Mission Studies

In 1835, a publishing firm asked McGuffey to create a series of graded Readers for primary-level students. The series consisted of stories, poems, essays, and speeches, and it is estimated that at least 120 million copies of McGuffey's Reader were sold between 1836 and 1960, placing its sales in a category with the Bible and Webster’s Dictionary.

With His gentle hand He wounded my neck And caused all my senses to be suspended. Part poetic masterpiece, part mystic treatise, The Dark Night of the Soul by 16th century Carmelite monk, St. John of the Cross, addresses the feeling of being forgotten by the Presence of the Almighty that every Christian, desirous of walking more closely with God must pass through in order to learn to walk by faith and not by sight.

The 2016 election of Donald J. Trump exposed a deep divide in American politics and culture, one that pollsters and pundits didn't seem to realize was there. But Trump did, and he used it to his advantage in ways that surprised nearly everyone, even those who voted for him. Perhaps the biggest question on many people's minds is how, exactly, did a crass, unrepentant reality TV star and cutthroat business tycoon secure the majority of the religious conservative vote?

Since 2000, America's most ambitious young evangelicals have been making their way to Patrick Henry College in Virginia, a small Christian school that has earned the nickname "God's Harvard". Most of these students are home-schoolers whose idealism and discipline put the average American teenager to shame. The school grooms them to become the Christian elite of tomorrow, dispatching them to the front lines of politics, entertainment, and science to wage the battle to take back a godless nation.

The year was 1922: World War I had just come to a close, the Ottoman Empire was in decline, and Asa Jennings, a YMCA worker from upstate New York, had just arrived in the quiet coastal city of Smyrna to teach sports to boys. Several hundred miles to the east in Turkey's interior, tensions between Greeks and Turks had boiled over into deadly violence. Mustapha Kemal, now known as Ataturk, and his Muslim army soon advanced into Smyrna, a Christian city, where a half a million terrified Greek and Armenian refugees had fled in a desperate attempt to escape his troops.

Despite the civil rights progress he fought for and saw on the horizon in the 1950s and '60s, Martin Luther King Jr.—increasingly concerned by America's moral vision, admitted—"I've come to believe that we are integrating into a burning house." In A Burning House, Brandon Washington...

In 1957, when the USSR launched Sputnik I, the first man-made satellite to orbit Earth, America’s rival in the Cold War claimed victory on a new frontier. The Space Race had begun, and the United States was losing. Closer to home, a decade of turbulence would soon have Americans reeling, with the year 1968 alone seeing the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy as well as many violent clashes between police and protesters. Americans desperately needed something good to believe in.

Since astronauts first ventured into space in the early 1960s, the human race has been thinking about the bigger picture: Could we ever live in space? Where would we plant our new roots? Explore the ways engineers, researchers, and astrophysicists are pushing our scientific limits every day to get us closer to living on another planet.

A spiritual aspirant’s journey is sprinkled with many battles overcoming mind over matter through different sadhanas (spiritual practices). One such sadhana is going on a pilgrimage, which provides challenges for the body, mind, and intellect.