Trust And Tragedy

With articulate words, Tommy Tenney helps lead us past tragedy to that place of trust. After reading this book, you will know what to do and know what to say. Most people-including Christians-avoid brokenness and personal failure at all costs. They will deny the truth to avoid pain. Yet tragedy visits every generation; hardship touches every life. The only question, then, is how will we respond. God promises to be near the brokenhearted. As Tenney puts it, "God is waiting to meet us on our way home from the funeral. The One who said, 'Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted,' fully intends to comfort us personally if we make the effort to detour from our road of grief to search for Him." Many believers first turned to God in the moment of crisis. Trust and Tragedy shows them how to find Him there again. For "whenever there is earthly brokenness, there is always heavenly openness."

Ambassador to South Vietnam during the Kennedy administration, this book is Nolting's frank and perceptive account of the events in Vietnam and Washington that culminated in the overthrow of the Diem government in November 1963.

One of Christianity Today's Top 10 Books of the Year! Leith Anderson's preaching vision, and leadership have guided his church through a process of change and growth process of change and growth, putting it on the cutting edge to meet the spiritual needs of its people. His counsel is sound, practical, and full of hope to pastors, church leaders, and lay Christians. Christianity Today selected this book as its top pick in the Church/Pastoral Leadership category for 2000.

Robert R. Williams offers a bold new account of divergences and convergences in the work of Hegel and Nietzsche. He explores four themes - the philosophy of tragedy; recognition and community; critique of Kant; and the death of God - and explicates both thinkers' critiques of traditional theology and metaphysics.

An Oxford-trained historian who became Israeli Foreign Minister, Shlomo Ben-Ami was a key figure in the Camp David negotiations and many other rounds of peace talks, public and secret, with Palestinian and Arab officials. He offers here an unflinching account of the Arab-Israeli conflict, informed by his firsthand knowledge of the major characters and events. Clear-eyed and unsparing, Ben-Ami traces the twists and turns of the Middle East conflict and the many missteps of the Israelis and Palestinians. The author paints particularly trenchant portraits of key figures from Ben-Gurion to Bill Clinton, and gives us behind-the-scenes accounts of the meetings in Oslo, Madrid, and Camp David. He is highly critical of Ariel Sharon and the late Yasser Arafat ("the sad embodiment of an archaic political orthodoxy devoid of a vision for the future"). He sees Arafat's rejection of Clinton's peace plan as a crime against the Palestinian people. The author is also critical of President Bush's Middle East policy ("a presumptuous grand strategy"). And along the way, Ben-Ami highlights the many blunders on both sides, describing for instance how the great victory of the Six Day War launched many Israelis on a misbegotten "messianic" dream of controlling all the Biblical Jewish lands, actually making the Palestinian problem much worse. In contrast, it has only been when Israel has suffered setbacks that it has made moves towards peace. The best hope for the region, he concludes, is to create an international mandate in the Palestinian territories that would lead to the implementation of Clinton's two-state peace parameters. Scars of War, Wounds of Peace is a major work of history--with by far the most fair and balanced critique of Israel ever to come from one of its key officials. It is an absolute must-read for everyone who wants to understand the dynamics of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

While trauma and loss can occur anywhere, most suffering is experienced as personal tragedy. Yet some tragedies transcend everyday life's sad but inevitable traumas to become notorious public events: de facto "public" tragedies. In these crises, suffering is made publicly visible and lamentable. Such tragedies are defined by public accusations, social blame, outpourings of grief and anger, spontaneous memorialization, and collective action. These, in turn, generate a comparable set of political reactions, including denial, denunciation, counterclaims, blame avoidance, and a competition to control memories of the event. Disasters and crises are no more or less common today than in the past, but public tragedies now seem ubiquitous. After Tragedy Strikes argues that they are now epochal—public tragedies have become the day's definitive social and political events. Thomas D. Beamish deftly explores this phenomenon by developing the historical context within which these events occur and the role that political elites, the media, and an emergent ideology of victimhood have played in cultivating their ascendence.