Power Encounters

A critique of the deliverance ministries movement, showing positive and negative sides of its fascination with the demonic and sensational accounts, with guidelines for a more biblical approach.

How does the church portray the beauty of Christ? The gospel is the greatest message of all time addressing the greatest need of all people. However, the good news about Jesus does more than just promise eternal life to all who believe. In the latest addition to the 9Marks: Building Healthy Churches series, pastor Ray Ortlund explains the gospel's power to transform individuals from the inside out and create beautiful human relationships. This short book helps readers experience the power of God as they are encouraged to trust in Christ and allow him to transform their beliefs, perspectives, and practices. For everyone who wants to be true to the Bible and honest with themselves, this book offers a practical guide to the fundamental teachings of the gospel and how they affect our relationships with others.

When the state punishes criminals or removes children at risk, its power is immediately apparent. However, power is also at stake when the state seeks to educate, advise, or empower citizens, and this book encourages reflection on the exercise of professional power in these less coercive encounters.

Describes personal encounters with the Holy Spirit, including the experiences of theologians, ministers, and missionaries

How did the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia approach non-heterosexuality? How did young girls and boys come to realize their queer desires and identities within a state known for repressing individuality? What did they do with that self-awareness—and later on, as adults, what strategies did they employ in their everyday dealings with a state that defined homosexuality as a medical diagnosis? Queer Encounters with Communist Power answers these questions as it interweaves groundbreaking queer oral history with meticulous archival research into the discourses on homosexuality and transsexuality in Czechoslovakia from 1948 to 1989.

Mac Powell of Third Day called Clayton King’s previous book, Dying to Live, “A must-read.” An evangelist and missionary, Clayton has spoken to millions, including hundreds of thousands in the teen-to-thirties age group in the U.S. Through his firsthand stories in Amazing Encounters with God, believers will see freshly that they can step back and be amazed by God...as Clayton is after poking around in a dark church basement meeting a drunken millionaire on an airplane considering a horse sticking his head through barbed wire having a surprise encounter with the IRS seeing a baby born dead...and God’s credibility in a whole village start to crumble A great reminder that God speaks through ordinary occurrences, using ordinary things to reveal Himself. “He is still close, maybe as close as the next person you meet, the next song you hear, or the next conversation you have.”

Part of the Jewish Encounter series Taking in everything from the Kingdom of David to the Oslo Accords, Ruth Wisse offers a radical new way to think about the Jewish relationship to power. Traditional Jews believed that upholding the covenant with God constituted a treaty with the most powerful force in the universe; this later transformed itself into a belief that, unburdened by a military, Jews could pursue their religious mission on a purely moral plain. Wisse, an eminent professor of comparative literature at Harvard, demonstrates how Jewish political weakness both increased Jewish vulnerability to scapegoating and violence, and unwittingly goaded power-seeking nations to cast Jews as perpetual targets. Although she sees hope in the State of Israel, Wisse questions the way the strategies of the Diaspora continue to drive the Jewish state, echoing Abba Eban's observation that Israel was the only nation to win a war and then sue for peace. And then she draws a persuasive parallel to the United States today, as it struggles to figure out how a liberal democracy can face off against enemies who view Western morality as weakness. This deeply provocative book is sure to stir debate both inside and outside the Jewish world. Wisse's narrative offers a compelling argument that is rich with history and bristling with contemporary urgency.

To understand the creative fabric of digital networks, scholars of literary and cultural studies must turn their attention to crowdsourced forms of production, discussion, and distribution. Digital Encounters explores the influence of an increasingly networked world on contemporary Latin American cultural production. Drawing on a spectrum of case studies, the contributors to this volume examine literature, art, and political activism as they dialogue with programming languages, social media platforms, online publishing, and geospatial metadata. Implicit within these connections are questions of power, privilege, and stratification. The book critically examines issues of inequitable access and data privacy, technology’s capacity to divide people from one another, and the digital space as a site of racialized and gendered violence. Through an expansive approach to the study of connectivity, Digital Encounters illustrates how new connections – between analog and digital, human and machine, print text and pixel – alter representations of self, Other, and world.