Facing The Facts

1 Million Copies Sold in Series ECPA Christian Book Award Winner Puberty is an exciting but often stressful time of transition to adulthood. It marks the beginning of significant changes in a child’s relationships with their parents and with the opposite sex. Facing the Facts will give your child clear and comprehensive information to help them understand what’s happening to their body and why God designed it that way. Designed so they can read with you, your child will learn about: How girls’ and boys’ bodies change, both inside and out The science behind pregnancy and how a woman gives birth Why sex is a good and beautiful gift Romance, dating, and how relationships mature Protecting their purity and sexual health Now revised and updated with: An introduction to different worldviews about sex Age-appropriate material on the broader theological meaning of sex Chapters on masturbation, sexual addiction, gender identity, and same-sex love Designed for ages 12 to 16. With solid and positive insight on tough subjects, the God’s Design for Sex series provides clear answers to some of kids’ toughest questions without making it awkward.

Facing Facts is a powerful, original examination of attempts to dislodge a cornerstone of modern philosophy: the idea that our thoughts and utterances are representations of slices of reality. Representations that are accurate are usually said to be true, to correspond to the facts - this is the foundation of correspondence theories of truth. A number of prominent philosophers have tried to undermine the idea that propositions, facts and correspondence can play any useful role in philosophy, and formal arguments have been advanced to demonstrate that, under seemingly uncontroversial conditions, such entities collapse into an undifferentiated unity. The demise of individual facts is meant to herald the dawn of a new era in philosophy, in which debates about scepticism, realism, subjectivity, representational and computational theories of mind, possible worlds, and divergent conceptual schemes that represent reality in different ways to different persons, periods, or cultures evaporate through lack of subject matter. By carefully untangling a host of intersecting metaphysical, epistemological, semantic, and logical issues, and providing rich and original analyses of key aspects of the work of Frege, Russell, Gödel, and Davidson, Stephen Neale demonstrates that arguments for the collapse of facts are considerably more complex and interesting than either friend or foe ever imagined. A number of deep semantic facts emerge along with a powerful proof: while it is technically possible to avoid the collapse of facts, rescue the idea of representations of reality, and thereby face anew the problems raised by the sceptic or the relativist, doing so requires making some tough semantic decisions about predicates and descriptions. It is simply impossible, Neale shows, to invoke representations, facts, states, or propositions without making hard choices - choices that may send many philosophers scurrying back to the drawing board. Facing Facts will be crucial to future work in metaphysics, the philosophy of language and mind, and logic, and will have profound implications far beyond.

Experts in thanatology look at the ways people face dying and bereavement, incorporating disciplines including psychology, nursing, family studies, philosophy, law, religion, and political science, while highlighting thanatology's core psychological and therapeutic dimensions. Chapters touch on subjects such as historical and cultural attitudes, institutional dying, the hospice approach, American funeral practice, and spiritual aspects of grief and mourning. This third edition includes material on AIDS and the right to die. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

A guide to sex for Christian teenagers describes the physical differences between men and women, the changes that come with puberty, pregnancy, and abstinence.

One Million Copies Sold in Series! Christian Book Award: ECPA Medallion of Excellence Your kids know about sex. But what they’ve gathered from TV, other kids, or the internet doesn’t tell them everything or answer all of their questions. What’s the Big Deal? was written to help parents provide the answers to their 8-to-12-year-olds. This book explains the basic facts about sex and related issues such as: Why God made adults so that they want to have sex What God actually says in the Bible about sex and why it’s designed for marriage The amazing changes ahead of you during puberty How to respond when you feel sexual pressure from friends, TV shows, movies, and magazines Your kids can read this book with you so you can discuss it together. This provides them the safe space to ask hard questions they might find embarrassing. The book will help kids understand what a beautiful and exciting gift from God sexuality is meant to be. Now revised and updated with: Separate chapters on puberty for boys and girls A chapter on the dangers of pornography An expanded age range (formerly 8 to 11, now 8 to 12)

