The Enduring Revolution

Originally a speech addressed to Harvard's Business School, this is Colson's compelling case that to do what is right, people need not only the intellect, but also the will. In short, men and women can be transformed only through Jesus Christ. Colson also argues that a society without a foundation of moral absolutes cannot long survive.

To most observers—including many conservatives—the so-called Republican Revolution of 1994 was anything but revolutionary, and the Contract with America that propelled the GOP into power was just a gimmick. But in The Enduring Revolution, Fox News national reporter Major Garrett turns this conventional wisdom on its head, revealing how the Contract with America and the Republican Revolution have changed our lives in startling ways. The Republicans have fundamentally altered our approach to taxes, national defense, terrorism, welfare, entitlements, health care, education, abortion, gun control, and crime, among other issues. Quite simply, America is a vastly different place after the Contract than it was before it. If you think the 2004 elections re?ected a political realignment in this country, think again. That realignment occured a decade earlier; the Republicans’ victory in 1994 made George W. Bush’s election and reelection possible. Based on exclusive interviews with more than fifty key players from both sides of the aisle, and complete with more than thirty pages of crucial, previously unpublished confidential documents, The Enduring Revolution offers the dramatic behind-the-scenes story of how the Contract with America came into being and how this one document has defined American politics for a decade. Garrett’s exhaustive research and remarkable access enable him to tell a story that will surprise even the most seasoned political observers. In The Enduring Revolution, you’ll learn: •How George W. Bush and John Kerry built much of their 2004 presidential campaigns around the Contract with America •How conservatives angered by the recent growth of the federal government have overlooked critical Republican victories on spending •How Bill Clinton’s supposed great achievements, welfare reform and a balanced budget, resulted directly from the Contract with America—and actually reflected his weakness as a leader •How the Republican majority made the 2003 Iraq invasion possible years before our military campaign began •How our intelligence community’s problems in the War on Terror would have been much worse had there been no Republican Revolution Undeniably, Republican leaders from Newt Gingrich to Dennis Hastert have made critical mistakes—and Garrett provides the inside story on how and why those failures occurred. But he also reveals how the usual focus on setbacks ignores the jaw-dropping changes the Contract with America has produced. The Enduring Revolution is a stunning reassessment of a crucial but misunderstood episode in our political history.

In 1798, the federal government levied its first direct tax on American citizens, one that seemed to favor land speculators over farmers. In eastern Pennsylvania, the tax assessors were largely Quakers and Moravians who had abstained from Revolutionary participation and were recruited by the administration of John Adams to levy taxes against their patriot German Reformed and Lutheran neighbors. Led by local Revolutionary hero John Fries, the farmers drew on the rituals of crowd action and stopped the assessment. Following the Shays and Whiskey rebellions, Fries's Rebellion was the last in a trilogy of popular uprisings against federal authority in the early republic. But in contrast to the previous armed insurrections, the Fries rebels used nonviolent methods while simultaneously exercising their rights to petition Congress for the repeal of the tax law as well as the Alien and Sedition Acts. In doing so, they sought to manifest the principle of popular sovereignty and to expand the role of local people within the emerging national political system rather than attacking it from without. After some resisters were liberated from the custody of a federal marshal, the Adams administration used military force to suppress the insurrection. The resisters were charged with sedition and treason. Fries himself was sentenced to death but was pardoned at the eleventh hour by President Adams. The pardon fractured the presidential cabinet and splintered the party, just before Thomas Jefferson's and the Republican Party's "Revolution of 1800." The first book-length treatment of this significant eighteenth-century uprising, Fries's Rebellion shows us that the participants of the rebellion reengaged Revolutionary ideals in an enduring struggle to further democratize their country.

An important new reading of the importance of Parmenides, widely regarded as the most influential of the Presocratic philosophers.

Fantastic fiction is traditionally understood as Western genre literature such as fantasy, science fiction, and horror. Expanding on this understanding, these essays explore how the fantastic has been used in Western societies since the Middle Ages as a tool for organizing and materializing abstractions in order to make sense of the present social order. Disciplines represented here include literature studies, gender studies, biology, ethnology, archeology, history, religion, game studies, cultural sociology, and film studies. Individual essays cover topics such as the fantastic creatures of medieval chronicle, mummy medicine in eighteenth-century Sweden, how fears of disease filtered through the universal and adaptable vampire, the gender aspects of goddess worship in the secular West, ecocentrism in fantasy fiction, how videogames are dealing with the remediation of heritage, and more.

A look at how America has preserved more than 100 million acres of diverse wilderness areas in 44 states, now protected in our National Wilderness Preservation System. Discussion of current visions valuing wilderness and its place in our culture.

Joyce Meyer is not satisfied with the status quo. She believes that we each need to become a revolutionary and practice love every day. And if Joyce has her way, the revolution will spread -- person by person, house by house, town by town, until the old culture of selfishness and greed gives way to a new culture of concern for others. The book is a revolutionaries' manual, a hands-on primer for bringing the Golden Rule to life in the twenty-first century. Meyer starts out by giving some stunning statistics. Right now. . .210,000 children will die this week because of poverty; 640 million children do not have adequate shelter; every day, 3,000 children are abducted into the sex-trafficking industry; every day, 16,000 children die from hunger-related causes. She goes on to say that although crisis is global, the solution is local. We can't solve the world's problems, but that isn't a reason to remain idle. Love Revolution focuses on personal behavior on the local scale. It's not just a call to action; it is a call to being: being the person who goes out of your way to encourage someone who's out of hope; being the one who smiles at a stranger; being the one who is willing to do something for nothing. The paradox: when we do something for nothing, what we often get is something far greater.