A book of poetic essays written in English, Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet is full of religious inspirations. With the twelve illustrations drawn by the author himself, the book took more than eleven years to be formulated and perfected and is Gibran's best-known work. It represents the height of his literary career as he came to be noted as ‘the Bard of Washington Street.’ Captivating and vivified with feeling, The Prophet has been translated into forty languages throughout the world, and is considered the most widely read book of the twentieth century. Its first edition of 1300 copies sold out within a month.
This is the moving story of Matt Chandler's battle with a potentially fatal brain tumor. But it's also the stories of those in his church family who taught him, and teach him, how to walk with joy in sorrow. Readers will find encouragement and strength to get through tough times, or to support others to do so.
Joy in Sorrow, Hope for Tomorrow is a book written by Vonnetta Mayo. It is about a young girl telling her story about her mother, her mother's three friends, and her three younger brothers' experience as slaves on a plantation in Memphis, Tennessee. When the young girl is telling her story, you would be able to visualize the young girl, her mother, her mother's three friends, and her three younger brothers' day-to-day lives as slaves on a plantation. This book will uplift your spirit with its Christianity foundation. As well as enlighten you a little about African American history.
From bestselling author of The Book of Delights and award-winning poet, a book of lyrical mini-essays celebrating the everyday that will inspire readers to rediscover the joys in the world around us. In Ross Gay’s new collection of small, daily wonders, again written over the course of a year, one of America’s most original voices continues his ongoing investigation of delight. For Gay, what delights us is what connects us, what gives us meaning, from the joy of hearing a nostalgic song blasting from a passing car to the pleasure of refusing the “nefarious” scannable QR code menus, from the tiny dog he fell hard for to his mother baking a dozen kinds of cookies for her grandchildren. As always, Gay revels in the natural world—sweet potatoes being harvested, a hummingbird carousing in the beebalm, a sunflower growing out of a wall around the cemetery, the shared bounty from a neighbor’s fig tree—and the trillion mysterious ways this glorious earth delights us. The Book of (More) Delights is a volume to savor and share.
Much-Afraid had been in the service of the Chief Shepherd, whose great flocks were pastured down in the Valley of Humiliation. She lived with her friends and fellow workers Mercy and Peace in a tranquil little white cottage in the village of Much-Trembling. She loved her work and desired intensely to please the Chief Shepherd, but happy as she was in most ways, she was conscious of several things which hindered her in her work and caused her much secret distress and shame. Here is the allegorical tale of Much-Afraid, an every-woman searching for guidance from God to lead her to a higher place.
Since the mid-1990s, Taiwan’s unique brand of Mandopop (Mandarin Chinese–language pop music) has dictated the musical tastes of the mainland and the rest of Chinese-speaking Asia. Cries of Joy, Songs of Sorrow explores Mandopop’s surprisingly complex cultural implications in Taiwan and the PRC, where it has established new gender roles, created a vocabulary to express individualism, and introduced transnational culture to a country that had closed its doors to the world for twenty years. In his early chapters, Marc L. Moskowitz provides the historical background necessary to understand the contemporary Mandopop scene, beginning with the birth of Chinese popular music in the East Asian jazz Mecca of 1920s Shanghai. A brief overview of alternative musical genres in the PRC such as Beijing rock and revolutionary opera is included. The section concludes with a look at the manner in which Taiwan’s musical ethos has influenced the mainland’s music industry and how Mandopop has brought Western music and cultural values to the PRC. This leads to a discussion of Taiwan pop’s exceptional hybridity, beginning with foreign influences during the colonial period under the Dutch and Japanese and continuing with the country’s political, cultural, and economic alliance with the U.S. Moskowitz addresses the resulting wealth of transnational musical influences from the rest of East Asia and the U.S. and Taiwan pop’s appeal to audiences in both the PRC and Taiwan. In doing so, he explores how Mandopop’s "songs of sorrow," with their ubiquitous themes of loneliness and isolation, engage a range of emotional expression that resonates strongly in the PRC. Later chapters examine the construction of male and female identities in Mandopop and look at the widespread condemnation of the genre by critics. Drawing on analyses and data from earlier chapters (including interviews with dozens of performers, song writers, and lay people in Taipei and Shanghai), Moskowitz attempts to answer the question: Why, if the music is as bad as some assert, is it so central to the lives of the largest population in the world? To answer, he highlights Mandopop’s important contribution as a poetic lament that simultaneously embraces and protests modern life. Cries of Joy, Songs of Sorrow is a highly readable introduction to an important but understudied East Asian phenomenon. It will find a ready audience among scholars and students of Chinese and Taiwanese popular culture as well as musicologists studying transnational music flows and non-Western popular music.
Joy Nason was born into an English working class family during World War Two and raised in the fundamentalist Christian cult of the Exclusive Brethren. Growing up in this strict and demanding world, her family migrated to Australia in the 1950s. In her early 20s, Joy made the courageous decision to flee her family, knowing that she would be cut off from that moment on. Slowly but surely Joy made her way in the world, with kind employers who encouraged her to gain skills, and friends who helped her with socialising, travel and a new-found enjoyment of life. Through many jobs and disappointing liaisons, to finally becoming a mother of a baby boy, Joy picks herself up after each failure and faces the world with determination and a positive attitude. Joy finally entered the world of education - denied her by her sect - and attained teaching degrees, through which she became Senior Head Teacher at New South Wales TAFE. With Joy and Sorrow, Joy made the decision to go public with her life and experiences, partly to give inspiration to others trapped in similar situations, but also to add to the body of evidence exposing the hypocrisy of the Exclusive Brethren. This secretive sect, now re-branded the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church, will stop at nothing to maintain their Charitable status - and keep their tax-free millions.
Joy Nason was born into an English working class family during World War Two and raised in the fundamentalist Christian cult of the Exclusive Brethren. Growing up in this strict and demanding world, her family migrated to Australia in the 1950s. In her early 20s, Joy made the courageous decision to flee her family, knowing that she would be cut off from that moment on. Slowly but surely Joy made her way in the world, with kind employers who encouraged her to gain skills, and friends who helped her with socialising, travel and a new-found enjoyment of life. Through many jobs and disappointing liaisons, to finally becoming a mother of a baby boy, Joy picks herself up after each failure and faces the world with determination and a positive attitude. Joy finally entered the world of education - denied her by her sect - and attained teaching degrees, through which she became Senior Head Teacher at New South Wales TAFE. With 'Joy and Sorrow', Joy made the decision to go public with her life and experiences, partly to give inspiration to others trapped in similar situations, but also to add to the body of evidence exposing the hypocrisy of the Exclusive Brethren. This secretive sect, now re-branded the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church, will stop at nothing to maintain their Charitable status - and keep their tax-free millions.
