Crafting a Rule of Life


Book Description

In this practical workbook Stephen A. Macchia looks to St. Benedict as a guide for discovering your rule of life. It takes time and effort; you must listen to God and discern what he wants you to be and do for his glory. But through the disciplines of Scripture, prayer and reflection with a small group you will journey toward Christlikeness.







Crafted by God


Book Description

With so many authors and an array of genres, you might expect the Bible to be an anthology of disconnected pieces. Yet, the sixty-six books from Genesis to Revelation weave together into a cohesive unit of divine instruction. But, the question remains - Is there more? Is there a comprehensive design in the Bible that surpasses the mere idea of conceptual unity? Stepping back to look more broadly at the arrangement of the sixty-six divinely inspired books of the Bible it is surprising to observe a mosaic image of a person with a head, torso, arms, and legs. The body of Jesus Christ (Incarnation) and the body of biblical truth (Inspiration) representing the two special revelations of God, were apparently constructed in the same manner. Taking the books of the Bible in their received groupings and order, being careful not to manipulate God's providential arrangement, we see a mirror image of the man Jesus Christ. It seems that the Bible presents to us the Person of our Lord, not only in its content, but also in its form. Crafted by God is the unveiling of this discovery and a probing of its implications. Here is a study that truly unlocks the harmonious structure and purposeful design of the Bible - as well as opening new vistas of thought that put all of Scripture into its contextual meaning.




Boardinghouse Women


Book Description

In this innovative and insightful book, Elizabeth Engelhardt argues that modern American food, business, caretaking, politics, sex, travel, writing, and restaurants all owe a debt to boardinghouse women in the South. From the eighteenth century well into the twentieth, entrepreneurial women ran boardinghouses throughout the South; some also carried the institution to far-flung places like California, New York, and London. Owned and operated by Black, Jewish, Native American, and white women, rich and poor, immigrant and native-born, these lodgings were often hubs of business innovation and engines of financial independence for their owners. Within their walls, boardinghouse residents and owners developed the region's earliest printed cookbooks, created space for making music and writing literary works, formed ad hoc communities of support, tested boundaries of race and sexuality, and more. Engelhardt draws on a vast archive to recover boardinghouse women's stories, revealing what happened in the kitchens, bedrooms, hallways, back stairs, and front porches as well as behind closed doors—legacies still with us today.




Godyssey


Book Description

Anyone who had their corporate coming-of-age during the "live-for-success/look-out-for-number-one" heyday of the 70s and 80s will nostalgically delight and find renewal of spirit in this book by a onetime Yuppie "reclaimed" by her Lord. Like many of her generation who found themselves caught up in consumerist values and careerist lifestyles, the author experienced a sense of estrangement from her own soul...sparking a search for "redemption" that will touch the heart of the most jaded worldling. A spiritual adventure with a cosmopolitan twist, Godyssey seeks to help the spiritually disenfranchised rediscover that Lord whose gentle "wooing" they still sense within some recess of the soul, and to recover those Christian ideals they had lost touch with in their pursuit of success. By presenting Christ as a kind of "mentor" in the art of successful living, this book provides much-needed shepherding to those left spiritually stranded by their immersion in America's recent corporate and cultural milieu. CONTENTS Foreword.........................................................................................................................9 I Strange Gods.....................................................................................................13 In servitude to the self II The Pearl of Great Price....................................................................................25 A seduction of the soul III Coming Home....................................................................................................33 God's gentle politics of persuasion and conversion IV The Good Life....................................................................................................71 A work of art from the canvas of the everyday V The Greatest of These.......................................................................................95 Life's highest calling VI Getting Along...................................................................................................123 Grace through gritted teeth VII The Second Mile..............................................................................................149 The art of "Good Samaritanship" VIII A Journal of the Winds....................................................................................179 God's potluck providence IX Crooked Lines..................................................................................................199 The poetry of pain Afterword.......................................................................................................................221




