Search results for ""The Believer""

The dynamic of religious expression employs symbolic language, actions, and art. These symbols are symbols of transcendence because it is transcendence which is the unique referent that sets apart symbols which give rise to religious understanding from symbols which do not. The main objective of this book is to demonstrate that in Louis Dupre's work all religious expression, insofar as it has a transcendent reference, is intrinsically symbolic. Religious language is never purely objective nor purely subjective, but a dialectical relation with a transcendent dimension. True to the teachings of Dupre, this book uncovers that without a transcendent referent, religious symbols lose their religious significance. This is the plight of the (late-post)modern condition which resulted from the fracturing of nature into its cosmic, human and transcendent components. To regain a sense of transcendence the believer is forced to make an inward turn akin to the mystical practice of past ages. This does not recover a sense of transcendence for culture but can do so for the believer's personal spiritual life.

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Gabrielle Bell’s acclaimed collection explores a spectrum of human experience that ranges from the quotidian to the fantastical while always maintaining reliability. The characters of these stories, represented with a spare line, are deeply compelling, even in the finest minutiae of their struggles and triumphs. Culled from numerous anthologies, Cecil & Jordan in New York collects the best of Bell’s short stories and solidifies her place among today’s top cartoonists. This new softcover edition includes additional hard-to-find material not previously included in the original edition. Gabrielle Bell’s work has been selected several times for Best American Comics and the Yale Anthology of Graphic Fiction, and has been featured in McSweeney’s, The Believer, Bookworm, and Vice magazines. Her story, “Cecil and Jordan In New York,” was turned into a film by Michel Gondry. The Voyeurs was named one of the best Graphic Novels of the year by Publishers Weekly. Bell’s most recent book, Everything is Flammable, was on multiple best of 2017 lists, including Kirkus Reviews, Entertainment Weekly, and Publishers Weekly’s Critics Poll. Gabrielle Bell currently lives in Brooklyn, NY.

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"This book is simply written and will be of much help to new converts and defeated Christians in starting them off to a victorious spiritual life." -- Bibliotheca Sacra"Major Thomas points out how many dedicated people, ministers, Sunday school teachers, and the like, have come out of the old life but never gone on to the full, joyous life in Christ. He writes with fresh insight into many Bible passages, and challenges Christians to walk on and take the victory that is already won." -- Faith at Work". . . a very inspiring and helpful book." -- Baptist Standard"This is one of the most helpful treatments of a neglected subject which has come to this reviewer's attention." --The Baptist Bulletin". . . the author evidences keen insight into the definition and activity of the two natures of the believer and the path to victory. This path is explained with refreshing theological objectivity." --The Sunday School Times"A deeply spiritual study of the doctrine of the indwelling Christ. . . . Complete surrender is our need that Christ may live through us. We found the book helpful and enriching." -- The Southern Baptist S.S. Board

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A richly textured history spanning a thousand years of holy relics across Europe Relics were everywhere in medieval society. Saintly morsels such as bones, hair, teeth, blood, milk, and clothes, and items like the Crown of Thorns, coveted by Louis IX of France, were thought to bring the believer closer to the saint, who might intercede with God on his or her behalf. In the first comprehensive history in English of the rise of relic cults, Charles Freeman takes readers on a vivid, fast-paced journey from Constantinople to the northern Isles of Scotland over the course of a millennium.In Holy Bones, Holy Dust, Freeman illustrates that the pervasiveness and variety of relics answered very specific needs of ordinary people across a darkened Europe under threat of political upheavals, disease, and hellfire. But relics were not only venerated—they were traded, collected, lost, stolen, duplicated, and destroyed. They were bargaining chips, good business and good propaganda, politically appropriated across Europe, and even used to wield military power. Freeman examines an expansive array of relics, showing how the mania for these objects deepens our understanding of the medieval world and why these relics continue to capture our imagination.

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J. R. R. Tolkien: The Mind Behind the Rings, you'll get a never-before-seen look at the man, the artist, and the believer behind some of the world's most beloved stories.Join bestselling author Mark Horne as he explores lasting impact of the kind of creative freedom that can only come from faith and struggle.Raised in South Africa and Great Britain, young Tolkien led a life filled with uncertainty, instability, and loss. As he grew older, however, the faith that his mother instilled in him continued as an intrinsic contribution to his creative imagination and his everyday life.J. R. R. Tolkien explores: The literary giant's childhood, coming-of-age stories, and the countless hurdles he faced What inspired and influenced The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit Tolkien's service in the war The ways that Tolkien's faith influenced his work Previously published as a volume in the Christian Encounters series, this renewed edition of J. R. R. Tolkien now includes updated information about TV series and films inspired by Tolkien's literary creations as well as a discussion guide designed to keep the conversation going.

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In the Middle Ages, textual amulets—short texts written on parchment or paper and worn on the body—were thought to protect the bearer against enemies, to heal afflictions caused by demonic invasions, and to bring the wearer good fortune. In Binding Words, Don C. Skemer provides the first book-length study of this once-common means of harnessing the magical power of words. Textual amulets were a unique source of empowerment, promising the believer safe passage through a precarious world by means of an ever-changing mix of scriptural quotations, divine names, common prayers, and liturgical formulas. Although theologians and canon lawyers frequently derided textual amulets as ignorant superstition, many literate clergy played a central role in producing and disseminating them. The texts were, in turn, embraced by a broad cross-section of Western Europe. Saints and parish priests, physicians and village healers, landowners and peasants alike believed in their efficacy. Skemer offers careful analysis of several dozen surviving textual amulets along with other contemporary medieval source materials. In the process, Binding Words enriches our understanding of popular religion and magic in everyday medieval life.

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Muslims are required to pray five times a day, but for too many of us these are little more than physical movements devoid of any spirit or divine connection? In contrast, the Prophet characterised prayer as “the spiritual ascent (mi'raj) of the believer.” In a modern world of constant distraction, how are we to achieve the communion with the Divine that prayer is supposed to be? How can we reach the state of the Prophet who would ask his Companion Bilal to give the call to prayer with the expression: “Give us repose through it, O Bilal.” The present short but valuable work provides us with the answer. Dr Bassam Saeh, a scholar of the Arabic language, casts a refreshing new perspective on prayer in the modern context. With practical examples, and in contemporary idiom, he charts a path for the seeker of God’s pleasure to attain a deeper sense of consciousness and devotion in prayer. The short chapters of this work are designed to be read and reread as constant reminders for us to renew our commitment to the Divine in our prayer.

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Josef Pieper’s The Platonic Myths is the work of a scholar and philosopher whose search for the level of truth contained in the myths is carried out with a series of careful distinctions between the kinds of myths told by Plato. In the Platonic stories Plato crystallizes mythical fragments from the mere stories which contain them, and in the genuine Platonic myths he purifies the proper mythical elements, freeing them of the non-mythical elements which tend to obscure them. In examining the ‘accepted’ scholarly interpretations of the myths, Pieper succeeds in establishing the case for a truth, found particularly in the eschatological myths, that is not reducible to the rational truth normally sought by philosophers. While it is not purely rational truth, it is not inferior. It is different. It stems from tradition, which reaches back to the ultimate beginnings of man’s existence – back into our pre-history and to events of which, naturally, we have no experience. The only access we have to this truth is through ‘hearing’ (ex akoés), which is not dependent on mere ‘hearsay,’ but which, in Pieper’s interpretation, reflects the handing on, in stories, of what the gods first communicated to man about the creation of the world and about the afterlife. These truths are to be found – long before the New Testament (or even the Old Testament) – in the myths of a variety of civilizations and give evidence of an extraordinary consensus: that there was a creating hand, that primeval man incurred guilt in the eyes of the gods; that he could be saved; that there is an afterlife in which man is rewarded or punished; that he can undergo a kind of purgatory for lesser offenses; and that in the afterlife he can dwell with the gods. What is the basis for accepting such truth as is contained in the myths? No purely rational argument will suffice. What man cannot experience himself he either tends to reject or, if he accepts it, he does so on the authority of another – ex akoés. Even before – or even without – Christian revelation, men have based their lives on a conviction, for instance, that there is an afterlife. They have this conviction not from experience or from some rational philosophical argument. They have it on the basis of ‘belief.’ With the coming of Christian revelation, the logos, or word, of the myth is seen – to the believer – to be the Logos of the New Testament. But even here the ‘believer’ can depend neither on purely rational argument nor on satisfactorily verifiable fact. He has only – belief.

