Who Shall Lead Them

The clergy today faces mounting challenges in an increasingly secular world, where declining prestige makes it more difficult to attract the best and the brightest young Americans to the ministry. As Christian churches dramatically adapt to modern changes, some are asking whether there is a clergy crisis as well. Whatever the future of the clergy, the fate of millions of churchgoers also will be at stake. In Who Shall Lead Them?, prizewinning journalist Larry Witham takes the pulse of both the Protestant and Catholic ministry in America and provides a mixed diagnosis of the calling's health. Drawing on dozens of interviews with clergy, seminarians and laity, and using newly available survey data including the 2000 Census, Witham reveals the trends in a variety of traditions. While evangelicals are finding innovative paths to ministry, the Catholic priesthood faces a severe shortage. In mainline Protestantism, ministry as a second career has become a prominent feature. Ordination ages in the Episcopal and United Methodist churches average in the 40s today. The quest by female clergy to lead from the pulpit, meanwhile, has hit a "stained glass ceiling" as churches still prefer a man as the principal minister. While deeply motivated by the mystery of their "call" to ministry, America's priests, pastors, and ministers are reassessing their roles in a world of new debates on leadership, morality, and the powers of the mass media. Who Shall Lead Them? offers a valuable snapshot of this contemporary clergy drama. It will be required reading for everyone concerned about the rapidly shifting ground of our churches and the health of religion in America.

In the twentieth-century struggle for racial equality, there was perhaps no setting more fraught and contentious than the public schools of the American south. In Prince Edward County, Virginia, in 1951, a student strike for better school facilities became part of the NAACP legal campaign for school desegregation. That step ultimately brought this rural, agricultural county to the Supreme Court of the United States as one of five consolidated cases in the historic 1954 ruling, Brown v. Board of Education. Unique among those cases, Prince Edward County took the extreme stance of closing its public school system entirely rather than comply with the desegregation ruling of the Court. The schools were closed for five years, from 1959 to 1964, until the Supreme Court ruling in Griffin v. County School Board of Prince Edward County ordered the restoration of public education in the county. This historical anthology brings together court cases, government documents, personal and scholarly writings, speeches, and journalism to represent the diverse voices and viewpoints of the battle in Prince Edward County for—and against—educational equality. Providing historical context and contemporary analysis, this book offers a new perspective of a largely overlooked episode and seeks to help place the struggle for public education in Prince Edward County into its proper place in the civil rights era.

Picking up where Paved with Good Intentions left off, the second installment in the Halos & Horns fantasy series finds the angel Gabe Horn and demon Lou Cypher facing the Dark Gods in their bid for domination of the multiverse; Lilith, the mother of all succubi; and Armageddon! Heaven and Hell must join forces to battle a common adversary, but will their combined forces be enough to prevail against the coming darkness? Ditzy vampire Pandora is dating a werewolf! Resident witch Samantha gives birth to Alaric, but is his father Lou or the warlock Mordred? All your favorite characters are back, along with some intriguing new arrivals. And meet the kids: Emma the Cockney witchling; Síofra, the Irish changeling; Asabi, the African emere; Kaya, the Japanese hypnalis; and Artemus, the boy vampire. But how long can even these supernatural children survive now that the ancient child-devouring succubus Lilith walks the Earth once more?

Dr. Rufus Burrow turns his attention to a less investigated but critically important byway in this powerful storythe role of children and young people in the Civil Rights Movement. What role did young people play, and how did they support the efforts of their elders? What did they see that their elders were unable to envision? How did children play their part in the liberation of their people? In this project, Burrow reveals the surprising power of youth to change the world.

The story of the remarkable life of Civil Rights leader Bob Moses From his role as one of the architects of the civil rights movement to his work with inner city children late into his life, Robert Moses was one of America's most courageous, energetic, and influential leaders. Wary of the cults of celebrity he saw surrounding Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X and fueled by a philosophy that shunned leadership, Moses always labored behind the scenes. This first biography sheds significant light on the intellectual and philosophical worldview of a man who was rarely seen but whose work created a lasting impact on American life. Moses spent almost three years in Mississippi trying to awaken the state's Black citizens to their moral and legal rights before the fateful summer of 1964 would thrust him and the Freedom Summer movement into the national spotlight. We follow him through the civil rights years—his intensive, fearless tradition of community organizing, his involvements with SNCC and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, and his negotiations with the Department of Justice—to his time in Canada after fleeing the draft for a war he opposed, through the decade he spent teaching in Tanzania. Returning in 1977 under President Carter's amnesty program, Moses dedicated the rest of his life to the Algebra Project—an innovative program he established to teach math to Boston's inner-city youth, an important extension of his tireless pursuit of equal rights. Quiet and intensely private, Moses quickly became legendary as a man whose conduct exemplified leadership by example. And Gently He Shall Lead Them tells the story of this remarkable man, an elusive hero of the civil rights movement whose flight from adulation only served to increase his reputation as an intellectual and moral leader.

In the year 1212 A.D. a young boy named Steven led of an army of children to the Holy Land to free it of its Moslem overlords. This is the story of the Children's Crusade, and the horrors that the children endured.

The Boy is a fictionalized version of how one thirteen-year-old child makes a difference in changing the face of apartheid in South Africa. In 1976, Jonah Moloi stands up to the new law making Afrikaans the official language taught in schools. This language was considered the language of the white oppressors. The children’s decisive action eventually brought about the end of apartheid. Jonah becomes the living symbol for equality and freedom. The novel follows Jonah as he leads the children through a hail of police bullets, leaving behind an efficient protest system before he is forced to flee. The Boy: And a Child Shall Lead Them will resonate with readers who believe in justice, and shows how one person can make a difference!