Best Selling Books by Scott Smith

“ A Certain Sound is a well-written, carefully crafted, scripturally saturated book that was a joy to read. As one who has many years’ experience with open air preaching, I thank God for this stirring call to the church to fulfill one of her main duties—namely, preaching Jesus ‘to every creature.’ Read this book. Master it. And with the help of the Holy Spirit, let the ‘certain sound’ of the glorious gospel of Christ be heard outdoors once again.” — Rob Ventura, Grace Community Baptist Church, North Providence, Rhode Island, and coauthor of A Portrait of Paul and Spiritual Warfare Table of Contents: PART 1: THEOLOGY OF OPEN AIR PREACHING 1. A History of Open Air Preaching 2. Theology for Open Air Preaching 3. The Local Church and the Open Air Preacher 4. Using the Law in the Open Air 5. Using Apologetics in the Open Air Part 2: THE TASK OF OPEN AIR PREACHING 6. The Open Air Preacher’s Character 7. The Open Air Preacher’s Competence 8. Response to Open Air Preaching 9. The Open Air Preacher’s Response 10. Exhortation to the Church and Seminaries

In their studies of social Christianity, scholars of American religion have devoted critical attention to a group of theologically liberal pastors, primarily in the Northeast. Gary Scott Smith attempts to paint a more complete picture of the movement. Smith''s ambitious and thorough study amply demonstrates how social Christianity--which included blacks, women, Southerners, and Westerners--worked to solve industrial, political, and urban problems; reduce racial discrimination; increase the status of women; curb drunkenness and prostitution; strengthen the family; upgrade public schools; and raise the quality of public health. In his analysis of the available scholarship and case studies of individuals, organizations, and campaigns central to the movement, Smith makes a convincing case that social Christianity was the most widespread, long-lasting, and influential religious social reform movement in American history.

Are Brian McLaren, Tony Jones, Doug Pagitt, and Rob Bell “yesterday’s news,” as many evangelicals seem to think? Truth and the New Kind of Christian (2005) tried to provide a balanced assessment of McLaren’s and Jones’s views. But, they seem to be right about much more that is affecting evangelicals than was realized then. Also, that book misunderstood one of their core claims: everything is interpretation. Moreover, their views have developed over the years, e.g., ethically about colonialism, its influences, and how we should live now. They also have advanced several further claims about the gospel and traditional doctrines. To what extent should Christians embrace their views? Are these the ways to go forward toward a more authentic Christianity, one that is morally better, and a better fit, for our times? Like Truth, this book gives careful attention to their thought. It also offers its own portrait of major shaping influences on Western, Americanized Christianity. But, there remains a root issue that keeps the Western church, whether progressive emergents or evangelicals, in its “Babylonian captivity.” It is liberation from that root that will lead to an authentically emergent Christianity.

This book is designed to introduce a theory of ecological psychology into interprofessional health education. The foundations are affordances (features in the environment that afford the opportunity to be recognized and utilized), the life-world (what the meaningful environment contains for the trainee), and behavioral-settings (person-made affordances that are permissive, supportive, or resistive to specific behaviors). Expanding the life-world is the main mechanism of learning in health care. Becoming aware of intentional and unintentional features of the behavioral setting is how we structure the curricular environment to achieve this life-world expansion. The book is structured into four domains: The Natural Domain, The Mental Domain, The Social Domain, and Non-Linearity. The final application section lays out a structure for designing, implementing, and evaluating the educational program in a professional healthcare setting. This book is ideal for clinician managers of interprofessional healthcare clinics, and for the teachers and trainees from each discipline (e.g., medicine, nursing, pharmacy, psychology, social work, etc.).

We all have a story to tell. Three years after losing his first wife to breast cancer in 2001, Scott met Rhonda through an Internet dating service, and, after a whirlwind romance, they married in 2005. The next few years were filled with both bliss and the challenges of blending two families and five children. In 2009, Rhonda was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. This book chronicles their seven-year journey through the raw emotions of e-mails exchanged with their amazing support group of church, friends, coworkers, and family. With a skilled and dedicated team of doctors and caregivers on their side, they were carried through it all by the Grace and Strength of their Lord. This is their story.

Philosophical naturalism is taken to be the preferred and reigning epistemology and metaphysics that underwrites many ideas and knowledge claims. But what if we cannot know reality on that basis? What if the institution of science is threatened by its reliance on naturalism? R. Scott Smith argues in a fresh way that we cannot know reality on the basis of naturalism. Moreover, the "fact-value" split has failed to serve our interests of wanting to know reality. The author provocatively argues that since we can know reality, it must be due to a non-naturalistic ontology, best explained by the fact that human knowers are made and designed by God. The book offers fresh implications for the testing of religious truth-claims, science, ethics, education, and public policy. Consequently, naturalism and the fact-value split are shown to be false, and Christian theism is shown to be true.

