A Guide To The Passion

Evangelical guide to the film The Passion of the Christ, including an analysis of the film's theological and artistic elements.

The coauthors of the bestselling Peak Performance dive into the fascinating science behind passion, showing how it can lead to a rich and meaningful life while also illuminating the ways in which it is a double-edged sword. Here’s how to cultivate a passion that will take you to great heights—while minimizing the risk of an equally great fall. Common advice is to find and follow your passion. A life of passion is a good life, or so we are told. But it's not that simple. Rarely is passion something that you just stumble upon, and the same drive that fuels breakthroughs—whether they're athletic, scientific, entrepreneurial, or artistic—can be every bit as destructive as it is productive. Yes, passion can be a wonderful gift, but only if you know how to channel it. If you're not careful, passion can become an awful curse, leading to endless seeking, suffering, and burnout. Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness once again team up, this time to demystify passion, showing readers how they can find and cultivate their passion, sustainably harness its power, and avoid its dangers. They ultimately argue that passion and balance--that other virtue touted by our culture--are incompatible, and that to find your passion, you must lose balance. And that's not always a bad thing. They show readers how to develop the right kind of passion, the kind that lets you achieve great things without ruining your life. Swift, compact, and powerful, this thought-provoking book combines captivating stories of extraordinarily passionate individuals with the latest science on the biological and psychological factors that give rise to—and every bit as important, sustain—passion.

Jesus’ final days were full of risk. Every move he made was filled with anticipation, danger, and the potential for great loss or great reward. Jesus risked his reputation when he entered Jerusalem in a victory parade. He risked his life when he dared to teach in the Temple. His followers risked everything when they left behind their homes, or anointed him with costly perfume. We take risks as we read and re-read these stories, finding new meanings and new challenges. In Entering the Passion of Jesus: A Beginner’s Guide to Holy Week, author, professor, and biblical scholar Amy-Jill Levine explores the biblical texts surrounding the Passion story. She shows us how the text raises ethical and spiritual questions for the reader, and how we all face risk in our Christian experience. Entering the Passion of Jesus provides a rich and challenging learning experience for small groups and individual readers alike. The book is part of a larger six-week study that is perfect for Lent and includes a DVD, and a comprehensive Leader Guide. The book’s six chapters include: Jerusalem: Risking Reputation The Temple: Risking Righteous Anger Teachings: Risking Challenge The First Dinner: Risking Rejection The Last Supper: Risking the Loss of Friends Gethsemane: Risking Temptation

Find Your Passion and Change Your Life"Provides clear explanations, insightful self-assessments and inspiring stories of people both ordinary and famous."--Newsday"An inspiring call to action."--Publishers Weekly"Written with the burning fire he espouses, Richard Chang's The Passion Plan powerfully teaches us how to ignite the embers of our dreams in order to truly find success and happiness."--Stephen R. Covey, author of the No. 1 best-seller, The 7-Habits of Highly Effective Peoplea"Richard Chang boldly challenges us not only to seek and find the passions which exist in all of us, but more importantly equips us with a plan to pursue those passions all the way to a rewarding and fulfilling life!"--Ken Blanchard, co-author of The One Minute Managera"The Passion Plan offers a simple, easy-to-follow recipe for finding your own special passion and following it to greater personal satisfaction and success."--Debbi Fields, founder and chief cookie lover, Mrs. Fields CookiesTHE AUTHORRichard Chang is CEO of Richard Chang Associates, Inc., a performance-improvement consulting, training, and publishing firm headquartered in Irvine, California. He is internationally recognized for his strategic planning, performance measurement, quality improvement, organization development, change management, product realization, customer service, and human resource development expertise. Chang has consulted to a wide range of organizations--including Toshiba, Marriott, Nabisco, Universal Studios, Citibank, Nortel Networks, Fidelity Investments, and McDonalds. He has served as chair of the board for the American Society for Training and Development and as a judge for the prestigious Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award in the U.S. Chang is the author or co-author of more than twenty books on business and personal development, including The Passion Plan at Work (Jossey-Bass, 2001).

Deepen your journey into the unforgettable film, The Passion of The Christ. In this authorized, behind-the-scenes look at the movie, Fr. John Bartunek, L.C., provides biblical, historical, and theological insights gleaned from hours spent on the set and interviews with the director, actors, and filmmaking crew. Inside The Passion is the most complete and thorough commentary on the movie you will read.

The PassionBook is the most famous work of erotica in the vast literature of Tibetan Buddhism, written by the legendary scholar and poet Gendun Chopel (1903-1951). Soon after arriving in India in 1934, he discovered the Kama Sutra. Realizing that this genre of the erotic was unknown in Tibet, he set out to correct the situation. His sources were two: classical Sanskrit works and his own experiences with his lovers. Completed in 1939, his “treatise on passion” circulated in manuscript form in Tibet, scandalizing and arousing its readers. Gendun Chopel here condemns the hypocrisy of both society and church, portraying sexual pleasure as a force of nature and a human right for all. On page after page, we find the exuberance of someone discovering the joys of sex, made all the more intense because they had been forbidden to him for so long: he had taken the monastic vow of celibacy in his youth and had only recently renounced it. He describes in ecstatic and graphic detail the wonders he discovered. In these poems, written in beautiful Tibetan verse, we hear a voice with tints of irony, self-deprecating wit, and a love of women not merely as sources of male pleasure but as full partners in the play of passion.