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Free Download Wonder of Wonders : A 25 Day Journey into the Heart of Christmas By Keith Wall
2014 | 88 Pages | ISBN: 1780781288 | EPUB | 1 MB
Through this heartwarming, 25-day collection of reflections, bestselling author Keith Wall challenges readers to use the characters and events surrounding the Christmas story as a mirror to explore the ways God is at work in our lives. Beginning on December 1, Wonder of Wonders takes readers through the season with personal-application thoughts on the individuals and incidents that make up this decisive moment in human history. Along the way Wall explores the meaning behind the moments we have read about and sung about over and over.Readers will see how the beloved tales of Christ and Christmas are turned into moving examples of God's grace, creativity, and love-and the ways in which we can reflect these qualities to those around us in practical and powerful ways. Wonder of Wonders reminds us that the Christmas season, like no other time during the year, opens doors for the restoration of broken relationships, healing for wounded hearts, and the expression of love to those who desperately need a touch of grace.

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Free Download Women in Ministry : Questions and Answers in the Exploration of a Calling By Shannon Smythe; Robert W. Wall
2015 | 114 Pages | ISBN: 1625645120 | EPUB | 1 MB
Does Scripture exclude women from full participation in all forms of Christian ministry simply on the basis of gender? What insights can the church's "rule of faith," theology, Scripture, Christian history, and testimonies give women and men exploring this important issue today? In many Christian congregations and college classrooms, debates over the ordination and ministry of women create hurtful and debilitating divisions among believers. This new book by Shannon Smythe leans into those inhospitable places by inviting readers into a process of discernment that intends to lead them, and women especially, into a fresh awareness of their sacred calling to a ministry of the gospel. In Women in Ministry Smythe presents a carefully curated collection of thoughtful answers to common questions asked by those investigating this topic, inviting them to share in the communal practice of studying scripture together in dialogue with the church's theological traditions and the testimonies of faithful women. Readers are asked to reflect in deeply personal ways upon the truth they have found in their study, which then enables the Spirit to direct (or redirect) them forward in the ways of God.

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Free Download Women in Mexican Politics : A Study of Representation in a Renewed Federal and Democratic State By Fernanda Vidal Correa
2016 | 142 Pages | ISBN: 1498534392 | EPUB | 1 MB
This book offers an analysis of how women's participation is conducted in Mexico´s political sphere. Federalization and decentralization processes can have a significant impact on women's participation and discrimination. By questioning the form in which a democratic state is built (that is, the degree of (de)centralization) the book looks to a set of forms and processes affecting women's political life. A decentralized form of state-government implies three levels of government in which women (or any other group of people) can have active participation: central-federal government, state-regional-province government, and local (municipalities) government. This book offers an analysis of how gender discrimination operates in a different way in each of these levels of government and the corresponding political activity. Policies that fight against gender discrimination and promote women's participation, in both administration and political parties, do not always operate cooperatively, and often exist in contradiction with each other.

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Free Download Women in Leadership and Work-Family Integration By Margaret J. Weber; Kerri Cissna-Heath
2015 | 165 Pages | ISBN: 1443871931 | PDF | 1 MB
The majority of university students in the US and around the world are women (Economist, 2006). This recent increase in the education of women has allowed their employment rate to inflate, leading to an influx of issues surrounding the work-life balance. The era surrounding World War II led to an amplified presence of women seeking opportunities for a career, which in turn led to tensions at home and in the workplace as women try to balance the roles of family with a career. Many women have joined men in the provider role and the dual earner family has now become the norm (Gornick and Myers 2003). Traditional roles have shifted as women and men are both parents and workers. The picture of the career women and mother is divided and multi-faceted in existing research findings and opinions. Commonly assessed issues include the social implications of the dual roles of females, cultural norms, workplace policies with attention to female-specific hurdles, and marital satisfaction in gender roles. Various research studies suggest that marital relationships have become more egalitarian (Bielenski and Wagner, 2004), while others find that a large number of well-educated women have left careers for full-time motherhood (Belkin, 2003; Warner, 2005). In 2009, a research group was formed at Pepperdine University's Graduate School of Education and Psychology to explore the competing narratives of women's lives as they balance their work activities with the demands of marriage and motherhood. The ultimate goal of this project was to understand the work-life balance issues of women in the workforce. This work is now known as the Digital Women's Project (Weber, 2011) and has collected over 400 interviews of women to explore themes around work-life balance. This phenomenological analysis utilizes a narrative life-course framework created by Giele (2008) to explore identity, relational style, drive and motivation, and adaptive style in order to understand the work-life balance of women. Women in Leadership and Work-Family Integration brings together the findings of this research group.

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Free Download Women in Leadership : Contextual Dynamics and Boundaries, Second Edition By Karin Klenke
2017 | 592 Pages | ISBN: 1787430642 | EPUB | 1 MB
Women leaders in many parts of the world have leadership opportunities that never existed before as a result of technology, globalization, and demographic shifts that have produced more female graduates than in the past and created a workforce which consists almost 50% of women. Ever more so, in today's rapidly changing environment, the contexts in which women exercise leadership is critically important in shaping their leadership style. At the same time, objectifying women in contexts such as sports and the media or the patriarchal ideology that permeates contexts such as the military and the church have changed very little. This book, updated and expanded from the 2011 first edition, acknowledges and discusses the belief that the context in which women exercise leadership is critically important in shaping their leadership style. Each chapter opens with a vignette of an extraordinary leader in the respective context, presents a contextual analysis, and discusses issues, controversies and paradoxes germane to the context of interest. What is the future of women's leadership in a global environment characterized by ambiguity, uncertainty, increasing interdependence and interconnectivity? Award-winning author Karin Klenke shows us in this revised edition of Women in Leadership.

