Is there really any hope for a spiritual way of living that actually works? Admiration, comfort, love, power, success, pleasure, escape, control: we're all addicted to something, whether we realize it or not. In this deeply heartfelt book, author John Ortberg offers a guide for transformation when we know something needs to change but we can't do it on our own. Rooted in the teachings of Jesus and using the framework of AAs 12 steps as a guide, Ortberg offers all of us a freeing roadmap for: Giving up our exhausting and fruitless efforts to fix, manage, and control our own lives Distinguishing between when willpower is essential and when it is futile Discovering how God can do for us what we can't do for ourselves, and living authentically, joyfully and in communion with God and other people. Ortberg shows us how to discover: Our spiritual attachment styles Our core doubts The benefits of practices like prayer, meditation, and mindfulness God's sufficiency in our inadequacy In Steps, find what's needed to experience a new freedom, a new fellowship and a new happiness no matter our circumstances.
Using unpublished manuscript writings, this book reinterprets material, social, literary, philosophical and religious contexts of women's letter-writing in the long 18th century. It shows how letter-writing functions as a form of literary manuscript exchange and argues for manuscript circulation as a method of engaging with the republic of letters.
Uncovers African influences on the Western imagination during the eighteenth century, paying particular attention to the ways Ethiopia inspired and shaped the work of Samuel Johnson.