Joyce Hollyday

In an age of intolerance, compassion can be dangerous. Pillar of Fire captures the stunning witness of the medieval mystics known as Beguines. Amid the intrigues of kings and knights, against a panorama of church corruption, Crusader campaigns, and Inquisition trials, these bold women broke all the rules. In this sweeping historical saga, young Clarissa flees from a forced marriage, befriends a colorful minstrel, and unravels the mystery of a midwife's murder. After a spiritual pilgrimage to the Egyptian desert, she returns with a Muslim orphan and gathers a community of devoted sisters. Threats come when they offer refuge to people suffering from leprosy and a Jewish family under persecution. When church officials get word of their rituals celebrating the feminine aspects of God and of Clarissa's mystical visions, they charge her with heresy and turn up the heat, as she struggles with the wound of betrayal and discovers the power of forgiveness.

In an age of intolerance, compassion can be dangerous. Pillar of Fire captures the stunning witness of the medieval mystics known as Beguines. Amid the intrigues of kings and knights, against a panorama of church corruption, Crusader campaigns, and Inquisition trials, these bold women broke all the rules. In this sweeping historical saga, young Clarissa flees from a forced marriage, befriends a colorful minstrel, and unravels the mystery of a midwife's murder. After a spiritual pilgrimage to the Egyptian desert, she returns with a Muslim orphan and gathers a community of devoted sisters. Threats come when they offer refuge to people suffering from leprosy and a Jewish family under persecution. When church officials get word of their rituals celebrating the feminine aspects of God and of Clarissa's mystical visions, they charge her with heresy and turn up the heat, as she struggles with the wound of betrayal and discovers the power of forgiveness.

David Hartsough knows how to get in the way. He has used his body to block Navy ships headed for Vietnam and trains loaded with munitions on their way to El Salvador and Nicaragua. He has crossed borders to meet "the enemy" in East Berlin, Castro's Cuba, and present-day Iran. He has marched with mothers confronting a violent regime in Guatemala and stood with refugees threatened by death squads in the Philippines. Hartsough's stories inspire, educate, and encourage readers to find ways to work for a more just and peaceful world. Inspired by the examples of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., Hartsough has spent his life experimenting with the power of active nonviolence. Engaging stories on every page provide a peace activist's eyewitness account of many of the major historical events of the past 60 years, including the Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War movements in the United States as well as the little-known but equally significant nonviolent efforts in the Soviet Union, Kosovo, Palestine, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines. "Waging Peace" is a testament to the difference one person can make; however, it is more than one man's memoir: it shows how this struggle is waged all over the world by ordinary people committed to ending the spiral of violence and war.

For more than thirty years, Don Mosley has traveled the globe, working for the cause of justice on behalf of two organizations he helped to found: Habitat for Humanity and Jubilee Partners, a community of believers who have welcomed 3,000 refugees from danger zones around the world.In this book, he uses stories from his remarkable walk of faith to issue an action call for Christians to live out the teachings of Jesus, no matter where they take us or what they require us to do."

This saga opens with the mutiny of captured Africans on the Amistad in 1839, follows the path of missionaries who risked their lives to establish schools among emancipated slaves in the South, and culminates with the testimonies of descendants of those who were freed. Documenting a stunning, but little known, story of rare courage and interracial partnership, this story will inspire anyone seeking to be faithful in challenging times.

The Bible holds a great treasure of amazing women. They are judges and prophets, caregivers and teachers, prominent matriarchs of large clans or quiet disciples, women who suffered alone or sang joyous praises to God amid the crowds. Their stories come alive in these pages as they are interwoven with the lives of modern women, bound together by common threads of strength and courage in the face of vulnerability and violation. From Eve to Revelation's woman clothed with the sun--from the first creative impulse to the close of time--female energy has been and will continue to be a river of life and wisdom, of dignity and hope.