John Bishop

Intimate confessions and spit-your-dentures-out hilarious commentary - this is observational comedy at its best. How to Grow Old is a stupid title, because the answer is obvious- Don't Die. Provided you don't die, you are growing old. Don't come to this book under any illusions. It isn't going to tell you how to stay alive any longer. It won't help you understand the aging process from a sociological and anthropological perspective, and I'm not sure how much practical advice you're going to get. However, if you happen to want to know what a white, heterosexual, middle-aged man thinks of getting old - from the struggle to stay fit, keep hold of your friends or stay relevant, to why I'm better at doing a dump now than at any time in my life - this book could very well be exactly what you have been looking for. You might even find it a bit funny.

How to Grow Old

If you’re a man of a certain age you’ll know there comes a point in life when getting a sports car and over-analysing your contribution to society sounds like a really good idea.

How Did All This Happen?

One spring day in 1994 Houston, Dr. Jim Bob Brady witnesses his neighbor's ten-year-old son killed by a hit-and-run driver. An accident, or an act of murder? After the death, Brady enlists the help of his son J. J. and his wife Mary Louise in chasing down clues that take them deeper and deeper into a Houston he never imagined existed.

A Medical Thriller

Act of Revenge

“Joyce’s Book of the Dark gives us such a blend of exciting intelligence and impressive erudition that it will surely become established as one of the most fascinating and readable Finnegans Wake studies now available.”—Margot Norris, James Joyce Literary Supplement

Finnegans Wake

Joyce's Book of the Dark

Dennis Green

Draws on the author's philosophies about the benefits of simple and elegant food carefully prepared using local ingredients, sharing a range of seasonally organized recipes for popular dishes from Bishop's Restaurant. Reprint.

Easy Seasonal Recipes

Simply Bishop's

THE STORIES: CONFLUENCE. Visiting his young fiancée, who is acting in a summer stock company, Chuck Janola, a former Pittsburgh Steeler, and now a prosperous businessman, picnics with her in a rural park, overlooking the confluence of three Pennsyl

Two Short Plays

Confluence ; And, The Skirmishers

Ken Perszyk

What must reality be like if the God of Abrahamic theism exists? How could the worldview of Abrahamic theism be understood if not in terms of the existence of a supremely powerful, knowledgeable, and good personal being? John Bishop and Ken Perszyk argue that it is reasonable to reject what many analytic philosophers take to be the standard conception of God as the 'personal omniGod'. They argue that a version of a 'logical' Argument from Evil is still very much in play, contrary to the widely held view that this line of argument is bankrupt. This book provides a new presentation and defence of the alternative that Bishop and Perszyk have called euteleology. Its core claims are that reality is inherently purposive, and that the Universe exists ultimately because its overall end (telos), which is the supreme good, is made concretely real within it. There is no supreme agent ('standing by' while horrors take place); God is 'no-thing' in euteleology's basic ontology. Rather, talk of God-as-a-personal-being is a cognitive construction, treating ultimate reality by analogy with our ordinary ways of experiencing and talking about the world. But euteleological theism is also emphatically realist. Analogizing God-talk enables humans to align themselves with reality and is aptly deployed in prayer and worship-practices whose broad function is a human contribution to, and enjoyment of, the fulfilment of reality's inherent ultimate purpose.

A Euteleological Understanding of Theism

God, Purpose, and Reality

THE STORY: The creative team responsible for a recent Broadway flop (in which three chorus girls were murdered by the mysterious Stage Door Slasher) assemble for a backer's audition of their new show at the Westchester estate of a wealthy angel.

The Musical Comedy Murders of 1940

John Christopher Bishop

From a moral point of view we think of ourselves as capable of responsible actions. From a scientific point of view we think of ourselves as animals whose behavior, however highly evolved, conforms to natural scientific laws. Natural Agency argues that these different perspectives can be reconciled, despite the skepticism of many philosophers who have argued that "free will" is impossible under "scientific determinism." This skepticism is best overcome according to the author, by defending a causal theory of action, that is by establishing that actions are constituted by behavioral events with the appropriate kind of mental causal history. He sets out a rich and subtle argument for such a theory and defends it against its critics. Thus the book demonstrates the importance of philosophical work in action theory for the central metaphysical task of understanding our place in nature.

An Essay on the Causal Theory of Action

Natural Agency

The last three decades of the twentieth century saw dramatic changes in the bus industry with deregulation of bus services nationally in October 1986 in the provincial areas. Visually London seemed to stay the same with the buses still operating in the customary red liveries which all cherished from childhood. This book sets out to show how the vehicles moved forward from the traditional layout of rear platform and open half cab to the introduction of one man buses with their front entrances. The effects of deregulation are shown with dynamic color schemes especially with the Bexleybus blue and cream color scheme. With the passing of years we progress to the now familiar single deck buses, and also cover various other transport experiments.

