Spiritual Defiance

During his thirty-year career as a parish minister and professor, Robin Meyers has focused on renewing the church as an instrument of social change and personal transformation. In this provocative and passionate book, he explores the decline of the church as a community of believers and calls readers back to the church’s roots as a community of resistance. Shifting the conversation about church renewal away from theological purity and marketing strategies that embrace cultural norms, and toward “embodied noncompliance” with the dominant culture, Meyers urges a return to the revolutionary spirit that marked Jesus’s ministry. Framing his discussion around three poems by twentieth-century Polish poet Anna Kamienska, Meyers casts the nature of faith as a force that stands against anything and everything that engenders death and indignity. He calls for active—sometimes even subversive—defiance of the ego’s temptations, of what he terms “the heresy of orthodoxy itself,” and of an uncritical acceptance of militarism and capitalism. Each chapter is a poignant and urgent invitation to recover the Jesus Movement as a Beloved Community of Resistance.

Calls readers to reinvigorate the church by returning it to its roots as a community of resistance, against the dominant culture, egoism, and forces that threaten human life and dignity.

Calls readers to reinvigorate the church by returning it to its roots as a community of resistance, against the dominant culture, egoism, and forces that threaten human life and dignity.

Ancient Greece at the time of the Trojan War. Will true valour triumph over greed, lust for power and unimaginable evil? Astraia: Spirit of Defiance follows a teenage princess from Corfu named Astraia who has outstanding fighting skills. When her cousin is kidnapped by pirates she launches a secret expedition to rescue him, helped by his best friend Leandros. The pair, and the other members of their band, head for the nearby island of Paxos, where they eventually find her cousin and his fellow crew drugged in the hold of a pirate ship. After being tricked by the pirates, Astraia and other members of her band are also taken prisoner and transported to Anti-Paxos where they meet the feared pirate leader, Deimos. He has built up a huge fleet of ships – but for what sinister purpose? Are the pirates planning to attack her homeland? If so, Astraia needs to alert her father, King Atreus of the impending invasion. Can she and her followers escape and make it back in time to save Corfu and its people from Deimos and his armada?

The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio introduces Evelyn Ryan, an enterprising woman who kept poverty at bay with wit, poetry, and perfect prose during the "contest era" of the 1950s and 1960s. Stepping back into a time when fledgling advertising agencies were active partners with consumers, and everyday people saw possibility in every coupon, Terry Ryan tells how her mother kept the family afloat by writing jingles and contest entries. Mom's winning ways defied the Church, her alcoholic husband, and antiquated views of housewives. To her, flouting convention was a small price to pay when it came to securing a happy home for her six sons and four daughters. Evelyn, who would surely be a Madison Avenue executive if she were working today, composed her jingles not in the boardroom, but at the ironing board. By entering contests wherever she found them -- TV, radio, newspapers, direct-mail ads -- Evelyn Ryan was able to win every appliance her family ever owned, not to mention cars, television sets, bicycles, watches, a jukebox, and even trips to New York, Dallas, and Switzerland. But it wasn't just the winning that was miraculous; it was the timing. If a toaster died, one was sure to arrive in the mail from a forgotten contest. Days after the bank called in the second mortgage on the house, a call came from the Dr Pepper company: Evelyn was the grand-prize winner in its national contest -- and had won enough to pay the bank. Graced with a rare appreciation for life's inherent hilarity, Evelyn turned every financial challenge into an opportunity for fun and profit. From her frenetic supermarket shopping spree -- worth $3,000 today -- to her clever entries worthy of Erma Bombeck, Dorothy Parker, and Ogden Nash, the story of this irrepressible woman whose talents reached far beyond her formidable verbal skills is told in The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio with an infectious joy that shows how a winning spirit will triumph over the poverty of circumstance.

The most authoritative and comprehensive book available on dreams and dreaming. Enter the fascinating world of dreams, their mysteries, their meanings: to dream of a bird flying freely represents hopes and aspirations; to dream of winter means a time in life that is not fruitful; to be visited by someone in a dream can mean that there is information, warmth, or love available; to be searching in a dream is an attempt to find an answer to a problem. These are just a few of the 10,000 dream images and interpretations contained in this volume, a book that can bring insight, clarification, and guidance.

Life changing, miracles and true incidents based story of a defiant Telecom engineer to whom parents on high street, trains, buses; his own tragic, repenting and eye watering experiences and happenings in london realized the importance of his parents, compelled and made him to repent on his actions and attitude towards his parents, sibling and realized the importance of his luckiest and successful time of his life, before coming to England.