Daring To Hope

New York Times bestseller How do you hold on to hope when you don’t get the ending you asked for? When Katie Davis Majors moved to Uganda, accidentally founded a booming organization, and later became the mother of thirteen girls through the miracle of adoption, she determined to weave her life together with the people she desired to serve. But joy often gave way to sorrow as she invested her heart fully in walking alongside people in the grip of poverty, addiction, desperation, and disease. After unexpected tragedy shook her family, for the first time Katie began to wonder, Is God really good? Does He really love us? When she turned to Him with her questions, God spoke truth to her heart and drew her even deeper into relationship with Him. Daring to Hope is an invitation to cling to the God of the impossible—the God who whispers His love to us in the quiet, in the mundane, when our prayers are not answered the way we want or the miracle doesn’t come. It’s about a mother discovering the extraordinary strength it takes to be ordinary. It’s about choosing faith no matter the circumstance and about encountering God’s goodness in the least expected places. Though your heartaches and dreams may take a different shape, you will find your own questions echoed in these pages. You’ll be reminded of the gifts of joy in the midst of sorrow. And you’ll hear God’s whisper: Hold on to hope. I will meet you here.

A mother and her daughter recount their escape, refuge and, above all, luck during the Holocaust.

In many ways Tiffany is the newest girl in her small community near Albuquerque, New Mexico. In the whirlwind of the last few weeks she has emerged from the shell of a scared and confused little boy named Brandon. Ever since Tiffany's parents confirmed with her their suspicions of her deepest wants and needs, they've supported her completely. With solid support from her family, her best friend and family and surprisingly, her growing circle of other friends it seems she might have a chance for a successful future. 'Can all this last?' is one of the biggest questions on her mind now. She's had an amazingly easy last couple weeks and she knows it won't last. What will happen when she returns to school? Will her psychiatrist force her to return to living the lie as Brandon? These fears and more whirl in her mind as she looks to an uncertain future. Daring to Hope is the continuing story of a bright, talented, and beautiful girl, who dares to hope for a future that is right for her.

"The Summa Theologica is the best-known work of Italian philosopher, scholar, and Dominican friar SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS (1225 1274), widely considered the Catholic Church s greatest theologian. Famously consulted (immediately after the Bible) on religious questions at the Council of Trent, Aquinas s masterpiece has been considered a summary of official Church philosophy ever since. Aquinas considers approximately 10,000 questions on Church doctrine covering the roles and nature of God, man, and Jesus, then lays out objections to Church teachings and systematically confronts each, using Biblical verses, theologians, and philosophers to bolster his arguments. In Volume II, Aquinas addresses: happiness good and evil love and hatred hope and despair anger virtue sin and grace and much more. This massive work of scholarship, spanning five volumes, addresses just about every possible query or argument that any believer or atheist could have, and remains essential, more than seven hundred years after it was written, for clergy, religious historians, and serious students of Catholic thought."

The Public Intellectual and the Culture of Hope brings together a number of winners of the Polanyi Prize in Literature – a group whose research constitutes a diversity of methodological approaches to the study of culture – to examine the rich but often troubled association between the concepts of the public, the intellectual (both the person and the condition), culture, and hope. The contributors probe the influence of intellectual life on the public sphere by reflecting on, analyzing, and re-imagining social and cultural identity. The Public Intellectual and the Culture of Hope reflects on the challenging and often vexed work of intellectualism within the public sphere by exploring how cultural materials – from foundational Enlightenment writings to contemporary, populist media spectacles – frame intellectual debates within the clear and ever-present gaze of the public writ large. These serve to illuminate how past cultures can shed light on present and future issues, as well as how current debates can reframe our approaches to older subjects.