John Clayton

From enchanting downtown architecture to the spectacular Beartooth Highway, Red Lodge wears its vibrant history with pride. A coal-mining boom founded the city and attracted immigrant populations between 1895 and 1920. John "Liver-Eatin'" Johnstonserved as constable, and Buffalo Bill Cody, Calamity Jane, and Frederic Remington paid visits. Though the coal boom eventually faded, Red Lodge refused to become a ghost town. Cattle ranching thrived in thevalleys and foothills, fostering such Rodeo Hall of Fame stars as Turk, Alice, and Marge Greenough and Bill and Bud Linderman. Meanwhile the road through the Beartooth Mountains to Yellowstone National Park, completed in 1936, boosted tourism. Today events such as the Fourth of July Home of Champions Rodeo and the August Festival of Nations celebrate the heritage of this unique Montana community.

In 1901, Philadelphia's celebrity female journalist stepped off a train in Blackfoot, Montana, and into a world of living legends. The miners and frontiersmen, Indians and trappers that Caroline Lockhart met there inspired this beautiful, single, strong-willed woman to live a life she had only dreamed about in what remained of the Wild West. This is the true story of a woman whose work and life teetered between realism and romanticism and who wrote novels "like a man" yet ran her businesses and love affairs like a liberated feminist. Prep-school educated (she attended the Moravian Seminary for girls) and well-traveled (her assignments took her throughout Europe), she chose to live out her passions in a time when to bare one's ankle could ruin a woman for life. As a newspaper publisher in Cody, Wyoming, she founded the town's still-thriving Stampede Rodeo, received critical praise from the demanding H. L. Mencken, and saw three of her seven novels turned into films. Yet she also infuriated neighbors and admirers with her cantankerous crusades (she referred to novelist Zane Grey, for instance, as "that tooth-pulling ass!") and indomitable will. In this all-encompassing portrait the Cowboy Girl, Caroline Lockhart, emerges as a woman who remade the fantasy of the West in life and in words, and who keeps us spellbound to this day.

Traditional theistic proofs are often understood as evidence intended to compel belief in a divinity. John Clayton explores the surprisingly varied applications of such proofs in the work of philosophers and theologians from several periods and traditions, thinkers as varied as Ramanuja, al-Ghazali, Anselm, and Jefferson. He shows how the gradual disembedding of theistic proofs from their diverse and local religious contexts is concurrent with the development of natural theologies and atheism as social and intellectual options in early modern Europe and America. Clayton offers a fresh reading of the early modern history of philosophy and theology, arguing that awareness of such history, and the local uses of theistic argument, offer important ways of managing religious and cultural difference in the public sphere. He argues for the importance of historically grounded philosophy of religion to the field of religious studies and public debate on religious pluralism and cultural diversity.

An entertaining collection of 101 quintessential places, people, events, customs, lingo, and eats that help define the personality of this proud state.

What is the origin of the world and of life itself? Did a series of accidents and evolution bring about the world as we know it? Or is there a design and purpose behind it all? And if there is a design, is there an ultimate designer? A number of years ago, John Clayton, a second-generation atheist and respected scientist and teacher, set out to disprove the Bible from a scientific point of view. Instead, his six-year study brought him to a profound faith in the God of the Bible. Now, in this highly informative and easy to understand book, John Clayton and Nils Jansma -- a geotechnical engineer and geologist -- present convincing evidence that the Bible and the facts of science agree. As the public moves away from a belief in God as Creator of our heaven and earth, it becomes imperative that all believers be well informed on this vital subject. This book will become a resource you will use again and again.