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Religion and Humour: An Introduction (Engaging with Religion)
By David Feltmate. 2024
This timely and lively introduction to exploring the intersection of religion and humour evaluates existing scholarship and methodologies within the…
field, arguing for a culturally critical approach to the study.Hinged on a qualitative sociological framework, this book asks questions about the construction, presentation, and purpose of humour in religious contexts. It is broken down by theoretical approach, with chapters covering: a “comparative religions” approach; a theological approach; how social sciences offer us useful tools for research; and a review of existing theoretical models. As the first volume to introduce the field of religion and humour, this engaging book is essential reading for students approaching the topic for the first time, and for anyone with an interest in related fields such as religion and popular culture and humour studies.Weathering the Reformation explores the role of the Little Ice Age in early modern Christian culture and considers climate as…
a contributing factor in the Protestant Reform. The book focuses on religious narratives from Strasbourg between 1509 and 1541, pivotal years during which the European cultural concept of nature splintered along confessional differences. Together with case studies from antagonistic religious communities, Linnéa Rowlatt draws on annual weather reports for a period during which the climate became less hospitable to human endeavours. Social uunrest and the cultural upheaval of Reform are examined in relation to deteriorating climactic conditions characteristic of the Spörer Minimum. This book will be of particular interest to scholars of religious history and climate history.Twelve Words for Moss: Love, Loss And Moss
By Elizabeth-Jane Burnett. 2023
SHORTLISTED FOR THE JHALAK PRIZE 2024Shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize 2023 for Nature Writing'Exquisite, luminous and quietly radical . .…
. utterly unique and refreshing' Lucy JonesWhere nothing grows, moss is the spark that triggers new life. Embarking on a journey though landscape, memory and recovery, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett explores this mysterious, ancient marvel of the plant world, meditating on and renaming her favourite mosses – from Glowflake to Little Loss – and drawing inspiration from place, people and language itself. 'Fascinating, subtle and risk-taking . . . Poetry, descriptive-evocative prose, memory, memoir, natural history and more all drift and mingle in strikingly new ways' Robert MacfarlaneDumpty: The Age of Trump in Verse (Dumpty Ser. #1)
By John Lithgow. 2019
New York Times Bestseller!Dumpty: The Age of Trump in Verse is Volume 1 of a satirical poetry collection from award-winning…
actor and bestselling author John Lithgow. Chronicling the last few raucous years in American politics, Lithgow takes readers verse by verse through the history of Donald Trump's presidency.• Lampoons the likes of Betsy DeVos, William Barr, Rudy Giuliani, and dozens more.• Illustrated from cover to cover with Lithgow's never-before-seen line drawings.• Draws inspiration from A. A. Milne, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, and even Mother Goose.• Great for fans of A Very Stable Genius by Mike Luckovich, Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don't Matter by Scott Adams, and The Donald J. Trump Presidential Twitter Library by The Daily Show with Trevor Noah.The poems collected in Dumpty draw inspiration from A. A. Milne, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Mother Goose, and many more. A feat of laugh-out-loud lyrical storytelling, this timely volume is bound to bring joy to poetry lovers, political junkies, and Lithgow fans alike. Audio edition read by the author.Things to Do
By Elaine Magliaro. 2017
With playful prose and vivid art, Things to Do brings to life the small moments and secret joys of a…
child's day. There are wonders everywhere. In the sky and on the ground—blooming in a flower bed, dangling from a silken thread, buzzing through the summer air—waiting ...waiting to be found. In this thoughtful and ingenious collection of poems, Elaine Magliaro, an elementary school teacher for more than three decades and a school librarian for three years, and illustrator Catia Chien provide a luminous glimpse of the ordinary wonders all around us. Plus, this is the fixed format version, which looks almost identical to the print edition.Leaf Jumpers
By Carole Gerber. 2004
This vibrant poem celebrates the beauty of autumn while inviting us all to go ahead and jump in that big,…
colorful, pile of fall leaves. Leslie Evan&’s bold artwork brings together gold, orange, yellow, red, and brown leaves into a literary pile creating the magic of autumn for young readers. The poetic text gives simple facts about different types of fall leaves making it easy for readers to identify leaves ranging from red maple to sycamore by color, shape, and other characteristics. Informative and fun, Carole Gerber brings us a wonderful introduction to seasons and science for the earliest of leaf jumpers.Former special assistant to President Trump, New York Times bestselling author, and evangelical Christian Cliff Sims shares the lessons he learned on…
