Best Selling Books by John

It is sometimes said that the Bible is one of the most unread books in the world, yet has been a major force in the development of Western culture and continues to exert an enormous influence over many people's lives. This Very Short Introduction looks at the importance accorded to the Bible by different communities and cultures and attempts to explain why it has generated such a rich variety of uses and interpretations. It explores how the Bible was written, the development of the canon, the role of Biblical criticism, the appropriation of the Bible in high and popular culture, and its use for political ends. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

A story of friendship through adversity, faith and destiny, and the search for God.

Trim new edition of a modern evangelical classic on preaching Internationally esteemed as an expository preacher and evangelical spokesman, John Stott edified thousands of Christian preachers and listeners during his lifetime. His writings, marked by a special clarity of expression, continue to speak to readers around the world. This book abridges and revises the text of Stott's Between Two Worlds: The Challenge of Preaching Today, first published in 1982, and updates it for our twenty-first-century context. Through Greg Scharf's abridging and updating work, John Stott's perspectives and insights on faithful, relevant preaching of the Word of God will benefit a new generation of preachers and preachers-to-be.

The John Harvard Library edition of the classic American essay with an introduction by Cass Sunstein.

The premise of the book is that everyone who has ever died (up to the time in which the book is set, which seems to be about the time of its publication) has gone to Styx, the river that circles the underworld. The book begins with Charon, ferryman of the Styx being startled - and annoyed - by the arrival of a houseboat on the Styx. At first afraid that the boat will put him out of business, he later finds out that he is actually to be appointed the boat's janitor. What follows are eleven more stories (for a total of twelve) which are set on the house boat. There is no central theme, and the purpose of the book appears to be as a literary thought experiment to see what would happen if various famous dead people were put in the same room with each other. Each chapter is a short story featuring various souls from history and mythology. In the twelfth chapter the house boat disappears, leading into the sequel, The Pursuit of the House-Boat.

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding John Locke - An Essay Concerning Human Understanding is a work by John Locke concerning the foundation of human knowledge and understanding. It first appeared in 1689 (although dated 1690) with the printed title An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. He describes the mind at birth as a blank slate (tabula rasa, although he did not use those actual words) filled later through experience. The essay was one of the principal sources of empiricism in modern philosophy, and influenced many enlightenment philosophers, such as David Hume and George Berkeley.Book I of the Essay is Locke's attempt to refute the rationalist notion of innate ideas. Book II sets out Locke's theory of ideas, including his distinction between passively acquired simple ideassuch as "red," "sweet," "round"and actively built complex ideas, such as numbers, causes and effects, abstract ideas, ideas of substances, identity, and diversity. Locke also distinguishes between the truly existing primary qualities of bodies, like shape, motion and the arrangement of minute particles, and the secondary qualities that are "powers to produce various sensations in us" such as "red" and "sweet." These secondary qualities, Locke claims, are dependent on the primary qualities. He also offers a theory of personal identity, offering a largely psychological criterion. Book III is concerned with language, and Book IV with knowledge, including intuition, mathematics, moral philosophy, natural philosophy ("science"), faith, and opinion.

The Everyman Paperback Classics series offers the latest scholarship on the works of the world's greatest poets, writers and philosophers. Each edition includes a comprehensive introduction, chronology, notes, appendix, critical responses, and a text summary. Presented in an affordable edition with wide format pages for generous margins for notes. Contact your sales rep or call Tuttle for a complete list of available titles. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Set in a Bronx Catholic school in 1964, a nun is faced with uncertainty as she has grave concerns for a male colleague.

“My prayer is that this will be one of the most exciting years of your life.” —Lloyd John Ogilvie Don’t Settle for Anything Less A lot has changed since this timeless devotional was first released almost 40 years ago, but one truth has stayed the same—a loving Savior still calls you closer to Him and wants His very best for you. Will you accept His gracious invitation? These short yet powerful devotions will take you less than 10 minutes each to read, but their impact on your daily life will be incalculable. As you fellowship with God and learn more about Him, you’ll experience anew His grace, mercy, wisdom, and more. This beautifully designed edition of this classic devotional makes an ideal gift or a great way to rededicate yourself to spending more time in God’s presence. Are you ready to experience His best? Start today.

