Abandoned Prayers


Book Description

On Christmas Eve in 1985, a hunter found a young boy's body along an icy corn field in Nebraska. The residents of Chester, Nebraska buried him as "Little Boy Blue," unclaimed and unidentified-- until a phone call from Ohio two years later led authorities to Eli Stutzman, the boy's father. Eli Stutzman, the son of an Amish bishop, was by all appearances a dedicated farmer and family man in the country's strictest religious sect. But behind his quiet façade was a man involved with pornography, sadomasochism, and drugs. After the suspicious death of his pregnant wife, Stutzman took his preschool-age son, Danny, and hit the road on a sexual odyssey ending with his conviction for murder. But the mystery of Eli Stutzman and the fate of his son didn't end on the barren Nebraska plains. It was just beginning. . . Gregg Olsen's Abandoned Prayers is an incredible true story of murder and Amish secrets.




Answered Prayers


Book Description

Although Truman Capote's last novel was unfinished at the time of his death, its surviving portions offer a devastating group portrait of the high and low society of his time. • Includes the story La Cote Basque featured in the major FX series Feud: Capote Vs. the Swans. "Prose that makes the heart sing and the narrative fly." —The New York Times Book Review Tracing the career of a writer of uncertain parentage and omnivorous erotic tastes, Answered Prayers careens from a louche bar in Tangiers to a banquette at La Côte Basque, from literary salons to high-priced whorehouses. It takes in calculating beauties and sadistic husbands along with such real-life supporting characters as Colette, the Duchess of Windsor, Montgomery Clift, and Tallulah Bankhead. Above all, this malevolently finny book displays Capote at his most relentlessly observant and murderously witty.




A True Crime Collection


Book Description

Master true crime writer Gregg Olsen's has been hailed by Ann Rule as "searing and brilliant," and this collection, featuring three of his most shocking cases, shows why. Abandoned Prayers Eli Stutzman, the son of an Amish bishop, was by all appearances a dedicated farmer and family man in the country's strictest religious sect. But behind his quiet façade was a man involved with pornography, sadomasochism, and drugs. After the suspicious death of his pregnant wife, Stutzman took his preschool-age son, Danny, and hit the road on a sexual odyssey ending with his conviction for murder. But the mystery of Eli Stutzman and the fate of his son didn't end on the barren Nebraska plains. It was just beginning. . . A Twisted Faith Olsen investigates the sensational story of a minister who seduced four of his female congregants, and hatched a cold-blooded plot to murder his wife: On December 26, 1997, a house went up in flames. In it was the shy, beloved minister's wife Dawn Hacheney. When the fire was extinguished, investigators found only her charred remains. Her husband Nick was visibly devastated by the loss. What investigators failed to note, however, was that Dawn's lungs didn't contain smoke. Was she dead before the fire began? Cruel Deception In and out of hospitals since birth, angelic nine-month-old Morgan Reid finally succumbed to what appeared to be Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Morgan's Texas-born mother Tanya, a nurse and devoted wife, pulled up stakes with her grieving husband Jim, and moved on. It was the best way to put the past behind them. Until their son Michael began showing signs of the same mysterious affliction that stole the life of his baby sister . . .




Prayers for the Assassin


Book Description

SEATTLE, 204. The Space Needle lies crumpled. Veiled women hurry through the streets. Alcohol is outlawed, replaced by Jihad Cola, and mosques dot the skyline. New York and Washington, D.C., are nuclear wastelands. At the edge of the empire, Islamic and Christian forces fight for control, and rebels plot to regain free will....




Oswald Chambers, Abandoned to God


Book Description

What do you know about the man behind the popular devotional My Utmost for His Highest? Trace the life of Oswald Chambers from his boyhood in Scotland through an astounding journey of faith and trust in God's provision. From the United Kingdom to a YMCA training camp in Egypt during World War I, Chambers was a man utterly devoted to God and to sharing the timeless wisdom of the Bible with others. Discover a remarkable story, and find inspiration for your walk with Christ.




