Raised in the High Sierras, Brenda Peterson was influenced daily by wildlife. She now explores her deep connection with animals--from watching grizzlies in Montana's Rockies to her work for the restoration of wild wolves in the West--and includes intimate stories of wild dolphins, whales, and orcas she has studied for 20 years.
Founded in 1930 as the result of efforts by several black Catholic laywomen, Queen of Angels was the first African American Catholic congregation in Newark, New Jersey. The church quickly embarked on an outreach campaign that endured for decades and affected the entire Newark community - black and white, Catholic and Protestant. By the 1960's, many people looked to Queen of Angels as a model of social and civil rights activism. In A Mission for Justice, Mary Ward places Queen of Angles within its broader historical, religious, and social context and explores the church's struggle for justice within the Catholic Church and in society as a whole. The reach of Queen of Angels extended far beyond its own membership. For example, while riots erupted in other cities across the country after the murder of Martin Luther King Jr., Queen of Angels played an instrumental role in organizing the Walk for Understanding, a peaceful march of twenty-five thousand blacks and whites through the heart of the inner city. That event and the ethos that inspired it gave birth to the New Community Corporation, the largest nonprofit housing corporation in the country, led by former Queen of Angels priest, William Linder. Today, Queen of Angels is one of several African American Catholic parishes in Newark, and its mission is now more pastoral than activist. But the church continues as a home to various community based programs working to improve the lives of Newark's residents. Based on nine years of research, A Mission for Justice draws on oral histories of parishioners, pastors, nuns, and layworkers at Queen of Angels as well as on documents from various private collections. Ward's study will be valuable reading for those interested in African American and church history as well as the history of social activism and the Civil Rights Movement. The Author: Mary A. Ward is an adjunct professor of religion at Fordham University.
Growing up in a small prairie town, J’s first indication that the world might not always be a happy place is when her beloved father falls into alcoholism and abandons the family. As she and her brothers grow up in low-rent housing with a struggling single mother, J’s worldview continues to get darker until she’s feeling completely out of place at school, with her friends, in her dysfunctional relationships with boys, and in the world. But there’s a voice in J’s head, and it’s telling her that she can shape the broken kaleidoscope pieces of her life into beautiful, shifting patterns if she’ll just write her way out of her heartbreak, confusion, and pain. In sensitive, lyrical, and often very witty prose, J chronicles her continuing journey to become the person she wants to be. It’s a book for anyone who has ever felt alone or who has seen the world as a hard, dark place, while still yearning to find the love, forgiveness, and beauty in it.
Sean O’Brien is widely acknowledged as one of the most gifted English poets now writing, and as a leading poet-critic. Cousin Coat collects the best of O’Brien’s work to date; long-time O’Brien aficionados will be grateful to have so much of the early work available again, while recent converts will be delighted to find that O’Brien’s boisterous wit, intelligence and astonishing technical fluency were as much in evidence at the outset of his career as they are now. While some of O’Brien’s mises en scène and dramatis personae have remained constant over the years – the urban dystopia, the train, the rain, the underground, the canal, the lugubrious procession of conductors, policemen, head teachers and detectives – their shadows have deepened with O’Brien’s sense of their historicity and mythic power. His imaginative landscape has become impressively varied: as well as blackly paranoid fantasy and scabrous political critique, O’Brien’s work now encompasses English pastoral, comic set-piece and metaphysical lyric, and shows a growing fascination with song-form and dramatic verse. Cousin Coat represents the best introduction to one of the most significant English poets of the last thirty years. ‘The bard of urban Britain’ The Times ‘A collection which holds numerous satisfactions for anyone with a sense of humour and a political consciousness’ Guardian on Ghost Train ‘The most invigorating new book of poems I’ve read this year’ Sunday Telegraph on Downriver
This collection, drawing on almost forty years of verse, represents the definitive guide to one of the leading English poets working today. It will allow the reader the chance to survey both the remarkable variety and the consistent quality of O’Brien’s work, as well as the enduring strength of his obsessions: these have helped create a tone and a landscape as immediately recognizable as those of MacNeice, Larkin or Eliot. O’Brien’s hells and heavens, underworlds and urban dystopias, trains and waterways have formed the imaginative theatre for his songs, satires, pastorals and elegies; throughout, the poems demonstrate O’Brien’s astonishing flair for the dramatic line, where he has inherited the mantle of W. H. Auden. Also included are selections from both O’Brien’s dramatic writing and his acclaimed version of the Inferno.
Jacques Ellul, a former member of a Law Faculty at the University of Bordeaux, was recognized as a brilliant and penetrating commentator on the relationship between theology and sociology. In the Meaning of the City he presents what he finds in the Bible--a sophisticated, coherent theology of the city fully applicable to today's urbanized society. Ellul believes that the city symbolizes the supreme work of man--and, as such, represents man's ultimate rejection of God. Therefore it is the city, where lies man's rebellious heart, that must be reformed. The author stresses the fact that the Bible does not find man's fulfillment in a return to an idyllic Eden, but points rather to a life of communion with the Savior in the city transfigured. The Meaning of the City, says John Wilkinson in his introductory essay to the book, is the theological counterpoint to Ellul's Technological Society, a work that analyzed the phenomenon of the autonomous and totally manipulative post-industrial world. Ellul takes issue with those who idealistically plan new urban environments for man, as though man alone can negate the inherent diabolism of the city. For Ellul, the history of the city from the times of Cain and Nimrod through to Babylon and Jerusalem reveals a tendency to destroy the human being for the sake of human works. Nevertheless, continuing the theme of the tension between two realities that characterizes all his works, Ellul sees God as electing the city as itself an instrument of grace for the believer. William Stringfellow describes The Meaning of the City as a book of startling significance, which should rank beside Reinhold Niebuhr's Moral Man and Immoral Society as a work of truly momentous potential. Douglass D. McFerran adds that it is a book worth serious consideration by anyone interested in the relationship between religious commitment and secular involvement. And John Wilkinson sums it up: There are very few convincingly religious analyses of the sociological phenomena of the present day. . . . Ellul's biblically based sociology is today furnishing the matter for a large and growing group of social protestants, particularly in the United States.
K. J. Parker's new novel is the remarkable tale of the siege of a walled city, and the even more remarkable man who had to defend it. A siege is approaching, and the city has little time to prepare. The people have no food and no weapons, and the enemy has sworn to slaughter them all. To save the city will take a miracle, but what it has is Orhan. A colonel of engineers, Orhan has far more experience with bridge-building than battles, is a cheat and a liar, and has a serious problem with authority. He is, in other words, perfect for the job. Sixteen Ways To Defend a Walled City is the story of Orhan, son of Siyyah Doctus Felix Praeclarissimus, and his history of the Great Siege, written down so that the deeds and sufferings of great men may never be forgotten.