"Danielle Beazer Dubrasky and Karin Anderson are expert guides to this territory. Let them and this book bring you home." —Joanna Brooks Blossom as the Cliffrose: Mormon Legacies and the Beckoning Wild features original poems and prose by writers who are faithful, non–faithful, believers, heretics, converts and de–converts, dragged in or forced out of the Mormon faith. This dynamic collection demonstrates the breadth, complexity, and diversity of a Latter–day Saint legacy of commitment to natural place and challenges readers to examine the myriad ways deeply rooted heritage shapes personal relationship with landscape.
Literature and Ecotheology: From Chaos to Cosmos challenges us in a time of climate crisis to find more common ground between the dual projects of ecocriticism and ecotheology. This book argues that in our postsecular age, literature has become an important repository of theological wisdom that can, like formal work in ecotheology, provide the moral grounds for environmental care. However, for any cosmological understanding to be adequate to the challenges before us, it must be responsive to the often-painful contingencies and uncertainties that inhere in the cosmos, something that both ecocriticism and ecotheology have often neglected. After a treatment of the ecocritical and ecotheological questions that pertain to the religious/secular divide, the study then turns to four contemporary American writers—Annie Dillard, Cormac McCarthy, Marilynne Robinson, and David James Duncan—as examples. Each uses the contingency of literary form and its promise of wholeness in order to imagine reasons for hope in light of the unpredictability and untold human and more-than-human suffering that lie at the heart of nature. The book will be of interest to students, scholars and researchers interested in ecotheology, religious studies, environmental literature, the environmental humanities, and environmental studies more broadly. It offers a needed paradigm shift in how Western societies have tended to misuse both secularity and religion.
In The Missing Morningstar and Other Stories, Stacie Denetsosie confronts long-reaching effects of settler-colonialism on Native lives in a series of gritty, wildly imaginative stories. A young Navajo man catches a ride home alongside a casket he’s sure contains his dead grandfather. A gas station clerk witnesses the kidnapping of the newly crowned Miss Northwestern Arizona. A young couple’s search for a sperm donor raises questions of blood quantum. This debut collection grapples with a complex and painful history alongside an inheritance of beauty, ceremony, and storytelling.
A Metaphysical Odyssey:The True Story of a Thunderbird Medicine Woman.It is the story of Grandfather, Little Hawk and Desert Wolf. It is a true story of romantic passion, drama,adventure, learning, and mystery. It is a story for all ages.Grandfather Thundering Elk says, " A good story, upon hearing it, has the ability to heal..."
America's red rock desert is a place unlike any other -- such a marvelous fusion of form and color -- and Another Country is a correspondingly unique song of praise. Pairing fifteen essays with fifteen short stories, acclaimed writer John A. Murray takes you deep into this wonderland, one of the most remarkable regions on Earth. The territory Murray celebrates is a vast triangle in the heart of the Colorado Plateau, a region embracing slickrock canyons, blue mesas, snow-capped peaks and the world's greatest concentration of national parks and monuments.
From the big picture to the smallest detail, Richard Collins fashions a rousing memoir about the modern-day lives of cowboys and ranchers. However, Cowboy is a Verb is much more than wild horse rides and cattle chases. While Collins recounts stories of quirky ranch horses, cranky cow critters, cow dogs, and the people who use and care for them, he also paints a rural West struggling to survive the onslaught of relentless suburbanization. A born storyteller with a flair for words, Collins breathes life into the geology, history, and interdependency of land, water, and native and introduced plants and animals. He conjures indelible portraits of the hardworking, dedicated people he comes to know. With both humor and humility, he recounts the day-to-day challenges of ranch life such as how to build a productive herd, distribute your cattle evenly across a rough and rocky landscape, and establish a grazing system that allows pastures enough time to recover. He also intimately recounts a battle over the endangered Gila topminnow and how he and his neighbors worked with university range scientists, forest service conservationists, and funding agencies to improve their ranches as well as the ecological health of the Redrock Canyon watershed. Ranchers who want to stay in the game don’t dominate the landscape; instead, they have to continually study the land and the animals it supports. Collins is a keen observer of both. He demonstrates that patience, resilience, and a common-sense approach to conservation and range management are what counts, combined with an enduring affection for nature, its animals, and the land. Cowboy is a Verb is not a romanticized story of cowboy life on the range, rather it is a complex story of the complicated work involved with being a rancher in the twenty-first-century West.
