Does "Christianity" confuse and frustrate you? Do you long for insight and clarity concerning an authentic walk with God? There is hope! Quit settling for mediocrity (or hypocrisy) and begin living in the crescendo, the increase, the upsurge of true Christianity! In the pages of this book, you will find that out there somewhere - between Christ wanting us to have real life (John 10:10) and His sincere desire that we obey Him (Luke 6:46) - are the principles of PRY, waiting to be discovered, grasped, and activated. They promise to transform your heart. The Bible shows us the way - we just need to take God at His Word! Psalm 34:8 (NKJV) sings out, "Oh, taste and see that the LORD is good; Blessed is the man who trusts in Him!" Gaining his formal and spiritual education first from Liberty University and later from Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary, Ed Meshler is a native North Carolinian, Robin'shusband, Sam and Ginger's dad, a pastor, a Bible teacher, a writer, a reader, and a bit of a ragamuffin. Ed first formulated and began teaching these PRY principles in 1991. Family, friends, books, music, art, sports, church, youth camps, and the love of Trinity God fill the rest of his time. Well, all that and an ever-handy bottle of cold and refreshing sparkling water. www.edmeshler.com

Cycles, Growth and the Great Recession is a collection of papers that assess the nature and role of the business cycle in contemporary economies. These assessments are made in the context of the financial market instability that distinguishes the Great Recession from previous post-war slowdowns. Theorists and applied scholars in the fields of economics and mathematical economics discuss various approaches to understanding cycles and growth, and present mathematical and applied macro models to show how uncertainty shapes cycles by affecting the economic agent choice. Also included is an empirical section that investigates how the Great Recession affected households’ housing wealth, labour productivity and migration decisions. This book aims to: Propose a novel understanding of the business cycle by comparing the approaches of various scholars, starting from Hyman Minsky and Piero Ferri. Show that uncertainty is a main feature of the business cycle that affects decision-making and economic behaviour in general. Explain with mathematical models how the behaviour of economic agents can lead to cyclical paths for modern developed economies. Augment theory with empirical analysis of some central issues related to the Great Recession. This book comprises an original view of such widely discussed subjects as business cycles, uncertainty, economic growth and the Great Recession, constructed around theory, models and applications.

A groundbreaking reassessment of W. H. Auden's early life and poetry, shedding new light on his artistic development as well as on his shifting beliefs about political belonging in interwar England. W. H. Auden is a towering figure in modern literary history with a complex private self. Hannah Arendt wrote that he had 'the necessary secretiveness of the great poet'. The Island lays bare for the first time some of the most telling 'secrets' of Auden's early poetry, his world, his emotional life, his values and the sources of his art. In a book that is an argument but also a story, Nicholas Jenkins gives compelling readings of iconic poems. He presents Auden in the inter-War years as both a visionary writer, creatively dependent on dreams and intuitions, and a traumatized poet, haunted by war and suffering, and shadowed by his outsider status as a privileged but queer man. The Island considers, as well, Auden's imaginative flirtations with a lyrical nationalism appealing to a poet who, for a while, felt his psyche was like a map of English culture. The narrative ends in Auden's disillusionment with these potent myths and beliefs and the time when he left 'the island'. Auden's preoccupations - with the vicissitudes of war and the problems of love, belonging and identity - are of their time but they still resonate profoundly today. 'A superb, deeply researched study of Auden's early work and identity. Jenkins's understanding of young Auden as a poet shaped and haunted by the First World War - assimilating the influence of Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas, Robert Graves, and W. H. R. Rivers - is convincing, original, and poignant. Fusing biography, cultural history, and literary criticism in innovative and elegant ways, The Island is a landmark publication in modernist studies.' Heather Clark, author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath 'Nicholas Jenkins is one of our most perceptive and resourceful'Nicholas Jenkins is one of our most perceptive and resourceful critics. In this wonderful study of the early Auden, he brings to bear history, biography, and an acute sense of the artistic moment to fashion for us a young genius who is conservative, bucolic, gay, a patriotic adherent of post-imperial Little England. Most people work backwards from a writer's ultimate reputation, but Jenkins gives us a new, unexpected image of a poet developing in the aftermath of World War I and the collapse of modernism.' Edmund White, author of The Humble Lover 'The Island is a Copernican Revolution in Auden studies, a revelatory and often exciting book that presents a new and convincing account of Auden's early years. It explores, for the first time, the deep connections between the inner workings of his poems and the worlds of politics and economics. By bringing to light Auden's ambition to be a national poet, Jenkins transforms our understanding of not only Auden himself but all of modernist literature.' Edward Mendelson, author of Early Auden and Later Auden