faith, politics, and the Christian witness while working in the halls of power. American life today is consumed by politics. Even our churches are tearing themselves apart over political candidates, cultural flashpoints, and debates about whether certain pastors are vessels for the Holy Spirit or an unholy political agenda. So how should Christians approach our lives in this time of strife and division? How should we engage in politics and respond when we find that our beliefs are at odds with the culture? And how do we keep our focus on eternity when the present attractions of the world are there in front of us at every turn? Cliff Sims, the son of a Baptist minister and man of deep Christian faith, has walked the halls of power, serving as a Special Assistant to President Trump and Deputy Director of National Intelligence. While working at the highest levels of the American government, he experienced firsthand the cutthroat world of power politics, an environment that can test the character of any follower of Jesus, and he wrestled continually with how to live out his faith. In this book, Cliff shares hard-earned wisdom from his time serving in government, giving Christians lessons on how to live faithfully and with integrity. Recounting stories from the West Wing, Air Force One, and top secret bunkers, Sims offers practical advice and biblical insight on how to let the light of Christ shine in our dark world, regardless of our politics. The Darkness Has Not Overcome is a must-read for every Christian who has found themselves exasperated by politics, fearful about the future, or discouraged by the times in which we live.Death's Country
By R. M. Romero. 2024
Lakelore meets &“Orpheus and Eurydice&” when two Miami teens travel to the underworld to retrieve their girlfriend&’s soul.Andres Santos of…
São Paulo was all swinging fists and firecracker fury, a foot soldier in the war between his parents, until he drowned in the Tietê River… and made a bargain with Death for a new life. A year later, his parents have relocated the family to Miami, but their promises of a fresh start quickly dissolve in the summer heat. Instead of fists, Andres now uses music to escape his parents&’ battles. While wandering Miami Beach, he meets two girls: photographer Renee, a blaze of fire, and dancer Liora, a ray of sunshine. The three become a polyamorous triad, happy, despite how no one understands their relationship. But when a car accident leaves Liora in a coma, Andres and Renee are shattered. Then Renee proposes a radical solution: She and Andres must go into the underworld to retrieve their girlfriend&’s spirit and reunite it with her body—before it&’s too late. Their search takes them to the City of the dead, where painters bleed color, songs grow flowers, and regretful souls will do anything to forget their lives on earth. But finding Liora&’s spirit is only the first step in returning to the living world. Because when Andres drowned, he left a part of himself in the underworld—a part he&’s in no hurry to meet again. But it is eager to be reunited with him... In verse as vibrant as the Miami skyline, critically acclaimed author R.M. Romero has crafted a masterpiece of magical realism and an openhearted ode to the nature of healing.The Routledge Handbook of Megachurches (Routledge Handbooks in Religion)
By Afe Adogame, Chad M. Bauman, Damaris Parsitau, Jeaney Yip. 2024
The Routledge Handbook of Megachurches provides a survey of global megachurch phenomena, with an international slate of authors introducing existing…
and emerging research on a wide variety of relevant topics.Over the past decade, the field of megachurch studies has matured and become global in its scope and orientation. The Handbook offers 33 chapters by top scholars in the field, focusing in particular on: The location, demographic nature, and transnational connections of megachurches. Megachurch worship, hermeneutics, and theology (in theory and practice). Megachurch institutional dynamics. The various ways that megachurches have both influenced and been influenced by their social contexts in terms of class, age, gender, sexuality, and pop culture. The Handbook's interdisciplinary orientation makes it essential reading for sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, media specialists, pop culture observers, business strategists, leadership consultants, marketing analysts, scholars of religion, and Christian historians, theologians, and missiologists. Experienced scholars of megachurches will gain valuable insight into aspects of megachurch research beyond their own specializations. Scholars new to the field will find the chapters useful as signposts for where to begin their own academic exploration. Christian pastors and laypeople will learn more about this increasingly prominent and influential form of their faith.Nothing Sacred