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When a dark shadow passes overhead, do you stop? Or do you run? Infamous sky monsters have haunted our imaginations for centuries. The Thunderbird, steeped in Native American folklore, supposedly controls evil by throwing lightning. The Jersey Devil is said to roam the Pine Barrens of South Jersey, terrorizing anyone who crosses its path. And the cryptic warnings of Mothman have worried residents of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, since the 1960s. In A Guide to Sky Monsters: Thunderbirds, the Jersey Devil, Mothman, and Other Flying Cryptids, authors T. S. Mart and Mel Cabre introduce 20 flying cryptids with legends that span the United States. With 70 hand-drawn illustrations, A Guide to Sky Monsters details our fascination with these creatures and describes both historical evidence found in the fossil record and the specifics of modern-day sightings. By studying the fact, fiction, and pop culture surrounding these notorious beasts, Mart and Cabre help us lean into the question, "What if?"A Guide to Sky Monsters, perfect for the believer and skeptic alike, addresses the wider truths about flying cryptids and leaves us all to wonder whether that breeze was the wind or a wing.

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Too many discipleship books are written for clean, perfect people who know all the right Sunday school answers. The Imperfect Disciple is for the rest of us--people who screw up, people who are weary, people who are wondering if it's safe to say what they're really thinking. For the believer who is tired of quasi-spiritual lifehacks being passed off as true, down-and-dirty discipleship, here is a discipleship book that isn't afraid to be honest about the mess we call real life. With incisive wit, warm humor, and moving stories, Jared Wilson shows readers how the gospel works in them and in their lives when - they can't get their act together - they think God is giving them the silent treatment - they think church would be better without all the people - they're not happy with the person in the mirror - and much more Wilson frees readers from the self-doubt and even the misplaced self-confidence they may feel as they walk with Jesus down the often difficult road of life. The result is a faith that weathers storms, lifts burdens, and goes forth to make more imperfect disciples.

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What if there were a book that changed every time you read it? Actually, every book does this. We are all part of the books we read, because our individual reactions, ideas, and emotions make the book whole, and these things are changing all the time. Keri Smith has helped millions of people free their creativity and find their own voice with her interactive books, and now she brings that sensibility to children and to the act of reading. This picture book is an invitation to honour your own vision and to welcome imperfection. Kids will discover that reading can engage all five senses, and that what they themselves bring to a book is an important contribution. (And of course they'll be invited to do a bit of harmless wrecking!)Praise for Keri Smith:A conceptual artist and author luring kids into questioning the world and appreciating every smell, texture and mystery in it." --TIME"Keri Smith may well be the self-help guru this DIY generation deserves." --The Believer"Not gonna lie, this is probably the coolest journal you'll ever see. . . . Wreck This Journal is here to inspire you." --BuzzFeed"Smith pushes kids (and adults) to break convention by seeing the world as inspiration, rather than simply 'things.'" --GeekDad (of The Pocket Scavenger)

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"If you take a broad squint at our nation's new poets you can find two general strategies: poets who are carrying the torch, and poets who are using it to start fires. And then we have Joshua Beckman. He seems to be doing everything."--Daniel Handler, The Believer "Beckman ...does the incredible work of writing poems full of desire, for a world in the midst of radical upheaval."--Publishers Weekly (starred review for Take It) Joshua Beckman is at his most immediate, attentive, and available in The Inside of an Apple. Beckman's latest collection of sincere, spare poems invites the reader to experience a revelation of consciousness and a generosity of spirit. Let my still dark soul be music. A made whistle floating out a window arranged. Some little thing fell and I picked it up and up it kept on going. Eight dead stars make a sickle, and the earth is covered in grass. Joshua Beckman is the author of nine books, including collections of poetry, translations, and collaborations. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including a NYFA fellowship and a Pushcart Prize. He lives in Seattle and New York.

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When a dark shadow passes overhead, do you stop? Or do you run? Infamous sky monsters have haunted our imaginations for centuries. The Thunderbird, steeped in Native American folklore, supposedly controls evil by throwing lightning. The Jersey Devil is said to roam the Pine Barrens of South Jersey, terrorizing anyone who crosses its path. And the cryptic warnings of Mothman have worried residents of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, since the 1960s. In A Guide to Sky Monsters: Thunderbirds, the Jersey Devil, Mothman, and Other Flying Cryptids, authors T. S. Mart and Mel Cabre introduce 20 flying cryptids with legends that span the United States. With 70 hand-drawn illustrations, A Guide to Sky Monsters details our fascination with these creatures and describes both historical evidence found in the fossil record and the specifics of modern-day sightings. By studying the fact, fiction, and pop culture surrounding these notorious beasts, Mart and Cabre help us lean into the question, "What if?"A Guide to Sky Monsters, perfect for the believer and skeptic alike, addresses the wider truths about flying cryptids and leaves us all to wonder whether that breeze was the wind or a wing.

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A Bible Study to Help You Receive and Extend Christ's Mercy In our divisive and unforgiving world, we need mercy more than ever. When we extend grace toward one another despite faults, mistakes, and differences of opinion, we model the kind of longsuffering patience and love that God shows toward us. But how do you cultivate a merciful heart in the midst of a culture where everyone seems quick to judge and slow to forgive? Where do you begin? Create in Me a Heart of Mercy is a six-week Bible study that will help you · discover the transformational power that mercy has in and through the life of the believer · learn how to extend mercy to others, even in circumstances where it feels difficult or undeserved · experience the freedom and purpose that come from multiplying mercy in a world that desperately needs it The mercy that God has shown us through Jesus is meant to flow through us to the rest of the world as a powerful witness to God's love and forgiveness. Join (in)courage and let God create in you a heart of mercy!

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The New Testament writers use spatial language and imagery to portray our relationship with God, speaking both about God or Christ in us, and us in them. Believers are also described as possessing and participating in divine qualities such as life and glory. Both aspects are prominent in John's Gospel and letters. However, outside the Pauline writings, union with Christ has hardly been addressed in New Testament scholarship. Dr. Clive Bowsher seeks to redress this balance in Life in the Son. In John's Gospel, the oneness of the Father and Son is described as the Father and Son being 'in-one-another.' Clive Bowsher's study shows that union with Christ in John's Gospel and letters is the in-one-another relationship of believers with the Father and Son by the Spirit - the intimate, loving, relational participation of the believer and God, each in the life, affections, ways and work of the other. Insightful and accessible, Bowsher's study also explores connections with the shape of sonship, and with covenant and the life of the age to come. This new volume in the NSBT series fills a significant gap in the literature and promises to be a blessing to pastors, preachers and scholars alike.

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'Improvement is a major work of literature.' - Nick Hornby, The BelieverReyna knows her relationship with Boyd isn't perfect, yet as she visits him throughout his three-month stint in prison, their bond grows tighter. Kiki, now settled in New York after a journey that took her to Turkey and around the world, admires her niece's spirit but worries that she always picks the wrong man. Little does she know that the otherwise honourable Boyd is pulling Reyna into a scheme which violates his probation. When Reyna ultimately decides to remove herself for the sake of her four-year-old child, her small act of resistance sets into motion a tapestry of events that affect the lives of loved ones and strangers around them. A novel that examines conviction, connection and the possibility of generosity in the face of loss, Improvement is as intricately woven together as Kiki's beloved Turkish rugs and as colourful as the tattoos decorating Reyna's body, with narrative twists and turns as surprising and unexpected as the lives all around us. The Boston Globe says of Joan Silber 'No other writer can make a few small decisions ripple across the globe, and across time, with more subtlety and power.' Improvement is Silber's most shining achievement yet.

