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.
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.
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.
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.
Holy Week is not an obligation. It is an opportunity. In the chaos of our increasingly fast-paced and hectic society, the annual coming of Holy Week each spring is a reminder to pause and ponder, to carefully mark each day, and not let this greatest of all weeks fly like every other. It is a chance to walk with the church throughout the world and throughout time as she accompanies her Bridegroom through the eight most important days in the history of the world. And it is an opportunity to focus our minds on, and seek to intensify our affections for, the highest and most timeless realities in the universe. We have assembled a team of eleven pastors and scholars to walk us through Holy Week as we walk together with our Lord. This collection of short meditations includes readings for each morning and evening from Palm Sunday to the triumph of Easter.
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.
Since earliest times Christians have used pebbles, a string of knots, or beads on a cord to keep track of their prayers, and prayer beads can be found in virtually every major religious tradition in the world. Anglicans and other Protestants have also begun to use the rosary to help refresh a life of prayer--it creates a rhythm that helps wean us from our distractions and focus our attention so that we can more readily move into God's presence. As the beads and prayers recede into the background, the mysteries that make up the rosary come into our minds and hearts like religious pictures or icons. First published in 1975, J. Neville Ward's unusual collection of meditations offer an entirely new approach to the rosary for all Christians. He begins with its traditional use and then offers fifteen insights into the life of Jesus and his mother Mary that can speak to us today. Thus a meditation on the sorrowful themes reminds us of the suffering that is so much a part of our own lives, while the joyful and glorious mysteries speak of the desire for faith, hope, and love that will heal them. These reflections serve up a rich spiritual repast for Christians seeking new contemplative practices and learning to pray with the rosary.
Violinist and composer Fritz Kreisler was a most beloved musician, bringing to the musical stage a grace and warmth that were unmatched during his prime. Born in 1875, he was the last, best ambassador of nineteenth-century Vienna to a twentieth-century world. Nurtured in the rich musical environment of that European capital, Kreisler had a middling career as a prodigy, never attaining the early celebrity of a young Heifetz or Menuhin, and he even abandoned the violin for several years while exploring other pursuits. Yet Kreisler was to become the most influential musician among string players the world over. This lively portrait by a perceptive critic brings back to life a musical giant of the first half of the twentieth century, examining important themes and events of his life and his views on politics and art as well as on music and musicians. It reveals a man whose gift was a unique ability to communicate joys and sorrows to an adoring world through music.