A Purple Place for Dying is the third book in John MacDonald's Travis McGee series, and McGee comes upon his most troubling case yet. McGee is brought to the Midwest by a big, brassy, bossy Blonde who needs help. Mona Yeoman suspects that her husband has pilfered her trust fund, and she wants a divorce. McGee's job is to find out what happened to the money. McGee doesn't particularly like Yeoman, but is tempted to take the case because he needs the money. But before he even has a chance to say yes, Mona is murdered right in front of his eyes, and this changes everything. What makes things even more mysterious is that her body disappears when the police are called to the scene of the crime.

Famed naturalist John Muir (1838-1914) came to Wisconsin as a boy and studied at the University of Wisconsin. He first came to California in 1868 and devoted six years to the study of the Yosemite Valley. After work in Nevada, Utah, and Colorado, he returned to California in 1880 and made the state his home. One of the heroes of America's conservation movement, Muir deserves much of the credit for making the Yosemite Valley a protected national park and for alerting Americans to the need to protect this and other natural wonders. My first summer in the Sierra (1911) is based on Muir's original journals and sketches of his 1869 stay in the Sierras. Hired to supervise a San Joaquin sheep owner's flock at the headwaters of the Merced and Tulomne Rivers, Muir sets out for the mountains in June, returning to the Valley in September. He describes the flora and fauna of the mountains as well as his visits to Yosemite and his climbs of Mt. Hoffman and other peaks in the range.

Few Americans know much about contemporary farming, which has evolved dramatically over the past few decades. In The Changing Scale of American Agriculture, the award-winning geographer and landscape historian John Fraser Hart describes the transformation of farming from the mid-twentieth century, when small family farms were still viable, to the present, when a farm must sell at least $250,000 of farm products each year to provide an acceptable level of living for a family. The increased scale of agriculture has outmoded the Jeffersonian ideal of small, self-sufficient farms. In the past farmers kept a variety of livestock and grew several crops, but modern family farms have become highly specialized in producing a single type of livestock or one or two crops. As farms have become larger and more specialized, their number has declined. Hart contends that modern family farms need to become integrated into tightly orchestrated food-supply chains in order to thrive, and these complex new organizations of large-scale production require managerial skills of the highest order. According to Hart, this trend is not only inevitable, but it is beneficial, because it produces the food American consumers want to buy at prices they can afford. Although Hart provides the statistics and clear analysis such a study requires, his book focuses on interviews with farmers: those who have shifted from mixed crop-and-livestock farming to cash-grain farming in the Midwest agricultural heartland; beef, dairy, chicken, egg, turkey, and hog producers around the periphery of the heartland; and specialty crop producers on the East and West Coasts. These invaluable case studies bring the reader into direct personal contact with the entrepreneurs who are changing American agriculture. Hart believes that modern large-scale farmers have been criticized unfairly, and The Changing Scale of American Agriculture, the result of decades of research, is his attempt to tell their side of the story.

This eBook edition of "The King of the Golden River" has been formatted to the highest digital standards and adjusted for readability on all devices. The richness of the Treasure Valley, high in the mountains of Stiria is lost through the evil of the owners, the two elder "Black Brothers", Hans and Schwartz, who in their foolishness mistreat Southwest Wind, Esquire, who in turn floods their valley, washing away their "liquid assets", and turning their valley into a dead valley of red sand. Forced into a trade other than farming, Hans and Schwartz become goldsmiths. They cruelly melt their younger brother Gluck's prize heirloom, a golden mug. This action releases the King of the Golden River for Gluck to pour out of the crucible as a finely dressed little golden dwarf. The dwarfish king offers a proposition to brothers: if someone were to climb up to the source of the Golden River high in the mountains and throw into it at least three drops of "holy water", it would become, for that person only, a river of gold. That person must do it on his first and only attempt or be overwhelmed by the river to become a black stone.

This ground-breaking book presents a brief history of behaviorism, along with a critical analysis of radical behaviorism, its philosophy and its applications to social issues. This third edition is much expanded and includes a new chapter on experimental method as well as longer sections on the philosophy of behaviorism. It offers experimental and theoretical examples of a new approach to behavioral science. It provides an alternative philosophical and empirical foundation for a psychology that has rather lost its way. The mission of the book is to help steer experimental psychology away from its current undisciplined indulgence in "mental life" toward the core of science, which is an economical description of nature: parsimony, explain much with little. The elementary philosophical distinction between private and public events, even biology, evolution and animal psychology are all ignored by much contemporary cognitive psychology. The failings of radical behaviorism as well as a philosophically defective cognitive psychology point to the need for a new theoretical behaviorism, which can deal with problems such as "consciousness" that have been either ignored, evaded or muddled by existing approaches. This new behaviorism provides a unified framework for the science of behavior that can be applied both to the laboratory and to broader practical issues such as law and punishment, the health-care system, and teaching.

