Agriculturalist Fred Bahnson and theologian Norman Wirzba develop a vision for community renewal based on reconciliation with the land. With a balance of theological and practical insight, the authors lead communities into practices of local food production, eucharistic eating and delight in God?s provision.

Making Peace with the Earth outlines how a paradigm shift to earth-centred politics and economics is our only chance of survival and how collective resistance to corporate exploitation can open the way to a new environmentalism."--pub. desc.

God is reconciling all things in heaven and on earth. We are alienated not only from one another, but also from the land that sustains us. Our ecosystems are increasingly damaged, and human bodies are likewise degraded. Most of us have little understanding of how our energy is derived or our food is produced, and many of our current industrialized practices are both unhealthy for our bodies and unsustainable for the planet. Agriculturalist Fred Bahnson and theologian Norman Wirzba declare that in Christ, God reconciles all bodies into a peaceful, life-promoting relationship with one another. Because human beings are incarnated in material, bodily existence, we are necessarily interdependent with plants and animals, land and sea, heaven and earth. The good news is that redemption is cosmic, with implications for agriculture and ecology, from farm to dinner table. Bahnson and Wirzba describe communities that model cooperative practices of relational life, with local food production, eucharistic eating and delight in God's provision. Reconciling with the land is a rich framework for a new way of life. Read this book to start down the path to restoring shalom and experiencing Jesus' kingdom of shared abundance, where neighbors are fed and all receive enough.

The world’s great religious and philosophical traditions often include poignant testimonies of spiritual turmoil and healing. Following episodes of harrowing personal crisis, including addictions, periods of anxiety and panic, and reminders of mortality, these accounts then also describe pathways to consolation and resolution. In Making Peace with the Universe, Michael Scott Alexander reads diverse classic religious accounts as masterpieces of therapeutic insight. In the company of William James, Socrates, Muslim legal scholar turned mystic Hamid al-Ghazali, Chinggis Khan as described by the Daoist monk Qui Chuji, and jazz musician and Catholic convert Mary Lou Williams, Alexander traces the steps from existential crisis to psychological health. He recasts spiritual confessions as case histories of therapy, showing how they remain radical and deeply meaningful even in an age of scientific psychology. They record the therapeutic affect of spiritual experience, testifying to the achievement of psychological well-being through the cultivation of an edifying spiritual mood. Mixing scholarly learning with episodes from his own skeptical quest, Alexander demonstrates how these accounts of private terror and personal triumph offer a model of therapy through spiritual adventure. An interdisciplinary consideration of the shared terrain of religion and psychology, Making Peace with the Universe offers an innovative view of what spiritual traditions can teach us about finding meaning in the modern world.

President Carter has been a student of the biblical Holy Land all his life. For the last three decades, as president of the United States and as founder of The Carter Center, he has studied the complex and interrelated issues of the region's conflicts and has been actively involved in reconciling them. He knows the leaders of all factions in the region who will need to play key roles, and he sees encouraging signs among them. Carter describes the history of previous peace efforts and why they fell short. He argues persuasively that the road to a peace agreement is now open and that it has broad international and regional support. Most of all, since there will be no progress without courageous and sustained U.S. leadership, he says the time for progress is now. President Barack Obama is committed to a personal effort to exert that leadership, starting early in his administration. This is President Carter's call for action, and he lays out a practical and achievable path to peace.

This book presents an analytical framework which assesses how 'land-for-peace' agreements can be achieved in the context of territorial conflicts between de facto states and their respective parent states. The volume examines geographic solutions to resolving ongoing conflicts that stand between the principle of self-determination (prompted by de facto states) and the principle of territorial integrity (prompted by parent states). The authors investigate the conditions under which territorial adjustments can bring about a possibility for peace between de facto states and their parent states. It does so by interrogating the possibility of land-for-peace agreements in four de facto state–parent state pairs, namely Kosovo–Serbia, Nagorno–Karabakh–Azerbaijan, Northern Cyprus–Republic of Cyprus, and Abkhazia–Georgia. The book suggests that the value that parties put on land to be exchanged and peace to be achieved stand at odds for land-for-peace agreements to materialise. The book brings theoretical and empirical insights that open several avenues for discussions on the conservative stance that the international community has held on territorial changes in the post-1945 international order. This book will be of much interest to students of statebuilding, state formation, secessionism, political geography, and international relations.

Davy kills two men and leaves home. His father packs up the family in a search for Davy.