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The No. 1 New York Times BestsellerJess Walter's Beautiful Ruins is a gorgeous, glamorous novel set in 1960s Italy and a modern Hollywood studio.The story begins in 1962. Somewhere on a rocky patch of the sun-drenched Italian coastline a young innkeeper, chest-deep in daydreams, looks out over the incandescent waters of the Ligurian Sea and views an apparition: a beautiful woman, a vision in white, approaching him on a boat. She is an American starlet, he soon learns, and she is dying.And the story begins again today, half a world away in Hollywood, when an elderly Italian man shows up on a movie studio's back lot searching for the woman he last saw at his hotel fifty years before.Gloriously inventive, funny, tender and constantly surprising, Beautiful Ruins is a novel full of fabulous and yet very flawed people, all of them striving towards another sort of life, a future that is both delightful and yet, tantalizingly, seems just out of reach.'Magic...A monument to crazy love with a deeply romantic heart' New York Times'A novel shot in sparkly Technicolor' Booklist'Hilarious and compelling' Esquire'Beautiful Ruins is a novel unlike any other you're likely to read this year' Nick Hornby, The Believer

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In the early twentieth century, travel writing represented the desire for the expanding bourgeoisie to experience the exotic cultures of the world past their immediate surroundings. Journalist William Buehler Seabrook was emblematic of this trend participating in voodoo ceremonies, riding camels cross the Sahara desert, communing with cannibals and most notably, popularizing the term zombie in the West. A string of his bestselling books show an engaged, sympathetic gentleman hoping to share these strange, hidden delights with the rest of the world. He was willing to go deeper than any outsider had before. But, of course, there was a dark side. Seabrook was a barely functioning alcoholic who was deeply obsessed with bondage and the so-called mystical properties of pain and degradation. His life was a series of traveling highs and drunken lows; climbing on and falling off the wagon again and again. What led the popular and vivid writer to such a sad state? Cartoonist Joe Ollmann spent seven years researching Seabrook s life and accessing long neglected archives in order to piece together the peripatetic life of a for- gotten American writer. Often weaving in Seabrook s own words and those of his biographers, Ollmann posits Seabrook the believer versus Seabrook the exploiter, and leaves the reader to consider where one ends and the other begins.

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"Bell's pen becomes a kind of laser, first illuminating the surface distractions of the world, then scorching them away to reveal a deeper reality that is almost too painful and too beautiful to bear."-- Alison Bechdel, Fun Home, Are You My Mother In Gabrielle Bell's much anticipated graphic memoir, she returns from New York to her childhood town in rural Northern California after her mother's home is destroyed by a fire. Acknowledging her issues with anxiety, financial hardships, memories of a semi-feral childhood, and a tenuous relationship with her mother, Bell helps her mother put together a new home on top of the ashes. A powerful, sometimes uncomfortable, examination of a mother-daughter relationship and one's connection to place and sense of self. Spanning a single year, Everything is Flammable unfolds with humor and brutal honesty. Bell's sharp, digressive style is inimitable. Gabrielle Bell's work has been selected for Best American Comics and the Yale Anthology of Graphic Fiction, and has been featured in McSweeney's, the Believer, Bookforum, and Vice among numerous other publications. Her story, "Cecil and Jordan In New York," was adapted into film by Michel Gondry. Bell's previous graphic novel, The Voyeurs, was named one of the best books of the year by Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, and the Atlantic. She currently lives in Brooklyn, NY.

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Theo, our scruffy, big-hearted, and quick-witted heroine, is not so much down on her luck as delivered luckless into a culture where the winners and losers have already been decided. Her adventures in getting over take her from San Francisco to New York City, from dyke bars to telemarketing outfits, casinos to free clinics. With the signature poet's voice that has won her awards and acclaim, Ali Liebegott investigates the conjoined hearts of hope and addiction in an unforgettable story of what it means to be young and broke in America. Praise for Cha-Ching!: "...frank, funny and painfully realistic ...Liebegott has unleashed a book that's part road novel, part portrait of a would-be artist as a young woman and part unabashed romance."--Josh Davis, The Rumpus "Ali Liebegott's books evoke a life-affirming sensation that comes from embracing the pendular. Her ability to hit the right tone is scientific, almost violent in its precision--a single word or observation, well-placed, can have a reader crying or laughing aloud."--Evan Karp, Bomb Magazine "Cha-Ching!, [Liebegott's] latest novel, is one of those books that cause you to look up, blinking, realizing that you've read 75 pages and your coffee is cold. It's a rush of offtrack betting, impulsive road trips, liquor-fueled make-out sessions, and the sort of low-end jobs that are invisible in most fiction but everywhere in Liebegott's work."--San Francisco Magazine "Cha-Ching! is a rush - the clatter of youth on the angry move, the rattling of dreamy gambles in crappy apartments, the desperate crash of falling for someone despite the million reasons why and the bang! bang! bang! of our tender hearts."--Daniel Handler author of Why We Broke Up "Cha-Ching! is so raw with need that I found myself itching that addict's itch to chase the seemingly impossible."--Karolina Waclawiak, deputy editor of The Believer and author of How to Get Into the Twin Palms "An open-hearted, deeply romantic story about a fucked-up dyke, her pit bull, her search for love, her tenuous grasp on hope, a pretty girl and the literal spin of the wheel."--Sarah Schulman, author of The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination "...fresh and compelling ...the novel offers a subtle and compassionate depiction of addiction and its cycle of despair-and-hope, too. "--Charlotte Bhskar, Zyzzyva About the Author: Ali Liebegott is the author of the award-winning books The Beautifully Worthless and The IHOP Papers. In 2010 she took a train trip across America interviewing female poets for a project titled, The Heart Has Many Doors; excerpts from these interviews are posted monthly on The Believer Logger. Her novel Cha-Ching! is the third in the City Lights/Sister Spit series. In addition, she is the founding editor at Writers Among Artists whose first publication, Faggot Dinosaur, was released in 2012.

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The Best American Magazine Writing 2020 brings together outstanding writing, from in-depth reporting to incisive criticism. The anthology features excerpts from major projects that challenge American certitudes: the Washington Post Magazine’s “Prison” issue, detailing the scope of mass incarceration, and the New York Times Magazine’s “The 1619 Project,” which recenters the nation’s history around slavery and its legacies. It includes extraordinary globe-spanning journalism, including pieces on the genocide against the Rohingya (New York Times Magazine) and the unintended consequences of a dengue fever vaccine (Fortune). Pamela Colloff details prosecutors’ reliance on an untrustworthy jailhouse informant (New York Times Magazine in partnership with ProPublica), and a ProPublica series investigates the disaster that befell the USS Fitzgerald.The anthology showcases the work of remarkable stylists, including Jia Tolentino’s cultural commentary (New Yorker) and Ligaya Mishan’s columns on food and culture (T: The New York Times Style Magazine). Columns by s.e. smith consider disability (Catapult), and the DeafBlind poet John Lee Clark writes about art he can touch (Poetry). Jordan Kisner visits a Martha Washington–themed debutante ball in Texas near the Mexican border for The Believer, and Jacob Baynham offers a moving portrait of his father-in-law (Georgia Review). Arundhati Roy excoriates the increasing authoritarianism of Modi’s India (The Nation in partnership with Type Media Center). The anthology concludes with Jonathan Escoffery’s short story of homesickness for Jamaica, “Under the Ackee Tree” (Paris Review).

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Twenty-one years after Kaya Press first published Sesshu Foster’s City Terrace Field Manual, a powerful collection of prose poems that map the East Los Angeles neighborhood of Foster's childhood, comes a new collection of poetry and prose that takes on gentrification, modernization and globalization, as told from the same corner of this rapidly changing metropolis. Winner the CLMP Firecracker Award for Poetry, 2019 These poems are, in the poet’s words: “Postcards written with ocotillo and yucca. Gentrification of your face inside your sleep. Privatization of identity, corners, and intimations. Wars on the nerve, colors, breathing. Postcard poems of early and late notes, mucilage, American loneliness. Postcard poems of slopes, films of dust and crows. Incarceration nation ‘Wish You Were Here’ postcards 35 cents emerge from gentrified pants. You can’t live like this. Postcards sent into the future. You can’t live here now; you must live in the future, in the City of the Future.” Poet, teacher and community activist Sesshu Foster (born 1957) was born and raised in East Los Angeles. He earned his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and returned to LA to continue teaching, writing and community organizing. His third collection of poetry, World Ball Notebook (2009), won an American Book Award and an Asian American Literary Award for Poetry. Foster is the author of the speculative-fiction novel Atomik Aztex (2005), which won the Believer Book Award and imagines an America free of European colonizers.