Breaking the Rule of Cool


Book Description

BIOGRAPHY LITERARY CRITICISM The Beat movement nurtured many female dissidents and artists who contributed to Beat culture and connected the Beats with the second wave of the women's movement. Although they have often been eclipsed by the men of the Beat Generation, the women's contributions to Beat literature are considerable. Covering writers from the beginning of the movement in the 1950s and extending to the present, this book features interviews with nine of the best-known women Beat writers, including Diane di Prima, ruth weiss, Joyce Johnson, Hettie Jones, Joanne Kyger, Brenda Frazer (Bonnie Bremser), Janine Pommy Vega, Anne Waldman, and the critic Ann Charters. Each is presented by a biographical essay that details her literary or scholarly accomplishments. In these recent interviews the nine writers recall their lives in Beat bohemia and discuss their artistic practices. Nancy M. Grace outlines the goals and revelations of the interviews, and introduces the community of female Beat writers created in their conversations with the authors. Although they have not received attention equal to the men, women Beat writers rebelled against mainstream roles for young women and were exuberant participants in creating the Beat scene. Mapping their unique identities in the Beat movement, Ronna C. Johnson shows how their poetry, fiction, and memoirs broke the male rule that defined Beat women as silent bohemian chicks rather than artistic peers. Breaking the Rule of Cool combines the interviews with literary criticism and biography to illustrate the vivacity and intensity of women Beat writers, and argues that American literature was revitalized as much by the women's work as by that of their male counterparts. Nancy M. Grace, a professor of English at the College of Wooster, is the author of The Feminized Male Character in Twentieth-Century Literature. Her work has appeared in Contemporary Literature, the Beat Scene, and the Artful Dodge. Ronna C. Johnson, a lecturer in English and American Studies at Tufts University, has been published in College Literature, the Review of Contemporary Fiction, and the Poetry Project Newsletter. Johnson and Grace are the editors of and contributors to Girls Who Wore Black: Women Writing the Beat Generation."




Space, Time and Language in Plutarch


Book Description

'Space and time' have been key concepts of investigation in the humanities in recent years. In the field of Classics in particular, they have led to the fresh appraisal of genres such as epic, historiography, the novel and biography, by enabling a close focus on how ancient texts invest their representations of space and time with a variety of symbolic and cultural meanings. This collection of essays by a team of international scholars seeks to make a contribution to this rich interdisciplinary field, by exploring how space and time are perceived, linguistically codified and portrayed in the biographical and philosophical work of Plutarch of Chaeronea (1st-2nd centuries CE). The volume's aim is to show how philological approaches, in conjunction with socio-cultural readings, can shed light on Plutarch's spatial terminology and clarify his conceptions of time, especially in terms of the ways in which he situates himself in his era's fascination with the past. The volume's intended readership includes Classicists, intellectual and cultural historians and scholars whose field of expertise embraces theoretical study of space and time, along with the linguistic strategies used to portray them in literary or historical texts.




Aging Out of the Foster System


Book Description

Decades of demographic studies and applied efforts have convinced scholars, students, and social workers that young people coming of age and transitioning out of the foster care system face great challenges in health, education, income, and general well-being. Despite the wealth of research on these outcomes, we know much less about the lived experiences of young people leaving foster care. Aging Out of the Foster System: Youths' Perspectives adds to this narrative the personal experiences of young people who are aging out or have aged out of their child welfare placement. The authors center the stories of these young people and apply critical ethnographic methods to frame their accounts with attention to the encounters within which they were produced, including power imbalances, institutional contexts, and relational dynamics. By centering the experiences of youths in these contexts and attending to the larger forces at work, this book helps connect the dots between youth aging out of the foster care system, social workers in Independent Living Programs, and the professors and scholars teaching the next generations of professionals working to support the aging out process.




Family Bonds


Book Description

Between 1854 and 1864, more than a hundred free African Americans in Virginia proposed to enslave themselves and, in some cases, their children. Ted Maris-Wolf explains this phenomenon as a response to state legislation that forced free African Americans to make a terrible choice: leave enslaved loved ones behind for freedom elsewhere or seek a way to remain in their communities, even by renouncing legal freedom. Maris-Wolf paints an intimate portrait of these people whose lives, liberty, and use of Virginia law offer new understandings of race and place in the upper South. Maris-Wolf shows how free African Americans quietly challenged prevailing notions of racial restriction and exclusion, weaving themselves into the social and economic fabric of their neighborhoods and claiming, through unconventional or counterintuitive means, certain basic rights of residency and family. Employing records from nearly every Virginia county, he pieces together the remarkable lives of Watkins Love, Jane Payne, and other African Americans who made themselves essential parts of their communities and, in some cases, gave up their legal freedom in order to maintain family and community ties.