The Prayer Coin


Book Description

Take a coin. Toss it in the air. Now call it. Heads? Tails? What if you could choose both sides? Elisa Morgan birthed the "prayer coin" idea as she was struggling in her own prayer life. Should she be blatantly honest about her desires or just leave everything to God and let Him lead? An epiphany came when Elisa noticed how Jesus prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane: "Take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done" (Luke 22:42). Jesus Christ begged for relief from the trial He faced, while utterly complying with what He knew the Father's will to be. Honesty and abandon--in the same breath. Elisa discovered that Jesus invites us to both. And the emotional back-and-forth, between full-out honesty and "giving it up" in abandon, actually drew her closer to God. If Jesus--our Savior, Mentor, and Friend--could pray both sides of the prayer coin, could we as well?




A Beginner's Book of Prayer


Book Description

This beginner's guide to prayer will guide Catholics who need help learning to pray.




Prayers for the People


Book Description

“Grieve well and you grow stronger.” Anthropologist Rebecca Louise Carter heard this wisdom over and over while living in post-Katrina New Orleans, where everyday violence disproportionately affects Black communities. What does it mean to grieve well? How does mourning strengthen survivors in the face of ongoing threats to Black life? Inspired by ministers and guided by grieving mothers who hold birthday parties for their deceased sons, Prayers for the People traces the emergence of a powerful new African American religious ideal at the intersection of urban life, death, and social and spiritual change. Carter frames this sensitive ethnography within the complex history of structural violence in America—from the legacies of slavery to free but unequal citizenship, from mass incarceration and overpolicing to social abandonment and the unequal distribution of goods and services. And yet Carter offers a vision of restorative kinship by which communities of faith work against the denial of Black personhood as well as the violent severing of social and familial bonds. A timely directive for human relations during a contentious time in America’s history, Prayers for the People is also a hopeful vision of what an inclusive, nonviolent, and just urban society could be.




If I Can't Have You


Book Description

In If I Can't Have You, bestselling author Gregg Olsen and co-author Rebecca Morris investigate one of the 21st Century's most puzzling disappearances and how it resulted in the murder of two children by their father. Every once in a great while a genuine murder mystery unfolds before the eyes of the American public. The tragic story of Susan Powell and her murdered boys, Charlie and Braden, is the only case that rivals the Jon Benet Ramsey saga in the annals of true crime. When the pretty, blonde Utah mother went missing in December of 2009 the media was swept up in the story – with lenses and microphones trained on Susan's husband, Josh. He said he had no idea what happened to his young wife, and that he and the boys had been camping in the middle of a snowstorm. Over the next three years bombshell by bombshell, the story would reveal more shocking secrets. Josh's father, Steve, who was sexually obsessed with Susan, would ultimately be convicted of unspeakable perversion. Josh's brother, Michael, would commit suicide. And in the most stunning event of them all, Josh Powell would murder his two little boys and kill himself with brutality beyond belief.




Summary of Gregg Olsen's Abandoned Prayers


Book Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 Chuck Kleveland, age 44, was a truck driver who lived in Chester, a small town near Hebron. He was on his way to the barber in Hebron when he saw a dead body in a cornfield. He knew it was a girl, dressed in a blue one-piece blanket sleeper, and her hand was glazed over with ice. #2 Kleveland, the owner of a truck stop, had seen enough. He did not move closer to the small corpse, which lay only fifteen feet from the roadside. He radioed his bookkeeper, who called the sheriff. #3 The Amish, descendants of Dutch and Swiss Anabaptists, are a religious group that live by strict interpretation of the Bible. They believe in adult baptism, nonresistance, and separatism from the world. #4 The Amish are a collection of scattered, great white boxes. They live together in large groups called families, and they never suffer the humiliation of a rest home. They speak a dialect of German and Swiss with a little English mixed in.