Showing results for "True Stories" in Religious Studies

As the adopted son of two cult leaders, Benjamin Risha was raised to someday assume a place of leadership in the Tony and Susan Alamo Christian Foundation with the Bible, and his parents’ interpretation of it, as his guide. He believed the prophecies of his adoptive mother and father. However, when none of it happened, and the foundation slid from bucolic communal lifestyle to insufferable criminality that included absolute obedience to the Alamos, Benjamin knew he had to escape.

Queen of Thieves is the gritty, fast-paced story of Fredericka "Marm" Mandelbaum, a poor Jewish woman who rose to the top of her profession in organized crime during the Gilded Age in New York City. During her more than twenty-five-year reign as the country’s top receiver of stolen goods, she accumulated great wealth and power inconceivable for women engaged in business, legitimate or otherwise.

In the early 1980s on a remote part of the Sudanese coast, a new luxury holiday resort opened for business. Catering for divers, it attracted guests from around the world. Little did the holidaymakers know that the staff were undercover spies, working for the Mossad - the Israeli secret service. Providing a front for covert night-time activities, the holiday village allowed the agents to carry out an operation unlike any seen before. What began with one cryptic message pleading for help, turned into the secret evacuation of thousands of Ethiopian Jews....

Some individuals have such a magnetic personality that they can attract a hugely devoted following, ignoring the misdeeds of their leader and even committing evil on their behalf. With religious, spiritual or philosophical beliefs to guide them, cults can lead to some of the disturbing events of the modern era.

For many Christians, our understanding of the history of the church universal jumps straight from what we read in the New Testament to a basic understanding of the Reformation. We're missing more than a millennium! And it was a busy, fascinating, tumultuous thousand-or-so years during which Christianity spread across three continents. In places as distant and different from each other as China, Sudan, and Britain, the gospel was spreading, the church was growing, and believers were expressing their faith in myriad ways.

The unforgettable true story of a girl born in the Kovno Ghetto, and the dangerous risk her parents faced in defying the barbarous Nazi law prohibiting childbirth. Elida Friedman was not supposed to have been born. In the Kovno Ghetto in Lithuania, Nazi law forbade Jewish women from giving birth...

Raised near New Orleans as one of six children, Dorothy Newton was surrounded by abuse and poverty as she grew up. But she became the first in her family to graduate from college and moved out of poverty. She then began to live out her dreams in Dallas of a better home and life when she married...

A powerful chronicle of the women who used their sewing skills to survive the Holocaust, stitching beautiful clothes at an extraordinary fashion workshop created within one of the most notorious WWII death camps. At the height of the Holocaust twenty-five young inmates of the infamous...

Read by the authors. Explore the interwoven lives of King Herod and Mary, Mother of Jesus as New York Times bestselling author Kathie Lee Gifford brings these biblical figures into a new light. Follow Herod from boyhood as he strives and fails throughout his life to become a beloved king. Walk...

The unforgettable story of two unsung heroes of World War II: sisters Janny and Lien Brilleslijper who joined the Dutch Resistance, helped save dozen of lives, were captured by the Nazis, and ultimately survived the Holocaust. Eight months after Germany’s invasion of Poland, the Nazis roll...

The shocking and subversive memoir of a 12-year-NXIVM-member-turned-whistleblower, and her inspiring true story of abuse, escape, and redemption. "Master, would you brand me? It would be an honor."Scarred follows actress Sarah Edmondson's account of her recruitment into the NXIVM cult, founded...

The powerful, true story of a Holocaust survivor told by her daughter—a tale that reminds us of the resilience of the soul and the ability of the heart to heal. As Mira is nearing the end of her life, her daughter Rachelle wants to find out how her mother had lived through four concentration...

The New York Times bestselling author of The Dressmakers of Auschwitz tells the stories of four Jewish girls during the Holocaust, strangers whose lives were unknowingly linked by everyday garments, revealing how the ordinary can connect us in extraordinary ways. Jock Heidenstein, Anita Lasker...

An inspiring true story of hope and survival, this is the testimony of a boy who was imprisoned in Auschwitz, Gross-Rosen and Buchenwald and recorded his experiences through words and color drawings. In June 1943, after long years of hardship and persecution, thirteen-year-old Thomas Geve and...

In 1937, the Shwartz family lived a calm life in their small village in Poland. Fifteen-year-old Rachel liked to sing and go out dancing at a local night club, while her older brother David was busy running a farm and raising a family with his wife Hinda. But all that changed when the war reached Butla. First, the Russians came and kicked them out of their house. Then, the Nazis came to cart them off. But the Shwartz family resisted. David decided that no matter what, his family would not be taken captive. Instead, he snuck his family out of their village and into Hungary.

In 1939, a team of workers beneath the Vatican unearthed an early Christian grave. This surprising discovery launched a secret quest that would last decades a quest to discover the long-lost burial place of the Apostle Peter. From earliest times, Christian tradition held that Peter, a lowly fisherman from Galilee, whom Christ made leader of his church was executed in Rome by Emperor Nero and buried on Vatican Hill. But his tomb had been lost to history. Now, funded anonymously by a wealthy American, a small army of workers embarked on the dig of a lifetime.

This odd, irreverent spiritual memoir chronicles the author's accidental hallucinogenic journey to God and back with blunt comic undertones, undercutting the lofty gravitas typically associated with the "meeting God" genre. While making no claims regarding the "proof" of God in any way, this light-hearted true story is an entertaining and thought-provoking journey into the psychology of religion and the existence of God.

At the height of World War II, with the Third Reich's final solution in full operation, a small group of Jews who had barely escaped the Nazis did the unthinkable: They went back. Spies now, these men took on a dangerous mission behind enemy lines. They Dared Return is their story - a tale of adventure, espionage, love, and revenge.

Read by the author. Deepen your faith and find fresh hope in God's goodness as you discover inspiring stories that will encourage your heart. Life can be hard: grief, loss, busyness, financial hardships, abuse, broken relationships, and illness are just some of the difficulties we all face on a...

In the spring of 1933, more than 8,000 Jewish musicians, actors, and other artists were expelled from their positions with German orchestras, opera companies, and theater groups. Later that year, the Jüdische Kulturbund, or Jewish Culture Association, was created to allow Jewish artists to perform for Jewish audiences.