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Free Download Women and Men after Christendom : The Dis-Ordering of Gender Relationships By Fran Porter
2015 | 127 Pages | ISBN: 1842277596 | EPUB | 1 MB
This book explores the way that gender relationships changed under Christendom and then after Christendom, challenging us to rethink gender relations in both church and society. Fran Porter goes beyond the personal aspects of gender identity to structural, philosophical and theological considerations; and offers a paradigm for gender relationships different to the oppositional models that currently prevail. "This is an accessible read about the complex topic of gender, Christendom and post Christendom. For those seeking to explore the history of gender relationships in the church from the first century this is an excellent introduction." Dianne Tidball, East Midland Baptist Association, UK "Through careful handling of the argument, Fran Porter helps us to glimpse that vision of what the new community of Christ, the new kin-work he inaugurated, could look like - and how the church, in the way she is in the world, can be radical good news for men and women everywhere." Sian Murray Williams, Tutor in Worship Studies at Bristol Baptist College

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Free Download Women and Capitalism in the Croatian Hinterland : The Practice of Labor and Consumption By Nila Ginger Hofman
2014 | 175 Pages | ISBN: 0739187368 | EPUB | 1 MB
In Women and Capitalism in the Croatian Hinterland: The Practice of Labor and Consumption, Nila Ginger Hofman examines the effects of post-socialist capitalism on the lives of Croatian women. Croatia's secession from socialism and a more recent gestating capitalist landscape provide the contexts in which the author examines how women navigate the labor and consumer markets. The women consulted for this book experienced two decades of developing free-market capitalism. They also experienced the disintegration of the self-managing socialism that existed in Yugoslavia from 1948 to 1991; four years of the Balkan War, which brought emotional and infrastructural tolls; and the emergence of the new Croatian Republic in 1991. The transition to capitalism in the last part of the twentieth century brought anticipation, angst, and excitement. The new millennium has also been plagued by unemployment rates hovering around 20 percent as well as the emergence of western-style shopping malls. Women and Capitalism in the Croatian Hinterland details the cumulative effects of these changes, which resulted in an unprecedented upheaval in the lives of Croatians.

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Free Download Women Reviewing Women in Nineteenth-Century Britain : The Critical Reception of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot By Joanne Wilkes
2010 | 178 Pages | ISBN: 1138265659 | EPUB | 1 MB
Focusing particularly on the critical reception of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontà and George Eliot, Joanne Wilkes offers in-depth examinations of reviews by eight female critics: Maria Jane Jewsbury, Sara Coleridge, Hannah Lawrance, Jane Williams, Julia Kavanagh, Anne Mozley, Margaret Oliphant and Mary Augusta Ward. What they wrote about women writers, and what their writings tell us about the critics' own sense of themselves as women writers, reveal the distinctive character of nineteenth-century women's contributions to literary history. Wilkes explores the different choices these critics, writing when women had to grapple with limiting assumptions about female intellectual capacities, made about how to disseminate their own writing. While several publishing in periodicals wrote anonymously, others published books, articles and reviews under their own names. Wilkes teases out the distinctiveness of nineteenth-century women's often ignored contributions to the critical reception of canonical women authors, and also devotes space to the pioneering efforts of Lawrance, Kavanagh and Williams to draw attention to the long tradition of female literary activity up to the nineteenth century. She draws on commentary by male critics of the period as well, to provide context for this important contribution to the recuperation of women's critical discourse in nineteenth-century Britain.

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Free Download Wittgenstein and Early Analytic Semantics : Toward a Phenomenology of Truth By James Connelly
2015 | 283 Pages | ISBN: 0739199544 | EPUB | 1 MB
This book assesses the respective prospects of two competing methodological approaches to the study of meaning and communication, as well truth and inference, each figuring prominently within the analytic tradition of philosophy of language. The first, 'logistical' approach is characterized by the employment of de-compositional logical analysis designed to resolve various theoretically problematic semantic and logical puzzles. The representative proponents of this approach are the three great early analytic philosophers (Frege, Russell, and the early Wittgenstein). The second, 'phenomenological' approach, by contrast, instead advocates careful inspection and detailed description of our actual linguistic practices, along with general features of the ordinary circumstances, and lived experiences, in which they are situated. The aim of such description is then to dissolve the aforementioned puzzles by showing them to derive from key misunderstandings of these practices and circumstances. The principle proponent here is the later Wittgenstein. Expanding upon the work of the later Wittgenstein, this book argues that considerations regarding the nature of following a rule, and deriving from the impossibility of private languages, decisively recommend the phenomenological over the logistical methodology, in particular because these considerations demand that we identify linguistic meanings with the disciplined uses of words within public, and proto-typically social, linguistic practices.

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Free Download Wittenberg Meets the World : Reimagining the Reformation at the Margins By Alberto L. Garcia; John A. Nunes
2017 | 135 Pages | ISBN: 0802873286 | EPUB | 1 MB
Proposes creative implications of the 500-year Reformation tradition for today As the global church assesses the legacy of the Lutheran Reformation, Alberto García and John Nunes in this book reimagine central Reformational themes from black, Hispanic, and other perspectives traditionally at the margins of catholic-evangelical communities. Focusing on the central theme of justification, García and Nunes delve into three interlinked aspects of the church's life in the world-martyria (witness), diakonia (service), and koinōnia (fellowship). They argue that it is critically important and vitally enriching for the whole church, especially Eurocentric Protestant churches, to learn from the grassroots theological emphases of Christian communities in the emerging world.

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