Goppy and Libby are best friends. But when Libby needs money for a new backpack, Goppy decides to teach her a valuable lesson about responsibility and frugality. He shows her how to earn her own money, and together they learn the joy of honest work and financial independence. It is never too early to begin teaching children about self-responsibility and the fundamentals of conservatism, and in this charming and humorous tale, Scott and Andrea Smith prove these lessons can be learned in an enjoyable and entertaining way. Children will identify with Goppy''s prudence and Libby''s tenacity, and together, children and their parents will learn how to Teach a Donkey to Fish. Andrea and Scott Smith are the not-so-normal parents of two young kids living in beautiful upstate South Carolina. Although not farmers by trade, Andrea and Scott wanted to plant the seeds of conservatism in their children at an early age.

"“The People’s Victory is a mirror for each of us to see our own power to fight for justice and create the change we want to see in our world.” – Gavin Newsom, Lieutenant Governor of California In 1996, a small group of Americans from all walks of life banded together to create one of the most miraculous political victories in modern American history. Opponents attacked the issue of marriage equality as amoral and a direct threat to families. Allies warned that it was a generation away from being practicable and a selfish drain of precious political capital. A stirring oral history told by those who almost inexplicably found themselves fighting on the front lines, The People''s Victory recounts the successes – and the setbacks – that only served to strengthen everyone’s resolve to resist, fight, and bring equal marriage rights to an entire nation. Through it all, these love warriors found their voice and home in Marriage Equality USA, the nation’s oldest and largest grassroots organization of its kind. While high profile books, articles and documentaries have covered the judicial and legislative machinations, this book puts a human face on the people who made the everyday personal sacrifices to keep the movement alive. The People’s Victory shares deeply moving personal testimonies of over sixty people, from Marvin Burrows, who was forced out of his home and lost many treasured possessions after losing his lost his partner of fifty years; to Kate Burns, who risked arrest for the first time when she stood up for her relationship; to Mike Goettemoeller, who pushed his mother in a wheelchair with Marriage Equality USA to fulfill her dream of marching in a Pride parade. Edie Windsor, the triumphant lead plaintiff in the Supreme Court case United States vs. Windsor recounts shouting down a major LGBTQ organization with “I’m 77 years old and I can’t wait!!” when they attempted to belittle marriage as a critical issue. Writer and producer Del Shores shares the touching moment his young teenage daughter used tears and laughter to console him after the passage of Proposition 8 in California dealt a blow to the cause. The People’s Victory is an inspirational roadmap for anyone who has felt passionately about an issue, but has questioned whether one person’s contribution can make a difference. These candid accounts once again prove that every movement for important social change must be built on the acts of everyday. In fact, that is the only way the people have ever been victorious. In his introduction, California Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom writes: “I hope these stories inspire you to resist, to fight, to win and in the end write the next stories in our continuing push for a more just and perfect union.”

We live in a time of moral confusion: many believe there are no overarching moral norms, and we have lost an accepted body of moral knowledge. Alasdair MacIntyre addresses this problem in his much-heralded restatement of Aristotelian and Thomistic virtue ethics; Stanley Hauerwas does so through his highly influential work in Christian ethics. Both recast virtue ethics in light of their interpretations of the later Wittgenstein''s views of language. This book systematically assesses the underlying presuppositions of MacIntyre and Hauerwas, finding that their attempts to secure moral knowledge and restate virtue ethics, both philosophical and theological, fail. Scott Smith proposes alternative indications as to how we can secure moral knowledge, and how we should proceed in virtue ethics.

Constructivism dominates over other theories of knowledge in much of western academia, especially the humanities and social sciences. In Exposing the Roots of Constructivism: Nominalism and the Ontology of Knowledge, R. Scott Smith argues that constructivism is linked to the embrace of nominalism, the theory that everything is particular and located in space and time. Indeed, nominalism is sufficient for a view to be constructivist. However, the natural sciences still enjoy great prestige from the “fact-value split.” They are often perceived as giving us knowledge of the facts of reality, and not merely our constructs. In contrast, ethics and religion, which also have been greatly influenced by nominalism, usually are perceived as giving us just our constructs and opinions. Yet, even the natural sciences have embraced nominalism, and Smith shows that this will undermine knowledge in those disciplines as well. Indeed, the author demonstrates that, at best, nominalism leaves us with only interpretations, but at worst, it undermines all knowledge whatsoever. However, there are many clear examples of knowledge we do have in the many different disciplines, and therefore those must be due to a different ontology of properties. Thus, nominalism should be rejected. In its place, the author defends a kind of Platonic realism about properties.