In Facing Facts, David Shi provides the most comprehensive history to date of the rise of realism in American culture. He vividly captures the character and sweep of this all-encompassing movement - ranging from Winslow Homer to the rise of the Ash Can school, from Whitman to Henry James to Theodore Dreiser. He begins with a look at the antebellum years, when idealistic themes were considered the only fit subject for art (Hawthorne wrote that "the grosser life is a dream, and the spiritual life is a reality"). Whitman's assault on these otherworldly standards coincided with sweeping changes in American society: the bloody Civil War, the aggressive advance of a modern scientific spirit, the emergence of photography and penny newspapers, the expansion of cities, capitalism, and the middle class - all worked to shake the foundations of genteel idealism and sentimental romanticism. The public developed an ever-expanding appetite for concrete facts and for art that accurately depicted them. As Shi proceeds through the nineteenth century, he traces the realist impulse in each major area of arts and letters, combining an astute analysis of the movement's essential themes with incisive portraits of its leading practitioners. Here we see Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., shaken to stern realism by the horrors of the Civil War; the influence of Walt Whitman on painter Thomas Eakins and architect Louis Sullivan, a leader of the Chicago school; the local-color verisimilitude of Louisa May Alcott and Sarah Orne Jewett; and the impact of urban squalor on intrepid young writers such as Stephen Crane. In the process of surveying nineteenth-century cultural history, Shi provides fascinating insights into thespecific concerns of the realist movement - in particular, the nation's growing obsession with gender roles. Realism, he observes, was in part an effort to revive masculine virtues in the face of effeminate sentimentality and decorous gentility. By the end of the nineteenth century, realism had displaced idealism as the dominant approach in thought and the arts. During the next two decades, however, a new modernist sensibility challenged the fact-devouring emphasis of realism: "Is it not time", one critic asked, "that we renounce the heresy that it is the function of art to record a fact?" Shi examines why so many Americans answered yes to this question, under influences ranging from psychoanalysis to the First World War. Nuanced, detailed, and comprehensive, Facing Facts provides the definitive account of the realist phenomenon, revealing its essential causes, explaining why it played so great a role in American cultural history, and suggesting why it retains its perennial fascination.

An astute diagnosis of one of the biggest problems in business Denial is the unconscious determination that a certain reality is too terrible to contemplate, so therefore it cannot be true. We see it everywhere, from the alcoholic who swears he's just a social drinker to the president who declares "mission accomplished" when it isn't. In the business world, countless companies get stuck in denial while their challenges escalate into crises. Harvard Business School professor Richard S. Tedlow tackles two essential questions: Why do sane, smart leaders often refuse to accept the facts that threaten their companies and careers? And how do we find the courage to resist denial when facing new trends, changing markets, and tough new competitors? Tedlow looks at numerous examples of organiza­tions crippled by denial, including Ford in the era of the Model T and Coca-Cola with its abortive attempt to change its formula. He also explores other companies, such as Intel, Johnson & Johnson, and DuPont, that avoided catastrophe by dealing with harsh realities head-on. Tedlow identifies the leadership skills that are essential to spotting the early signs of denial and taking the actions required to overcome it.

The charges of white privilege and systemic racism that are tearing the country apart fIoat free of reality. Two known facts, long since documented beyond reasonable doubt, need to be brought into the open and incorporated into the way we think about public policy: American whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians have different violent crime rates and different means and distributions of cognitive ability. The allegations of racism in policing, college admissions, segregation in housing, and hiring and promotions in the workplace ignore the ways in which the problems that prompt the allegations of systemic racism are driven by these two realities. What good can come of bringing them into the open? America’s most precious ideal is what used to be known as the American Creed: People are not to be judged by where they came from, what social class they come from, or by race, color, or creed. They must be judged as individuals. The prevailing Progressive ideology repudiates that ideal, demanding instead that the state should judge people by their race, social origins, religion, sex, and sexual orientation. We on the center left and center right who are the American Creed’s natural defenders have painted ourselves into a corner. We have been unwilling to say openly that different groups have significant group differences. Since we have not been willing to say that, we have been left defenseless against the claims that racism is to blame. What else could it be? We have been afraid to answer. We must. Facing Reality is a step in that direction.