New Releases by Scott Dawson

When Lucas decides to skip school because he wants to discuss football with a firefighter friend of his father, he finds himself caught up in the terrorist attacks on New York City.

Although the message of the Gospel never changes, our methods for communicating it need to adjust to an ever-changing audience. Evangelism Today helps believers, whether individually or in groups, share their faith in a culturally relevant way. This book draws on insights from dozens of evangelists, church leaders, and educators to reveal present and future trends of evangelism in America. It explores whether evangelism is still needed and in what form, what the local church''s role should be, and where the biggest evangelistic opportunities are emerging. Readers in any occupation or stage of life will gain a renewed passion for spreading the message of the cross from this practical and straightforward book.

Dawson provides readers with a guide to awakening to God via discovering Jesus through the Scriptures. (Christian)

Mexicans have long dreamt of the First World, and in recent times it has landed there with a thud. Under the guise of globalization, Mexico opened its borders, reformed its political system, and transformed its economy. The impacts have been paradoxical. A vibrant civil society is marred by human rights abuses and violent rebellion. Market reforms have produced a stable economy, economic growth and great fortunes, while devastating much of the countryside and crippling domestic producers. Mexico is today one of the world''s largest exporting nations, yet has a perpetually negative trade balance. It is a country in a perpetual state of becoming; a modern industrial democracy where human rights are respected-and a violent, fragmented place where the chasms of wealth and poverty threaten to undo the dreams of modernity.

"The book presents the Ascension as public truth, examining questions such as when did Jesus ascend - and how, where did he go, with what kind of body and into what kind of space? It discusses the nature of Jesus'' victory, how it has been challenged, how it has been understood at different times in history, and how it relates to his second coming. The author examines the relevance of the doctrine for personal spiritual life: our union with Christ, Jesus praying for us, worship, and our own prayers. He goes on to consider living in God''s kingdom, the tension between waiting for the kingdom and working for it now, suffering, humanisation, and the church and the world today. The book approaches the Ascension thematically, making it a useful teaching tool. Its themes arise from the categories in which the Church Fathers employed the doctrine. Gerrit Dawson shows the Ascension to be a vital key to understanding in a fresh way the person and work of Christ, union with Christ, the mission of the church in the world, Christian identity and spiritual theology. A unique feature of the book is the way Dawson combines a full presentation of Nicene trinitarian Christology with its application to the practicalities of Christian life today. Praise for Jesus Ascended: ''Gerrit Dawson harkens back to an older vision of ministry, that of the pastor-theologian. This vision is remarkably illustrated in this beautifully written book that can properly lay claim to being practical theology ... Very highly recommended for both pastors and theologians who want to have a faith grounded in the continuing reality of the incarnation in the ascension of Jesus.'' Andrew Purves, Princeton Theological Seminary ''This is a truly outstanding book for students, pastors and thinking Christians alike. I could not recommend it more enthusiastically!'' Alan Torrance, St Andrew''s University, UK ''A yawning gulf often appears between the interests of preacher and scholar, of pastor and theologian. Serious attempts to bridge that gulf are too few. This book is one of them. It brings to life the voice of the Fathers on the subject of the ascension of Jesus, and calls the church back to the roots of its faith.'' Douglas Farrow, McGill University, Canada."--Bloomsbury Publishing.

The Companions in Christ Leader''s Guide may be the most user-friendly and comprehensive guide available. It provides leaders with a complete outline for each of the 28 weekly meetings, full content for each meeting including simple worship experiences for opening and closing times, music suggestions, lists of items needed each week, and notice of any unique needs in future weeks. All weekly group gatherings follow the same general outline: -- Opening time of worship and centering -- Sharing insights from the weekly readings and exercises -- Break -- Deeper explorations through a group experience -- Closing worship Leading a spiritual formation group requires distinctive leadership skills. The Leader''s Guide helps leaders identify and develop such qualities as patience, trust, listening, and acceptance.

In this book, Dawson uses the third section of the Book of Isaiah (chapters 56-66) as his scriptural basis. He leads us through this study by first exploring diminishing names and how we can be free of them. The author then directs us to how we may receive the blessing of the new names God bestows upon us--My Delight Is In Her, Sought Out, Repairer of the Breach. It uses imaginative stories, prayer, and reflection to enable us to fully experience the transition from responding to our defeating names to living our fresh identities in God.

Why is it so difficult for us to live as people whose lives are shaped by the words of scripture? To remedy this situation, Dawson suggests a three-part system for understanding a scripture passage and carrying it into everyday life.

Abstract: "This paper presents a technique for probing and fault injection of distributed protocols. The proposed technique, called script- driven probing and fault injection, can be used for studying the behavior of distributed systems and for detecting design and implementation errors of fault-tolerant protocols. The focus of this work is on fault injection techniques that can be used to demonstrate three aspects of a target protocol: i) detection of design or implementation errors, ii) identification of violations of protocol specifications, and iii) insight into design decisions made by the implementors. The emphasis of our approach is on experimental techniques intended to identify specific ''problems'' in a protocol or its implementation rather than the evaluation of system dependability through statistical metrics such as fault coverage. To demonstrate the capabilities of this technique, the paper describes a probing and fault injection tool, called the PFI tool (Probe/Fault Injection Tool), and several experiments that studied the behavior of two protocols: the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) [4,25] and the Group Membership Protocol (GMP) [18]. The tool can be used to delay, drop, reorder, duplicate, and modify messages. It can also introduce new messages into the system to probe participants. In the case of TCP, we used the PFI tool to duplicate the experiments reported in [7] on several TCP implementations without access to the vendors'' TCP source code in a very short time. We also run several new experiments that are difficult to perform using past approaches based on packet monitoring and filtering. In the case of GMP, we used the tool to test the fault-tolerance capabilities of an implementation under various failure models including daemon/link crash, send/receive omissions, and timing failures. Furthermore, by selective reordering of messages and spontaneous transmission of new messages, we were able to guide a distributed computation into hard to reach global states without instrumenting the protocol implementation."

This book features a fresh approach to relating to Jesus as we find him in the Gospels. It is written with those who are familiar with Christianity but who feel that their experience of traditional faith has not been enough for them.