Showing results by narrator "Tom Parks" in All Categories

As we walk through this life, the way will not always be easy and well-marked. In fact, we can expect lots of ups and downs and setbacks along the way. Sometimes we'll find ourselves face-to-face with a mountain that threatens to stop us in our tracks. We know that Jesus tells us we can move these mountains - but how?

In this groundbreaking re-evaluation of American society, economics, and public policy, Oren Cass challenges our basic assumptions about what prosperity means and where it comes from to reveal how we lost our way. The good news is that we can still turn things around - if the nation’s proverbial elites are willing to put the American worker’s interests first. Which is more important, pristine air quality, or well-paying jobs that support families? Unfettered access to the cheapest labor in the world, or renewed investment in the employment of Americans?

Faithful Catholics are beginning to realize it’s not their imagination. Pope Francis has led them on a journey from joy to unease to alarm and even a sense of betrayal. They can no longer pretend that he represents merely a change of emphasis in papal teaching. Assessing the confusion sown by this pontificate, Lost Shepherd explains what’s at stake, what’s not at stake, and how loyal believers should respond.

Corporate trainers are tasked with an awesome responsibility - helping individuals develop the skills they need to advance their careers and boost their organizations' bottom lines. It's a challenging job, but What Great Trainers Do is here to help - providing a proven structure for dynamic workshops along with surefire strategies for blending course content with fluid interaction.

Do you wish you had more qualified, committed, and mission-oriented leaders in your church to share the ministry workload? Do you have a passion for cultivating the God-given leadership gifts in others? Most pastors say that the need to identify and develop leaders is critical to the health and growth of their church, yet most churches do not have an intentional plan for doing this.

Eminent biblical scholar Michael D. Coogan offers here a wide-ranging and stimulating exploration of the Old Testament, illuminating its importance as history, literature, and sacred text.

Infertility is the profoundly wounding experience of many couples, often leading to feelings of despair and shame as they grapple with shattered dreams and unanswered questions. But God does not leave them alone in their pain. The Creator and Redeemer of life has not forsaken the infertile, but has called and equipped them to participate in his church, kingdom, and mission.

Looking for direction in your life? Ever wonder how God is working in you and around you? Join pastor and trainer Steve Witt as he helps you locate the intersection where our passions and personal currencies meet - your sweet spot - and in the process discover where God has been at work all along. Partnering with God’s Spirit in these ways will breed a deep sense of inner peace and cause your faith to grow. You will begin to recognize God’s hand in your past, your present, and see how He is plotting a course for your future.

What is the 'Christian life' all about? Studying the Bible, attending church, cultivating a prayer life, witnessing to others---those are all good. But is that really what Jesus has in mind? The answer, says Scot McKnight in One.Life, lies in Jesus' words, 'Follow me.'What does it look like to follow Jesus, and how will doing so change the way we live our life---our love.life, our justice.life, our peace.life, our community.life, our sex.life---everything about our life.

Do you want to have great ideas? Do you want to break out of the rut of conventional thinking? Would you like to be a genius? Would presenting brilliant ideas help in your job, career, and social life? How to be a Brilliant Thinker will help you to achieve all these ideals, by helping you to think in powerful new ways. It tells you how to harness techniques in lateral thinking, analytical thinking, problem analysis, idea generation and other areas so that you become much more creative.

If you’ve ever lain awake at night wondering what might be around the corner of your child’s adolescence, this book is for you! After more than 38 years of working with more than 2,500 teens, Mark Gregston, founder of Heartlight, a Christian residential counseling center, introduces Tough Guys and Drama Queens - a must-listen "how-to" book for parents of preteens and teens with time-tested, biblical techniques to guide you through these unavoidably challenging years. Mark helps parents realize that some natural parenting approaches are actually counterproductive and therefore totally ineffective.

Anyone who has ever taken a music lesson knows the key to playing well is practice. The same is true for another transformative discipline - meditation - and yet, so often the two fail to harmonize. In Tune helps sync these practices to achieve the kind of mindfulness that opens our ears to the symphony of sound and silence all around.

“There is no good reason why human societies should not be described and explained with the same precision and success as the rest of nature.” Thus argues evolutionary psychologist Pascal Boyer in this uniquely innovative book. Integrating recent insights from evolutionary biology, genetics, psychology, economics, and other fields, Boyer offers precise models of why humans engage in social behaviors such as forming families, tribes, and nations, or creating gender roles.

Are you tired of getting the standard cookie-cutter answers to questions you aren't even asking? This candid book offers uncommon answers to both classic and bleeding-edge questions you may have about Christians and Christianity. Covering such topics as astrophysics, social justice, and acceptance of the LGBTQ community, this one-of-a-kind book is perfect for anyone skeptical of Christianity who values honest answers to their honest questions.

Building Digital Culture aims to answer a simple question: How can organisations succeed when the environment they operate in is changing so quickly? The last thing businesses need today is a digital strategy. Instead, their strategy needs to be fit for our fast-changing digital world, where businesses have more data than they know what to do with, a media landscape that's exploded in size and complexity, the risk of a new disruption around every corner, and only one certainty: that this change won't let up.

Business schools teach that the most important prerequisite for starting a business is a business plan. Nonsense, says Carl Schramm in Burn the Business Plan, who for a decade headed the most important foundation devoted to entrepreneurship in this country. Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, and Google are just a few of the companies that began without one.

It happens to every parent. One day, you have a sweet son or daughter who loves to snuggle on the couch and who puts a smile on your face just by walking into the room. The next day, it's as if someone left the door open and let in an alien with a smart mouth and an attitude that, frankly, you could do without. Entering middle school is like stepping onto a different planet - for parent and child alike. It's a planet where peer pressure, social media, and hormones can wreak havoc in your child's life.

The purpose of this book is twofold: first, to elucidate the logic, principles, and significance of the Declaration of Independence as the embodiment of the American mind; and, second, to shed light on what John Adams once called the "real American Revolution"; that is, the moral revolution that occurred in the minds of the people in the 15 years before 1776.

The 16 case studies in this volume examine the culture of armies, navies, and air forces from the Civil War to the Iraq War and how and why culture affected their performance in the ultimate arbitration of war.

Positive organizational psychology, with its focus on the identification and development of strengths, is a natural ally to executive development and leadership coaching. However, this approach is only just beginning to come to the attention of organizations and consequently, the research base for strength-based coaching is in its early stages of development. Strength-Based Leadership Coaching in Organizations reviews strength-based approaches to positive leadership development and evaluates the evidence for their effectiveness, critically assesses their apparent distinctiveness and more.