Showing results by narrator "And Arndt." in All Categories

From “one of the most brilliant young psychologists of her generation” (Paul Bloom), a groundbreaking examination of how speech causes some of our deepest social divides—and how it can help us overcome them.

When Claire Hoffman's alcoholic father abandons his family, his desperate wife, Liz, tells five-year-old Claire and her seven-year-old brother, Stacey, that they are going to heaven - Iowa - to live in Maharishi's national headquarters for Heaven on Earth. For Claire's mother, Transcendental Meditation - the Maharishi's method of meditation and his approach to living the fullest possible life - was a salvo that promised world peace and enlightenment just as their family fell apart.

All I want for the holidays is the willpower to resist my brother’s sexy, charming, easy-on-the-eyes new business partner. Instead, I'm stuck planning all the holiday parties with the one guy who makes me want to break my dating diet. Who thought that was a good idea? Oh, me. Yep, brilliant, strategic me who raised her hand and said yes I’d love to hang mistletoe with that hot former sports star. (Note to self: Mistletoe leads to toe-curling, knee-weakening kisses.)

Cassie swore she'd never forgive Ethan for breaking her heart when they were in acting school years ago. He was her one great love, and when he refused to love her back, a part of her died forever...or so she thought. Now she and Ethan are sharing a Broadway stage, and he's determined to win her back. Finally he's able to say all the things she needed to hear years ago...but can she believe him? Has he really changed, and what makes this time different from all his other broken promises?

On a dark Kentucky night in 1952, exactly halfway between her 15th and 16th birthdays, Annie Holleran crosses into forbidden territory. Everyone knows Hollerans don't go near Baines - not since Joseph Carl was buried two decades before - but armed with a silver-handled flashlight, Annie runs through her family's lavender fields toward the well on the Baines' place. At the stroke of midnight, she gazes into the water in search of her future.

Toward the end of the fourth century, a group of men and women began to withdraw from the halls of privilege and power into the desert to rediscover the essence of Jesus Christ. The stories and examples of these desert fathers and mothers are recorded for us. The desert fathers and mothers found a way to live radically, humanly, and beautifully in a spiritually desolate and confusing time. So can we. Streams in the Wasteland is for all those who thirst for a better way—the radical way of Jesus amid the desert of our age.

Rule number one: Don't get hit by your own arrow.... I'm a professional Cyrano - minus the honking great nose. Need a love note, raunchy sext, or apology letter so epic that your other half will forget you hesitated a beat too long when you asked, "does this make me look fat?"? I've got you covered. But when my most frequent client, the annoyingly charming (or is that charmingly annoying?) Dylan Griffin comes to me with an unconventional new job, I discovers that three little words can add up to one big complication.

Four years ago, I lost my virginity on live, streaming television. Too bad I wasn’t awake for it. Three of the four guys in the video shared me. But that fourth guy, who did nothing? That was my boyfriend, Drew. And that was the last time I saw him. Until today, when my father - now on a path to the White House - hired him as head of security for my new team as I return home after four years of “recovering” in an undisclosed location that involved white lab coats, needles, pills, and damage control.

Out of work for months, Lussi Meyer is desperate to work anywhere in publishing. Prestigious Blackwood-Patterson isn’t the perfect fit, but a bizarre set of circumstances leads to her hire and a firm mandate: Lussi must find the next horror superstar to compete with Stephen King, Anne Rice, and Peter Straub. It’s the ’80s, after all, and horror is the hottest genre. But as soon as she arrives, Lussi finds herself the target of her coworkers’ mean-spirited pranks.

Sasha Martin set herself a rather ambitious goal: to cook - and eat - her way around the world, with 196 recipes from196 countries in 196 weeks. Enter Global Table Adventure, a project that proves to be more than just a culinary challenge as Sasha attempts to navigate the vicissitudes of marriage, motherhood, and life's failures and successes, all inextricably linked to her troubled past.

Ruby Graves, a young girl in Depression-era Alabama, faces the hardships of poverty and loss with as much faith as she can muster. At only the age of 13, she's already lost a younger brother to illness and now faces losing both her father and the boy who's stealing her heart to illnesses as well. Armed with her beloved scriptures, she prays daily for their healing, only to have her tender faith shattered by her father's death.

In the title story, set five minutes in the future where you not only have a credit score but also a dating score, a woman who’s been banished from all dating apps attends a weekly help group with others who have been “banned for life,” and finds herself falling in love. In “Backwards,” a twist on Benjamin Button, a woman reconnects with her estranged father as he de-ages ten years each day they spend together. In “Welcome to Oxhead,” all the parents in a gated community “shut off” when the power goes out.

With The Last Days of California, Mary Miller bursts into the literary world, taking up the mantle of Southern fiction and rendering it her own with wry vulnerability and contemporary urgency. Miller’s revelatory protagonist, Jess, is fourteen years old and waiting for the world to end. Her evangelical father has packed up the family and left their Montgomery home to drive west to California, hoping to save as many souls as possible before the Second Coming.

As a child, Abby had the same recurring nightmare night after night, in which she wandered through a field ridden with human skulls and bones. Now an adult, Abby thinks she's outgrown her demons, until, the evening before her wedding, the terrible dream returns and forces her to confront the dark secrets from her past she has kept from her new husband, Willem. The following day - less than 24 hours after exchanging vows - Abby steps out into traffic.

When you’re born without a trace, no one knows you’re a weapon. I lie for her. I hunt for her. I kill for her. And above all, I betray my mission for her. She doesn’t know why. She doesn’t care why. I do. Treason comes in many forms. Love is one of them. Our training taught me to be a sociopath. A machine. A pawn. Nothing more than a tool for a larger goal, without attachments or feelings. Our teachers forgot one important detail: Pawns shouldn’t have hearts. Yet we do.

Ten-year-old Grace is in search of a subject for her fifth-grade history project when she learns that her four times-great grandfather once stabbed his lover to death. His grisly act was memorialized in a murder ballad, her aunt tells her, so it must be true. But the lessons of that revelation—to be careful of men and desire—are not just Grace’s to learn. Her family’s tangled past is part of a dark legacy in which the lives of generations of women are affected by the violence immortalized in folk songs like “Knoxville Girl” and “Pretty Polly” reminding them always to know their place.

Many books engage the life of the Trinity at an academic level, focusing simply on fine points of theological distinction. In All Flame, Andrew Arndt drills down, with mystical power and missional energy, to the dream of the God revealed in three persons - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit - showing how the Triune God is not far but near, already in touch with your life, already present to you, already at work in and through your circumstances to make you the kind of person he desires you to be: all flame. 

I was ready to propose and I got upstaged by a snake. Not a real one. My bandmate. A case of mistaken identity almost derailed my proposal to Amy, but in the end, love prevailed. And my hand hurts from the punch, but it was worth it. She’s worth it. But I really need an ice pack now. Though a kiss from Amy and that yes are even better.

An old love letter found in the glove compartment of a young woman's inherited '72 Volkswagen propels her to leave her life in Los Angeles and go to the small town of Capitola, California. There her dream of finding the writer of the letter leads her on an unexpected journey that changes her life forever.

An intimate portrait of Handel’s life and inner circle, modeled after one of the composer’s favorite forms: the fugue. During his lifetime, the sounds of Handel’s music reached from court to theater, echoed in cathedrals, and filled crowded taverns, but the man himself - known to most as the composer of Messiah - is a bit of a mystery. Though he took meticulous care of his musical manuscripts and even provided for their preservation on his death, very little of an intimate nature survives.