New Titles – May 6, 2025

Here is a selection of print and e-books recently added to our collection.

 Addresses on the Song of Solomon /by H.A. Ironside.   Addresses on the Song of Solomon is a book of sermons by H.A ironside, first published in 1933.  It presents an abbreviated version of addresses delivered at Moody Memorial Church in Chicago, focused on the Song of Solomon. The book primarily offers an allegorical interpretation, viewing the Song as a representation of Christ and His relationship with the Church

 Aging faithfully: the holy invitation of growing older /Alice Fryling.  Would you like to grow in life-giving ways as you age? Do you have the courage to let go of former ways of thinking to receive God’s love and life in new ways? As we age, we experience the loss of physical stamina, independence, and career fulfillment. Yet within each of these losses is a holy invitation to grow. God calls us to let go of our need for accomplishment and embrace the gift of fruitfulness so that we might be transformed in this final season of our lives. In Aging Faithfully, Fryling explores how to navigate the journey of retirement, lifestyle changes, and new limitations. In this season of life, we are invited to hold both grief and hope, to acknowledge ways of thinking that no longer represent who we are, and to receive peace in the midst of our fears. We all age differently, and God calls each of us to new spiritual birth as we mature. When we embrace the aging process, we grow closer to God and experience his grace as he renews us from within. Whether you are approaching the beginning, middle, or end of your senior years, you are invited. Come and be transformed.

  Applied logistic regression /David W. Hosmer, Jr., Stanley Lemeshow, Rodney X. Sturdivant.  This thoroughly expanded Third Edition of the definitive guide to logistic regression modeling for health science and other applications provides an easily accessible introduction to the logistic regression (LR) model and highlights the power of this model by examining the relationship between a dichotomous outcome and a set of covariables. The book emphasizes applications in the health sciences and handpicks topics that best suit the use of modern statistical software. It also provides readers with state-of-the-art techniques for building, interpreting, and assessing the performance of LR models. New and updated features include: A chapter on the analysis of correlated outcome data. A wealth of additional material for topics ranging from Bayesian methods to assessing model fit. Rich data sets from real-world studies that demonstrate each method under discussion. Detailed examples and interpretation of the presented results as well as exercises throughout..

  Art as witness : a practical theology of arts-based research /Helen T. Boursier.  Art As Witness argues for the integration of arts-based research with theology and religious studies to make urgent social justice themes easily accessible for education, advocacy, and public witness. Several case studies engage the arts with immigration, biblical studies, political protest, HIV/AIDS, gender equity, racial justice, and more.

 Assessing well-being /Ed Diener, editor. The Collected Works of Ed Diener, in 3 volumes, present the major works of the leading research scientist studying happiness and well-being. Professor Diener has studied subjective well-being, people’s life satisfaction and positive emotions, for over a quarter of a century, and has published 200 works on the topic, many more than any other scholar. He has studied hundreds of thousands of people in over 140 nations of the world, and the Collected Works present the major findings from those studies.

Augustine and the limits of virtue /James Wetzel.  Augustine’s moral psychology was one of the richest in late antiquity, and in this book James Wetzel evaluates its development, indicating that the insights offered by Augustine on free-will have been prevented from receiving full appreciation as the result of an anachronistic distinction between theology and philosophy. He shows that it has been commonplace to divide Augustine’s thought into earlier and later phases, the former being more philosophically informed than the latter. Wetzel’s contention is that this division is less pronounced than it has been made out to be. The author shows that, while Augustine clearly acknowledges his differences with philosophy, he never loses his fascination with the Stoic concepts of happiness and virtue, and of the possibility of their attainment by human beings. This fascination is seen by Wetzel to extend to Augustine’s writings on grace, where freedom and happiness are viewed as a recovery of virtue. The notorious dismissal of pagan virtue in ‘The City of God’ is part of Augustine’s family quarrel with philosophers, not a rejection of philosophy per se. Augustine the theologian is thus seen to be a Platonist philosopher with a keen sense of the psychology of moral struggle.

