A Less Than Perfect Peace

"Fourteen-year-old Annie Howard is determined to help her father embrace life once again as the Cold War grips the nation. In the midst of her efforts, she meets and befriends two refugees from Holland, and comes to see the world differently and understand a bit about the nature of sacrifice"--

In 1946, imaginary conversations with President Truman help ten-year-old Annie cope with having to live with her grandmother in Walla Walla, Washington, her uncle's prejudice toward her grandmother's black tenant, and her intense desire for news of her father, a pilot in the Army Air Corps who was reported missing in action.

As a life long Christian that has had several mistakes and shortcomings, Carroll felt God leading her to put together a devotional book to reach those that don’t fit in the “positive, encouraging” definition. Many hurts and pains, both self-inflicted and inflicted by others, can hurt our perception of God. Using Bible verses as examples, Carroll put together a series of devotions for those that are “Less Than Perfect”.

The heartbreaking portrait of a large, rural southern family's attempt to grapple with their mother's desperate decision to make her newborn son into the daughter she will never have When the seventh child of the Peace family, named Perfect, turns eight, her mother Emma Jean tells her bewildered daughter, "You was born a boy. I made you a girl. But that ain't what you was supposed to be. So, from now on, you gon' be a boy. It'll be a little strange at first, but you'll get used to it, and this'll be over after while." From this point forward, his life becomes a bizarre kaleidoscope of events. Meanwhile, the Peace family is forced to question everything they thought they knew about gender, sexuality, unconditional love, and fulfillment.

The birth of Christ is not only about the coming of the Messiah to the world—it is the Incarnation. By striving to understand Christ, we can understand what it is to be a follower of Jesus. Exploring the idea of the Incarnation also helps us get a grip on why God came in human form and what our purpose is as we respond with faith in Him. That is just one of the many insights from Tom Kingery, a United Methodist pastor, in his sixth book about Christian life. Like a photo album, each Christmas message in the Bible gives us part of the whole picture. While we may not ever get the entire picture, we can see enough of it to know what we are looking at and what we’re called on to do because of it. Most of the sermons in this book were offered as a series of messages during the weeks up to and including Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Kingery presents them as different parts of a “gallery” of images and impressions, encouraging you to enjoy the offerings and as you move closer to the Lord.

In an exploration of the nature of Jewishness and the condition of modern Israel, this novel, set on a kibbutz in the mid-nineteen-sixties, traces the rebellion of a young man against the only world he knows

This monograph provides a contemporary analysis of the frictions between peacemaking and international human rights law based on the cases of postconflict power-sharing in Lebanon and Bosnia-Herzegovina. In this context it evaluates the long-standing debate in the United Nations and human rights bodies about the 'imperfect peace'. Written from a practitioner–scholarly viewpoint and drawing from new authentic sources, the book describes the mechanisms used in peace agreements and post-conflict constitutions for managing ethnic or religious diversity, explains their legal limits under international human rights law, and provides a conceptual framework for analysing the nexus between law and peacemaking. The book argues that the relationship between the content of peace agreements and post-conflict constitutions, their negotiation process and the element of time, needs to be untangled to better understand the legal limits of statebuilding in the aftermath of armed conflict. It is a key resource for scholars in human rights law and peace and conflict studies, advisers in peace processes, constitution-makers, and peace mediators.