Ruth survived the Holocaust and the long journey to Palestine. Now she finds herself once again in a war zone as Israel battles for its existence. Her brother is on the front lines. Ruth and her boyfriend are injured and cannot fight, so they care for children in a hospital. Ruth tells the children stories to distract them and help them make sense of their situation. As she recovers, she too must return to the fight. A trauma forces her back to another time when she told stories: to her fellow prisoners in Auschwitz. We discover what Ruth went through in the camps, the horrors she saw, the friends she made and lost. Through it all Ruth comes to understand that she must find a new way to live, a way that does not give up on hope.
Building on the biblical story of Jacob wrestling with God and on the story of her own battle with life-changing disappointment, Sister Joan Chittister deftly explores the landscape of suffering and hope, considering along the way such wide-ranging topics as consumerism, technology, grief, the role of women in the Catholic Church, and the events of September 11, 2001.
I've told my kids for years that God doesn't make mistakes," writes Mary Beth Chapman, wife of Grammy award winning recording artist Steven Curtis Chapman. "Would I believe it now, when my whole world as I knew it came to an end?" Covering her courtship and marriage to Steven Curtis Chapman, struggles for emotional balance, and living with grief, Mary Beth's story is our story--wondering where God is when the worst happens. In Choosing to SEE, she shows how she wrestles with God even as she has allowed him to write her story--both during times of happiness and those of tragedy. Readers will hear firsthand about the loss of her daughter, the struggle to heal, and the unexpected path God has placed her on. Even as difficult as life can be, Mary Beth Chapman Chooses to SEE. Includes a 16-page full color photo insert.
The inspiring story of Monia Mazigh’s courageous fight to free her husband, Maher Arar, from a Syrian jail. On September 26, 2002, Maher Arar boarded an American Airlines plane bound for New York, returning early from vacation with his family because a work project needed his attention. He was a Canadian citizen, a telecommunications engineer and entrepreneur who had never been in trouble with the law. His nightmare began when he was pulled aside by Immigration officials at JFK airport, questioned, held without access to a lawyer, and ultimately deported to Syria on the suspicion that he had terrorist links. He would remain there, tortured and imprisoned for over one year. Meanwhile his wife, Monia, and their two children stayed on visiting family in Tunisia, unaware that their lives were about to be torn apart. Upon her return to Canada, Monia was horrified at the media’s and public’s willingness to assume that the Canadian police and intelligence agencies, and their American counterparts, take on her husband as a terrorist was correct. She began a tireless campaign to bring public attention and government action to her husband’s plight, eventually turning the tide of public opinion in Arar’s favour, and gaining his release and return to Canada. Of her willingness to speak out, she has said that she was never afraid: “I had lost my life. I didn’t have more to lose.” This is a remarkable story of personal courage, and of an extraordinary woman who lets us into her life so that other Canadians can understand the denial of rights and the discarding of human rights her family suffered. Candid, poignant, and inspiring, this is the most important book of the season.
Explores the history of Norvelt, Pennsylvania, originally known as Westmoreland Homesteads, which was founded in 1934 as part of the New Deal homestead subsistence program.
“A crucial text” – Rev Bill Shaw, CEO of 174 Trust, Belfast “Touching … thoughtful collection … of rich testimonies” – Prof Maggie Scull, Syracuse University, London The working-class community of Ardoyne has been described as a Catholic and Nationalist island within the Protestant Unionist sea of North Belfast. No other community suffered as much during the Troubles as Ardoyne. During the three-day period of 14–16 August 1969, stoked by the Battle of the Bogside in Derry, long-lived tensions in the area boiled over into riots. Streets became battlefields, houses went up in fire, and the first of many lives were lost. Ardoyne ’69: Stories of Struggle and Hope explores the stories of 14 people who share one experience in common – the violence of 14, 15 and 16 August 1969. The book highlights their memories, but also asks how they interpreted the violent events they witnessed, and what impact these events had upon their subsequent lives. It illustrates how people from the one community who experienced a common event have different memories, interpretations and reactions to what they saw. Stories come from people as varied as IRA prisoners and a local teacher to an RUC officer, an Irish Times journalist, a former Director General of RTE and a former President of Ireland. Illustrated by contemporary photographs, Ardoyne ’69: Stories of Struggle and Hope is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how seismic events can shape our lives in radically different ways. Brian McKee is an Ardoyne man to the core. He has almost 40 years’ experience of teaching, retreat work and youth ministry. The majority of his work is in the field of peace and reconciliation in the parish of Holy Cross, Ardoyne, with the Passionist Peace Office. He is also manager of the nearby Passionist Retreat and Conference Centre at Tobar Mhuire, Crossgar.
