Church Government

David Headley, the American Pakistani also known as Daood Gilani, lived a double life. One day he would stroll through Central Park in his tailored Armani suit as a true New Yorker, and the next he would browse in the bazaar in Lahore wearing traditional Pakistani clothes. One day he would drink champagne at the most extravagant clubs; on another he would prostrate himself in prayer in remote Pakistan and pledge fidelity to Allah.

As a child, Elias Chacour lived in a small Palestinian village in Galilee. When tens of thousands of Palestinians were killed and nearly one million forced into refugee camps in 1948, Elias began a long struggle with how to respond. In Blood Brothers, he blends his riveting life story with historical research to reveal a little-known side of the Arab-Israeli conflict, touching on questions such as: What behind-the-scenes politics touched off the turmoil in the Middle East?

When conflicts become entrenched over generations, the language of war infiltrates everyday life, concealing destruction and hardening positions. Nowhere is this truer than in the Middle East. Award-winning author Raja Shehadeh explores the politics of language and the language of politics in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, reflecting on the walls that they create - legal and cultural - that confine today's Palestinians just like the borders, checkpoints and so-called "Separation Barrier".

In The Righteous Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt explores the origins of our divisions and points the way forward to mutual understanding. His starting point is moral intuition - the nearly instantaneous perceptions we all have about other people and the things they do. These intuitions feel like self-evident truths, making us righteously certain that those who see things differently are wrong. Haidt shows us how these intuitions differ across cultures, including the cultures of the political left and right.

Do "In God We Trust", the Declaration of Independence, and other historical "evidence" prove that America was founded on Judeo-Christian principles? Are the Ten Commandments the basis for American law? A constitutional attorney dives into the debate about religion's role in America's founding.

"I first met al-Qaeda before there was an al-Qaeda, way back in the winter of 1984. It was an encounter that came within a split second of costing me my life." So begins Rob Schultheis's gripping account of his journey into the heart of one of the world's most dangerous places, on the trail of the world's most wanted man. A veteran war correspondent, Schultheis offers a first-hand look at how the seeds of al-Qaeda were planted by foreign jihadists in the 1980s, before most Americans knew what the word "jihad" meant.

This highly anticipated debut from Matt Walsh of The Blaze demands that conservative voters make a last stand and fight for the moral center of America. The Trump presidency and Republican Congress provides an urgent opportunity to stop the Left's value-bending march to destroy the culture of our country. Republican control of the presidency, senate, and House of Representatives for the next two years is a precious - and fleeting - gift to conservatives.

Afghanistan traces the historic struggles and the changing nature of political authority in this volatile region of the world, from the Mughal Empire in the 16th century to the Taliban resurgence today. Thomas Barfield introduces listeners to the bewildering diversity of tribal and ethnic groups in Afghanistan, explaining what unites them as Afghans despite the regional, cultural, and political differences that divide them.

It is June 1936. Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) has finally been granted a visa for asylum in Norway, having been banned first from living in Paris, and then the whole of France. With him comes the draft of The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going?, which is completed and sent to the publishers on the 4th of August. The book, published by Faber in 1937, is considered to be Trotsky’s major work on Stalinism.

America has a God-shaped hole in its heart, argues New York Times best-selling author Ben Shapiro, and we shouldn't fill it with politics and hate.

Reaching out to listeners of all religious backgrounds, Desmond Tutu shows us how to transform suffering into joy both in our lives and in our world. He tells us that God dreams of a world where laughter, love, and peace reign, and where we realize that we are all members of one family, God's family. In this extremely personal and liberating message, Father Tutu helps us "see with the eyes of the heart" and cultivate the qualities of forgiveness, humility, generosity, and courage.

In January 2012, having covered a Somali pirate trial in Hamburg for Spiegel Online International, Michael Scott Moore traveled to the Horn of Africa to write about piracy and ways to end it. In a terrible twist of fate, Moore himself was kidnapped and subsequently held captive by Somali pirates for 977 days. Yet Moore’s own struggle is only part of the story: The Desert and the Sea falls at the intersection of reportage, memoir, and history.

In the Closet of the Vatican is a fascinating description and evaluation of financial, sexual and political misconduct throughout the Catholic Church at a time when new revelations are being uncovered each and every week. This audiobook explores the underlying causes and includes interviews with numerous Cardinals and other individuals, some of whom cannot be named. Martel reveals financial scandals in the Vatican bank; political collusion with unsavoury regimes, including Castro’s Cuba and Pinochet’s Chile; sexual abuse and hypocrisy over homosexuality.

From America's beginning, Christians have often merged their religious faith with national identity. But what is Christian nationalism? Paul D. Miller, a Christian scholar, political theorist, veteran, and former White House staffer, provides a detailed portrait of—and case against—Christian nationalism. Miller shows what's at stake if we misunderstand the relationship between Christianity and the American nation. Christian nationalism is an illiberal political theory, at odds with the genius of the American experiment, and could prove devastating to both church and state.

The Convenient Terrorist is the definitive inside account of the capture, torture, and detention of Abu Zubaydah, the first “high-value target” captured by the CIA after 9/11. But was Abu Zubaydah, who is still being indefinitely held by the United States under shadowy circumstances, the blue-ribbon capture that the Bush White House claimed he was?

By day, Julia Ebner works at a counter-extremism think tank, monitoring radical groups from the outside. But two years ago, she began to feel she was only seeing half the picture; she needed to get inside the groups to truly understand them. She decided to go undercover in her spare hours - late nights, holidays, weekends - adopting five different identities, and joining a dozen extremist groups from across the ideological spectrum.

In this eye-opening book, Matthew Rose introduces us to one of the most controversial intellectual movements of the 20th century, the "radical right", and discusses its adherents' different attempts to imagine political societies after the death or decline of liberalism. Questioning democracy's most basic norms and practices, these critics rejected ideas about human equality, minority rights, religious toleration, and cultural pluralism not out of implicit biases, but out of explicit principle.

How did a libertine who lacks even the most basic knowledge of the Christian faith win 81 percent of the white evangelical vote in 2016? And why have white evangelicals become a presidential reprobate's staunchest supporters? Jesus and John Wayne is a sweeping account of the last 75 years of white evangelicalism, showing how American evangelicals have worked for decades to replace the Jesus of the Gospels with an idol of rugged masculinity and Christian nationalism.

From UFOs to the New World Order, the inside story of how conspiracy theories won over America. In November 2017, a serial climate change denier and anti-vaxxer was elected President of the United States. The rise of Donald Trump marked the beginning of a new American epoch: the age of the conspiracy theorist. Now, Anna Merlan goes undercover in America’s sprawling network of conspiracy theorists.

Most Americans were shocked by the violence they witnessed at the nation's Capital on January 6th, 2021. And many were bewildered by the images displayed by the insurrectionists: a wooden cross and wooden gallows; "Jesus saves" and "Don't Tread on Me;" Christian flags and Confederate Flags; even a prayer in Jesus's name after storming the Senate chamber. Where some saw a confusing jumble, Philip S. Gorski and Samuel L. Perry saw a familiar ideology: white Christian nationalism.