BONAVENTURE POINTE, A Western Romance Volume 2


Book Description

On an abandoned beach on the Southern California Coast near midnight, Everett Durant reaches into the pockets of his jeans as he approaches the water’s edge. He unburdens himself of all personal belongings as he prepares to commit suicide by drowning but fails. During his unsuccessful drowning, Everett experiences the appurtenance of a Guardian Angel, of sorts. When he wakes, he sees only the impression of a sand angel remaining where he washed ashore. He soon learns that a young girl either jumped or fell from the cliffs above and suffered and died not so long ago. This realization encourages the washed-up emo-songwriter to honor her memory in a constructive way, and that sets the saga in motion. Everett deeply connects with those living in society’s underbelly as he gives them a voice through a collection of post-beat poetry. Soon, a quick fifteen minutes of fame lead him into the path of Beatrice Rutherford, otherwise known as “the heiress.” With the prompting of the heiress, Everett moves deeper into the disorienting seas of cultural conformity, mass socialization, and geopolitical control, while championing the role of an inspired individualism. He could never have imagined that this incredible postmodern journey would begin with a dark night of the soul on an abandoned beach.




Bonaventure Pointe


Book Description

On an abandoned beach on the Southern California Coast near midnight, Everett Durant reaches into the pockets of his jeans as he approaches the water’s edge. He unburdens himself of all personal belongings as he prepares to commit suicide by drowning but fails. During his unsuccessful drowning, Everett experiences the appurtenance of a Guardian Angel, of sorts. When he wakes, he sees only the impression of a sand angel remaining where he washed ashore. He soon learns that a young girl either jumped or fell from the cliffs above and suffered and died not so long ago. This realization encourages the washed-up emo-songwriter to honor her memory in a constructive way, and that sets the saga in motion. Everett deeply connects with those living in society’s underbelly as he gives them a voice through a collection of post-beat poetry. Soon, a quick fifteen minutes of fame lead him into the path of Beatrice Rutherford, otherwise known as “the heiress.” With the prompting of the heiress, Everett moves deeper into the disorienting seas of cultural conformity, mass socialization, and geopolitical control, while championing the role of an inspired individualism. He could never have imagined that this incredible postmodern journey would begin with a dark night of the soul on an abandoned beach.




Point of Origin


Book Description

The Point of Origin investigates the evolution of religious consciousness as an integral reality in the human person. The evolution of religious consciousness is an experience found throughout human history beginning with the earliest known human species, the Cro-Magnon. In this work Dr. Thomas identifies empirical data that lends itself to his theory that spirituality is not a bi-product of the human phenomena but an essential characteristic of being human. The author delves into conscious acknowledgement of the natural law as a universal norm guiding human activity in the wake of the plurality of religious expressions (Atheism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, etc.). In a crescendo effect of his work Dr. Thomas illustrates how mysticism becomes the ultimate expression of religious consciousness in the human experience.




Medieval Philosophy of Religion


Book Description

The Medieval period was one of the richest eras for the philosophical study of religion. Covering the period from the 6th to the 16th century, reaching into the Renaissance, "The History of Western Philosophy of Religion 2" shows how Christian, Islamic and Jewish thinkers explicated and defended their religious faith in light of the philosophical traditions they inherited from the ancient Greeks and Romans. The enterprise of 'faith seeking understanding', as it was dubbed by the medievals themselves, emerges as a vibrant encounter between - and a complex synthesis of - the Platonic, Aristotelian and Hellenistic traditions of antiquity on the one hand, and the scholastic and monastic religious schools of the medieval West, on the other. "Medieval Philosophy of Religion" will be of interest to scholars and students of Philosophy, Medieval Studies, the History of Ideas, and Religion, while remaining accessible to any interested in the rich cultural heritage of medieval religious thought.




The Sacramentality of Music


Book Description

Steeped in the Catholic spiritual tradition, The Sacramentality of Music argues that musical experience, in its appeal to the entirety of the human person, can serve as a locus of encounter with the divine and an occasion of God’s self-revelation in love, with spiritually nurturing, ultimately transformative, ends. Christina Labriolacontends that this dynamic might most aptly be understood as sacramental, an all-encompassing perspective of the cosmos permeated by the divine creative, salvific, sustaining presence. Through its participation in the mysteries of beauty and creativity, its bodily and affective engagement, and impact on the inner life, music operates sacramentally: manifesting divine realities through the tangible stuff of human experience. In a thematic theological exploration that interweaves pastoral theology, theological aesthetics, and mysticism, the reader is invited to contemplate music’s sacramental potentiality and to engage the sacramentally charged music of Beethoven, Bartok, MacMillan, Messiaen, Mozart, Ešenvalds, Bach, Pärt, and Hildegard. In attending to musical ways of relating to God, this book invites readers into a deepening awareness of the sacramental nature of reality itself as that in which the spiritual resonance of music is grounded and reveals afresh, taking musical beauty seriously in the spiritual order with repercussions for Christian living.




Rhetoric and Irony


Book Description

This pathbreaking study integrates the histories of rhetoric, literacy, and literary aesthetics up to the time of Augustine, focusing on Western concepts of rhetoric as dissembling and of language as deceptive that Swearingen argues have received curiously prominent emphasis in Western aesthetics and language theory. Swearingen reverses the traditional focus on rhetoric as an oral agonistic genre and examines it instead as a paradigm for literate discourse. She proposes that rhetoric and literacy have in the West disseminated the interrelated notions that through learning rhetoric individuals can learn to manipulate language and others; that language is an unreliable, manipulable, and contingent vehicle of thought, meaning, and communication; and that literature is a body of pretty lies and beguiling fictions. In a bold concluding chapter Swearingen aligns her thesis concerning early Western literacy and rhetoric with contemporary critical and rhetorical theory; with feminist studies in language, psychology, and culture; and with studies of literacy in multi- and cross-cultural settings.




The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow


Book Description

A magical debut novel from Rita Leganski, The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow is the tale of a mute boy whose gift of wondrous hearing reveals family secrets and forgotten voodoo lore, and exposes a murder that threatens the souls of those who love him. Bonaventure Arrow didn’t make a peep when he was born, and the doctor nearly took him for dead. But he was listening, placing sound inside quiet and gaining his bearings. By the time he turns five, he can hear flowers grow, a thousand shades of blue, and the miniature tempests that rage inside raindrops. He also hears the voice of his dead father, William Arrow, mysteriously murdered by a man known only as the Wanderer. Exploring family relics, he opens doors to the past and finds the key to a web of secrets that both hold his family together, and threaten to tear them apart. Set against the backdrop of 1950s New Orleans, The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow is a magical story about the lost art of listening and a wondrous little boy who brings healing to the souls of all who love him.




Mystical Darkness


Book Description




Crucified Love


Book Description

The author studies various aspects of Bonaventure's mystical world view, leading to an understanding of his relevance to contemporary issues such as individualism and relatedness, peace and violence, and the problems of the created world's relationship to the person who seeks to love God in all and above all.




A Theology of the Church for the Third Millennium


Book Description

At the beginning of the new millennium, the Christian Churches are in a process of renewal. The Roman Catholic Church, since Vatican II, has been in a major stage of renewal. Contemporary globalization, multi-cultural interrelationships, and inter-religious dialogues have presented serious challenges to these renewal efforts. In this volume, I want to offer to the Catholic Renewal and from there to other denominational renewals, a view of the church from the rich tradition of Franciscan philosophy and theology. To date there are a only a few books which include small essays on this theme. This volume presents an in-depth Franciscan approach to ecclesiology.