Books by Mark Johnston

This book provides a Biblically-based, seven-month program to turn your son into a solid man of God based on the Seven Pillars of Manhood: 1. Identity in Christ 2. Love 3. Godly Wisdom 4. The Word of God 5. Purity 6. Character 7. Legacy Churches are filled with well-meaning youth pastors and programs that promote Christian values, doctrine, and culture to todays youth. But it is rare to find a program that includes a comprehensive set of pillars that are specifically designed to bring a teenage boy into Christian Manhood. By providing an intentional framework for Christian Manhood that can be worked through by a father/guardian and son over seven months, this book is designed to provide such a program.

FBI & An Ordinary Guy, -The Private Price of Public Service - is a memoir about the many chilling, sometimes comical, events in a career as an FBI agent and the personal price some of us paid. For me, coming from a rough childhood I confronted the choices of becoming a clergyman, crook or cop. As an FBI agent in New York and other large American cities, we faced outlaw motorcycle gangs, the Mafia, drug kingpins, and terrorists; land pirates. I personally had many successes, but hard-won victories eventually sapped my energy and spirit. Along the way I had to come to grips with the murders of a squad partner, two New York City cops and several government witnesses. The public knows little about the stress and high emotional costs the guardians of their safety pay in the constant battle against crime and terror. The favorite antidotes of many law enforcement peers -crawling into a bottle or the wrong bed-proved to provide little long-lasting comfort. FBI & An Ordinary Guy reveals the inner working of the FBI, the humanness of its family members, and the real life story behind some of its major cases. But, this factual account is told through a genuine framework of the bitter sweet contrast of the gritty horrors of law enforcement versus affectionate father to daughter communication via never mailed letters to my children.

Synopsis coming soon.......

Anzacs in the Middle East is a compelling exploration of the experiences of soldiers who fought in the Middle East during World War II. Spurred by a sense of adventure and duty, they set sail to countries of which they knew very little. The book examines the relationships between Australians and their allies and also how they related to the local people: Greeks, Egyptians, Syrians, Lebanese and Palestinians. Mark Johnston draws on extensive research to provide a new perspective on the famous campaigns at Tobruk and Alamein, as well as significant but less familiar battles at Bardia, Retimo and Damascus. Featuring first-hand accounts and stories from the front line, the book discovers the true nature of the 'larrikin Australian' and is a must-read for anyone interested in Australia's military history. This book is a companion volume to Mark Johnston's previous books, At the Front Line and Fighting the Enemy.

In this book, Mark Johnston argues that God needs to be saved not only from the distortions of the "e;undergraduate atheists"e; (Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris) but, more importantly, from the idolatrous tendencies of religion itself. Each monotheistic religion has its characteristic ways of domesticating True Divinity, of taming God's demands so that they do not radically threaten our self-love and false righteousness. Turning the monotheistic critique of idolatry on the monotheisms themselves, Johnston shows that much in these traditions must be condemned as false and spiritually debilitating. A central claim of the book is that supernaturalism is idolatry. If this is right, everything changes; we cannot place our salvation in jeopardy by tying it essentially to the supernatural cosmologies of the ancient Near East. Remarkably, Johnston rehabilitates the ideas of the Fall and of salvation within a naturalistic framework; he then presents a conception of God that both resists idolatry and is wholly consistent with the deliverances of the natural sciences. Princeton University Press is publishing Saving God in conjunction with Johnston's forthcoming book Surviving Death, which takes up the crux of supernaturalist belief, namely, the belief in life after death.Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions.

In this extraordinary book, Mark Johnston sets out a new understanding of personal identity and the self, thereby providing a purely naturalistic account of surviving death. Death threatens our sense of the importance of goodness. The threat can be met if there is, as Socrates said, "e;something in death that is better for the good than for the bad."e; Yet, as Johnston shows, all existing theological conceptions of the afterlife are either incoherent or at odds with the workings of nature. These supernaturalist pictures of the rewards for goodness also obscure a striking consilience between the philosophical study of the self and an account of goodness common to Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism: the good person is one who has undergone a kind of death of the self and who lives a life transformed by entering imaginatively into the lives of others, anticipating their needs and true interests. As a caretaker of humanity who finds his or her own death comparatively unimportant, the good person can see through death. But this is not all. Johnston's closely argued claims that there is no persisting self and that our identities are in a particular way "e;Protean"e; imply that the good survive death. Given the future-directed concern that defines true goodness, the good quite literally live on in the onward rush of humankind. Every time a baby is born a good person acquires a new face.

This moving book examines Australian front-line soldiers' reactions to their ordeal in World War II. Based on the letters and diaries of more than 300 soldiers, its focus is the stress they faced and how they coped with it. Johnston challenges the stereotype of the fearless, undisciplined, comradely Australian soldier.