Pilgrim's Wilderness

Pilgrim's Wilderness

Author: Tom Kizzia

Publisher: Crown

Published: 2013-07-16

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 0307587843

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Into the Wild meets Helter Skelter in this riveting true story of a modern-day homesteading family in the deepest reaches of the Alaskan wilderness—and of the chilling secrets of its maniacal, spellbinding patriarch. When Papa Pilgrim, his wife, and their fifteen children appeared in the Alaska frontier outpost of McCarthy, their new neighbors saw them as a shining example of the homespun Christian ideal. But behind the family's proud piety and beautiful old-timey music lay Pilgrim's dark past: his strange connection to the Kennedy assassination and a trail of chaos and anguish that followed him from Dallas and New Mexico. Pilgrim soon sparked a tense confrontation with the National Park Service fiercely dividing the community over where a citizen’s rights end and the government’s power begins. As the battle grew more intense, the turmoil in his brood made it increasingly difficult to tell whether his children were messianic followers or hostages in desperate need of rescue. In this powerful piece of Americana, written with uncommon grace and high drama, veteran Alaska journalist, Tom Kizzia uses his unparalleled access to capture an era-defining clash between environmentalists and pioneers ignited by a mesmerizing sociopath who held a town and a family captive.


Nola

Nola

Author: Robin Hemley

Publisher: University of Iowa Press

Published: 2013-04-01

Total Pages: 363

ISBN-13: 1609381807

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The evidence at hand: an autobiography—complete with their mother’s edits—written by his brilliant and disturbingly religious sister; a story featuring actual childhood events, but published by his mother as fiction; the transcript of a hypnotherapy session from his adolescence; and perjured court documents hidden in a drawer for decades. These are the clues Robin Hemley gathers when he sets out to reconstruct the life of his older sister Nola, who died at the age of twenty-five after several years of treatment for schizophrenia. Armed with these types of clues, Hemley quickly discovers that finding the truth in any life—even one’s own—is a fragmented and complex task. Nola: A Memoir of Faith, Art, and Madness is much more than a remembrance of a young woman who was consumed her entire life by a passion for finding and understanding God; it is also a quest to understand what people choose to reveal and conceal, and an examination of the enormous toll mental illness takes on a family. Finally, it is a revelation of the alchemy that creates a writer: confidence in the unknowable, distrust of the proven, tortuous devotion to the fine print in life, and sacrifice to writing itself as it plays the roles of confessor, scourge, and creator. Upon its first release in 1998, Nola won ForeWord’s Book of the Year Award for biography/memoir, the Washington State Book Award for biography/memoir, and the Independent Press Book Award for autobiography/memoir.


Faith, Madness, and Spontaneous Human Combustion

Faith, Madness, and Spontaneous Human Combustion

Author: Gerald N. Callahan

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2002-01-03

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 0312268076

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Provides an exploration into how science has shaped our identity by examining the elements of our immune systems such as the thymuses, bone marrow, and lymph nodes to show how they define us in extremely individual ways, and reveals how faith and love are in fact programmed into our genes.


Of God and Madness

Of God and Madness

Author: T. Byram Karasu

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 9780742559752

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Follows the spiritual journey of a young man, the child of the last sultan of the Ottoman Empire and a Jewish palace concubine, as he struggles to make sense of God through World War I in Istanbul, World War II in Paris, and the final years of British rule in Jerusalem, while maintaining his own precarious sanity.


Sitting in Two Boats

Sitting in Two Boats

Author: Shahid Nawaz

Publisher:

Published: 2018-06-14

Total Pages: 175

ISBN-13: 9781983168864

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In a thought experiment, Shahid Nawaz arrives at the unity of knowledge. He creates a fictional character, Mr. Monologue. Mr. Monologue knows everything. He solves all problems of the mankind. H claims that there is no God. He is only noticed after he commits suicide. It is then when people think that Mr. Monologue was a messenger of God.How could God send a messenger whose very message is that He does not exist? This question impacts Shahid Nawaz so much that he becomes mentally ill and diagnosed with bipolar disorder. He is an atheist when stable. In mania, he becomes psychotic and strongly believes that Mr. Monologue is real, who will one day emerge as a prophet.About the authorShahid Nawaz received his Ph.D. in information physics from University at Albany, State University of New York. Before that, he earned his M.Phil. in particle physics from Quaid-i-Azam University Islamabad. He was born in District Khyber, Khyber Pakhtoonkhwa, Pakistan. Currently, he lives with his wife and son in Albany, New York.


Margins of Religion

Margins of Religion

Author: John Llewelyn

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2008-12-17

Total Pages: 488

ISBN-13: 0253002796

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Pursuing Jacques Derrida's reflections on the possibility of "religion without religion," John Llewelyn makes room for a sense of the religious that does not depend on the religions or traditional notions of God or gods. Beginning with Derrida's statement that it was Kierkegaard to whom he remained most faithful, Llewelyn reads Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Feuerbach, Heidegger, Sartre, Levinas, Deleuze, Marion, as well as Kierkegaard and Derrida, in original and compelling ways. Llewelyn puts religiousness in vital touch with the struggles of the human condition, finding religious space in the margins between the secular and the religions, transcendence and immanence, faith and knowledge, affirmation and despair, lucidity and madness. This provocative and philosophically rich account shows why and where the religious matters.