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In this book the author walks the reader through the nature of the arts, the nature of Christian faith, and the historical factors which have brought us to our current crises of faith and imagination. There is a connection between religious faith and artistic expression which rests in the archetypal images of human culture. In our era, that connection seems to be more of a disjunction. Current artistic expressions do not seem to project the same images as religious faith confesses. This is especially true in Western civilization. Both the arts and religious faith (specifically Christianity) are approached as manifestations of the activity of human beings. Only later do these activities become intellectualized in aesthetics and theology. Understanding the artist and the believer as existing human beings, the perceived disjunction can be eclipsed when we grasp the context in which the human artist and the human believer in this century find themselves at odds. The crux of the disjunction is not so much the artists' disbelief (as religious believers seem to assume) as it is the failure of traditional expressions of belief in meeting human needs and a concurrent tightening of the grip by believers on the traditional metaphors of their faith. Perhaps the resolution will come in the new metaphors of the artists and a simultaneous turning by believers to give attention to the attempts of artists to speak mystery anew.

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Through the centuries, at the heart of Catholic moral theology is a fundamental question: How do we behave responsibly in the face of moral uncertainty? Attempts to resolve problems of everyday life led to the growth of a variety of moral systems, one of which emerged in the early 17th century and was known as "probabilism." This method of solving difficult moral cases allowed the believer to rely upon a view that was judged defensible in terms of its arguments or the authorities behind it, even if the opposite opinion was supported by stronger arguments or more authorities. The theologian Juan Caramuel, a Spanish Cistercian monk whom Alphonso Liguori famously characterized as "the prince of laxists," has been regarded as one of the more extreme - and notorious - proponents of probabilism. As the only full-length English study of Caramuel's theological method, "Defending Probabilism" seeks to reappraise Caramuel's legacy, claiming that his model of moral thinking, if better understood, can actually be of help to the Church today. Considered one of the most erudite theologians of his age, a scientist and scholar who published works on everything from astronomy and architecture to printing and Gregorian chant, Caramuel strove throughout his life to understand probabilism's theological and philosophical foundations as part of his broader analysis of the nature of human knowledge. In applying Caramuel's legacy to our own time, "Defending Probabilism" calls for a reconsideration of the value of provisional moral knowledge. Fleming's study shows that history matters, and that to attain any position on moral certitude is a difficult and painstaking process.

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Developing original accounts of the many aspects of belief, On Believing puts the believer at the heart of the story. Hunter argues that to believe something is to be in position to do, think, and feel things in light of a possibility whose obtaining would make one right. The logical aspect is that being right depends only on whether that possibility obtains. The psychological one concerns how that possibility can rationalise what one does, thinks, and feels. But, Hunter argues, beliefs are not causes, capacities, or dispositions. Rather, believing rationalises because possibilities are potential reasons. Hunter also denies that believing is a form of representing. The objects of belief are possibilities, not representations, and belief states are not themselves true or false. Hunter defends this modal view against familiar objections and explores how objective and subjective limits to belief generate credal illusions and ground credal necessities. Developing a novel account of the normativity of belief, he argues that voluntary acts of inference make us responsible for our beliefs. While denying that believing is intrinsically normative, Hunter grounds the ethics of belief in attributive goodness. Believing something is to our credit when it shows us to be good in some way, and what we ought to believe depends on what we ought to know, and not on the evidence we have. The ethics of belief, Hunter argues, concern how a believer ought to be positioned in a world of possibilities.

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Titled after the US Air Force song, this engaging debut explores the legacy of the Greatest Generation from the perspective of Generation Y, the fallout of war through the eyes of a pacifist, and the enduring human desire for love, adventure, truth, and understanding. Pensive in the wake of 9/11, a young man—our “correspondent between the past and the present”—launches a mission to reunite his beloved grandfather, an American bombardier, with Luddie, the woman who saved him during WWII. Armed only with the address on the back of an old photograph and his grandfather’s memories, the young man begins writing letters to Luddie. Undaunted by her lack of response, the narrator travels to Poland with his girlfriend and grandfather. As they come closer to finding the site where the bombardier was shot down, the letters to Luddie become more personal and the saga of a family with a long and storied history emerges. Beautifully orchestrated and eloquently original, each sentence slowly builds upon the next in a charming style both poetic and engrossing. A tale of soldiers and saviors, of burning and bombing, of fathers and sons and brothers and lovers, this is also the story of what we find when we dare to revisit the past. Born in Iowa in 1979, Travis Nichols now lives in Chicago. An editor at the Poetry Foundation, his writing has appeared in The Village Voice, The Believer, Details, Paste, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and The Stranger. Off We Go Into the Wild Blue Yonder is his first novel.

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Most Christians miss the ultimate hope for their future because their views of heaven are vague, religious . . . and, frankly, boring. Hope begins when we understand that for the believer, nothing is lost. Heaven is not an endless life of harp strumming and worship singing in the clouds. Rather, the life we long for – the paradise Adam and Eve knew – is precisely the life that is coming to us. And that life is coming soon.In this five-session study, John Eldredge explores the revolutionary idea that according to the Bible, heaven is not our eternal home – the New Earth is. Jesus said the next chapter of our story begins with “the renewal of all things” (Matthew 19:28), by which he meant the earth we love, ourselves, and all the things that make for a rich life: music, art, food, and laughter. God’s promise is that everything shall be renewed “when the world is made new.”Part devotional, part adventure story, part field manual, this study will help you see the glorious future coming to you and provide “hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure” (Hebrews 6:19). Ideal for individual or group use, this guide includes personal reflection questions, targeted excerpts from All Things New, a Big Ideas overview, small-group discussion questions, and group exercises. A leader’s guide is also included for those facilitating a group.Sessions include: The Hope of Renewal Creation Made New Your Story Told Rightly What We’ll Do in the New Earth The Power of Our Hope This pack contains one study guide and one DVD.

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For the Time Being is a pivotal book in the career of one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. W. H. Auden had recently moved to America, fallen in love with a young man to whom he considered himself married, rethought his entire poetic and intellectual equipment, and reclaimed the Christian faith of his childhood. Then, in short order, his relationship fell apart and his mother, to whom he was very close, died. In the midst of this period of personal crisis and intellectual remaking, he decided to write a poem about Christmas and to have it set to music by his friend Benjamin Britten. Applying for a Guggenheim grant, Auden explained that he understood the difficulty of writing something vivid and distinctive about that most cliched of subjects, but welcomed the challenge. In the end, the poem proved too long and complex to be set by Britten, but in it we have a remarkably ambitious and poetically rich attempt to see Christmas in double focus: as a moment in the history of the Roman Empire and of Judaism, and as an ever-new and always contemporary event for the believer. For the Time Being is Auden's only explicitly religious long poem, a technical tour de force, and a revelatory window into the poet's personal and intellectual development. This edition provides the most accurate text of the poem, a detailed introduction by Alan Jacobs that explains its themes and sets the poem in its proper contexts, and thorough annotations of its references and allusions.