Inside and on the Outs is an account of one man's struggle to find redemption. The story begins in his early teen years which were full of drugs and destruction, and moves on to his successes in high school, and the trials of college life. But how did he end up inside the Illinois Shawnee Correctional Center? He is now an adult living in the Chicago area. He is divorced; he is a father; he is a college graduate; he is an ex-convict. He was sentenced to eight years inside the penitentiary, sharing an eight by ten foot cell with a man who was serving time for first-degree murder and strong-armed robbery. Worse, he was sentenced to those eight years for DUI convictions. His dreams came crashing down around him. He is now working through the toughest battle of all...how to live the life that he has created for himself. Inside a medium-maximum penitentiary in Illinois, hundreds of miles away from the people he loves, he had to seek forgiveness and come to terms with all that he had done. This is his life...this is his story.
In the 1930s and 1940s, a loose alliance of blacks and whites, individuals and organizations, came together to offer a radical alternative to southern conservative politics. In Days of Hope, Patricia Sullivan traces the rise and fall of this movement. Using oral interviews with participants in this movement as well as documentary sources, she demonstrates that the New Deal era inspired a coalition of liberals, black activists, labor organizers, and Communist Party workers who sought to secure the New Deal's social and economic reforms by broadening the base of political participation in the South. From its origins in a nationwide campaign to abolish the poll tax, the initiative to expand democracy in the South developed into a regional drive to register voters and elect liberals to Congress. The NAACP, the CIO Political Action Committee, and the Southern Conference for Human Welfare coordinated this effort, which combined local activism with national strategic planning. Although it dramatically increased black voter registration and led to some electoral successes, the movement ultimately faltered, according to Sullivan, because the anti-Communist fervor of the Cold War and a militant backlash from segregationists fractured the coalition and marginalized southern radicals. Nevertheless, the story of this campaign invites a fuller consideration of the possibilities and constraints that have shaped the struggle for racial democracy in America since the 1930s.
Is it possible to fully accept, even love, the life you have? Is it possible to drop the struggle to make yourself and your life different? Acclaimed teacher and bestselling author Roger Housden says yes in this profound alternative to nonstop striving and self-criticism. Whether about our relationships, careers, or spirituality, many of us judge ourselves as not measuring up. But fulfillment comes when we stop struggling and learn to trust the wisdom of what life presents us with. Housden wrote Dropping the Struggle as someone who, up until a few years ago, spent much of his time in a covert struggle with life. Despite his success, he often felt that something was missing. He struggled for years with an ongoing spiritual longing, with questions of meaning and purpose, with the search for love, with all the usual difficulties of being human, until he finally realized — though not with his thinking mind — that the only thing life was asking of him was to rest in a deeper knowing that was always there, usually silently, behind the arguments and strategies that would so commonly occupy his conscious self. “Struggle will never get us the things we want most,” Housden writes, “love; meaning; presence; freedom from anxiety over the past and future; contentment with ourselves exactly as we are, imperfections and all; the acceptance of our mortality — because these things lie outside the ego’s domain. For these, we need another way. That way begins and ends in surrender, in letting go of our resistance to life as it presents itself.”