Salvation on Sand Mountain
Salvation on Sand Mountain

Author: Dennis Covington

Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com

Published: 2010-02

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 1458766276

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For Dennis Covington, what began as a journalistic assignment - covering the trial of an Alabama preacher convicted of attempting to murder his wife with poisonous snakes - would evolve into a headlong plunge into a bizarre, mysterious, and ultimately irresistible world of unshakable faith: the world of holiness snake handling, where people drink strychnine, speak in tongues, lay hands on the sick, and, some claim, raise the dead. Set in the heart of Appalachia, Salvation on Sand Mountain is Covington's unsurpassed and chillingly captivating exploration of the nature, power, and extremity of faith - an exploration that gradually turns inward, until Covington finds himself taking up the snakes. University.

Redneck Riviera
Redneck Riviera

Author: Dennis Covington

Publisher: Counterpoint Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13:

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The author describes his odyssey to the Gulf Coast of the Florida Panhandle to claim his inheritance, two and a half acres of land purchased by his father, in a study of the clash of values that is tearing apart much of rural America.

Them That Believe
Them That Believe

Author: Ralph Hood

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2008-09-02

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 052094271X

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Although outlawed in many states, serpent handling remains an active religious practice—and one that is far more stereotyped than understood. Ralph W. Hood, Jr. and W. Paul Williamson have spent fifteen years touring serpent-handling churches in Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina, and West Virginia, conducting scores of interviews with serpent handlers, and witnessing hundreds of serpent-handling services. In this illuminating book they present the most in-depth, comprehensive study of serpent handling to date. Them That Believe not only explores facets of this religious practice—including handling, preaching, and the near-death experiences of individuals who were bitten but survived—but also provides a rich analysis of this phenomenon from historical, social, religious, and psychological perspectives.

Cleaving
Cleaving

Author: Dennis Covington

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2000-05-08

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 086547589X

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Told in the authors' alternating voices, "Cleaving" is both the story and the understory of a marriage. After their marriage begins to fall apart, Vicki and Dennis embark on a mission to dig wells in Central America, assuaging a spiritual thirst by addressing a practical need.

Revelation
Revelation

Author: Dennis Covington

Publisher: Little, Brown

Published: 2016-02-16

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 0316368601

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Acclaimed journalist Dennis Covington examines how faith and violence shape our world. In war zones witnessing widespread conflict, what makes life at all worth living? When chaos becomes a way of life in places where religion and violence intersect, what do people hold on to? If religious belief is, as Christopher Hitchens argues, the cause of wars and genocide, then is faith the cure? Dennis Covington pursued answers to these questions for years, traveling deep into places like Syria, Mexico, and the American South. Looking not for rigid doctrines, creeds, or beliefs -- which, he says, can be contradictory, even dangerous -- he sought something bigger and more fundamental: faith. It's faith in goodness, kindness, and the humanity of the smallest moments that makes the most difficult times bearable. The young bomb victim who offers a smile from his hospital bed, the grieving parent who shares a photograph, the joined hands of men who were previously mortal enemies, and Covington's own family turmoil. These are some of the moments that leave him touching the beating heart of what it truly is to live. Like Covington's widely celebrated Salvation on Sand Mountain, Revelation is an intensely personal journey that goes to the edges of a world filled with violence and religious strife to find the enduring worth of living.

Serpent-handling Believers
Serpent-handling Believers

Author: Thomas G. Burton

Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 9780870497889

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Burton seeks to present a balanced view of the remote churches of East Tennessee where believers take literally the words of Saint Mark: "and they shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them."

The World Without Us
The World Without Us

Author: Alan Weisman

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2008-08-05

Total Pages: 436

ISBN-13: 9780312427900

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A penetrating take on how our planet would respond without the relentless pressure of the human presence

Whispers of Moonlight
Whispers of Moonlight

Author: Lori Wick

Publisher: Harvest House Publishers

Published: 2006-01-01

Total Pages: 433

ISBN-13: 0736933735

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When Travis and Rebecca marry, rumors quickly spread that he has done so only for her dying father's ranch. Confused and convinced that Travis can never truly love her, Rebecca strikes out on her own. She disappears to make a new life for herself in a town far away, but her friends there are few, and life is hard. When desperate circumstances drive Rebecca home to Travis, she can see the change in the man she left behind. In her absence, he has grown from a rough-hewn cowboy to a confident rancher. Still, her wounded heart is hesitant. Is she more afraid to love—or to be loved?

The Sound of the Dove
The Sound of the Dove

Author: Beverly Bush Patterson

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 9780252070037

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In The Sound of the Dove, Beverly Bush Patterson explores one of the oldest traditions of American religious folksong, a national heritage of great beauty and dignity that remains vital in the lives and worship of predestinarian Primitive Baptists in the southern mountains. This unaccompanied and frequently unharmonized congregational singing challenges our assumptions about creativity, aesthetics, meaning, and identity. Patterson's revealing study incorporates interviews, field observations, historical research, song transcriptions, and musical analysis. She uses seventeenth-century English documents to trace historical antecedents of Primitive Baptist singing and to frame her discussion of religious belief and gender roles as they intersect with singing. One chapter is devoted to the role of women in this church.

Make Way for Her
Make Way for Her

Author: Katie Cortese

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2018-03-09

Total Pages: 199

ISBN-13: 0813175135

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A girl afflicted with pyrokinesis tries to control her fire-starting long enough to go to a dance with a boy she likes. A woman trapped in a stalled marriage is excited by an alluring ex-con who enrolls in her YMCA cooking class. A teen accompanies her mother, a prestigious poet, to a writing conference where she navigates a misguided attraction to a married writer—who is, in turn, attracted to her mother—leaving her "inventing punishments for writers who believe in clichés as tired as broken hearts." In this affecting collection, Katie Cortese explores the many faces of love and desire. Featuring female narrators that range in age from five to forty, the narratives in Make Way for Her speak to the many challenges and often bittersweet rewards of offering, receiving, and returning love as imperfect human beings. The stories are united by the theme of desperate love, whether it's a daughter's love for a parent, a sister's for a sibling, or a romantic love that is sometimes returned and sometimes unrequited. Cortese's complex and multilayered stories play with the reader's own desires and anticipations as her characters stubbornly resist the expected. The intrepid girls and women in this book are, above all, explorers. They drive classic cars from Maine to Phoenix, board airplanes for the first time, and hike dense forests in search of adventure; but what they often find is that the most treacherous landscapes lie within. As a result, Make Way for Her explores a world of women who crave knowledge and experience, not simply sex or love.