By Stathis Gourgouris. 2024
Nothing Sacred makes a bold call for reconceptualizing the projects of humanism and democracy as creative sources of emancipatory meaning,…
from the immediate political sphere to the farthest reaches of planetary ways of living.Restaging Aristotle’s classic notion of the “political animal” in broad historical and geographical frames, Stathis Gourgouris explores the autopoietic capacities of human-being in society, while developing new frameworks of anticolonial humanism and radical democracy as the only worthy adversaries of neoliberal capitalism.This reconfigured anthropological horizon enables us to imagine new ways of living by learning to pursue a radical politics of autonomy and a planetary vision that upholds life-affirming coexistence and equal sharing against the fetishism of hierarchy and servitude, money and technologic, sovereignty and endless growth.Written with daring, erudition, and anarchic contestation, this book seeks the political through a poetic perspective. Nothing Sacred rejects niche thinking in the academy and engages a vast domain of reflections on the problem of human-being in today’s dismal world.Lossless
By Matthew Tierney. 2024
Tech-inspired sonnets and prose poems that decode a life through the experience of loss Tierney’s new collection takes its title…
from lossless data compression algorithms. It positions the sonnet as lines of code that transmit through time and space those ‘stabs of self,’ the awareness of being that intensifies with loss of relationships, of faith, of childhood, of people. The qualities of light, colour, and movement in the sonnets conjure a sense of arrested time, of dust motes in the air. Playing against this intimacy are loopy chapters of Borgesian prose poems – with appearances from Duns Scotus and Simone Weil, Wittgenstein, Niels Bohr and others – that extract knowledge from information to reconstruct the source experience into a subjectivity, a personality, and a life."Tierney tracks and backtracks in the realm of dispossession like a cross between a physicist and a magician from a future era. These poems are new forms for human heart and quiddity.” – Anne-Marie Turza, author of Fugue with Bedbug"In this wise, wonky, poignant avowal of error and losslessness, Matthew Tierney geotags his 'freefall of associative memory,' where the past flickers presently and futures bend toward the start. Invoking the dogmas of digital media, quantum mechanics and philosophy, Lossless is the devlog of a child becoming father of the man. A 'greybeard & tweener' at once, Tierney conjures his Gen Xer youth—neighborhood bullies, the first kiss, jogging with a Walkman on—to tweak his hi-fi output as a husband and fumbling dad. Given a spacetime continuum offering 'viaducts of alternate choices,' in which everyone, at the molecular level, is 'swappable soma' at best, Tierney parses 'compossible paths' from 'incompatibilism,' trying to track the quirks and quarks of multidimensional life. In troubleshot sonnets and corrupted prose, this book is an ode to the lost art of losing gracefully." – Andrew Zawacki, author of UnsunSidetracks
By Bei Dao. 2023
A lyrical masterpiece by the renowned poet with a “Whitman-like rhetorical immensity coupled with a passionately eccentric sensibility” (Carol Muske…
Dukes, Los Angeles Times) Sidetracks, Bei Dao’s first new collection in almost fifteen years, is also the poet’s first long poem and his magnum opus—the artistic culmination of a lifetime devoted to the renewal and reinvention of language. “As a poet, I am always lost,” Bei Dao once said. Opening with a prologue of heavenly questions and followed by thirty-four cantos, Sidetracks travels forward and backward along the divergent paths of the poet’s wandering life—from his time as a Young Pioneer in Beijing, through the years of exile living in six countries, back to the rural construction site where he worked during the Cultural Revolution, to the “sunshine tablecloth” in his kitchen in Davis, California, and his emotional visit home after a thirteen-year separation (“the mother tongue has deepened my foreignness”). All the various currents of our times rush into his lifelines, reconfigured through the “vortex of experience” and the poet’s encounters with friends and strangers, artists and ghosts, as he moves from place to place, unable to return home. As the poet Michael Palmer has noted, “Bei Dao’s work, in its rapid transitions, abrupt juxtapositions, and frequent recurrence to open syntax evokes the un-speakability of the exile’s condition. It is a poetry of explosive convergences, of submersions and unfixed boundaries, ‘amid languages.’”Celtic Druidry: Rituals, Techniques, and Magical Practices
By Ellen Evert Hopman. 2024
• Explains how to make and use the essential tools of a Celtic Druid and how to create Druid rituals…