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Funny and fact-filled, MOLES is another installment in the SUPERPOWER FIELD GUIDES series by author Rachel Poliquin, featuring full-colour illustrations by Nicholas John Frith that will engage readers with witty narration and fun visual elements, inspiring readers to dig deep and see the world, both above and below ground, with new eyes. Meet Rosalie, a common mole.The first thing you need to know about Rosalie is that she is shaped like a potato. Not a new potato, all cute and round, but a plain old lumpy potato. She may be small. She may be spongy. But never underestimate a mole. I know what you're thinking: moles are just squinty-eyed beasts that wreck your lawn. You're right! Those squinty eyes and mounds of dirt are proof that moles have superpowers. There is absolutely nothing common about the common mole. AGES: 7 to 10 AUTHOR: Rachel Poliquin is a writer engaged in all things orderly and disorderly in the natural world. With a cross-disciplinary background in visual arts, cultural history and natural history, she holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of British Columbia and a Post-Doctoral Degree in History from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Poliquin is the author of the Superpower Field Guide series, and has also written for Science Friday, The Believer Magazine, and The New York Times. Nicholas John Frith is the author/illustrator of Hector and Hummingbird, shortlisted for the Waterstones Children's book Prize 2016 and winner of the inaugural Klaus Flugge Prize, as well as the book Hello, Mr. Dodo! and the Superpower Field Guide series. He lives and works on the coast of Dorset, England.

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"The Voyeurs is the work of a mature writer, if not one of the most sincere voices of her literary generation. It's a fun, honest read that spans continents, relationships and life decisions. I loved it."--Chris Ware, Acme Novelty Library "As she watches other people living life, and watches herself watching them, Bell's pen becomes a kind of laser, first illuminating the surface distractions of the world, then scorching them away to reveal a deeper reality that is almost too painful and too beautiful to bear."-- Alison Bechdel, Fun Home "A master of the exquisite detail, Bell provides a welcome peephole into our lives."--Francoise Mouly, The New Yorker "I don't think I could tolerate her if she wasn't so talented."--Michel Gondry, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind The Voyeurs is a real-time memoir of a turbulent five years in the life of renowned cartoonist, diarist, and filmmaker Gabrielle Bell. It collects episodes from her award-winning series Lucky, in which she travels to Tokyo, Paris, the South of France, and all over the United States, but remains anchored by her beloved Brooklyn, where sidekick Tony provides ongoing insight, offbeat humor, and enduring friendship. Gabrielle Bell's work has been selected for the 2007, 2009, 2010, and 2011 Houghton-Mifflin Best American Comics and the Yale Anthology of Graphic Fiction, and has been featured in McSweeney's, The Believer, and Vice magazines. "Cecil and Jordan In New York," the title story of her most recent book, was adapted for the screen by Bell and director Michel Gondry in the film anthology Tokyo! She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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I.B.Tauris in association with the Institute of Ismaili Studies Culture shapes every aspect of the relationship between God and the believer in Islam - as well as among believers, and with those beyond the fold. Fasts, prayers and pilgrimages are attuned to social rhythms old and new, no less than the designs of mosques and public gardens, the making of 'religious' music, and ways of thinking about technology and wellbeing. Ancient deserts and modern urban landscapes may echo with the same call for transcendence, but in voices that emerge from very different everyday realities. Scripture itself, as the Prophet Muhammad knew, is ever seen through a cultural lens; both language and what it communicates are intimately tied to context. And the cosmopolitanism that runs through Muslim history from the outset recalls T.S. Eliot's remark that culture is 'that which makes life worth living'. It frames how the deepest religious values are understood and practiced, from modesty in adornment and solidarity with the underprivileged, to integrity and accountability in political life. Muslims have never been content with a passive separation of faith from their daily lives, whether public or private. What are the implications of this holistic view in a diverse world of Muslims and non-Muslims? How do core ethical values interface with the particulars of local cultures in all their complexity, especially when it comes to matters like the status of women and the scope of individual religious freedom? The answers - at a time when secular and Muslim identities appear to be locked in conflict - are explored in this Companion by some of today's finest scholars.

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Now that we ‘curate’ even lunch, what happens to the role of the connoisseur in contemporary culture? ‘Curate’ is now a buzzword, applied to everything from music festivals to artisanal cheese. Inside the art world, the curator reigns supreme, acting as the face of high-profile group shows and biennials in a way that can eclipse and assimilate the contributions of individual artists. Curatorial-studies programs continue to grow, and the business world is adopting curation as a means of adding value to content. Everyone, it seems, is a curator. But what is a curator, exactly? And what does the explosive popularity of curating say about our culture’s relationship with taste, labour and the avant-garde? In this vibrant, revelatory and original study, David Balzer travels through art history and around the globe to explore the cult of curation, from superstar curator Hans Ulrich Obrist’s war with sleep to Subway’s ‘sandwich artists.’ Recalling such landmark works of cultural criticism as Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word and John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, Curationism will change the way you look at art – and maybe even the way you see yourself. ‘This is an unusual art book. It is a book you should read and one that you can. Balzer traces the history and current hegemony of curationism, a practice of jumped-up interior decorators who double as priests explaining the gospel to the unlettered masses. A good read, if you don’t mind reading things that you don’t want to know.’ – Dave Hickey David Balzer has contributed to publications including the Believer, Modern Painters, Artforum.com, and The Globe and Mail, and is the author of Contrivances, a short-fiction collection. He is currently Associate Editor at Canadian Art magazine. Balzer was born in Winnipeg and currently resides in Toronto, where he makes a living as a critic, editor and teacher.

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Menahem Mendel Schneerson (1902-1994) was the seventh and seemingly last Rebbe of the Habad-Lubavitch dynasty. Marked by conflicting tendencies, Schneerson was a radical messianic visionary who promoted a conservative political agenda, a reclusive contemplative who built a hasidic sect into an international movement, and a man dedicated to the exposition of mysteries who nevertheless harbored many secrets. Schneerson astutely masked views that might be deemed heterodox by the canons of orthodoxy while engineering a fundamentalist ideology that could subvert traditional gender hierarchy, the halakhic distinction between permissible and forbidden, and the social-anthropological division between Jew and Gentile. While most literature on the Rebbe focuses on whether or not he identified with the role of Messiah, Elliot R. Wolfson, a leading scholar of Jewish mysticism and the phenomenology of religious experience, concentrates instead on Schneerson's apocalyptic sensibility and his promotion of a mystical consciousness that undermines all discrimination. For Schneerson, the ploy of secrecy is crucial to the dissemination of the messianic secret. To be enlightened messianically is to be delivered from all conceptual limitations, even the very notion of becoming emancipated from limitation. The ultimate liberation, or true and complete redemption, fuses the believer into an infinite essence beyond all duality, even the duality of being emancipated and not emancipated--an emancipation, in other words, that emancipates one from the bind of emancipation. At its deepest level, Schneerson's eschatological orientation discerned that a spiritual master, if he be true, must dispose of the mask of mastery. Situating Habad's thought within the evolution of kabbalistic mysticism, the history of Western philosophy, and Mahayana Buddhism, Wolfson articulates Schneerson's rich theology and profound philosophy, concentrating on the nature of apophatic embodiment, semiotic materiality, hypernomian transvaluation, nondifferentiated alterity, and atemporal temporality.

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Menahem Mendel Schneerson (1902-1994) was the seventh and seemingly last Rebbe of the Habad-Lubavitch dynasty. Marked by conflicting tendencies, Schneerson was a radical messianic visionary who promoted a conservative political agenda, a reclusive contemplative who built a hasidic sect into an international movement, and a man dedicated to the exposition of mysteries who nevertheless harbored many secrets. Schneerson astutely masked views that might be deemed heterodox by the canons of orthodoxy while engineering a fundamentalist ideology that could subvert traditional gender hierarchy, the halakhic distinction between permissible and forbidden, and the social-anthropological division between Jew and Gentile. While most literature on the Rebbe focuses on whether or not he identified with the role of Messiah, Elliot R. Wolfson, a leading scholar of Jewish mysticism and the phenomenology of religious experience, concentrates instead on Schneerson's apocalyptic sensibility and his promotion of a mystical consciousness that undermines all discrimination. For Schneerson, the ploy of secrecy is crucial to the dissemination of the messianic secret. To be enlightened messianically is to be delivered from all conceptual limitations, even the very notion of becoming emancipated from limitation. The ultimate liberation, or true and complete redemption, fuses the believer into an infinite essence beyond all duality, even the duality of being emancipated and not emancipated--an emancipation, in other words, that emancipates one from the bind of emancipation. At its deepest level, Schneerson's eschatological orientation discerned that a spiritual master, if he be true, must dispose of the mask of mastery. Situating Habad's thought within the evolution of kabbalistic mysticism, the history of Western philosophy, and Mahayana Buddhism, Wolfson articulates Schneerson's rich theology and profound philosophy, concentrating on the nature of apophatic embodiment, semiotic materiality, hypernomian transvaluation, nondifferentiated alterity, and atemporal temporality.

