Paul Diederich worked in five new organizations dedicated to transforming American schools: the Ohio State University lab school, the Eight Year Study, a Harvard institute to revamp English language instruction, the University of Chicago's Board of Examiners, and the Educational Testing Service. Throughout his career he wrote critiques of American high schools and set forth many proposals to make them more flexible without sacrificing academic excellence. This anthology resurrects 14 Diederich essays, eight of them never before published. The scope ranges from visions of social justice to the details of the daily schedule. Like his heroes Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, he combined a passion for utopian speculation with a fascination for practical problems, a combination that is rare in the world of school reform today.

In Saint Paul, Elliott C. Maloney explores what the great saint says about the spiritual life, the “how to” in the day-to-day activities and concerns of Christians. How should people live in covenant relationship with God, committed to seeking God’s will in every aspect of their lives? Spirituality is a popular topic, but it is regarded as merely one part of life, some “higher level” of living when compared to ordinary living. Even Catholic scholarship, Maloney argues, notable as it is in Pauline exegesis and theology, seems to lack a feel for the overall kind of living that Paul wanted for his communities, not to mention how we might appropriate such wisdom for today. For Paul, all of a believer’s life is spiritual life. The alternative is a life “according to the flesh,” a self-centered life without God, a continual spiritual death. Based on over forty years of teaching and study of the Pauline letters, Maloney’s Saint Paul offers a rich vision of Christianity and the spiritual life “in Christ.”

La 4e de couverture indique : "For the Apostle Paul, humans do not identify and act on their own but are constituted, in part, by relationships. Samuel D. Ferguson shows that, according to Paul, the work of the Holy Spirit further attests to this, as Christians realize their new life through Spirit-created relationships of sonship and communal interdependence"

Paul is one of the more interesting and least understood characters in history--quite bluntly, a man who changed history, not just of the Christian community but the Jewish community as well. Paul was a rising star in the Jewish culture and openly admits to being the chief persecutor and prosecuting those of this upstart movement. While applying the legal system within the Jewish culture to all those now anathema to the Jewish culture, he finds himself not just defending this new movement but laying the groundwork for the behavior, customs, and legality of the Christ movement and organization. Once a defender of the Jewish faith, he now becomes a greater and stauncher defender of the Christian faith, even to the point of death in martyrdom as a political prisoner--a prosecuting attorney within the Jewish legal system now working as the principal legal and, as the author claims, prime legal counsel for the new Ekklesia. His letters are not so much about theology but legality. He was born to have a foot in the Jewish legal system and a foot in the world's then dominating legal system, only to serve as the first legal counsel and attorney general of the coming new legal system, this is Paul the lawyer; this is Paul the covenant killer.

Having gained fame and success in business, Paul G. Hoffman went on to become involved in a wide range of public concerns. In this new and revealing biography Alan R. Raucher provides the first assessment of Hoffman's entire career, beginning with his rise to the presidency of Studebaker and his success in applying progressive management to lift it from bankruptcy to profitability. A firm believer in the automobile, Hoffman became known as a sales genius, as a promoter of the new human relations approach to labor management, and as the industry's apostle of automotive safety. Raucher follows the movement of Hoffman's career into the broad public arena. Having developed a reputation as a progressive industrial statesman, Hoffman was a logical choice in 1948 to become the first administrator of the Marshall Plan, a key position in which he used economic foreign aid primarily to rebuild Western Europe in order to contain the spread of Communism. As the Cold War continued he came to regard economic foreign aid as a necessary sacrifice and dismissed all suggestions that the U.S. actually gave away billions of dollars in order to promote its own prosperity. Hoffman became convinced that foreign aid could promote peace and prosperity, especially through economic development in the poorer countries. As the first president of the new Ford Foundation, as a confidant of President Eisenhower, and as a top official of the U.N. Secretariat from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, Hoffman continued to confront the problems of the emerging Third World in a career that sheds light on the rise of the powerful development establishment and on its attitudes and policies.

During the past four years, political activism has grown to a level that has not been seen in the United States since the Vietnam War. Tensions over the war in Iraq and the presidential election motivated hundreds of thousands of people on both sides of the political fence to take to the streets. Politics the Wellstone Way offers a comprehensive set of strategies to help progressives channel that energy into winning issue-based and electoral campaigns. Wellstone Action is a nonprofit organization dedicated to continuing Paul and Sheila Wellstone’s fight for progressive change and economic justice by teaching effective political action skills to people across the country. Politics the Wellstone Way is a workshop in book form, providing the detailed framework needed to jump-start a new generation of activists plus plenty of helpful tools for old pros, including articulating a strong message, base building, field organizing, budgeting, fundraising, scheduling, getting out the vote, and grassroots advocacy and lobbying, illustrated by practical and inspirational examples. From the school board all the way to the White House, Politics the Wellstone Way instructs people on becoming better organizers, candidates, campaign workers, and citizen activists, empowering them to make their voices heard. Wellstone Action was established by the Wellstones’ two surviving sons, David and Mark. The main vehicle for this ongoing work is Camp Wellstone, a weekend training program that Wellstone Action leads regularly in locations across the country. Jeff Blodgett, Paul Wellstone’s longtime campaign manager, is the executive director of Wellstone Action. For more information visit www.wellstoneaction.com.

A generation of biblical scholars have sparked a revolution in thinking about the apostle Paul. Now, bible scholar and progressive Christian pastor Eric C. Smith is helping Christians see how that revolution makes a difference for people engaged in the work of justice and inclusion. In Paul the Progressive, Smith revisits Paul in light of modern biblical scholarship, telling the story of a Paul who challenged the norms of his day, broke down barriers of gender and ethnicity, and re-imagined God’s plan for the world in terms of radical inclusion and salvation available to everyone.