The American Gospel - literally, the good news about America - is that religion shapes our public life without controlling it. In this vivid book, New York Times best-selling author Jon Meacham tells the human story of how the Founding Fathers viewed faith, and how they ultimately created a nation in which belief in God is a matter of choice.

Debates about religion and politics are often more divisive than illuminating. Secularists point to a "wall of separation between church and state," while many conservatives act as though the Founding Fathers were apostles in britches. As Meacham shows in this brisk narrative, neither extreme has it right. At the heart of the American experiment lies the God of what Benjamin Franklin called "public religion," a God who invests all human beings with inalienable rights, in a nation that protects private religion from government interference. It is a great American balancing act, and it has served us well.

American Gospel makes it compellingly clear that the nation's best  chance of summoning what Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature" lies in recovering the spirit and sense of the Founding. in looking back, we may find the light to lead us forward.

Dan Brown's popular novel The Da Vinci Code makes assertions that are in stark opposition to Catholic teaching and seriously misrepresents church history and doctrine. In 101 Q & A on The Da Vinci Code and the Catholic Tradition, two church historians separate fact from fiction and go beyond the endless refutations of Brown's assertions to focus on positive and, in some cases, surprising aspects of church history.

Besides showing where Brown went wrong, the authors also unlock the doors to the treasures of the Catholic tradition, and display the wealth of people, customs, and events that comprise Catholic identity. Far more than a mere Da Vinci Code "debunker," this book celebrates Catholic culture. Here is the ideal guide to not only what's wrong in the Da Vinci Code but also what's right about the Catholic tradition.

Does American, as George W. Bush has proclaimed, have a special mission, derived from God, to bring liberty and democracy to the world? How much influence does the Christian right have over U.S. foreign policy? And how should America deal with violent Islamist extremists?

Madeline Albright, the former secretary of state and best selling author of Madam Secretary, offers a thoughtful and often surprising look at the role of religion in shaping America's approach to the world. Drawing upon her experience while in office and her own deepest beliefs about morality, the United States, and the present state of world affairs, a woman noted for plain speaking offers her thoughts about the most controversial topics of our time.

By definition, controversies are "discussions of questions in which opposing opinions clash" (Webster's Twentieth Century Dictionary Unabridged). Few would deny that controversies are a pervasive part of the human condition and exist on virtually every level of human enterprise.

The purpose of the Current Controversies series is to explore many of the social, political, and economic controversies dominating the national and international scenes today.

The debate over energy independence illustrates how complex energy policies are. Any energy decision will have a multitude of environmental and economic impacts that will continue to affect the country well into the future. Many of these costs are explored in Current Controversies: Alternative Energy Sources. In this anthology, authors examine whether alternative energy sources can help end foreign oil dependence and whether energy independence is a goal worth pursuing.

Since the publication of the first edition of Statues of Liberty in 1993, this book has been praised in both the USA and the UK as the definitive, as well as the first book on The New York School of Poets. It contains detailed readings of major poems by the key figures in the group, Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler and John Ashbery, now the most critically acclaimed American poet since Wallace Stevens. The book sheds new light on such questions as the relationship between American poetry and painting in the Cold War years, the importance of literary collaboration to gay writers pre-stonewall, and the growing influence of the New York School on postmodern poetry. For this second edition a new chapter has been added, focusing on contemporary developments, on O'Hara as a prescient critic of contemporary 'identity politics', and on the six books of poetry Ashbery has produced in the 1990s.

This unrivaled anthology presents a diverse and memorable array of poems published from the late 1950s to the present, reflecting the many voices of the American experience. Beginning with Robert Penn Warren and Elizabeth Bishop, Story Hour features a variety of poetic styles. It chronicles the increased interest in the form during the seventies, the New Narrative movement that began in the eighties, and the growing audience for stories in verse in such venues as cowboy poetry gatherings, demonstrating that narrative poetry continues to be an important and vital art form. Included is an appendix that provides summaries of long narrative poems, epic poems and novels in verse.