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This fourth installment in the hilarious and highly illustrated full-color Superpower Field Guide series features Olenka, an ordinary eel. Olenka may be slimy, wiggly, and the colour of mud, but never, ever underestimate an eel. Meet Olenka, an ordinary eel. Did I hear you say, "But aren't eels just long slippery slimy fishy-things that... hmm... Is there anything else to know about eels?" You bet your buttons there is! Sit back and hold on tight, because Olenka is going to amaze you with superpowers such as double invisibility and shape-shifting, and the super secret Lair of the Abyss (that means a top-secret deep-sea hideout). In fact, Olenka's life is so impossibly extraordinary, it has baffled the smartest scientists in the world for thousands of years. "Impossible!" you say. I say, "you don't know eels." But you will. Includes a ruler printed along the edge of the book's back cover to aid the observations of young field scientists everywhere! AGES: 7 to 10 AUTHOR: Rachel Poliquin is a writer engaged in all things orderly and disorderly in the natural world. With a cross-disciplinary background in visual arts, cultural history and natural history, she holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of British Columbia and a Post-Doctoral Degree in History from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Poliquin is the author of the Superpower Field Guide series, and has also written for Science Friday, The Believer Magazine, and The New York Times. Nicholas John Frith is the author/illustrator of Hector and Hummingbird, shortlisted for the Waterstones Children's book Prize 2016 and winner of the inaugural Klaus Flugge Prize, as well as the book Hello, Mr. Dodo! and the Superpower Field Guide series. He lives and works on the coast of Dorset, England.

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Beavers, the first book in the new middle-grade nonfiction Superhero Field Guide series by Rachel Poliquin and award-winning illustrator Nicholas John Frith, is a delightfully informative, laugh-out-loud full-colour look at the most unsuspecting of animal heroes, perfect for readers who like their facts served with a large dose of humour. Meet Elmer, an ordinary beaver. He may not be as mighty as a lion or as dangerous as a shark. He may be squat and brown. But never underestimate a beaver. I can almost hear you saying, "But aren't beavers just lumpy rodents with buck teeth and funny flat tails?" Yes, they are! And believe it or not, those buck teeth and funny flat tails are just a few of the things that make beavers extraordinary. Humorous and engaging, Beavers is the first book in the new highly illustrated nonfiction Superpower Field Guide series, inspiring readers to laugh, think, and view the world around them with new eyes. AGES: 7 to 10 AUTHOR: Rachel Poliquin is a writer engaged in all things orderly and disorderly in the natural world. With a cross-disciplinary background in visual arts, cultural history and natural history, she holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of British Columbia and a Post-Doctoral Degree in History from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Poliquin is the author of the Superpower Field Guide series, and has also written for Science Friday, The Believer Magazine, and The New York Times. Nicholas John Frith is the author/illustrator of Hector and Hummingbird, shortlisted for the Waterstones Children's book Prize 2016 and winner of the inaugural Klaus Flugge Prize, as well as the book Hello, Mr. Dodo! and the Superpower Field Guide series. He lives and works on the coast of Dorset, England.

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“SPRAWL in fact does not sprawl at all; rather, it radiates with control and fresh, strange reflection.” —Bookforum“Reads as if Gertrude Stein channeled Alice B. Toklas writing an Arcades Project set in contemporary suburbia.” —The BelieverWhen Danielle Dutton’s SPRAWL first broke upon the world in 2010, critics likened it to collage, a poetics of the suburbs, a literal unpacking of et cetera. This updated edition, with a new afterword by Renee Gladman, reopens the space of SPRAWL’s “fierce, careful composition”—as Bookforum wrote—“which changes the ordinary into the wonderful and odd.”Today I fell asleep in the tall grass near the old train station. It was a complete picture. A fashionable park. Yet the picture had its sordid and selfish aspect. I can’t seem to say what I mean, Mrs. Barbauld, but with some urgency I mean to inform you what a triumph the big city has become. I am a secular individual but even I can feel the shift in the horizon utterly alien to the constitution of things, the habitual. Sincerely, etc. I move in shade on the edge of a parking lot under walnut trees in the early morning around the edge of a curve in an accidental manner. I walk the sidewalk and ripple the surface of it. From this condition I have a view of the world.Danielle Dutton is the author of Margaret the First, SPRAWL, and Attempts at a Life. Her writing has also appeared or is forthcoming in The Paris Review, Harper’s, The White Review, Fence, BOMB, and others. She is on the faculty of the writing program at Washington University in St. Louis and is co-founder and editor of the feminist press Dorothy, a publishing project.

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The Best American Magazine Writing 2023 offers a selection of outstanding journalism on timely topics, including inequalities and injustices pressuring families, especially mothers. Rozina Ali tells the story of a U.S. marine who unlawfully adopted an Afghan girl and her family’s efforts to bring her home (New York Times Magazine). A Mother Jones exposé confronts the imprisonment of women for failing to protect their children from their abusive partners. “The Landlord and the Tenant” juxtaposes the lives of a poor single mother convicted for her children’s deaths in a fire and the man who owned the fatal property (ProPublica with Milwaukee Journal Sentinel). Caitlin Dickerson investigates the history of the U.S. government’s family-separation policy (The Atlantic). Jia Tolentino’s New Yorker commentary considers abortion in a post-Roe world.The anthology features pieces on a wide range of subjects, such as Nate Jones on the “Nepo Baby” and Allison P. Davis’s essay about a decade on Tinder (New York). Natalie So recounts how her mother’s small computer chip company became the target of a Silicon Valley crime ring (The Believer). Clint Smith asks what Holocaust memorials in Germany can teach the United States about our reckoning with slavery (The Atlantic). Esquire’s Chris Heath examines the FBI’s involvement in a plot to kidnap the governor of Michigan. Courtney Desiree Morris takes a queer psychedelic ramble through New Orleans (Stranger’s Guide). Namwali Serpell reflects on representations of sex workers (New York Review of Books). An ESPN Digital investigation uncovers Penn State’s other serial sexual predator before Jerry Sandusky. Profiles of the acclaimed actress Viola Davis (New York Times Magazine) and the self-taught artist Matthew Wong (New Yorker), as well as Michelle de Kretser’s short story “Winter Term” (Paris Review), round out the volume.

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The Best American Magazine Writing 2023 offers a selection of outstanding journalism on timely topics, including inequalities and injustices pressuring families, especially mothers. Rozina Ali tells the story of a U.S. marine who unlawfully adopted an Afghan girl and her family’s efforts to bring her home (New York Times Magazine). A Mother Jones exposé confronts the imprisonment of women for failing to protect their children from their abusive partners. “The Landlord and the Tenant” juxtaposes the lives of a poor single mother convicted for her children’s deaths in a fire and the man who owned the fatal property (ProPublica with Milwaukee Journal Sentinel). Caitlin Dickerson investigates the history of the U.S. government’s family-separation policy (The Atlantic). Jia Tolentino’s New Yorker commentary considers abortion in a post-Roe world.The anthology features pieces on a wide range of subjects, such as Nate Jones on the “Nepo Baby” and Allison P. Davis’s essay about a decade on Tinder (New York). Natalie So recounts how her mother’s small computer chip company became the target of a Silicon Valley crime ring (The Believer). Clint Smith asks what Holocaust memorials in Germany can teach the United States about our reckoning with slavery (The Atlantic). Esquire’s Chris Heath examines the FBI’s involvement in a plot to kidnap the governor of Michigan. Courtney Desiree Morris takes a queer psychedelic ramble through New Orleans (Stranger’s Guide). Namwali Serpell reflects on representations of sex workers (New York Review of Books). An ESPN Digital investigation uncovers Penn State’s other serial sexual predator before Jerry Sandusky. Profiles of the acclaimed actress Viola Davis (New York Times Magazine) and the self-taught artist Matthew Wong (New Yorker), as well as Michelle de Kretser’s short story “Winter Term” (Paris Review), round out the volume.