 Bible commentary: Jeremiah /by Theo. Laetsch.  This classic Lutheran commentary on the Prophet Jeremiah’s writings, by Dr. Theodore Laetsch, opens the work of Jeremiah, with a focus on the fact that he wrote by the inspiraton of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Christ testifying through him

 Cambridge history of China. Vol. 10-11, Late Ch́˜ing, 1800-1911 /edited by John F Fairbank  This is the first of two volumes in this major Cambridge history dealing with the decline of the Ch’ing empire. It opens with a survey of the Ch’ing empire in China and Inner Asia at its height, in about 1800. Contributors study the complex interplay of foreign invasion, domestic rebellion and Ch’ing decline and restoration. Special reference is made to the Peking administration, the Canton trade and the early treaty system, the Taiping, Nien and other rebellions, and the dynasty’s survival in uneasy cooperation with the British, Russian, French, American and other invaders. Each chapter is written by a specialist from the international community of sinological scholars. No knowledge of Chinese is necessary; for readers with Chinese, proper names and terms are identified with their characters in the glossary, and full references to Chinese, Japanese and other works are given in the bibliographies. Numerous maps illustrate the text, and there are a bibliographical essays describing the source materials on which each author’s account is based.

  Charles Wesley (1707-1788): preacher, poet, pastor /edited by Clive Murray Norris. Charles Wesley (1707-88) is most celebrated as a hymnwriter, and three of the essays in this book discuss this topic. They analyze how his verse encouraged both individuals and the church collectively to seek “renewal”; his use of symbolic language and the psychological responses that this engenders; and the complex history of the changing music to which his hymns are sung. Another essay focuses on Charles’s role as an evangelist and leader in the early years of the Evangelical Revival in Bristol. His role as a pastor is covered in a discussion of his relationship with an eccentric contemporary who dabbled in the occult, John Henderson (1757-88). Finally, there is a detailed analysis of known portraits of Charles Wesley, portraits which illustrated his status as one of history’s most consequential Methodists.

  Crucial conversations: tools for talking when stakes are high /Joseph Grenny, Kerry Patterson, Ron McMillan, Al Switzler, Emily Gregory.  Keep your cool and get the results you want when faced with crucial conversations. This New York Times bestseller and business classic has been fully updated for a world where skilled communication is more important than ever. The book that revolutionized business communications has been updated for today’s workplace. Crucial Conversations provides powerful skills to ensure every conversation-especially difficult ones-leads to the results you want. Written in an engaging and witty style, the book teaches readers how to be persuasive rather than abrasive, how to get back to productive dialogue when others blow up or clam up, and it offers powerful skills for mastering high-stakes conversations, regardless of the topic or person. This new edition addresses issues that have arisen in recent years. You’ll learn how to: Respond when someone initiates a crucial conversation with you Identify and address the lag time between identifying a problem and discussing it Communicate more effectively across digital mediums When stakes are high, opinions vary, and emotions run strong, you have three choices: Avoid a crucial conversation and suffer the consequences; handle the conversation poorly and suffer the consequences; or apply the lessons and strategies of Crucial Conversations and improve relationships and results. Whether they take place at work or at home, with your coworkers or your spouse, crucial conversations have a profound impact on your career, your happiness, and your future. With the skills you learn in this book, you’ll never have to worry about the outcome of a crucial conversation again.

  Delphi methods in the social and health sciences: concepts, applications and case studies/Marlen Niederberger, Ortwin Renn, editors. Delphi methods enable the systematic collection of expert judgments. They have proven to be particularly useful when a certain level of expertise and judgment is required to answer a research question. There are different variants of Delphi methods, such as the group Delphi or the real-time Delphi. The book presents current methodological developments and examples of application in the social and health sciences. This book is a translation of the original German 1st edition Delphi-Verfahren in den Sozial- und Gesundheitswissenschaften by Marlen Niederberger and Ortwin Renn, published by Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature in 2019. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content, so that the book will read stylistically differently from a conventional translation.