for seasonal rites, blessings, and other sacred observances • Details Druidic magical techniques and divination practices, as well as plant spells for performing magic with herbs • Explores the Gods and Goddesses of the Celtic pantheon, Druidic cosmology, and the Druidic festivals that occur throughout the year In this authentic handbook for the Celtic Druid path, Ellen Evert Hopman shares lessons, rituals, and magical techniques drawn from the ancient wisdom teachings of the Celts as well as a modern Druid Order created by the leading minds of 20th-century Celtic Reconstructionism. Hopman begins by exploring what we know about the original ancient Druids, citing Druid-contemporary sources such as Caesar and Diodorus Siculus as well as transcriptions of Druid oral teachings. She explains the basic tools and clothing of a Celtic Druid, including instructions for making the essential tools of the craft, such a Crane Bag, the Serpent Staff, and the Apple Branch, the tool used to open a Druid rite. She explores meditation techniques based on ancient texts and discusses the Gods and Goddesses of the Celtic pantheon, Druidic cosmology, and the Druidic festivals that occur throughout the turning of the year. She shares hymns to the Moon and the Sun as well as invocations for connecting with specific deities and elements. She also outlines the basics of Druidic liturgy, enabling you to create Druid rituals for seasonal rites, baby blessings, house blessings, hand-fastings, funerals, and other sacred observances. Detailing Druidic magical techniques, Hopman shares charms and incantations for abundance, protection, and healing as well as plant spells for performing magic with herbs. She discusses many forms of Druidic divination, including interpreting omens and divining with the ancient Irish alphabet, Ogham. Exploring the special connection between humans and Nature, a core component of Druidic practice, the author explains how to bond with Nature and the sacred land as well as examining the connection between Druids and trees. Revealing how to become a modern Druid, this concise yet detailed guide presents everything you need to know to start your journey on the Druidic path.You can find emotional freedom. Learn to see through the haze of conflicted feelings and move forward in your life…
with confidence. Licensed therapist and bestselling author Dr. Alison Cook guides you through a groundbreaking 3-step process to find the freedom you crave.When you're tangled up inside, it's hard to find clarity. Yet so many of us guilt-trip or gaslight ourselves instead of working our way through complicated feelings….I should be a good friend, even though I feel hurt by past betrayals.I should be content, even though I feel lonely or unfulfilled.I should just have faith, even though I feel discouraged by unanswered prayers. This jumbled-up knot is a cry for gentle care and patient attention, but most of us haven't been given the tools required to unravel it.I Shouldn't Feel This Way is your guide out of the chaos and into the calm and clarity you need to face life's challenges. Drawing from over twenty years of research and clinical practice, Dr. Alison Cook guides you through a groundbreaking 3-step process that has helped tens of thousands of people find emotional freedom and surprisingly simple breakthroughs. Dr. Alison shows you how to:identify guilt and know what to do with it,trade feeling stuck in your head for clarity,move from comfortable numbing to courageous conversations, andmake decisions that break cycles of defeat. Change starts when you finally stop beating yourself up for the way that you feel. I Shouldn't Feel This Way is your pathway to emotional freedom. It is time to finally work through your complicated feelings so you can start living with the clarity and confidence you crave.Where is jerusalem? (Where Is?)
By Ellen Morgan. 2024
Learn all about Jerusalem—a sacred city in the Middle East that has existed for over five thousand years. From the…
#1 New York Times Best-Selling Who Was? series comes Where Is?, a series that tells the stories of world-famous landmarks and natural wonders. In 2005, a group of construction workers in Jerusalem made an incredible discovery. Underneath the parking lot they were digging up lay an ancient city that was built in the tenth century! Three years later, gold coins from an even earlier century were found at the site. The city of Jerusalem is like a layer cake of history—more than five thousand years of complicated history—all of which author Ellen Morgan explains clearly and objectively in this audiobookBlack girl you are atlas
By Ren©♭e Watson. 2024
A thoughtful celebration of Black girlhood by award-winning author and poet Renée Watson. In this semi-autobiographical collection of poems, Renée…
Watson writes about her experience growing up as a young Black girl at the intersections of race, class, and gender. Using a variety of poetic forms, from haiku to free verse, Watson shares recollections of her childhood in Portland, tender odes to the Black women in her life, and urgent calls for Black girls to step into their power. Black Girl You Are Atlas encourages young readers to embrace their future with a strong sense of sisterhood and celebration. This collection offers guidance and is a gift for anyone who listens to itThis is the honey: An anthology of contemporary black poets