Praise for the first edition: "Aberth wears his very considerable and up-to-date scholarship lightly and his study of a series of complex and somber calamites is made remarkably vivid." -- Barrie Dobson, Honorary Professor of History, University of York The later Middle Ages was a period of unparalleled chaos and misery -in the form of war, famine, plague, and death. At times it must have seemed like the end of the world was truly at hand. And yet, as John Aberth reveals in this lively work, late medieval Europeans' cultural assumptions uniquely equipped them to face up postively to the huge problems that they faced. Relying on rich literary, historical and material sources, the book brings this period and its beliefs and attitudes vividly to life. Taking his themes from the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, John Aberth describes how the lives of ordinary people were transformed by a series of crises, including the Great Famine, the Black Death and the Hundred Years War. Yet he also shows how prayers, chronicles, poetry, and especially commemorative art reveal an optimistic people, whose belief in the apocalypse somehow gave them the ability to transcend the woes they faced on this earth. This second edition is brought fully up to date with recent scholarship, and the scope of the book is broadened to include many more examples from mainland Europe. The new edition features fully revised sections on famine, war, and plague, as well as a new epitaph. The book draws some bold new conclusions and raises important questions, which will be fascinating reading for all students and general readers with an interest in medieval history.

Race, ethnicity, and nation, Lie argues, are modern notions, associated with the rise of the modern state, the industrial economy, and Enlightenment ideas. The state is responsible for the development and nurturing of feelings of belonging associated with ethnic, racial, and national identity; but also for racial and ethnic conflict, even genocide.

These remarkable sermons by John Henry Newman (1801-1890) were first published at Oxford in 1843, two years before he was received into the Roman Catholic Church. Published here in its entirety is the third edition of 1872 for which Newman added an additional sermon, bracketed notes, and, importantly, a comprehensive, condensed Preface. In her introduction, noted Newman scholar Mary Katherine Tillman considers the volume as an integral whole, showing how all of the sermons systematically relate to the central theme of the faith-reason relationship.

“A moving evocation of the small-town South in the mid-twentieth century” that “belongs on the shelf with the works of Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, and Eudora Welty” (Orlando Sentinel). John Kennedy Toole—who won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for his best-selling comic masterpiece A Confederacy of Dunces—wrote The Neon Bible for a literary contest at the age of sixteen. The manuscript languished in a drawer and became the subject of a legal battle among Toole’s heirs. It was only in 1989, thirty-five years after it was written and twenty years after Toole’s suicide at thirty-one, that this amazingly accomplished and evocative novel was freed for publication. “Heartfelt emotion, communicated in clean direct prose . . . a remarkable achievement.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times “John Kennedy Toole’s tender, nostalgic side is as brilliantly effective as his corrosive satire. If you liked To Kill A Mockingbird you will love The Neon Bible.” —Florence King “Shockingly mature. . . . Even at sixteen, Toole knew that the way to write about complex emotions is to express them simply.” —Kerry Luft, Chicago Tribune

Working against racism is part of what it means to call Jesus Lord and Savior. Most of us don’t need to make speeches. We need to make friends. This is the core message of Black and White: racism can be disrupted by relationships. If you will risk forging friendships with those who do not look like you, it will change the way you see the world, and that could change the world. The authors, Teesha Hadra, a young African American woman, and John Hambrick, a sixty-year-old white man, bring a confident and redemptive tone to this hope because that is exactly what they’ve experienced. Black and White leverages their story, surrounding it with other’s stories, practical advice, and exploration of the systems of racism to motivate you to consider your own role in change. Learn about the various and often subtle ways racism continues to be a part of American culture. Discover how simple (albeit not always easy) it is to get involved in what God is doing to disrupt racism. Become equipped to take faithful, practical, next steps in obedience to God’s call to join the movement against racism. “Awareness creates discontent. A lack of awareness often results in complacency. When it comes to racism there’s no room for complacency. Especially for Christ followers. In Black & White my friends Teesha Hadra and John Hambrick stir our awareness. My hope—their hope—is that having become aware we will become permanently and passionately discontent with racism in all of its insidious forms and expressions.” —Andy Stanley, pastor and founder of North Point Community Church, author of Irresistible