Peculiar People

Rodney Clapp asks and answers the question, How can the church provide a significant alternative to the culture in which it is embedded?

Double cousins Alice and Teresa Guthrie grow up among Okie relatives on the western tip of the Mojave Desert in the Lancaster Heights, a shabby area sparsely settled with house trailers, a Quonset hut, tar paper shack and a dugout, a storm celler type habitat with tamped dirt walls. Each dwelling had an outhouse and some had chicken coops with wire enclosures. Reared in the 1950s and 1960s by pious parents with big plans for their only daughters, the girls come of age and escape the high desert community for L.A.s palm trees and begin lives in a wider world

2023 The Black Caucus of the American Library Association - Poetry Winner 2022 Heartland Bookseller Awards Finalist A Peculiar People creates an entire microcosm within these poems. Steven Willis crafts a cast of characters, showcasing their struggles, identities, & underlying emotions. Willis champions the art of storytelling: weaving pop-culture and screenwriting elements to allow the reader to view this social commentary with a fresh lens. This collection examines the author's life experience; the pain of being Black and facing systemic racism.

These days hardly anyone remembers Augustus John Curthbert Hare (1834-1903). But in his prime, the late Victorian age, his name was on the lips of anyone who mattered. He was a travel writer, a storyteller and a memoirist of the first order, and his work is a fascinating record of a lost way of life amongst the strangest upper classes of English society.

Though the U.S. Constitution guarantees the free exercise of religion, it does not specify what counts as a religion. From its founding in the 1830s, Mormonism, a homegrown American faith, drew thousands of converts but far more critics. In "A Peculiar People", J. Spencer Fluhman offers a comprehensive history of anti-Mormon thought and the associated passionate debates about religious authenticity in nineteenth-century America. He argues that understanding anti-Mormonism provides critical insight into the American psyche because Mormonism became a potent symbol around which ideas about religion and the state took shape. Fluhman documents how Mormonism was defamed, with attacks often aimed at polygamy, and shows how the new faith supplied a social enemy for a public agitated by the popular press and wracked with social and economic instability. Taking the story to the turn of the century, Fluhman demonstrates how Mormonism's own transformations, the result of both choice and outside force, sapped the strength of the worst anti-Mormon vitriol, triggering the acceptance of Utah into the Union in 1896 and also paving the way for the dramatic, yet still grudging, acceptance of Mormonism as an American religion.

This book gives you the basic information about who you are as a believer. So that you will not suffer in life for lack of knowledge. This book is equally good for unbelievers who are curious to know more about believers.