By Kwame Alexander. 2024
A breathtaking poetry collection on hope, heart, and heritage from the most prominent and promising Black poets and writers of…
our time, edited by Why Fathers Cry at Night author and #1 New York Times bestselling author Kwame Alexander. In this comprehensive and vibrant poetry anthology, bestselling author and poet Kwame Alexander curates a collection of contemporary anthems at turns tender and piercing and deeply inspiring throughout. Featuring work from well-loved poets such as Rita Dove, Jericho Brown, Warsan Shire, Ross Gay, Tracy K. Smith, Terrance Hayes, Morgan Parker, and Nikki Giovanni, This Is the Honey is a rich and abundant offering of language from the poets giving voice to generations of resilient joy, "each incantation," as Mahogany L. Browne puts it in her titular poem, is "a jubilee of a people dreaming wildly." This essential collection, in the tradition of Dudley Randall's The Black Poets and E. Ethelbert Miller's In Search of Color Everywhere, contains poems exploring joy, love, origin, race, resistance, and praise. Jacqueline A.Trimble likens "Black woman joy" to indigo, tassels, foxes, and peacock plumes. Tyree Daye, Nate Marshall, and Elizabeth Acevedo reflect on the meaning of "home" through food, from Cuban rice and beans to fried chicken gizzards. Clint Smith and Cameron Awkward-Rich enfold us in their intimate musings on love and devotion. From a "jewel in the hand" (Patricia Spears Jones) to "butter melting in small pools" (Elizabeth Alexander), This Is the Honey drips with poignant and delightful imagery, music, and raised fists. Fresh, memorable, and deeply moving, this definitive collection a must-have for any lover of language and a gift for our time"A rich, thoughtful anthology exploring centuries of Black poetry." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "This deep and complex assemblage of Black…
poetry culminates in a joyful, painful, and emotionally rich experience." —Publishers Weekly (starred review) "An eclectic mix of Black experiences fills this unmatched anthology that features both modern poets, such as Nikki Giovanni and Ibi Zoboi, and 'the brilliant Black poets who are now ancestors'... A fresh canon for poetry studies."—ALA Booklist (starred review) Starring thirty-seven poets, with contributions from acclaimed authors, including Kwame Alexander, Ibi Zoboi, and Nikki Giovanni, this breathtaking Black YA poetry anthology edited by National Book Award finalist Amber McBride, Taylor Byas, and Erica Martin celebrates Black poetry, folklore, and culture. Come, claim your wings. Lift your life above the earth, return to the land of your father's birth. What exactly is it to be Black in America? Well, for some, it's learning how to morph the hatred placed by others into love for oneself; for others, it's unearthing the strength it takes to continue to hold one's swagger when multitudinous factors work to make Black lives crumble. For some, it's gathering around the kitchen table as Grandma tells the story of Anansi the spider, while for others it's grinning from ear to ear while eating auntie's spectacular 7Up cake. Black experiences and traditions are complex, striking, and vast—they stretch longer than the Nile and are four times as deep—and carry more than just unimaginable pain—there is also joy. Featuring an all-star group of thirty-seven powerful poetic voices, including such luminaries as Kwame Alexander, James Baldwin, Ibi Zoboi, Audre Lorde, Nikki Giovanni, and Gwendolyn Brooks, this riveting anthology depicts the diversity of the Black experience by fostering a conversation about race, faith, heritage, and resilience between fresh poets and the literary ancestors that came before them. Edited by Taylor Byas, Erica Martin, and Coretta Scott King New Talent Award winner Amber McBride, Poemhood will simultaneously highlight the duality and nuance at the crux of so many Black experiences with poetry being the psalm constantly playing. A Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection pick!Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay On The Limits Of Sincerity
By Adam B. Seligman, Robert P. Weller, Michael J. Puett, Bennett Simon. 2008
Converting the Missionaries: The Wheeler Family and the Ojibwe
By Nancy Bunge. 2024
This book tells the uncommon story of a missionary family in the Midwestern United States, and their interactions with the…
indigenous Ojibwe. When Leonard and Harriet Wheeler arrived at La Pointe, Wisconsin in July of 1841, hoping to help the Ojibwe understand and accept the value of Christian civility, they did not expect such a profound transformation of their own lives. The Wheelers’ empathy for the Ojibwe not only grew during their twenty-five years of mission work in Northern Wisconsin, much of it spent trying to protect the Ojibwe from predatory whites, it also influenced the lives of their children.