This edition of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca's Relación offers readers Rolena Adorno and Patrick Charles Pautz's celebrated translation of Cabeza de Vaca's account of the 1527 Pánfilo de Narváez expedition to North America. The dramatic narrative tells the story of some of the first Europeans and the first-known African to encounter the North American wilderness and its Native inhabitants.

The United States' approach to China since the Communist regime in Beijing that began the period of reform and opening in the 1980s was based on a promise that trade and engagement with China would result in a peaceful, democratic state. Forty years later, the hope of producing a benign People's Republic of China utterly failed. The Communist Party of China deceived the West into believing that its system and the Party-ruled People's Liberation Army were peaceful and posed no threat.

Nothing is more essential than knowing how to worship the God who created us. This audiobook focuses listeners on the essentials of God-honoring worship, combining biblical foundations with practical application in a way that works in the real world. The author, a pastor and noted songwriter, skillfully instructs pastors, musicians, and church leaders so that they can root their congregational worship in unchanging scriptural principles, not divisive cultural trends.

Life is never peaceful in Chris Erskine's house, what with the four kids, 300-pound beagle, chronically leaky roof, and long-suffering wife, Posh. And that's exactly the way he likes it, except when he doesn't. Every week in the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune (and now and then in many other papers), Erskine distills, mocks, and makes us laugh at the absurdities of suburban fatherhood. And now, he's gathered the very best of these witty and wise essays - and invited his kids (and maybe even Posh) to annotate them with updated commentary.

A cautionary look at 10 dangerously appealing half-truths. Not long ago, I came across a list of 10 principles set forth by proponents of progressive Christianity. They are, in effect, a new 10 commandments. What’s striking is that they are far less about God revealing his desires and far more about man expressing his own - less Moses, more Oprah. Yet each of these commandments is partially true. Indeed, that is what makes this list, and progressive Christianity as a whole, so challenging.

Scripture calls parents to train and nurture their children's faith. How can churches best equip families to disciple their children? Family ministry expert Dr. Timothy Paul Jones gives church leaders a practical plan to equip parents to be the primary faith trainers in their children's lives, moving beyond mere programming into genuine spiritual transformation.

The most thorough account ever written of southwestern life in the early seventeenth century, this engaging book was first published in 1630 as an official report to the king of Spain by Fray Alonso de Benavides, a Portuguese Franciscan who was the third head of the mission churches of New Mexico. In 1625, Father Benavides and his party traveled north from Mexico City to New Mexico, a strange land of frozen rivers, Indian citadels, and mines full of silver and garnets.

This easy-to-understand book describes what happened to planet Earth during and after the 371 days that Noah and seven others remained secure inside the ark. They left behind a one-continent world and landed in a newly shattered world, the one great land mass having been ripped apart into the continents we know today. Stones and bones tell the story.

Until very recently, no society had seen marriage as anything other than a conjugal partnership: a male-female union. What Is Marriage? identifies and defends the reasons for this historic consensus and shows why redefining civil marriage as something other than the conjugal union of husband and wife is a mistake. Originally published in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, this book’s core argument quickly became the year’s most widely read essay on the most prominent scholarly network in the social sciences.

Your loved one begins drinking to the point of no return once again. A fight ensues, words are exchanged and it is another miserable episode of nagging and pleading and promises to refrain from ever returning to this point. Does this sound familiar? If this is the picture that represents your life, then it is time to enact an alternative to the repeated efforts of trying to make him or her quit this behavior. What if it were possible to alter your reaction to your loved one's drinking?

God commands us to remember the Sabbath, but is it realistic in today's fast-paced culture? In this warm and helpful book, Shelly Miller dispels legalistic ideas about the Sabbath and shows how even busy people can implement a rhythm of rest into their lives—whether for an hour, a morning, or a whole day. With encouraging stories from people in different stages in life, Miller shares practical advice for having peaceful, close times with God.

Drug use turns into abuse and addiction when the person begins experiencing urges and cravings. At this point, the user's mind finds a way to rationalize the addiction or deny that they even have a problem. The user begins to lose control over their drug use and may even underestimate the amount of drugs they are taking. While the amount of drugs a person takes does not necessarily indicate a problem, it is often an indicator of drug addiction.

Philosopher Malcolm Muggeridge stated in the Pascal Lectures, University of Waterloo, that "The theory of evolution...will be one of the great jokes in the history books of the future. Posterity will marvel that so very flimsy and dubious an hypothesis could be accepted." This report exposes the lies of Darwinism. The authors make a case strictly on how Darwinism stands up under the microscope of real science.

As our use of technology has increased, our communication skills have decreased. We text when we should talk. We tweet firings and breakups. Technology creates the illusion of being in touch, but we lose the deeper meaning conveyed by body language, facial expression, and tone of voice. What we need are real, face-to-face conversations. Have we lost that art?

This book presents the fullest account yet written of the impact of Hurricane Katrina on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Rooted in a wealth of oral histories, it tells the dramatic but underreported story of a people who confronted the unprecedented devastation of sixty five thousand homes when the eye wall and powerful northeast quadrant of the hurricane swept a record thirty-foot storm surge across a seventy-five-mile stretch of unprotected Mississippi towns and cities. James Patterson Smith takes us through life and death accounts of storm day, August 29, 2005, and the precarious days of food and water shortages that followed. Along the way the narrative treats us to inspiring episodes of neighborly compassion and creative responses to the greatest natural disaster in American history

The ancient merchants of Tyre sailed the high seas and plumbed their depths in search of a rare shellfish, valued for its rich, purple dye. The Greek word kalchaino, to ponder, literally means in search of the purple fish. Like the search for the purple fish, Jesus goes to remarkable lengths in seeking after his most valued treasure lost, broken, hurting, oppressed people. He invites us on a grand adventure to help him connect with these purple fish too.

The People’s Republic of China and the United States are today at war. It is being fought with the use of information, politics, and finance. The Chinese believe that, as in all war, it would be better to win without engaging the enemy on the battlefield or having to resort to the likes of nuclear weapons if it can be avoided. To achieve this, China has engaged in a decades-long campaign to manipulate and corrupt America’s ruling elite.

There is a movement that is misleading hundreds of millions of Christians and seekers. Today's Church is being sapped of its influence, vitality, and sustainability. It is sinking, submerging like a leaky boat taking on water. This report reveals that to destroy true Christian faith, one must simply compromise or ignore the first few chapters about creation in Genesis. Here we expose the depth to which compromises with secular opinions have embedded themselves into the submerging Church.

There is a war raging across America. The country's heritage is already a victim. They want to destroy all evidence that predominantly Christian men founded the United States on predominantly Christian principles. Now they're out to destroy the foundations that traditional United States freedoms are based upon. Is it too late to stem the tide?

We want to be different, but we don't want to change. Our attempts at spiritual formation and growth are consistently sabotaged by our surface efforts that never quite get to the root of the problem. We think we know what we're supposed to do, but we're not quite sure who we're supposed to be on the other side of transformation.