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Listed in The Boston Globe's Best Poetry Books of 2014 Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry Winner of The Believer Poetry Award "The (Soma)tic Exercises are innovative and crucial to our art form...Conrad must be one of the most original practitioners of poetry forging new territory."--The Rumpus "There was a time some of us believed poetry and poets could save the world; CAConrad never stopped believing it."--The Huffington Post From "M.I.A. ESCALATOR": The ultrasound machine gives the parents the ability to talk to the unborn by their gender, taking the intersexed nine-month conversation away from the child. The opportunities limit us in our new world. Encourage parents to not know, encourage parents to allow anticipation on either end. Escalators are a nice ride, slowly rising and falling, writing while riding, notes for the poem, meeting new people at either end, "Excuse me, EXCUSE ME..." My escalator notes became a poem. CAConrad's ECODEVIANCE contains twenty-three new (Soma)tic writing exercises and their resulting poems, in which he pushes his political and ecological efforts even further. These exercises, unorthodox steps in the writing process, work to break the reader and writer out of the quotidian and into a more politically and physically aware present. In performing these rituals, CAConrad looks through a sharper lens and confirms the necessity of poetry and politics. CAConrad is the author of A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon (Wave Books, 2012) and The Book of Frank (Wave Books, 2010/Chax Press, 2009), as well as several other books of poetry and essays. A 2014 Lannan Fellow, a 2013 MacDowell Fellow, and a 2011 Pew Fellow, he also conducts workshops on (Soma)tic poetry and Ecopoetics.

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A much anticipated third collection with poems mourning a mother figure, as well as recently deceased cultural icons. Praise for Kathleen Ossip: “Ossip conjures delightful and unexpected muses…shrewd and ambitious.” —New York Times Book Review "The Do-Over, Ossip’s third collection, is a lyrical, open-ended, meta-leaning meditation on the subject of death….[A]n exquisite cocktail of displacement, minutiae, and metapoetic introspection." —Boston Review “The biggest surprise in poetry for 2011 is this second book by Kathleen Ossip. It’s got everything one could wish for in a new collection of poems. . . . It’s just beautiful. And terrifying.” —Publishers Weekly, Best Books of 2011 “The poet has an uncanny ability to convey what it actually feels like to be alive today…Ossip is one of our foremost ethnographers of contemporary unreality.” —The Believer “How do you stay in heaven?” Ossip asks, “Is it a kind of sophisticated rewind?” Her third collection of poems is haunted by the idea of ‘rewind,’ and especially by the teasing possibility that we, too–like the moon, like a plant–may be granted cycles of life, death, and rebirth. The book's overarching narrative is the death of the poet’s stepmother-in-law, a cherished, loving, eccentric woman who returns to its pages again and again. But in spite of its focused grief and ontological urgency, The Do-Over is a varied collection–short acrostics mourn recently dead cultural icons (Amy Winehouse, Steve Jobs, Donna Summer); there's an ode to an anonymous Chinese factory worker, three “true stories” that read like anecdotes told over drinks, and more. The Do-Over is an unsentimental elegy to a mother figure, a fragmented portrait of its difficult, much loved subject. It's also a snapshot of our death-obsessed, death-denying cultural moment, which in Ossip's gifted hands turns out to be tremulous, skeptical, unsure of ultimate values and, increasingly, driven to find them. “I am still studying, aren’t you?” she begins. Readers will eagerly embrace the surprise, humor, and seriousness of her quest.

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The Catholic Church has always recognized that philosophy is necessary both to understand the faith as well as to defend it. The need for a philosophically informed faith has become more acute with the rise of secularism. Seat of Wisdom demonstrates that the philosophical principles developed in the Catholic tradition, especially as articulated in Thomism, provide the intellectual foundation for belief in God and are also the only reliable basis for a fully coherent vision of man's place in the world.Seat of Wisdom begins with an exploration of the relationship between faith and reason. Philosophy's essential role is to discover the rational principles underlying the intelligible order of reality. These principles act as a bridge connecting science and religious faith, enabling the believer to integrate all facets of human experience.Each of those first principles, as expressed in the transcendental properties, are then analyzed as the basis of the major philosophical disciplines. Starting with metaphysics' study of being, the argument proceeds to consider the true, the good, and the beautiful in terms of epistemology, anthropology, ethics, aesthetics, and political philosophy. Lastly, these principles are shown to point to God as creator.The strength of the Catholic philosophical tradition is evident when contrasted with reductive theories which fail to account for the breadth of human experience. Consequently, each chapter will introduce influential philosophers whose inadequate theories inform contemporary assumptions. Against this, the Thomistic argument is elucidated as being inclusive of the insights of the reductive position. It will be seen that this "both/and" approach is the only way to do justice to the glory of God and the gift of creation.Religion is prey to skepticism when it is isolated from the rest of knowledge. This integrative argument, uniting discussions of nature, politics, and theology according to common principles, enables the reader to grasp the unity of wisdom. Moreover, by engaging alternative positions, it provides the reader with tools to defend the Catholic worldview against those reductive philosophies which only deprive life of its full meaning.

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This third installment in the hilarious and highly-illustrated full-colour Superpower Field Guide series features the silly-looking, surprisingly fierce Ostrich. This two-toed torpedo may have the largest eyes of any animal on dry land, but it can outrun most horses! Meet Eno, an ordinary ostrich living in the Serengeti, a corner of the African savanna. But there's something you should know: Even ordinary ostriches are extraordinary. And that includes Eno. I know what you're thinking. You're thinking that ostriches are just overgrown chickens with ridiculous necks, skinny legs, and bad attitudes. And you're right! Believe it or not, that neck helps ostriches run at supersonic speeds. Those skinny legs can kill a lion dead. And these are only a few weapons in Eno's arsenal of superfierce survival skills - Eno has Colossal Orbs of Telescopic Vision, the Impossible Ever-Flow Lung, the Egg of Wonder, and so many more. You're still not convinced that ostriches are superpowered, are you? Well, you don't know ostriches yet. But you will. Includes a ruler printed along the book's back side to aid the observations of young field scientists everywhere! AGES: 7 to 10 AUTHOR: Rachel Poliquin is a writer engaged in all things orderly and disorderly in the natural world. With a cross-disciplinary background in visual arts, cultural history and natural history, she holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of British Columbia and a Post-Doctoral Degree in History from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Poliquin is the author of the Superpower Field Guide series, and has also written for Science Friday, The Believer Magazine, and The New York Times. Nicholas John Frith is the author/illustrator of Hector and Hummingbird, shortlisted for the Waterstones Children's book Prize 2016 and winner of the inaugural Klaus Flugge Prize, as well as the book Hello, Mr. Dodo! and the Superpower Field Guide series. He lives and works on the coast of Dorset, England.

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'Abby Ellin's writing is everything her fiancé pretended to be: witty, vulnerable, brave, smart, and honest' Michael Finkel, author of The Stranger in the WoodsIn Duped, New York Times journalist Abby Ellin explores the secret lives of compulsive liars, and the tragedy of those who trust them. Perfect for anybody who enjoyed Bad Blood and Dirty John.While leading a double life sounds like the stomping ground of psychopaths, moles, and covert agents with indeterminate dialects, plenty of people who appear 'normal' keep canyon-sized secrets from those in their immediate orbits. These untold stories lead to enormous surprises, often unpleasant ones. Duped is an investigation of compulsive liars - and how they fool their loved ones - drawing on Abby Ellin's personal experience.From the day Abby went on her first date with The Commander, she was caught up in a whirlwind. Within five months he'd proposed, and they'd moved in together. But there were red flags: strange stories of international espionage, involving Osama bin Laden and the Pentagon. Soon his stories began to unravel until she discovered, far later than she'd have liked, that he was a complete and utter fraud.When Ellin wrote about her experience in Psychology Today, the responses were unlike anything she'd experienced as a journalist. Legions of people wrote in with similar stories, of otherwise sharp-witted and self-aware people being taken in by ludicrous scams. Why was it so hard to spot these outlandish stories? Why were so many of the perpetrators male, and so many of the victims female? Was there something universal at play here?In Duped, New York Times journalist Abby Ellin explores the secret lives of compulsive liars, and the tragedy of those who trust them - who have experienced severe, prolonged betrayal - and the terrible impact on their sense of reality and their ability to trust ever again. Studying the art and science of lying, talking to victims who've had their worlds turned upside down, and writing with great openness about her own mistakes, she lays the phenomenon bare. Ellin offers us a shocking and intimate look not only at the damage that the duplicitous cause, but the painful reaction of a society that is all too quick to blame the believer.

