Faith Under Siege

Charlie and Marcy Boxford are two normal teenage kids. Their parents are David and Louise Boxford. Although the two siblings have grown up in a Christian Household their whole lives, their household is anything but Godly. Marcy's constant rebelliousness and Charlie's anti-socialism push the family to its breaking point. However, a tragic event will ironically be the thing that brings them back together. But just as the kids seem to get along with their parents better, David and Louise Boxford are kidnapped by a mysterious group of people. When the cops can't turn up anything, the duo head off to find their parents, accompanied by Ali Hussein, a deacon from the Baptist Church. Facing death and trials at every turn, the trio eventually comes face to face with a shocking evil, one that threatens not only their own family, but their faith as well Bio My name is Steven Richard Campagna. I live in Medford, New Jersey and attend Shawnee High School. I've always had a big love for books. I got this love from my first mother. Sadly, she passed away in January of 2018. I often questioned God's love until I realized that I needed to change, and not him. Throughout my life I've learned that God's ways are higher than ours. I have a desire to share that truth through ooks. I hope you enjoy reading the things I write. But also remember something: God's the true author. I'm just the tool he's using to write the books that you read. God Bless and enjoy!

Writing from the perspective of a student of life, history, law, politics, and theology, Don Hutchinson draws on all of these areas in Under Siege to offer perceptive insight into the Christian Church of today’s Canada. The reader will receive the benefit of his thirty years of church leadership, Christian witness, constitutional law, and public policy experience to gain a practical understanding of how we, the Church, may cast the deciding votes on the future of Christianity in our constitutionally guaranteed “free and democratic society.” How did we get here? What happened to “Christian” Canada? Do we not have Charter rights like everyone else? What does the Bible say? Many Christians sense that an advancing secularism is trying to force upon Canadians a culture in which faith is meant to be private. Hutchinson presents historic, legal, and theological grounds for us not to hide our faith in stained-glass closets, but instead to enter Canada’s contested public space with confidence. Together as individual Christians, congregations, denominations, and para-congregational ministries, we are the Church in Canada. And together we have the capacity to impact the nation for God’s good, the good of our neighbours, and the good of ourselves. Will we?

Unknown to most Americans, Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams and Benjamin Franklin were Unitarians. Today their beliefs have been called heretic or Christian, godless or liberal, argumentative or religious, or all of the above. Anatole Browde, an active Unitarian since 1948, uses history and theology to place these conflicting qualities into a unified liberal Judeo-Christian context. Browde is convinced that faith is besieged because Unitarian church goers have diverse belief systems. The power of the original Unitarian idea that God is one is too close to a creed and is therefore often devalued. Using sermons and essays by ministers and philosophers, Browde shows how Unitarianism beliefs dating from the sixteenth century overcame the restrictions of Calvinist predestination and sin, to become a worldwide free religion. Unitarians are free to believe in God, be humanists, have faith in an unknown, or in Christ as a prophet. His narrative provides an insight to the controversies that plagued believers throughout Unitarian history and demonstrates that the concepts of God and faith can make every service a celebration of joy and love.

What is the relationship between faith and works? Some have erroneously concluded that faith includes works or that "true" faith guarantees a life-long pattern of good works. The result of this teaching has caused many to seek assurance of their salvation by examining their good works. Many have become trapped by dwelling on the question, "Have I shown enough good fruit in my life to prove that I am really saved?" The Gospel Under Siege looks at many passages which are mistakenly thought to teach these ideas. Few, if any, books deal with a larger selection of debated texts than does this book. The already ample number of these (e.g., James 2, 1 John 3:6 and 9, Acts 2:38, Hebrews 6 and 10) has been increased in this new edition with such passages as Romans 2:7, 10, 13 and 2 Corinthians 13:5. Based on clear analysis of these passages, Zane Hodges demonstrates that these passages are meant for Christian readership. The Gospel Under Siege shows that the rock solid promises of God's Word is where one needs to look to find true biblical assurance. In many of these misunderstood passages, Christians are warned about the possibility of failure in the Christian life and not about the possibility of finding out that they were not really saved in the first place. If you have ever run across passages that made you wonder whether works are necessary for salvation or made you wonder whether you were "really" saved, then this book is for you!

In 1988, director Martin Scorsese fulfilled his lifelong dream of making a film about Jesus Christ. Rather than celebrating the film as a statement of faith, churches and religious leaders immediately went on the attack, alleging blasphemy. At the height of the controversy, thousands of phone calls a day flooded the Universal switchboard, and before the year was out, more than three million mailings protesting the film fanned out across the country. For the first time in history, a studio took responsibility for protecting theaters and scrambled to recruit a "field crisis team" to guide The Last Temptation of Christ through its contentious American openings. Overseas, the film faced widespread censorship actions, with thirteen countries eventually banning the film. The response in Europe turned violent when opposition groups sacked theaters in France and Greece and caused injuries to dozens of moviegoers. Twenty years later, author Thomas R. Lindlof offers a comprehensive account of how this provocative film came to be made and how Universal Pictures and its parent company MCA became targets of the most intense, unremitting attacks ever mounted against a media company. The film faced early and determined opposition from elements of the religious Right when it was being developed at Paramount during the last year the studio was run by the celebrated troika of Barry Diller, Michael Eisner, and Jeffrey Katzenberg. By the mid-1980s, Scorsese's film was widely regarded as unmakeable—a political stick of dynamite that no one dared touch. Through the joint efforts of two of the era's most influential executives, CAA president Michael Ovitz and Universal Pictures chairman Thomas P. Pollock, this improbable project found its way into production. The making of The Last Temptation of Christ caught evangelical Christians at a moment when they were suffering a crisis of confidence in their leadership. The religious right seized on the film as a way to rehabilitate its image and to mobilize ordinary citizens to attack liberalism in art and culture. The ensuing controversy over the film's alleged blasphemy escalated into a full-scale war fought out very openly in the media. Universal/MCA faced unprecedented calls for boycotts of its business interests, anti-Semitic rhetoric and death threats were directed at MCA chairman Lew Wasserman and other MCA executives, and the industry faced the specter of violence at theaters. Hollywood Under Siege draws upon interviews with many of the key figures—Martin Scorsese, Paul Schrader, Michael Ovitz, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Jack Valenti, Thomas P. Pollock, and Willem Dafoe—to explore the trajectory of the film from its conception to the subsequent epic controversy and beyond. Lindlof offers a fascinating dissection of a critical episode in the embryonic culture wars, illuminating the explosive effects of the clash between the interests of the media industry and the forces of social conservatism.

In Souls under Siege, Nicole Archambeau explores how the inhabitants of southern France made sense of the ravages of successive waves of plague, the depredations of mercenary warfare, and the violence of royal succession during the fourteenth century. Many people, she finds, understood both plague and war as the symptoms of spiritual sicknesses caused by excessive sin, and they sought cures in confession. Archambeau draws on a rich evidentiary base of 68 narrative testimonials from the canonization inquest for Countess Delphine de Puimichel, which was held in the market town of Apt in 1363. Each witness in the proceedings had lived through the outbreaks of plague in 1348 and 1361, as well as the violence inflicted by mercenaries unleashed by truces in the Hundred Years' War. Consequently, their testimonies unexpectedly reveal the importance of faith and the role of affect in the healing of body and soul alike. Faced with an unprecedented cascade of crises, the inhabitants of Provence relied on saints and healers, their worldview connecting earthly disease and disaster to the struggle for their eternal souls. Souls under Siege illustrates how medieval people approached sickness and uncertainty by using a variety of remedies, making clear that "healing" had multiple overlapping meanings in this historical moment.