Offering the first book-length consideration of Edward Upward (1903-2009), one of the major British left-wing writers, this collection positions his life and works in the changing artistic, social and political contexts of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Upward’s fiction and non-fiction, from the 1920s onwards, illustrate the thematic and formal richness of left-wing writing during the twentieth-century age of extremes. At the same time, Upward’s work shows the inherent tensions of a life committed at once to writing and to politics. The full range of Upward’s work and a wealth of unpublished materials are examined, including his early fantastic stories of the 1920s, his Marxist fiction of the 1930s, the extraordinary semi-autobiographical trilogy The Spiral Ascent and his formally and thematically innovative later stories. The essays collected here reevaluate Upward’s central place in twentieth-century British literary culture and assess his legacy for the twenty-first century.

Struggling Upward reconsiders the rise and maturation of the modern novel in Japan by connecting the genre to new discourses on ambition and social mobility. Collectively called risshin shusse, these discourses accompanied the spread of industrial capitalism and the emergence of a new nation-state in the archipelago. Drawing primarily on historicist strategies of literary criticism, the book situates the Meiji novel in relation to a range of texts from different culturally demarcated zones: the visual arts, scandal journalism, self-help books, and materials on immigration to the colonies, among others. Timothy J. Van Compernolle connects these Japanese materials to topics of broad theoretical interest within literary and cultural studies, including imperialism, gender, modernity, novel studies, print media, and the public sphere. As the first monograph to link the novel to risshin shusse, Struggling Upward argues that social mobility is the privileged lens through which Meiji novelists explored abstract concepts of national belonging, social hierarchy, and the new space of an industrializing nation.

"For My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways, saith the LORD." Isaiah 55:8 (KJV) How many times have you encountered difficult events or situations, shaken your head and whispered, "God just doesn't make sense"? On the surface, it certainly seems that way. He is a peculiar God, odd in many ways. But when we dig deeper, we also find a sinless and exhilarating God. From the days of Abel through today He baffles us, teaches us, and amazes us with real life lessons from real life people. The Christian life is an adventure - and God is anything but boring. Gaining his formal and spiritual education first from Liberty University and later from Liberty Theological Seminary, Ed Meshler is a native North Carolinian, Robin's husband, Sam and Ginger's dad, a Bible teacher, a writer, a reader, and a bit of a ragamuffin. Family, friends, books, music, art, sports, youth camps, and the love of Trinity God fill the rest of his time. Well, all that and an ever handy bottle of cold and refreshing sparkling water. www.edmeshler.com

Jasmin Humburg provides evidence of naturalist narrative strategies, tropes, and character variations in six contemporary American television series: The Wire, Tremé, Shameless, Ozark, Orange is the New Black and 2 Broke Girls. The author investigates how poverty is negotiated through classic literary naturalism and contemporary televisual articulations, and how the latter may have been influenced by the former in the age of the Great Recession. By connecting literary studies, television studies, and concepts of social mobility, this project contributes to the field of new poverty studies.

The Upward Spiral is both the story of Vals journey of transformation and a process she has developed, and tested, that can lead us out of the endless cycle of repeating mistakes and reaching dead ends in our personal growth, and onto a new path of endless possibilities. Her philosophy brings together metaphysics, science, philosophy, spirituality and much more, with simplicity and a ring of truth. With transparent and straightforward honesty, Val says that working the transformational ten steps of the Upward Spiral takes courage determination, discipline and responsibility, and it is darn hard work, but it is also a natural, joyous process that brings rewards from the very first step, and her enthusiasm for the Upward Spiral is encouraging.

First Published in 1993.A complete autobiography of Evalina Palmer-Sikelianos (1874-1952), a woman of immense spiritual strength who fought for the arts against the background of war. She contributed impressively throughout her life to the revival of interest in classical Greece, the theatre and choral dance, and advocated an adherence to mythical authenticity rather than a romanticised view of Greek tragic drama.