From the 1970s to the 1990s

The London Bus in Colour

A Model for the United States?

The French Mandate to Spend on Training

Estimation when the Sampling Ratio is a Linear Function of the Dependent Variable

Dangerous churches are willing to put everything on the line for the one thing that matters most; reaching lost people. Through probing questions and amazing stories of God's grace, John Bishop confronts church leaders to embrace what matters most to the heart of God, whatever the cost. Most churches naturally gravitate to what is safe and familiar. Church leaders who take risks are bound to fail, and fear drives us to continue in our comfortable, but ineffective patterns. But reaching out to a lost world was never meant to be easy. Jesus promised his followers that they would have trouble in this world. Dangerous churches are churches that are willing to risk everything--comfort, safety, and the security of the familiar--for the sake of the one thing that matters most: reaching out to people who may spend eternity separated from the God who created them. God wants us to live on the edge of our margins, walking by faith and not simply following scripted methods or programmed patterns. Dangerous Church takes you back to the Book of Acts and reminds church leaders that the heartbeat of the church is not found in agendas or human plans, but in pursuing the mission of God and reaching out to a lost world. Learn what can happen when church leaders abandon their fears and begin to live a dangerous faith. Dangerous Church is part of the Leadership Network Innovation Series.

Risking Everything to Reach Everyone

Dangerous Church

Park Service surveyor and former FBI forensic specialist Jack Randall finds himself swept away in a diabolical journey through a mystical primitive world. Following a naked man captured by aborigines, Jack steps through a vortex into a prehistoric 13th century Mesa Verde culture. Accompanied by a shaman of the Butterfly Clan, the shaman's lively and lovely granddaughter and Jack's best friend Spade, he searches the American Southwest 800 years in the past for an ancient Egyptian tablet. To find and possess the tablet, the trekkers must outwit a primeval cult whose high priest, sensuous women and warriors will stop at nothing to reclaim the lost stone. Murder becomes the norm. Loyalties are tested. Jack struggles to piece together the evidence--who among them is eliminating the trekkers one by one for their own selfish ends? The realism of a 13th century Mesa Verde setting comes from Bishop's years of extensive reading about our Ancestral Puebloans.

Casting Shadows with Shamans

It all started with a promise to a girl he hardly knew... Love, Freedom or Death is a love story set against the resistance struggle in Crete during World War 2. Inspired by true events, it follows impetuous young Dudley Watkins, a New Zealand Sergeant, as he journeys from the disillusionment of defeat in the battle of Crete to the willingness to risk all for the island he has come to love. Love, Freedom or Death tells of a man who kept his promises, but in doing so drove others to break theirs, a man who fought to make the Cretan dream of freedom a reality and a man who falls out with his British masters while falling in love with an unattainable woman. Reminiscent of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, John Bishop’s novel is a powerful story of love and betrayal.

Love, Freedom Or Death

Something unusual is going on with the dementia patients at Pleasant View Nursing Home. Dr. Jim Bob Brady, Houston orthopedic surgeon and amateur sleuth, finds himself in the midst of a different type of medical mystery. His friend and colleague, Dr. James Morgenstern, refers him a series of dementia patients with orthopedic problems from Pleasant View Nursing Home. Each patient dies, irrespective of the treatment, a situation that Doc Brady is unaccustomed to. Each death prompts an autopsy, performed by another Brady colleague, Dr. Jeff Clarke, who discovers unusual brain pathology in each patient. Some of the tissue samples show nerve regeneration, a finding unheard of in dementia patients. Doc Brady, enraged by the loss of his patients and obsessively curious about the pathologic findings, begins to investigate the nursing home, as well as its owner and CEO, Dr. Theodore Frazier. This leads Brady and Clarke on an adventure to discover the happenings at Pleasant View-an adventure that sees them running for their lives.

Act of Negligence: A Medical Thriller

Queuing for Union Jobs and the Social Return to Schooling

Valerie Benejam

James Joyce’s preoccupation with space—be it urban, geographic, stellar, geometrical or optical—is a central and idiosyncratic feature of his work. In Making Space in the Works of James Joyce, some of the most esteemed scholars in Joyce studies have come together to evaluate the perception and mental construction of space, as it is evoked through Joyce’s writing. The aim is to bring together several recent trends of literary research and criticism to bear on the notion of space in its most concrete sense. The essays move dialectically out of an immediate focus on the phenomenological and intra-psychic, into broader and wider meditations on the social, urban and collective. As Joyce’s formal experiments appear the response to the difficulty of enunciating truly the experience of lived space, this eventually leads us to textual and linguistic space. The final contribution evokes the space with which Joyce worked daily, that of his manuscripts—or what he called "paperspace." With essays addressing all of Joyce's major works, this volume is a critical contribution to our understanding of modernism, as well as of the relationship between space, language, and literature.

John Bishop

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