2015 Perilous Times

The goal of this fictional epic tale is to bring about a pragmatic understanding of prophetic events found in the book of Revelation and other principal scriptures. My duty here is to bring you into each short story, that is, to present the stories in such a way you are living the experience. These stories deal with information about biblical truths: plagues, wars, famines, and pestilence. A story is a helper in understanding the truth. Yeshua used parables, short stories to convey absolutes. My hope is that if you are not a diligent reader of scripture, then this fictional tale will inspire you to become one.

The goal of this fictional epic tale is to bring about a pragmatic understanding of prophetic events found in the book of Revelation and other principal scriptures. My duty here is to bring you into each short story, that is, to present the stories in such a way you are living the experience. These stories deal with information about biblical truths: plagues, wars, famines, and pestilence. A story is a helper in understanding the truth. Yeshua used parables, short stories to convey absolutes. My hope is that if you are not a diligent reader of scripture, then this fictional tale will inspire you to become one.

Drawing on a wealth of academic research, statistics and interviews with key Australian media people including present and former Australian Broadcasting Corporation staffers, this book explores the transitions of the ABC under various types of organisational re-strategising, governance and political shifts. The book provides the reader with an authoritative narrative as to how the ABC has lost its iconic status in Australian society, and unfolds how the ABC has strayed from its respected public charter which endowed the ABC with a distinctive and important role in informing, educating and entertaining the Australian public. Successive federal government funding cuts have shrunk staffing levels and services while it has pursued a corporatist model that mimics the trappings and practices of commercial media. In that process it has become politicised and trivialised, thereby threatening its demise. The book is a unique and timely contribution at a time of dwindling interest for the funding of public assets everywhere. There is no other book in the market that addresses the decline of the organisation (the ABC) and analyses the reasons for its demise within an organisational theoretical framework. The book is written for an educated general audience, with academics and media practitioners specifically in mind, and has everyday applications for business organisations operating in the public sector by bringing together important findings of public funding, budgets, management and organisational strategies and evolution.

The college classroom is inevitably influenced by, and in turn influences, the world around it. In the United States, this means the complex topic of race can come into play in ways that are both explicit and implicit. Teaching Race in Perilous Times highlights and confronts the challenges of teaching race in the United States—from syllabus development and pedagogical strategies to accreditation and curricular reform. Across fifteen original essays, contributors draw on their experiences teaching in different institutional contexts and adopt various qualitative methods from their home disciplines to offer practical strategies for discussing race and racism with students while also reflecting on broader issues in higher education. Contributors examine how teachers can respond productively to emotionally charged contexts, recognize the roles and pressures that faculty assume as activists in the classroom, focus a timely lens on the shifting racial politics and economics of higher education, and call for a more historically sensitive reading of the pedagogies involved in teaching race. The volume offers a corrective to claims following the 2016 US presidential election that the current moment is unprecedented, highlighting the pivotal role of the classroom in contextualizing and responding to our perilous times.

A book of 30 devotions that offer hope and encouragement to the reader, "Finding God's Peace in Perilous Times" deals with such topics as grief, sadness, loss, and fear. Each devotion includes a related scripture verse, a daily prayer, and journal space. A bonus CD features six songs from various Christian musical artists.

Perhaps the most difficult thing that human beings are called upon collectively to do is to run a government. Why do so many fail? There are 196 countries in the world, about 150 of them significant. At least 105 of them, briefly summarized here, are in deep trouble. Deep trouble is defined by wars, insurrections, active internal conflict, serious maldistribution of wealth, deep and widespread poverty, rampant corruption, serious lack of social services and public infrastructure, and an excess of plain old bumbling government incompetence, created and exacerbated by the governments themselves out of greed, viciousness, and an insatiable lust for power. This is the tragic record of government from the top down. It is therefore vital to strengthen the bottom up elements of national activity, and at the same time, people must try to point these stronger elements toward resistance to top-down authority. The new and growing hope is that decent people and organizations all over the world will increasingly rise up in their own defense and bring a new level of moderation and spirit of aid and service from the bottom up to these failing states that are their homes.

The calamitous impacts of climate change that are beginning to be felt around the world today expose the inextricability of human and natural histories. Arguing for a more complex account of such calamities, Kate Rigby examines a variety of past disasters, from the Black Death of the Middle Ages to the mega-hurricanes of the twenty-first century, revealing the dynamic interaction of diverse human and nonhuman factors in their causation, unfolding, and aftermath. Focusing on the link between the ways disasters are framed by the stories told about them and how people tend to respond to them in practice, Rigby also shows how works of narrative fiction invite ethical reflection on human relations with one another, with our often unruly earthly environs, and with other species in the face of eco-catastrophe. In its investigation of an array of authors from the Romantic period to the present—including Heinrich von Kleist, Mary Shelley, Theodor Storm, Colin Thiele, and Alexis Wright— Dancing with Disaster demonstrates the importance of the environmental humanities in the development of more creative, compassionate, ecologically oriented, and socially just responses to the perils and possibilities of the Anthropocene. Under the Sign of Nature: Explorations in Ecocriticism

Readings in the Anthropocene brings together scholars from German Studies and beyond to interpret the German tradition of the last two hundred years from a perspective that is mindful of the challenge posed by the concept of the Anthropocene. This new age of man, unofficially pronounced in 2000, holds that humans are becoming a geological force in shaping the Earth's future. Among the biggest challenges facing our future are climate change, accelerated species loss, and a radical transformation of land use. What are the historical, philosophical, cultural, literary, and artistic responses to this new concept? The essays in this volume bring German culture to bear on what it means to live in the Anthropocene from a historical, ethical, and aesthetic perspective.