A blockbuster anthology of original, blood-curdling vampire fiction from New York Times bestselling and award-winning authors, including Charlaine Harris, whose novels were adapted into HBO’s hit show True Blood, and Scott Smith, publishing his first work since The Ruins. Before being transformed into romantic heroes and soft, emotional antiheroes, vampires were figures of overwhelming terror. Now, from some of the biggest names in horror and dark fiction, comes this stellar collection of short stories that make vampires frightening once again. Edited by New York Times bestselling author Christopher Golden and featuring all-new stories from such contributors as Charlaine Harris, John Ajvide Lindqvist, Scott Smith, Sherrilyn Kenyon, Michael Kortya, Kelley Armstrong, Brian Keene, David Wellington, Seanan McGuire, and Tim Lebbon, Seize the Night is old-school vampire fiction at its finest.

Following a brief history of the market for private aircraft, this illustrated guide helps potential buyers assess their needs based on factors like budget, applications, planned travel distances, passenger capacity and speed. A range of models from names like Cessna, Piper, Beechcraft and more, are all arranged by price range.

Field Guide to Bedside Diagnosis, Second Edition enables students and physicians to navigate from the patient''s symptoms and presenting signs to the diagnosis. The book covers 139 chief complaints and signs and is organized to parallel the diagnostic reasoning process: a differential overview of probable causes, a diagnostic approach for each differential, and the specific clinical findings that point to diagnosis. A collection of 192 full-color illustrations show diagnostically important observable signs. This edition includes thoroughly updated diagnostic approaches and quick-access Evidence-Based Medicine Physical Diagnosis tables indicating sensitivity, specificity, and likelihood ratios for findings.

This book reports the results of an ethnographic study, focusing primarily on the experiences of four teachers of the Chinese language in Australian secondary schools. The author creates an audience for their voices as they reflect on their own understandings of culture, language teaching, and culture in language teaching through semi-structured interviews, and compares these reflections with written stimulus dialogues designed to elicit ''culture-in-language'' reflections, as well as curriculum and policy documents produced by the Australian government. The book''s findings indicate that teachers of the Chinese language are diverse in their views on culture, language teaching, and the ways in which culture can or should inform language teaching, and the author argues that language teacher intercultural competence cannot be assessed through a synthesis of the current English-only research literature. This book will be of interest to teachers and teacher trainers of Chinese as a foreign language, as well as students and scholars of applied linguistics and language education more broadly.

A nuanced portrait of a great historical figure considered everything from a “God-haunted man” to a “stalwart nonbeliever” What did faith mean to Winston Churchill? Churchill was far from transparent about his religious beliefs and never regularly attended church services as an adult, even considering himself “not a pillar of the church but a buttress,” in the sense that he supported it “from the outside.” But Gary Scott Smith assembles pieces of Churchill’s life and words to convey the profound sense of duty and destiny, partly inspired by his religious convictions, that undergirded his outlook. Reflecting on becoming prime minister in 1940, he wrote, “It felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial.” In a similarly grand fashion, he described opposing the Nazis—and later the Soviets—as a struggle between light and darkness, driven by the duty to preserve “humane, enlightened, Christian society.” Though Churchill harbored intellectual doubts about Christianity throughout his life, he nevertheless valued it greatly and drew on its resources, especially in the crucible of war. In Duty and Destiny, Smith unpacks Churchill’s paradoxical religious views and carefully analyzes the complexities of his legacy. This thorough examination of Churchill’s religious life provides a new narrative structure to make sense of one of the most important figures of the twentieth century.

This book presents sociology in an orderly, consistent, and integrated manner.

Do you have a scurry of squirrels playing baseball in your backyard? Jack does - along with many other groups of adventurous animals you''ll learn about in this fun story of amazing discoveries! From a tower of sparkly, pink giraffes to an array of cartwheeling hedgehogs, Jack uses the power of his imagination to create a tale that delights his teacher and classmates alike!

A complete primer on the art and technique of digital filmmaking with the FireWire-equipped digital video camera, this guide begins with a basic introduction to digital camcorders, then moves on to showing readers how to shoot their own digital movies. The CD-ROM includes QuickTime files, storyboards, audio clips, and eight short film selections from FireWire moviemakers.

The popular Citadel Press "100" Series takes an exciting new twist with "The Film 100", a listing of cinematic luminaries, ranked in order by the sheer magnitude of their impact on the motion picture industry. Filled with information about alluring screen idols, flamboyant producers, and eccentric inventors, "The Film 100" offers readers new and engaging biographical entries, photos, diagrams, and exclusive interviews with the living legends of the craft.

Renowned international academicians and food industry professionals have collaborated to create Food Processing: Principles and Applications. This practical, fully illustrated resource examines the principles of food processing and demonstrates their application by describing the stages and operations for manufacturing different categories of basic food products. Ideal as an undergraduate text, Food Processing stands apart in three ways: The expertise of the contributing authors is unparalleled among food processing texts today. The text is written mostly by non-engineers for other non-engineers and is therefore user-friendly and easy to read. It is one of the rare texts to use commodity manufacturing to illustrate the principles of food processing. As a hands-on guide to the essential processing principles and their application, this book serves as a relevant primary or supplemental text for students of food science and as a valuable tool for food industry professionals.