Perfectly Imperfect... Understanding the Misunderstood


Book Description

A group of students who are perfectly imperfect and who took the time to write their life stories in order to teach others to take the time to get to know the person standing in front of them, to delve into their inner soul and discover the whole person. Each person has a story to tell... each person has a voice. They also hope to enlighten teachers to get to know their students because a teacher may never know whose life they may save...




BACK TO THE GARDEN


Book Description




Back to the Garden


Book Description

Are the two of you missing out on all that God desires for your marriage? What did Adam and Eve originally have with each other and with God that is worth reclaiming? In Eden, that birthplace of marriage, God created us for physical, emotional, and spiritual intimacy, and created marriage as the most intimate of all human relationships. How is it that physical intimacy can seem relatively easy while spiritual and even emotional intimacy seem so hard? How can we get back to Gods garden, where we join with our mates, communing with God in His original design for intimacy with Him? Researched, written, and tested by a Christian couple, this workbook addresses the tough issues that can block deep emotional and spiritual intimacy and sets the stage for the journey toward spiritual intimacy with your mate. Through prayer exercises designed to take you both back to Eden, you and your spouse can regain what was first lost thereenjoyment of God and each other in His holy presence, where it is safe to be transparent and unashamed.




Bunny


Book Description

NATIONAL BESTSELLER Soon to be a major motion picture "Jon Swift + Witches of Eastwick + Kelly 'Get In Trouble' Link + Mean Girls + Creative Writing Degree Hell! No punches pulled, no hilarities dodged, no meme unmangled! O Bunny you are sooo genius!" —Margaret Atwood, via Twitter "A wild, audacious and ultimately unforgettable novel." —Michael Schaub, Los Angeles Times "Awad is a stone-cold genius." —Ann Bauer, The Washington Post The Vegetarian meets Heathers in this darkly funny, seductively strange novel from the acclaimed author of 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl and Rouge "We were just these innocent girls in the night trying to make something beautiful. We nearly died. We very nearly did, didn't we?" Samantha Heather Mackey couldn't be more of an outsider in her small, highly selective MFA program at New England's Warren University. A scholarship student who prefers the company of her dark imagination to that of most people, she is utterly repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort--a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other "Bunny," and seem to move and speak as one. But everything changes when Samantha receives an invitation to the Bunnies' fabled "Smut Salon," and finds herself inexplicably drawn to their front door--ditching her only friend, Ava, in the process. As Samantha plunges deeper and deeper into the Bunnies' sinister yet saccharine world, beginning to take part in the ritualistic off-campus "Workshop" where they conjure their monstrous creations, the edges of reality begin to blur. Soon, her friendships with Ava and the Bunnies will be brought into deadly collision. The spellbinding new novel from one of our most fearless chroniclers of the female experience, Bunny is a down-the-rabbit-hole tale of loneliness and belonging, friendship and desire, and the fantastic and terrible power of the imagination. Named a Best Book of 2019 by TIME, Vogue, Electric Literature, and The New York Public Library




A Perfectly Imperfect Match


Book Description

In one corner we have Jared Winterset, who's not in the market for a wife. He knows too well how few marriages succeed—and Jared hates failure. So he'll keep it light. In the other corner there's Elizabeth Stephens, a self-sufficient violinist. She's lonely sometimes, but playing her music is more rewarding—and safer—than playing the field. Then a certain someone calls in the Mamas, and—ding!— Jared and Elizabeth are thrown together, planning a thirty-fifth wedding anniversary party. Soon the two are enjoying themselves way too much. It won't last, thinks Elizabeth. It's fun, that's all, thinks Jared. But they're about to learn that in a real love match, both players can win…




Giving Thanks for a Perfectly Imperfect Life


Book Description

Giving Thanks for a Perfectly Imperfect Life dispels the worldly lie that perfection is (1) attainable or (2) desirable. As a recovering perfectionist, Michele Howe can speak from personal experience how damaging and paralyzing spending one’s life in pursuit of perfection on any plane is to us spiritually, mentally, emotionally, and physically. Perfectionists believe they can control their relationships, lives, environments, as well as the people around them—but the Bible teaches us that only God is in control. True safety and inner peace come from submitting ourselves to the loving and sovereign control of God; not from our attempts to manipulate, maneuver, or massage circumstances to our liking. This book will help Christian readers see through the untruths of striving for perfection and find true contentment, rest, and peace by learning to love the imperfect in life as we watch God restore, redeem, and remake our lives according to his purpose and plan. Giving Thanks for a Perfectly Imperfect Life addresses the most common life scenarios that perfectionists attempt to control. Each of the 25 chapters includes A Bible passage A quotation A real-life account An essay focusing on the specific chapter topic A takeaway action thought A prayer Several suggestions for practical steps to offer thanks for our imperfect lives Perfect for women’s small groups and book clubs, it’s a practical book that will help readers find true contentment, rest, and peace in God.




