BY A LEADER FOR LEADERS -- These devotions were forged, tested, and found true through the lives of the leaders served by this author. These devotions are written for smart, hard-working, no-nonsense workplace leaders who are looking for something solid to help you improve your leadership. If you are looking for a devotional to simply warm your heart or cram more Scripture between your ears, find another book. If you are eager to close the gap between the leader you are and the leader God created you to be, humble enough to recognize that you could use some help, and willing to try a proven approach, invest a few minutes each week with this book pondering the intersection of your life and leadership and God's Word. We think you'll be glad you did.

The X's and O's of Relationships takes Paul's teaching in 1 Corinthians 13 and gives you the opportunity to apply each element to your relationships with individual team members, family members, and friends. It addresses the question: Do you care about me? And, it equips you to answer the question well. The straightforward format will help you identify and close the gap between your feelings and your behavior. This book is meant to be taken personally and it encourages the reflective, heart-changing work that occurs when you choose to put God first in life and leadership. The great coaches will tell you that fundamentals make or break you; this book will address the biblical fundamentals for deepening your relationships and growing your influence. John Crosby serves as the Area Director for Coastal GA Fellowship of Christian Athletes. He is the founder of Priority Insight, a leadership focused workplace ministry. John has served as Administrator and Teaching Pastor for a large church, in several roles for smaller churches, and as the General Manager of a $50+ million beverage distributor. John has a passion for Christ and for leadership development. He has authored three leadership-oriented devotional books: Called to Coach, Called to Lead, and Called to Shepherd. Jo Crosby is a Licensed Professional Counselor with over twenty years of clinical experience. She leads professional workshops on various topics as part of her ongoing commitment to helping people build strong, healthy relationships with God and each other. As a communicator, she has a passion for revealing God's extraordinary love through the ordinary of life. Jo has authored an inspirational devotional book entitled, Wherein the Lilies Grow. John and Jo love teaching together, combining their unique and complimentary approaches to Scripture and teaching. They have three children and live near Savannah, Georgia.

Father-son relationships can be notoriously difficult. Often fractious, sometimes hostile, and occasionally destructive, the issue of authority is negotiated by fathers and sons in a range of styles. In this fascinating new book, John Crosby describes the filial relationships of 20 historical figures to illustrate the different ways they related to their fathers, and what this can tell us about love, authority and the wider family context. Sons and Fathers is an approach to understanding this son-father conflict based on early life experience rather than upon psycho-historian or psycho-biographical material and theorizing. Each vignette is designed to be read as a biographical account, but is bookended by a section reflecting on how each man’s relationship to his father can be understood in the context of key developmental theories, in particular those of Eric Erikson and Murray Bowen’s family system theory. The book also includes an extended introduction to both theorists for those unfamiliar with their work, as well as a discussion of the role of corporal punishment as a method of disciplining children. From Michael Jackson to Bing Crosby, Joseph Stalin to John F Kennedy, this is a uniquely accessible but insightful book that will appeal to both general readers as well as students of Developmental Psychology across the lifespan, Family Studies, Marriage and Family therapy, and related subjects. It will also appeal to professionals working in the area, including social workers, counsellors and therapists.

A basic question in philosophy is, Òhow do we know what we think we know? Constructivists answer this question as follows: categories for constructing reality reside in the human mind, so reality cannot escape the mind's limitations. Human beings constantly assimilate new knowledge and experience. Constructivists apply the same logic to the question of truth. What we claim to be true is always provisional. New information and breakthroughs may supplant what we presently hold to be true. Ultimate or absolute truth is unknowable. In The Flipside of Godspeak, John Crosby applies the principles of philosophical and theological constructivism to theistic belief. The idea of God is a constructed idea.We come to think that we know there is a God because we have internalized stories, images, and historical accounts passed on to us by people with authority. In these pages, however, and without reference to an authoritarian deity, Crosby considers questions of ethics and morality. An ethic of eudaemonism or Òwell-being is posited to be based on the principles of equality, honesty, and responsibility to self and others. Implications of the meaning and purpose of human existence are considered from the existential perspective, that is, from the viewpoint that we oursleves invent, create, and construct meaning.

Richard Caruso and John Crosby started the Uncommon Individual Foundation in 1986 with the belief that mentoring was the key to unlock human potential and individual growth, paving the way to meaningful and productive lives. Caruso envisioned a book revealing the importance of mentoring in his own life, and now his partner, Crosby, takes up the mantle to share it as a way to inspire others to achieve their own goals.

PONDERING THE INTERSECTION OF GOD'S WORD AND YOUR LEADERSHIP This book is written for coaches who work hard sometimes too hard and know how to quickly size up what is a waste of time. It is for coaches who are looking for something solid. It is for coaches who know that real ministry takes place in the opportunities of everyday life, rather than simply sitting in rows on Sunday morning or around a campfire singing kumbaya. It is for coaches who recognize that the Bible is the greatest source of leadership principles the world has ever known. It is for coaches eager to close the gap between the leader you are and the leader God created you to be. So sit back in your favorite chair and start your week investing a few minutes pondering the intersection of God's Word and your life and leadership. We're confident you'll be glad you did.

LEAD WISELY One simple, genuine prayer led me to sit before my computer one afternoon and start writing this book. God has spoken to me so clearly through his leaders so often that I hoped he would offer something worthwhile to you through me. I know that you have more to read than you care to even consider. I know the value of your time. That is why these are brief, weekly devotions that you can quickly read and simply ask God to reveal the principle at work the following week. You will not find deep theology or warm, feel-good expressions within these pages. Yet, you may realize that God has a simple message here specifically for you that will exponentially enhance your leadership.

It has been said that John Henry Newman stands at the threshold of the new age as a Christian Socrates, the pioneer of a new philosophy of the individual Person and Personal Life. Newman's personalism is found in the way he contrasts the theological intellect and the religious imagination. Newman pleads for the latter when he famously says, in words that John F. Crosby takes as the motto of his book, I am far from denying the real force of the arguments in proof of a God ...but these do not warm me or enlighten me; they do not take away the winter of my desolation, or make the buds unfold and the leaves grow within me, and my moral being rejoice. In The Personalism of John Henry Newman, Crosby shows the reader how Newman finds the life-giving religious knowledge that he seeks. He explores the heart in Newman and explains what Newman was saying when he chose as his cardinal's motto, cor ad cor loquitur (heart speaks to heart). He explains what Newman means in saying that religious truth is transmitted not by argument but by personal influence.Crosby also examines Newman's personalist account of what it is to think; he explains what it is for a person to think not just by rule but by his spontaneous living intelligence. Crosby examines the subjectivity of Newman, and shows how the modern turn to the subject is enacted in Newman. But these personalist aspects of Newman's mind, which connect him with many streams of contemporary thought, are not the whole of Newman; they stand in relation to something else in Newman, something that Crosby calls Newman's radically theocentric religion. Newman is a modern thinker, but not the modernist he is sometimes mistaken for. The inexhaustible plenitude of Newman derives from theunion of apparent opposites in him: the union of his teaching on the heart with his theocentric teaching, of the subjectivity of experience with the objectivity of revealed truth. Crosby writes for a broad non-specialist public just as Newman did.