Pew

Author: Catherine Lacey
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374720134
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Book Description
WINNER of the 2021 NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award. Finalist for the 2021 Dylan Thomas Prize. Longlisted for the 2021 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. One of Publishers Weekly's Best Fiction Books of 2020. One of Amazon's 100 Best Books of 2020. “The people of this community are stifling, and generous, cruel, earnest, needy, overconfident, fragile and repressive, which is to say that they are brilliantly rendered by their wise maker, Catherine Lacey.” --Rachel Kushner, author of The Flamethrowers A figure with no discernible identity appears in a small, religious town, throwing its inhabitants into a frenzy In a small, unnamed town in the American South, a church congregation arrives for a service and finds a figure asleep on a pew. The person is genderless and racially ambiguous and refuses to speak. One family takes in the strange visitor and nicknames them Pew. As the town spends the week preparing for a mysterious Forgiveness Festival, Pew is shuttled from one household to the next. The earnest and seemingly well-meaning townspeople see conflicting identities in Pew, and many confess their fears and secrets to them in one-sided conversations. Pew listens and observes while experiencing brief flashes of past lives or clues about their origin. As days pass, the void around Pew’s presence begins to unnerve the community, whose generosity erodes into menace and suspicion. Yet by the time Pew’s story reaches a shattering and unsettling climax at the Forgiveness Festival, the secret of who they really are—a devil or an angel or something else entirely—is dwarfed by even larger truths. Pew, Catherine Lacey’s third novel, is a foreboding, provocative, and amorphous fable about the world today: its contradictions, its flimsy morality, and the limits of judging others based on their appearance. With precision and restraint, one of our most beloved and boundary-pushing writers holds up a mirror to her characters’ true selves, revealing something about forgiveness, perception, and the faulty tools society uses to categorize human complexity.

Parenting in the Pew

Author: Robbie F. Castleman
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
ISBN: 0830866477
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 161

Book Description
In this upbeat book Robbie Castleman shows parents how to guide their toddlers and teenagers to participate more fully in the worship of the church. This significantly revised and updated edition includes a new preface and new appendices with ideas for children's sermons and intergenerational community.

The Next America

Author: Paul Taylor
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 1610396685
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 290

Book Description
The America of the near future will look nothing like the America of the recent past. America is in the throes of a demographic overhaul. Huge generation gaps have opened up in our political and social values, our economic well-being, our family structure, our racial and ethnic identity, our gender norms, our religious affiliation, and our technology use. Today's Millennials -- well-educated, tech savvy, underemployed twenty-somethings -- are at risk of becoming the first generation in American history to have a lower standard of living than their parents. Meantime, more than 10,000 Baby Boomers are retiring every single day, most of them not as well prepared financially as they'd hoped. This graying of our population has helped polarize our politics, put stresses on our social safety net, and presented our elected leaders with a daunting challenge: How to keep faith with the old without bankrupting the young and starving the future. Every aspect of our demography is being fundamentally transformed. By mid-century, the population of the United States will be majority non-white and our median age will edge above 40 -- both unprecedented milestones. But other rapidly-aging economic powers like China, Germany, and Japan will have populations that are much older. With our heavy immigration flows, the US is poised to remain relatively young. If we can get our spending priorities and generational equities in order, we can keep our economy second to none. But doing so means we have to rebalance the social compact that binds young and old. In tomorrow's world, yesterday's math will not add up. Drawing on Pew Research Center's extensive archive of public opinion surveys and demographic data, The Next America is a rich portrait of where we are as a nation and where we're headed -- toward a future marked by the most striking social, racial, and economic shifts the country has seen in a century.

From Politics to the Pews

Author: Michele F. Margolis
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022655581X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 307

Book Description
One of the most substantial divides in American politics is the “God gap.” Religious voters tend to identify with and support the Republican Party, while secular voters generally support the Democratic Party. Conventional wisdom suggests that religious differences between Republicans and Democrats have produced this gap, with voters sorting themselves into the party that best represents their religious views. Michele F. Margolis offers a bold challenge to the conventional wisdom, arguing that the relationship between religion and politics is far from a one-way street that starts in the church and ends at the ballot box. Margolis contends that political identity has a profound effect on social identity, including religion. Whether a person chooses to identify as religious and the extent of their involvement in a religious community are, in part, a response to political surroundings. In today’s climate of political polarization, partisan actors also help reinforce the relationship between religion and politics, as Democratic and Republican elites stake out divergent positions on moral issues and use religious faith to varying degrees when reaching out to voters.

From Pew to Pulpit

Author: Clifton Floyd Guthrie
Publisher: Abingdon Press
ISBN: 0687066603
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 138

Book Description
A down-to-earth, practical introduction to the ins and outs of preaching for lay preachers, bivocational pastors, and others newly arrived in the pulpit. Recent years have seen a considerable increase in the amount of financial resources required to support a full-time pastor in the local congregation. In addition, large numbers of full-time, seminary trained clergy are retiring, without commensurate numbers of new clergy able to take their place. As a result of these trends, a large number of lay preachers and bivocational pastors have assumed the principal responsibility for filling the pulpit week by week in local churches. Most of these individuals, observes Clifton Guthrie, can draw on a wealth of life experiences, as well as strong intuitive skills in knowing what makes a good sermon, having listened to them much of their lives. What they often don't bring to the pulpit, however, is specific, detailed instruction in the how-tos of preaching. That is precisely what this brief, practical guide to preaching has to offer. Written with the needs of those for whom preaching is not their sole or primary occupation in mind, it begins by emphasizing what every preacher brings to the pulpit: an idea of what makes a sermon particularly moving or memorable to them. From there the book moves into short chapters on choosing an appropriate biblical text or sermon topic, learning how to listen to one's first impressions of what a text means, moving from text or topic to the sermon itself while keeping the listeners needs firmly in mind, making thorough and engaging use of stories in the sermon, and delivering with passion and conviction. The book concludes with helpful suggestions for resources, including Bibles, commentaries, other print resources and websites.