Somewhere Between Love & Misunderstanding


Book Description

“Love is beautiful when it blossoms, but how can it flourish when it’s sometimes fed things it doesn’t need in order to grow? Fear, trust issues, anger and pain have no business inside of love’s gates, so what happens when these uninvited trespassers are allowed to roam freely for a while?” – Somewhere Between Love & Misunderstanding We’ve all heard the story of two lovers that allow their insecurities and their inability to communicate to take them to a place where they don’t want to leave the relationship but they don’t want to stay either.Written by spoken word poets, Keaidy Selmon and Marvin Wilson Jr., Somewhere Between Love & Misunderstanding tells that familiar story using poetry. Will our two lovers be able to find their way back to love, or will pride and fear claim defeat over yet another relationship?




Lost Sounds


Book Description

A groundbreaking history of African Americans in the early recording industry, Lost Sounds examines the first three decades of sound recording in the United States, charting the surprising roles black artists played in the period leading up to the Jazz Age and the remarkably wide range of black music and culture they preserved. Drawing on more than thirty years of scholarship, Tim Brooks identifies key black recording artists and profiles forty audio pioneers. Brooks assesses the careers and recordings of George W. Johnson, Bert Williams, George Walker, Noble Sissle, Eubie Blake, the Fisk Jubilee Singers, W. C. Handy, James Reese Europe, Wilbur Sweatman, Harry T. Burleigh, Roland Hayes, Booker T. Washington, and boxing champion Jack Johnson, plus a host of lesser-known voices. Many of these pioneers struggled to be heard in an era of rampant discrimination. Their stories detail the forces––black and white––that gradually allowed African Americans to enter the mainstream entertainment industry. Lost Sounds includes Brooks's selected discography of CD reissues and an appendix by Dick Spottswood describing early recordings by black artists in the Caribbean and South America.




Mutual Misunderstanding


Book Description

Do others understand what we say or write? Do we understand them? Theorists of language and interpretation claim to be more concerned with questions about "what" we understand and "how" we understand, rather than with the logically prior question "whether" we understand each other. An affirmative answer to the latter question is apparently taken for granted. However, in Mutual Misunderstanding, Talbot J. Taylor shows that the sceptical doubts about communicational understanding do in fact have a profoundly important, if as yet unacknowledged, function in the construction of theories of language and interpretation. Mutual Misundertanding thus presents a strikingly original analysis of the rhetorical patterns underlying Western linguistic thought, as exemplified in the works of John Locke, Jacques Derrida, Gottlob Frege, Jonathan Culler, Noam Chomsky, Ferdinand de Saussure, H. Paul Grice, Michael Dummet, Stanley Fish, Alfred Schutz, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Harold Garfinkel, and others. This analysis reveals how, by the combined effect of appeals to "commonsense" and anxieties about implications of relativism, scepticism has a determining role in the discursive development of a number of the intellectual disciplines making up the "human sciences" today, including critical theory, literary hermeneutics, philosophy of language and logic, communication theory, discourse and conversation analysis, pragmatics, stylistics, and linguistics. Consequently, this provocative study will be of value to readers from a wide variety of disciplinary backgrounds.




Perfect Love, Imperfect Relationships


Book Description

A nationally known couples therapist reveals the single root cause of all relationship problems—and offers revolutionary advice on what to do about it While most of us have moments of loving freely and openly, it is often hard to sustain this where it matters most—in our intimate relationships. If love is so great and powerful, why are human relationships so challenging and difficult? If love is the source of happiness and joy, why is it so hard to open to it fully and let it govern our lives? In this book, John Welwood addresses these questions and shows us how to overcome the most fundamental obstacle that keeps us from experiencing love's full flowering in our lives. Perfect Love, Imperfect Relationships begins by showing how all our relational problems arise out of a universal ‘wound of the heart’ that affects not only our personal relationships but the quality of life in our world as a whole. This core wound shows up as a pervasive mood of unlove—a deep sense that we are not intrinsically lovable just as we are. It shuts down our capacity to trust, so that even though we may hunger for love, we have difficulty opening to it and letting it circulate freely through us. This book takes the reader on a powerful journey of healing and transformation that involves learning to embrace these imperfections—within ourselves and within our relationships—as trail-markers along the path to great love. It sets forth a process for releasing deep-seated grievances we hold against others for not loving us better and against ourselves for not being better loved. And it shows how our longing to be loved can magnetize the great love that will free us from looking to others to find ourselves. Written with penetrating realism and a fresh, lyrical style that honors the subtlety and richness of our relationship to love itself, this revolutionary book offers profound and practical guidance for healing our lives as well as our embattled world.