Blood on a Pew

Blood on a Pew

Author: W. S. Gaines

Publisher: Tate Publishing

Published: 2011-07

Total Pages: 166

ISBN-13: 1617774022

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On June 18, 2003, at two thirty in the morning, my eldest son, Billy, fell through the tile ceiling of a church, crashing into a hard, wooden pew thirty feet below. At the time, he was temporarily staying in the shuttered convent of this Catholic church located just outside Pittsburgh and was attending a late-night party in the church rectory with a few of his University of Pittsburgh football teammates and the parish priest. The priest hosted the event and provided the alcohol. Every one of the football players in attendance, including my son, was underage. Tragically, later the same day, Billy was pronounced brain dead at Mercy Hospital in Pittsburgh. He was nineteen years old. Billy Gaines was a gifted athlete and promising wide receiver on the University of Pittsburgh football team. His untimely death shook his father, Bill Gaines, to the core. He felt grief as any parent would after the loss of a child. He also felt anger, not just toward the priest who provided alcohol to Billy that tragic night, but also toward God for letting Billy die. As the details surrounding his son's death surfaced, Bill faced some tough questions: What was Billy doing in a church crawlspace at two thirty in the morning? Who was responsible for Billy's death? What could he as a father have done to prevent Billy's death? Why did God allow Billy to die? As Bill Gaines puts the pieces together and tries to find answers to his questions, he finds himself on a spiritual journey. Join him as he finds healing and forgiveness in his faith and learns what led to Blood on a Pew.


Blood Stained Pews

Blood Stained Pews

Author: Carl Kuhl

Publisher: FEDD

Published: 2022-03-01

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 1949784908

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What if the church became more than a home for the hypocrites? What if the church became a hospital to heal the hurting? When the carnage of war broke out on D-Day, the wounded were brought to an empty, nearby church and laid on the pews so medics could treat them. When the war was over, and the blood-stained pews discovered, the townspeople decided to preserve the stains to remind all who would come afterward: This is the place where the wounded are welcome. Blood Stained Pews is a chance to examine Jesus’ original intent for the church, a hospital for the broken. Pastor and author Carl Kuhl is clear: Christians have been getting this wrong, but in this book, he gives clear steps to change our hearts, our practices, and ultimately our churches through the power of open brokenness. Through personal stories and powerful insights, Carl implores us to more deeply consider God’s grace and turn our churches into the places people run to when they’re wounded.


Silver

Silver

Author: Edward Chupack

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2008-02-19

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 1429986395

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I am Silver, and there is no other pirate like me on these waters. This being the last testament of the infamous pirate Long John Silver, you would do well not to trust a word in its pages. Held captive aboard his own ship, the Linda Maria, he is to be taken to England, where he will hang at the king's pleasure. But he has another plan: to tell a tale of treason, murder, a lost treasure that would rival King George's own riches, and what really happened on Treasure Island . . . if Long John Silver is to be believed. But is he? His beginnings as a pickpocket on the streets of Bristol are as dark as the rest of his deliciously devious life. Taken to sea by the pirate captain Black John, Silver soon learns the arts of his trade: the sword, saber, and pistol. He makes his trade in plundering, cheating, ransacking, and murder---more murders than he can bother to count. British, Frenchmen, Spaniards, and Portuguese all fall before him. He takes exceptional pleasure in murder, but never such pleasure as he finds in his search for a most uncommon treasure. To find that treasure he must heed the words of a dead man, solve the ciphers in a well-worn Bible, forgo the love of an extraordinary woman, and climb over the corpses of friend and foe alike to arrive at Treasure Island and find his fortune. But Silver's tricks are never done. Before he greets the hangman at Newgate Square, he will have one last secret to reveal. Hidden in these pages are clues that lead to his remarkable discovery. And although King George's bounty for this notorious scourge may be handsome indeed, the captain who has captured Silver would not mind adding Silver's riches to his own purse. He will let Silver tell his tale in the hope of learning clues to the treasure's location. And if you were to mark his words as well, you might discover the whereabouts of that treasure yourself. So we shall, for now, allow Long John Silver to spin his stories, tales of adventure and betrayal, gold and jewels, love and murder. And he will never leave out the murder. Not Long John Silver.


Pew

Pew

Author: Catherine Lacey

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2020-07-21

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 0374720134

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WINNER of the 2021 NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award. Finalist for the 2021 Dylan Thomas Prize. Longlisted for the 2021 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. One of Publishers Weekly's Best Fiction Books of 2020. One of Amazon's 100 Best Books of 2020. “The people of this community are stifling, and generous, cruel, earnest, needy, overconfident, fragile and repressive, which is to say that they are brilliantly rendered by their wise maker, Catherine Lacey.” --Rachel Kushner, author of The Flamethrowers A figure with no discernible identity appears in a small, religious town, throwing its inhabitants into a frenzy In a small, unnamed town in the American South, a church congregation arrives for a service and finds a figure asleep on a pew. The person is genderless and racially ambiguous and refuses to speak. One family takes in the strange visitor and nicknames them Pew. As the town spends the week preparing for a mysterious Forgiveness Festival, Pew is shuttled from one household to the next. The earnest and seemingly well-meaning townspeople see conflicting identities in Pew, and many confess their fears and secrets to them in one-sided conversations. Pew listens and observes while experiencing brief flashes of past lives or clues about their origin. As days pass, the void around Pew’s presence begins to unnerve the community, whose generosity erodes into menace and suspicion. Yet by the time Pew’s story reaches a shattering and unsettling climax at the Forgiveness Festival, the secret of who they really are—a devil or an angel or something else entirely—is dwarfed by even larger truths. Pew, Catherine Lacey’s third novel, is a foreboding, provocative, and amorphous fable about the world today: its contradictions, its flimsy morality, and the limits of judging others based on their appearance. With precision and restraint, one of our most beloved and boundary-pushing writers holds up a mirror to her characters’ true selves, revealing something about forgiveness, perception, and the faulty tools society uses to categorize human complexity.


Pew Bible-NRSV-Apocrypha

Pew Bible-NRSV-Apocrypha

Author: Hendrickson Publishers

Publisher: Hendrickson Publishers

Published: 2005-08

Total Pages: 1133

ISBN-13: 1565637461

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Though they are regularly used in both Protestant and Roman Catholic congregations, the books of the Apocrypha are difficult to find in affordable English Bibles today--until now Readers will enjoy the NRSV's contemporary, literal translation and the easy-to-read text. Churches that reference the Apocrypha in liturgy and worship will appreciate the quality and price of these outstanding editions for presentation, and outreach. Gift & Award Bible - Superior quality at an unbeatable price - Three classic colors--black, blue, and burgundy--complement any sanctuary interior - Hardcover, 1,120 pages, 51/2 x 81/2 inches - Readable 9-point type - Color maps and presentation page About the Translation Translated by a multi-denominational committee, and based on the original Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic, the New Revised Standard Version is widely used by English-speaking congregations throughout the world. About the Apocrypha The Apocrypha is a collection of books found in the Septuagint--the Greek version of the Jewish Bible. Though not incorporated into the final, canonical version of the Hebrew scriptures, it was included in important Bible translations such as the Latin Vulgate and the original King James Version of 1611. For centuries the books of the Apocrypha have had a significant influence on Christian art, literature, and theology.