The Divine Adventure

Are you looking for God's best for your life? Do you have a plan for getting there? God created you for an amazing adventure of faith, and the twelve spiritual practices found in The Divine Adventure offer a practical road map for your journey. By learning to apply ancient spiritual disciplines, you'll discover a life of wonder, passion, and flourishing faith. Intensely personal and deeply practical, The Divine Adventure unpacks powerful disciplines that will revolutionize your prayer life, deepen your intimacy with God, create balance between rest and work, cultivate meaningful community with others, and more. Drawing from Scripture, ancient writings, visits to holy sites, and her own life experiences of brokenness and breakthrough, Rebecca Friedlander shares the keys that any follower of Christ can use to unlock their own divine adventure. Whether you're a new believer or a seasoned disciple, you'll find that implementing these practices will both empower your passion for Jesus and open new opportunities to express God's heart to others. Are you ready?

USA TODAY BESTSELLER Truth of the Divine is the latest alternate-history first-contact novel in the Noumena series from the instant New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times bestselling author Lindsay Ellis. The human race is at a crossroads; we know that we are not alone, but details about the alien presence on Earth are still being withheld from the public. As the political climate grows more unstable, the world is forced to consider the ramifications of granting human rights to nonhuman persons. How do you define “person” in the first place? Cora Sabino not only serves as the full-time communication intermediary between the alien entity Ampersand and his government chaperones but also shares a mysterious bond with him that is both painful and intimate in ways neither of them could have anticipated. Despite this, Ampersand is still keen on keeping secrets, even from Cora, which backfires on them both when investigative journalist Kaveh Mazandarani, a close colleague of Cora’s unscrupulous estranged father, witnesses far more of Ampersand’s machinations than anyone was meant to see. Since Cora has no choice but to trust Kaveh, the two must work together to prove to a fearful world that intelligent, conscious beings should be considered persons, no matter how horrifying, powerful, or malicious they may seem. Making this case is hard enough when the public doesn’t know what it’s dealing with—and it will only become harder when a mysterious flash illuminates the sky, marking the arrival of an agent of chaos that will light an already-unstable world on fire. With a voice completely her own, Lindsay Ellis deepens her realistic exploration of the reality of a planet faced with the presence of extraterrestrial intelligence, probing the essential questions of humanity and decency, and the boundaries of the human mind. While asking the question of what constitutes a “person,” Ellis also examines what makes a monster.

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In Holy Play popular author and teacher Kirk Byron Jones shows how to move forward together with God to imagine and live your true life purpose with creativity and joy. This extraordinary book gives you permission to stop waiting for God to tell you what to do and start doing what God has been inspiring you to do all along. Through provocative stories and helpful exercises, Jones shows you how to foster the openness and energy that allow you to engage with and construct a fulfilling life that uses all your God-given talent. Jones shows how to humbly and gladly accept the sacred incredible in you--in particular the creator in you.

In Adventures in the Spirit, respected and influential theologian Philip Clayton argues that two major intellectual movements of our day-panentheism and emergence-are converging and that together they offer exciting new vistas for theological reflection. On the one hand, over the last decades many theologians have been re-conceiving the God-world relation panentheistically, affirming a radical indwelling of God within the world and the world within God. On the other hand, scientists have begun to abandon the reductionist ideology that characterized much of the modern period, with a new emphasis on emergence. Their study of how new, novel structures and entities arise throughout the evolutionary process yields a much more open-ended, holistic vision of reality, Clayton argues.

The inspiring biography of the adventuresome naturalist Carol Ruckdeschel and her crusade to save her island home from environmental disaster. In a “moving homage . . . that artfully articulates the ferocities of nature and humanity,” biographer Will Harlan captures the larger-than-life story of biologist, naturalist, and ecological activist Carol Ruckdeschel, known to many as the wildest woman in America. She wrestles alligators, eats roadkill, rides horses bareback, and lives in a ramshackle cabin that she built by hand in an island wilderness. A combination of Henry David Thoreau and Jane Goodall, Carol is a self-taught scientist who has become a tireless defender of sea turtles on Cumberland Island, a national park off the coast of Georgia (Kirkus Reviews). Cumberland, the country’s largest and most biologically diverse barrier island, is celebrated for its windswept dunes and feral horses. Steel magnate Thomas Carnegie once owned much of the island, and in recent years, Carnegie heirs and the National Park Service have clashed with Carol over the island’s future. What happens when a dirt-poor naturalist with only a high school diploma becomes an outspoken advocate on a celebrated but divisive island? Untamed is the story of an American original who fights for what she believes in, no matter the cost, “an environmental classic that belongs on the shelf alongside Carson, Leopold, Muir, and Thoreau” (Thomas Rain Crowe, author of Zoro’s Field: My Life in the Appalachian Woods). “Vivid. . . . Ms. Ruckdeschel’s biography, and the way this wandering soul came to settle for so many decades on Cumberland Island, is big enough on its own, but Mr. Harlan hints at bigger questions.” —The Wall Street Journal “Wild country produces wild people, who sometimes are just what’s needed to keep that wild cycle going. This is a memorable portrait.” —Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature “Deliciously engrossing. . . . Readers are in for a wild ride.” —The Citizen-Times

An original novel set in the Halo universe—based on the New York Times bestselling video game series! October 2559. With the galaxy in the suffocating grip of a renegade artificial intelligence, another perilous threat has quietly emerged in the shadows: the Keepers of the One Freedom, a fanatical and merciless Covenant splinter group, has made its way beyond the borders of the galaxy to an ancient Forerunner installation known as the Ark. Led by an infamous Brute named Castor, the Keepers intend to achieve what the Covenant, in all its might, failed to: activate Halo and take the last steps on the path of the Great Journey into transcendence. But unknown to Castor and his new, unexpected ally on the Ark, there are traitors to the cause in their midst—namely the Ferrets, composed of Office of Naval Intelligence operative Veta Lopis and her young team of Spartan-IIIs, who have been infiltrating the Keepers to lay the groundwork for Castor’s assassination. But with ONI’s field operations now splintered and cut off by the Guardian threat, Veta’s original mission has suddenly and dramatically escalated in scope. There’s simply no choice or fallback plan—either the Ferrets somehow stop the Keepers or the galaxy faces an extinction-level event….