Olivia Reynolds is just where she wants to be—in control. The youngest brand manager for Vital, an athletic wear company, she has no family, no pets, and no obligations. When Olivia literally bumps into Cardic Lawson, her world is turned upside down. Cardic insists a no strings fling will meet both their needs. No commitments and sex anytime, anywhere. Cardic is as carefree as they come. Other than her career, life is all about fun. She’s a cultural anthropology professor at Loyola, and studying human culture and growing up in a household of infidelity has made her bitter about love. After an eighteen-month field study in the Amazon, Cardic is back in the states and ready to let loose. She wants nothing more than a casual affair with the fiery redhead, but will her desire to break Olivia’s control also break the bonds of her own heart?
For the last 19 years and 363 days, Elizabeth Boone walked into the federal courthouse without a problem. On day 364, a bullet sends her to the hospital and changes her life forever. In the aftermath of the shooting, Liz quits her job and moves to a small house on the edge of a beautiful park in Spokane, but life doesn’t get back to normal. Visions haunt her, pushing her to the point of despair. Reaching out for help she meets a fellow survivor, Willow Blue, and together they discover Liz’s visions show her the faces of the lost and the killer who took their lives. As one by one the murdered are found, a stranger works to stop Liz before the serial killer is brought to justice. Will the love they discover in each other be enough to keep Liz safe? Or will she be the next to die?
Renowned composer and lyricist Giselle Bonnaire suffers from anxiety disorder and agoraphobia. She needs a driver and housekeeper or she won’t be able to work. Tierney Edwards, a restless, wandering soul, is on the move again, never staying in one place more than a few months. The two women are each other’s opposites, one nomad and one recluse, but when destiny places them together, their mutual attraction can’t be denied. Giselle knows her heart will break when Tierney moves on again. But Tierney has never felt so at home, which scares her. Can these women, so bruised by life and experience, find a way to break free of the past—or will they have to say good-bye?
2000 Catholic Press Association Award Winner! The claim has been made that we are gripped today in an aesthetic crisis" with considerable theological ramifications. Aesthetics, which has existed since the first human heart was moved by the influence of the beautiful, has played a major role, both implicit and explicit, in theological reflection. In The Community of the Beautiful Alejandro Garcia-Rivera draws from the North American philosophical tradition and Hispanic theological thought to propose a new aesthetic principle: a redemptive building of the community of the beautiful. The Community of the Beautiful focuses on the premise that religion and beauty go together. Yet today hundreds of theological treatises continue to speak solely of the "truth" of their claims. The Community of the Beautiful addresses this silence with a proposal about the relationship between God and the beautiful. It asks the question: How can the finite human creature name the nameless, perceive the imperceptible, make visible the invisible? The answer is what Hans Urs von Balthasar called a theological aesthetics. The Community of the Beautiful is not simply an analysis of Balthasar's theology; there exists a more personal and concrete reason for a reconsideration of the connection between God and the beautiful. The experience of a particular living ecclesial tradition, the Latin Church of the Americas, may be a guide to a world that lost its confidence in the religious dimensions of the beautiful. Garcia-Rivera recasts the question of theological aesthetics posed above in light of the religious experience of the Latin Church of the Americas so that the question becomes: What moves the human heart? To answer that question, Garcia-Rivera draws on along-ignored philosophical tradition. The philosophical semiotics of Charles Peirce and Josiah Royce enter into dialogue with the theological aesthetics of Hans Urs von Balthasar to describe the traditional transcendentals, the True and the Good, as communities. The final transcendental, the beautiful, enters into conversation with the semiotic aesthetics of Jan Mukarovsky and the religious experience of the Latin American Church to become the dazzling Vision of the community of the beautiful, God's community. Chapters are "Pied Beauty," "A Different Beauty," "Seeing the Form," "The Community of the True," "The Community of the Good," "The Community of the Beautiful," and "Lifting up the Lowly." Alejandro R. Garcia-Rivera, a Roman Catholic lay theologian, received his doctorate in theology from the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago and holds degrees in physics from Ohio State University and Miami University. The author of numerous articles and winner of a Catholic Press Association award, he is assistant professor of systematic theology at the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley. "
In "The Undiscovered Country", Mr. Howells appears in a new phase, and adds somewhat of the definite moral purpose of the teacher to the grace and finish of the literary artist. From the opening of the first chapter it is evident that the author has this time a further object in mind than the mere portrayal of character. Half-page monologues and whole-page conversations on matters of speculative inquiry are not altogether in the line of Mr. Howell's genius, which has always disclosed more of the artist than of the moralist; the lesson of his literary work being in its perfection and its correspondence to truth, rather than in any serious intent or design which serves as an appendage to the artistic motive. Happily, in "The Undiscovered Country" the author does not pursue his object in that dead-in-earnest style which so commonly tends to overthrow the mental equipoise of a writer and dull his finer perceptions; — happily, that is, so far as the artistic results of his works are concerned, though otherwise, one cannot help thinking, as regards the actual gain accomplished in the elucidation of a very difficult subject. The title of Mr. Howells's book is both ingenious and suggestive. "The Undiscovered Country" remains undiscovered to the last; and the fact that no way of its discovery is found but that of the solitary exploration of death, proves of valuable service to the author, supplying the element of mystery which throws a poetic glamour over the subject he is treating, while it compels no self-betrayal to any opinion or theory, and at the end leads him to revert to the homelier scenes and occupations of practical life for the solution, not of his problem, but of his heroine's happiness and well-being.
Luca Garner is eager and hardworking, but her new boss is a total nightmare: snarky and uncooperative, not to mention an ice queen. VP Stephanie Austin doesn’t mean to be unkind, but the last thing she wants is an assistant getting under her skin, especially one who is as attractive as she is kind.
Ronda Meyers plays cornerback for the Texas Stars. She’s the league MVP, and she plays hard both on and off the field. Ronda’s life is going great until she gets a devastating injury in the second game of the new season. Gayla Adkins is Ronda’s assistant and part-time lover. She takes care of Ronda after her injury and does her best to nurse her back to health. In the process, they discover love. They’re very happy until Gayla suspects Ronda of becoming addicted to her pain pills. She gives Ronda an ultimatum—get off the pills or lose her. Is Ronda strong enough to kick her addiction? Or will she choose the easy way out and lose Gayla?