Sittin' in the Front Pew

Author: Parry Ann Brown
Publisher: Villard
ISBN: 0375757058
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Book Description
Returning to Baltimore from Los Angeles to bury her late father, Glynda Naylor and her three sisters celebrate their father's life and search for answers about who the real Edward Naylor, who had raised them after their mother's death, was. Original. 35,000 first printing.

Pew Sisters

Author: Katie Schuermann
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780758638854
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Every woman in the pew has a story of God's faithfulness, and women love nothing better than to revel in one another's experiences and celebrate the sisterhood of believers. Pew Sisters helps get that celebration started. Devotional in both tone and form, this twelve-session study tells what God is doing in the lives of real women today. From depression to grief to cancer, women from all over the Church share their stories here for the consolation and encouragement of their sisters in faith. We are all one in the Body of Christ, so these beautiful women are your pew sisters. Their joys are your joys, and their sorrows are your sorrows. They share the same faith as you, eat at the same table as you, and inherit the same paradise as you. Join them in the pages of this study and in your own small group. Book jacket.

Preaching from the Pew

Author: Patricia G. Brown
Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
ISBN: 9780664500191
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 168

Book Description
In this deeply spiritual and prophetic collection of sermons, meditations, and prayers, Pat Brown takes the reader on a personal journey into and out of some of the most critical challenges facing the church in these turbulent and confusing times. She unveils her story of God's handiwork in shaping her life as a child of the Reformed tradition and as the mother of a special needs son. In a time when the call for justice withers on the vine as the church struggles with itself, this book is required reading for every perplexed servant of Jesus Christ.

The Pew and the Picket Line

Author: Christopher D. Cantwell
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252081484
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
The Pew and the Picket Line collects works from a new generation of scholars working at the nexus where religious history and working-class history converge. Focusing on Christianity and its unique purchase in America, the contributors use in-depth local histories to illustrate how Americans male and female, rural and urban, and from a range of ethnic backgrounds dwelt in a space between the church and the shop floor. Their vivid essays show Pentecostal miners preaching prosperity while seeking miracles in the depths of the earth, while aboveground black sharecroppers and white Protestants establish credit unions to pursue a joint vision of cooperative capitalism. Innovative and essential, The Pew and the Picket Line reframes venerable debates as it maps the dynamic contours of a landscape sculpted by the powerful forces of Christianity and capitalism. Contributors: Christopher D. Cantwell, Heath W. Carter, Janine Giordano Drake, Ken Fones-Wolf, Erik Gellman, Alison Collis Greene, Brett Hendrickson, Dan McKanan, Matthew Pehl, Kerry L. Pimblott, Jarod Roll, Evelyn Sterne, and Arlene Sanchez Walsh.

The Last Pew

Author: Sophia Sunshine Vilceus
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781937741655
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 165

Book Description
The Last Pew is the story of a young, single Christian woman who for most of her life lived a pure, wholesome, spiritual, and obedient existence. Upon moving to a new city and beginning her career as an educator, on the job she encounters a young unhappily married man who also happens to be a minister at a local Baptist church. Throughout a 2 year period of the two working together, she is courted; they fall in love, and commit to a life and relationship of immorality and sin. The narrative essentially tells the love story of the two. It shows how two people who know God intimately and have been doing God's will for so long can eventually walk down a path of spiritual destruction. The story illustrates the reasons that enabled the young woman's spiritual judgment to decline in order for this relationship to even take place. Moreover, the story shows the spiritual steps that the young woman had to take in order to be freed from the affair. The story clearly shows the power of God's Grace, Mercy, Forgiveness, and the true capacity of Prayer and Fasting. The Last Pew is an important story because it is an account on adultery which certainly is a muzzled issue within the Christian community. The story is an honest, transparent and appropriate narrative written with the hopes of providing its reader with a different take of who the other woman is. It is proof that the other woman can in fact be a woman of God who got lost while on her walk with Christ. At its core, The Last Pew is a story of redemption and finding purpose after sin. The title, The Last Pew, symbolizes how far the narrator was from God's altar and His will. But the story is a reminder that God's love can always allow for any lost soul to move back to the front of His altar. The end of the book serves as a workbook for struggling women coming out of their affair. There is a chapter devoted to points and scriptures to guide women through the process of their healing. The end of the book closes with an open letter to any woman who has had to deal with infidelity within her own marriage. A riveting testimony and a biblical based workbook, TLP is a resource for all women. Though adultery is a silent story within the Church, it certainly is a reality for many Christians, making this a conversation one that needs to be had. Whether the person reading this story is a woman trying to come out of an affair, a wife trying to heal from learning about an extra-marital affair, or a man of God that is caught in the middle---this book will minister.