Have you ever struggled to overcome anxiety, depression, people-pleasing, or your past? Do you believe no one knows the real you? Have you doubted God's goodness, love, or existence? Do you long to find hope for your life and reclaim your story? Sarah de Orlando's heart breaks for you because she's been there. In her debut memoir, Sarah takes the readers lovingly into a deeply personal journey to a life-changing eight months in Poland where she met Jesus. Unexpectedly, he wasn't an aloof religious figure confined to cathedrals but a loving, kind friend. This encounter set her on a path of vibrant, whole living. Sarah shares authentically how her relationship blossomed as she learned to receive and give Jesus' love. As you read, feel Sarah reaching out through these pages with a warm embrace and then look you in the eyes, "This hope is for you." Are you ready for your own freedom song? Come. Let us walk together, friend, there is so much encouragement to share.
Over the period of twelve months, between May 2017 and 2018, Polish-born curator and critic Anda Rottenberg has written a series of fictitious letters to legendary curator and writer Harald Szeemann (1933?2005). In these pieces, Rottenberg analyzes the art and nature of curating and reveals references and relations in the history of art. She questions female artistic positions both in the Eastern and Western Europe and so encourages new individual readings of them. Her letters express a unique rhetoric that take-up questions and polemic judgements to amalgamate individual opinion and objective knowledge into a personal history.00This is the first publication of the much acclaimed new museum foundation Muzeum Susch, an initiative of the Polish entrepreneur and art collector Gra?yna Kulczyk.
Love Letters from Golok chronicles the courtship between two Buddhist tantric masters, Tāre Lhamo (1938–2002) and Namtrul Rinpoche (1944–2011), and their passion for reinvigorating Buddhism in eastern Tibet during the post-Mao era. In fifty-six letters exchanged from 1978 to 1980, Tāre Lhamo and Namtrul Rinpoche envisioned a shared destiny to "heal the damage" done to Buddhism during the years leading up to and including the Cultural Revolution. Holly Gayley retrieves the personal and prophetic dimensions of their courtship and its consummation in a twenty-year religious career that informs issues of gender and agency in Buddhism, cultural preservation among Tibetan communities, and alternative histories for minorities in China. The correspondence between Tare Lhamo and Namtrul Rinpoche is the first collection of "love letters" to come to light in Tibetan literature. Blending tantric imagery with poetic and folk song styles, their letters have a fresh vernacular tone comparable to the love songs of the Sixth Dalai Lama, but with an eastern Tibetan flavor. Gayley reads these letters against hagiographic writings about the couple, supplemented by field research, to illuminate representational strategies that serve to narrate cultural trauma in a redemptive key, quite unlike Chinese scar literature or the testimonials of exile Tibetans. With special attention to Tare Lhamo's role as a tantric heroine and her hagiographic fusion with Namtrul Rinpoche, Gayley vividly shows how Buddhist masters have adapted Tibetan literary genres to share private intimacies and address contemporary social concerns.
World-renowned Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh champions a more mindful, spiritual approach to protecting nature and limiting climate change—one that recognizes people and planet as one and the same. While many experts point to the enormous complexity in addressing issues ranging from the destruction of ecosystems to the loss of millions of species, Thich Nhat Hanh identifies one key issue as having the potential to create a tipping point. He believes that we need to move beyond the concept of the “environment,” as it leads people to experience themselves and Earth as two separate entities and to see the planet only in terms of what it can do for them. Here, Thich Nhat Hanh points to the lack of meaning and connection in peoples’ lives as being the cause of our addiction to consumerism. He deems it vital that we recognize and respond to the stress we are putting on the Earth if civilization is to survive. Rejecting the conventional economic approach, Thich Nhat Hanh shows that mindfulness and a spiritual revolution are needed to protect nature and limit climate change. Love Letter to the Earth is a hopeful book that gives us a path to follow by showing that change is possible only with the recognition that people and the planet are ultimately one and the same.
While far fewer studies on women and gender have been published in Poland than in the West, the last decade has seen growing interest in gender history among Polish scholars. The first general history of Polish women in the early modern times was published by Dr. Bogucka in Polish in 1998; the present study constitutes an expansion, as well as a translation into English, of that seminal work. Women in Early Modern Polish Society, against the European Background makes widely available to historians and women's studies scholars in the West a mass of information about women in Poland from the 16th to the 18th century, previously inaccessible in Polish archives. In the preface, Bogucka points to the need for theoretical reflection within Polish studies of women's history, and the need to develop standard concepts and terms for the study of gender, to allow this research to develop further. She emphasizes that scholars of women's history must rely on all documents of a given epoch if they want to examine women's lives. Urban and rural records (especially law court records), church archives, private archives, diaries, noblemen's records, collections of sermons, last wills, inventories, belles letters, correspondence, are all sources which always contain scattered direct or indirect information on women and gender relations. Bogucka examines the stages of the typical woman's life-girl, married woman, widow-discussing their position in the family and society, as well as the societal changes that occurred in this sphere from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. She also looks, among other things, at the role of women's work in the countryside and in towns according to social status and education; religious life, which offered possibilities to women to appear and to act outside the home; the impact of Reformation on the situation of women; the participation of women in the creation and consumption of culture; and women's roles in political life. Finally, she places her discussion of Polish women in comparative context, exploring the legal status and general situation of women in Poland against those in Western countries - Germany, France and England - as well as Central and Eastern Europe-Hungary, Bohemia, and Russia.
Pura Belpré Award Winner Ruth Behar's inspiring story of a Jewish girl who escapes Poland to make a new life in Cuba, where she works to rescue the rest of her family The situation is getting dire for Jews in Poland on the eve of World War II. Esther's father has fled to Cuba, and she is the first one to join him. It's heartbreaking to be separated from her beloved sister, so Esther promises to write down everything that happens until they're reunited. And she does, recording both the good--the kindness of the Cuban people and her discovery of a valuable hidden talent--and the bad: the fact that Nazism has found a foothold even in Cuba. Esther's evocative letters are full of her appreciation for life and reveal a resourceful, determined girl with a rare ability to bring people together, all the while striving to get the rest of their family out of Poland before it's too late. Based on Ruth Behar's family history, this compelling story celebrates the resilience of the human spirit in the most challenging times.
Now available in English for the first time, this collection brings together some of noted poet Czeslaw Milosz's early essays and letters, composed in German-occupied Warsaw during the winter of 1942-43.
Elizabeth Stuart is one the most misrepresented - and underestimated - figures of the seventeenth century. This biography reveals the impact that she had on both England and Europe
