Showing results by author "Bryan Smith" in All Categories

Snakebite is a sleepy town in the middle of the Arizona desert. Nothing much exciting happens there. Until, that is, a terrified bounty hunter rides in raving about monsters.

We are story-making people. We love reading stories - and we love hearing the personal stories of others. We need stories, or narratives, to make sense of our world. And those stories shape our lives. What is the story you have been told about the Gospel? About God? About the Christian life? About Jesus? About the cross? About yourself? About heaven?

There is a road to life in the unshakable kingdom of God, but it's not an easy journey. In The Magnificent Journey, the author shows us the better road, the road less traveled, but the road full of riches. Along the way, he introduces us to new spiritual practices that will provide the sustenance we need for the deepest, most joy-filled journey of our lives - the journey into the heart of God.

For Allison Cook, the weekend trip to a horror convention in Virginia is a fun break from work and humdrum reality. Then she meets a guy who shows her a movie that shouldn’t exist, one that upends everything she thinks she knows about reality itself. The movie on the old VHS tape is an unseen and unknown installment of a legendary slasher franchise she’s loved since the dark days of her unhappy adolescence.

Beloved contemporary Christian musician Rich Mullins lived his life with abandon for God, leaving the spotlight to teach music among a Navajo community. An accident cut his life short in 1997, but his songs and ragamuffin spirit continue to teach many. In honor of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Rich's homegoing, this edition of Rich Mullins: An Arrow Pointing to Heaven delivers an intimate look at the experiences that sparked praise hits and the values behind his Christ-like candor.

For over fifteen years, writer Jeff Crosby has been searching for a language of the soul—a way to articulate our deepest longings. Through the years he gathered clues from within global music styles, from different cultures, from his own Christian tradition and its sacred texts—and from deep within himself.

It’s Halloween night in 1987. The era of fast cars, big hair, and glam metal is in full swing. A group of young friends push their appetite for destruction to the limit as they race along dark and dangerous back roads in search of a rumored epic spook night beer bash out in the boonies. But things take a tragic turn when they encounter a smirking villain in a sinister black car. They become trapped in haunted nightmare country with no obvious way out. Before long, it’s time to strap in tight, grab another cold one, and race with the devil. First to the finish line might even get to live.

The TV ads promised a festival of cheap and bloody fright films, all of them thinly disguised knockoffs of well-known movies with much better pedigrees. One film features a family of chainsaw maniacs, another a zombie uprising. In yet another, a cult of vampires lives in a creepy old mansion. The whole thing is hosted by the mysterious Dr. Ominous.

Exploring the artistic journeys of successful musicians, filmmakers, writers, painters and other creatives.

Do you ever struggle with matters of faith? Or wonder why you believe what you do (or don't), and whether it really matters? Are we always (or ever) able to simply choose what we believe? If not, what impact does that have on our ability to have faith, if any? Must genuine faith always be free from doubt? What if you're just honestly unsure about it all? Can one truly be both a Christian and an agnostic at the same time? If so, how? And what does it really mean to have faith, anyways? In Faith Seeking Belief, Bryan N. Smith presents an academic treatise in analytic philosophy of religion which seeks to wrestle with precisely such questions while also offering a fresh approach to answering them.

Join Ben (he/him), Bryan (he/they), and Bill (he/him) as they Gaslight (reflect), Gatekeep (read research), and Girlboss (share successes) language teaching!

Six months after losing everything that once mattered to her, Allison Cook’s life is mired in a grim downward spiral. The otherworldly entity known only as The Visitor still haunts her, feeding on her emotions and desires, leading her to the brink of madness and despair. In the beginning, the creature’s impossible gifts from other realms made the erosion of her humanity an acceptable sacrifice, but now they’re no longer enough. The all-consuming darkness growing within her becomes too much to bear, and she begins to yearn for a restoration of what was lost.

On a cold winter’s night, a pair of runaway lovers stop to refuel their car in a remote Pennsylvania town hours away from any major population center. The town has gone to rot after the death of its main industry, and the remaining citizens are kept in line by a powerful few who refuse to let the dwindling community die, no matter what the cost. The rare wayward travelers who come to the town are rarely ever allowed to leave, as the lovers discover when they are forced to play a deadly game of kill or be killed. A game called The Gauntlet.

Zach and Chelsea grew up in idyllic suburbia. Then one day, their father vanished without explanation, ripping their world apart. A year later, a dangerous man shows up looking for him, a man who claims to hunt monsters and things that go bump in the night.