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Finalist, 2019 Locus Award for Nonfiction, presented by the Locus Science Fiction Foundation Traverses the history of imagined futures from the 1890s to the 2010s, interweaving speculative visions of gender, race, and sexuality from literature, film, and digital media Old Futures explores the social, political, and cultural forces feminists, queer people, and people of color invoke when they dream up alternative futures as a way to imagine transforming the present. Lothian shows how queer possibilities emerge when we practice the art of speculation: of imagining things otherwise than they are and creating stories from that impulse. Queer theory offers creative ways to think about time, breaking with straight and narrow paths toward the future laid out for the reproductive family, the law-abiding citizen, and the believer in markets. Yet so far it has rarely considered the possibility that, instead of a queer present reshaping the ways we relate to past and future, the futures imagined in the past can lead us to queer the present. Narratives of possible futures provide frameworks through which we understand our present, but the discourse of “the” future has never been a singular one. Imagined futures have often been central to the creation and maintenance of imperial domination and technological modernity; Old Futures offers a counterhistory of works that have sought—with varying degrees of success—to speculate otherwise. Examining speculative texts from the 1890s to the 2010s, from Samuel R. Delany to Sense8, Lothian considers the ways in which early feminist utopias and dystopias, Afrofuturist fiction, and queer science fiction media have insisted that the future can and must deviate from dominant narratives of global annihilation or highly restrictive hopes for redemption. Each chapter chronicles some of the means by which the production and destruction of futures both real and imagined takes place: through eugenics, utopia, empire, fascism, dystopia, race, capitalism, femininity, masculinity, and many kinds of queerness, reproduction, and sex. Gathering stories of and by populations who have been marked as futureless or left out by dominant imaginaries, Lothian offers new insights into what we can learn from efforts to imaginatively redistribute the future.

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Finalist, 2019 Locus Award for Nonfiction, presented by the Locus Science Fiction Foundation Traverses the history of imagined futures from the 1890s to the 2010s, interweaving speculative visions of gender, race, and sexuality from literature, film, and digital media Old Futures explores the social, political, and cultural forces feminists, queer people, and people of color invoke when they dream up alternative futures as a way to imagine transforming the present. Lothian shows how queer possibilities emerge when we practice the art of speculation: of imagining things otherwise than they are and creating stories from that impulse. Queer theory offers creative ways to think about time, breaking with straight and narrow paths toward the future laid out for the reproductive family, the law-abiding citizen, and the believer in markets. Yet so far it has rarely considered the possibility that, instead of a queer present reshaping the ways we relate to past and future, the futures imagined in the past can lead us to queer the present. Narratives of possible futures provide frameworks through which we understand our present, but the discourse of “the” future has never been a singular one. Imagined futures have often been central to the creation and maintenance of imperial domination and technological modernity; Old Futures offers a counterhistory of works that have sought—with varying degrees of success—to speculate otherwise. Examining speculative texts from the 1890s to the 2010s, from Samuel R. Delany to Sense8, Lothian considers the ways in which early feminist utopias and dystopias, Afrofuturist fiction, and queer science fiction media have insisted that the future can and must deviate from dominant narratives of global annihilation or highly restrictive hopes for redemption. Each chapter chronicles some of the means by which the production and destruction of futures both real and imagined takes place: through eugenics, utopia, empire, fascism, dystopia, race, capitalism, femininity, masculinity, and many kinds of queerness, reproduction, and sex. Gathering stories of and by populations who have been marked as futureless or left out by dominant imaginaries, Lothian offers new insights into what we can learn from efforts to imaginatively redistribute the future.

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‘STUNNING PHOTOS THAT BRING THE GOSPELS TO MODERN LIFE.’ Mail on Sunday – Peter Stanford The New Testament Experience: The Gospels for the Modern World is specifically designed to reach a visual generation and bring them a fresh insight into the Gospels and the relevance of the Word of God to their lives today. Using the ESV translation and photography to bring the key characters and stories of each Gospel to life, this modern and immersive Bible aims to create a beautiful and engaging resource for the believer and for the local church leader. It is a tool to equip the youth of the Church and new Christians with the life and teaching of Jesus Christ. The New Testament Experience works with a broad international team of photographers and creatives, depicting the gospels in the modern world. Each gospel is set in a different city: Matthew in London; Mark in New York City; Luke in Sydney; John in Bogota. There are also 7 articles to teach key themes found in the gospels, these include: The Life of Jesus, The Gospels, Grace, The Holy Spirit, The Church, Prayer and The Bible. At the start and end of each gospel there are sections bringing pertinent insights and context to the key themes. This book utilises the method employed by Jesus himself to engage with and teach the people that followed him – the method of storytelling. Inspired by teaching through parables, The New Testament Experience works with the scriptures as a basis for the visual representation of the stories found in the gospels but for a 21st century audience. Key Features- Images brings the key characters and story of each Gospel to life in a modern context.- The spirit and narrative of the Bible is visually captured as scriptures are presented in a modern, readable and relevant way.- The reader is encouraged to visualise and remember stories and key scriptures that will inspire and shape their thinking of Jesus.- Full colour images and 8.75 point type face for easy reading Benefits- An ideal introduction to the bible for New Christians- A compelling resource for parents and youth leaders buying for teens and young adults.- Short features dispersed throughout the Bible.

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A young secular writer's journey along ancient religious pilgrimage routes in Spain, Japan and Ukraine leads to a surprise family reconciliation in this literary memoir Gideon Lewis-Kraus arrived in free-spirited Berlin from San Francisco as a young writer in search of a place to enjoy life to the fullest, and to forget the pain his father, a gay rabbi, had caused his family when he came out in middle age and emotionally abandoned his sons. But Berlin offers only unfocused dissipation, frustration and anxiety; to find what he is looking for (though he's not quite sure what it is), Gideon undertakes three separate ancient pilgrimages, travelling hundreds of miles: the thousand-year old Camino de Santiago in Spain with a friend, a solo circuit of eighty-eight Buddhist temples on the Japanese island of Shikoku, and finally, with his father and brother, a migration to the tomb of a famous Hassidic mystic in the Ukraine. It is on this last pilgrimage that Gideon reconnects with his father, and discovers that the most difficult and meaningful quest of all was the journey of his heart. A beautifully written, throught-provoking, and very moving meditation on what gives our lives a sense of purpose, and how we travel between past and present in search of hope for our future. "Beautiful, often very funny... a story that is both searching and purposeful, one that forces the reader, like the pilgrim, to value the journey as much as the destination." New Yorker "If David Foster Wallace had written Eat, Pray, Love it might have come close to approximating the adventures of Gideon Lewis-Kraus" Gary Shteyngart "Gideon Lewis-Kraus has written a very honest, very smart, very moving book about being young and rootless and even wayward. With great compassion and zeal he gets at the question: why search the world to solve the riddle of your own heart?" Dave Eggers Gideon Lewis-Kraus has written for numerous US publications, including Harper's, The Believer, The New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Times Book Review, Slate and others. A 2007-08 Fulbright scholarship brought him to Berlin, a hotbed of contemporary restlessness where he conceived this book. He now lives in New York, but continues to find himself frequently on the road to other places.

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