Audiobooks by Karen Swallow Prior

You Have a Calling: Finding Your Vocation in the True, Good, and Beautiful

Some people are lucky enough to get paid to do what they love. But many are not. What if your vocation doesn't align with your passion? In You Have a Calling, award-winning author Karen Swallow Prior has encouraging news: If we pursue the good, true, and beautiful in all our work, we will find our greatest fulfillment. In an age when passion and calling are often confused, Prior helps listeners understand that passions come from within, while our calling, or vocation, comes from without and is about being called by others to serve. That crucial distinction can help us understand how God can use both our passions and our work, even if for different purposes. This book will appeal to everyone who wants to know that their daily work, ordinary though it may be, can fulfill a higher calling to God. Listeners will emerge with a renewed sense of purpose, knowing they are created for virtue in all they do because they are created in the image of God.

Karen Swallow Prior (Author), Lisa Larsen (Narrator)

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The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis

Contemporary American evangelicalism is suffering from an identity crisis-and a lot of bad press. In this book, acclaimed author Karen Swallow Prior examines evangelical history, both good and bad. By analyzing the literature, art, and popular culture that has surrounded evangelicalism, she unpacks some of the movement's most deeply held concepts, ideas, values, and practices to consider what is Christian rather than merely cultural. The result is a clearer path forward for evangelicals amid their current identity crisis-and insight for others who want a deeper understanding of what the term 'evangelical' means today. This book explores ideas including conversion, domesticity, empire, sentimentality, and more. In the end, it goes beyond evangelicalism to show us how we might be influenced by images, stories, and metaphors in ways we cannot always see.

Karen Swallow Prior (Author), Susan Hanfield (Narrator)

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Beautifully Distinct: Conversations with Friends on Faith, Life, and Culture

Inspires women to engage with life and culture in a God-honoring way. How should we listen to, and think in a gospel way about, the ordinary things we come across in modern life? Things we watch, read, eat, and do. There are so many voices saying so many different things that the temptations are to either disengage completely, or find ourselves being influenced more and more by the world. In this book, godly, clear-thinking women talk about a range of areas of life and culture. They help us to be thoughtful about films, books, and the media; set out biblical principles for approaching topics such as body image and racism; and encourage us to shape the world around us for Christ-becoming beautifully distinct.

Alissa Wilkinson, Catherine Parks, Chelsea Sobolik, Courtney Reissig, Dannah Gresh, Erin Davis, Jackie Hill-Perry, Jen Wilkin, Jenny Yang, Karen Swallow Prior, Kelly Needham, Lilly Park, Lindsay Nicolet, Natasha Sistrunk Robinson, Trillia Newbell (Author), Carla Mercer-Meyer, Criselle Marie, Erin Bennett, Sarah Zimmerman, Zakiya Young (Narrator)

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On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books

Reading great literature well has the power to cultivate virtue. Great literature increases knowledge of and desire for the good life by showing readers what virtue looks like and where vice leads. It is not just what one reads but how one reads that cultivates virtue. Reading good literature well requires one to practice numerous virtues, such as patience, diligence, and prudence. And learning to judge wisely a character in a book, in turn, forms the reader's own character. Acclaimed author Karen Swallow Prior takes readers on a guided tour through works of great literature both ancient and modern, exploring twelve virtues that philosophers and theologians throughout history have identified as most essential for good character and the good life. In reintroducing ancient virtues that are as relevant and essential today as ever, Prior draws on the best classical and Christian thinkers, including Aristotle, Aquinas, and Augustine. Covering authors from Henry Fielding to Cormac McCarthy, Jane Austen to George Saunders, and Flannery O'Connor to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Prior explores some of the most compelling universal themes found in the pages of classic books, helping readers learn to love life, literature, and God through their encounters with great writing. In examining works by these authors and more, Prior shows why virtues such as prudence, temperance, humility, and patience are still necessary for human flourishing and civil society.

Karen Swallow Prior (Author), Lisa Larsen (Narrator)

Audiobook

Fierce Convictions: The Extraordinary Life of Hannah MorePoet, Reformer, Abolitionist

With a foreword by Eric Metaxas, best-selling author of Bonhoeffer and Amazing Grace. The enthralling biography of the woman writer who helped end the slave trade, changed Britain’s upper classes, and taught a nation how to read. The history-changing reforms of Hannah More affected every level of 18th-Century British society through her keen intellect, literary achievements, collaborative spirit, strong Christian principles, and colorful personality. A woman without connections or status, More took the world of British letters by storm when she arrived in London from Bristol, becoming a best-selling author and acclaimed playwright and quickly befriending the author Samuel Johnson, the politician Horace Walpole, and the actor David Garrick. Yet she was also a leader in the Evangelical movement, using her cultural position and her pen to support the growth of education for the poor, the reform of morals and manners, and the abolition of Britain’s slave trade. Fierce Convictions weaves together world and personal history into a stirring story of life that intersected with Wesley and Whitefield’s Great Awakening, the rise and influence of Evangelicalism, and convulsive effects of the French Revolution. A woman of exceptional intellectual gifts and literary talent, Hannah More was above all a person whose faith compelled her both to engage her culture and to transform it.

Karen Prior, Karen Swallow Prior (Author), Christine Stevens (Narrator)

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