The emerging generation is opting out of the church in large numbers. They're embarrassed at how the church is portrayed and dismayed at their options for participation. What's the point of the church anyway? With practical, actionable steps, Tim Soerens offers a vision of the church grounded in a grassroots movement of ordinary people living out the church in their everyday lives.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the bestselling, National Book Award–winning author of Three Junes comes a tender, riveting book of two sisters and their complicated relationship. Louisa Jardine is the older one, the conscientious student, precise and careful: the one who yearns for a good marriage, an artistic career, a family. Clem, the archetypal youngest, is the rebel: committed to her work saving animals, but not to the men who fall for her. In this vivid, heartrending story of what we can and cannot do for those we love, the sisters grow closer as they move further apart. All told with sensual detail and deft characterization, I See You Everywhere is a candid story of life and death, companionship and sorrow, and the nature of sisterhood itself.
A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2020 Winner of the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence “A comically dark coming-of-age story about growing up on the South Side of Chicago, but it’s also social commentary at its finest, woven seamlessly into the work . . . Bump’s meditation on belonging and not belonging, where or with whom, how love is a way home no matter where you are, is handled so beautifully that you don’t know he’s hypnotized you until he’s done.” —Tommy Orange, The New York Times Book Review In this alternately witty and heartbreaking debut novel, Gabriel Bump gives us an unforgettable protagonist, Claude McKay Love. Claude isn’t dangerous or brilliant—he’s an average kid coping with abandonment, violence, riots, failed love, and societal pressures as he steers his way past the signposts of youth: childhood friendships, basketball tryouts, first love, first heartbreak, picking a college, moving away from home. Claude just wants a place where he can fit. As a young black man born on the South Side of Chicago, he is raised by his civil rights–era grandmother, who tries to shape him into a principled actor for change; yet when riots consume his neighborhood, he hesitates to take sides, unwilling to let race define his life. He decides to escape Chicago for another place, to go to college, to find a new identity, to leave the pressure cooker of his hometown behind. But as he discovers, he cannot; there is no safe haven for a young black man in this time and place called America. Percolating with fierceness and originality, attuned to the ironies inherent in our twenty-first-century landscape, Everywhere You Don’t Belong marks the arrival of a brilliant young talent.
Emily Dickinson is an unlikely patron saint for all who seek or wrestle with God. Looking closely at twenty-five poems, this intimate portrait and personal reflection shows how Dickinson can guide us, through belief and doubt alike, toward God. Many have thought that Dickinson, one of America's greatest poets, rejected religion. Yet the poems that unfold her soul can inspire ours, offering fresh answers to ultimate questions about life and death, faith and doubt, Jesus and God. In chapters on belief, prayer, mortality, immortality, and beauty, Kristin LeMay traces the dimensions of Dickinson's spiritual life and tells the story of her own search for God between the lines of the poems that Dickinson called "hymns." Praise for I Told My Soul to Sing “Exuberant and captivating. A shimmering jewel of a book.” –Dinty W. Moore “Through her deep engagement with Dickinson’s poems—by turn prayers, partners, revelations, songs—LeMay has written a book that is, in Dickinson’s words, ‘the Heart’s portrait – every Page a Pulse,’ every page a kind of faith.” – Sarah Sentilles, author of Breaking Up with God: A Love Story “Part spiritual autobiography, part homage to Dickinson’s inexhaustible poetic genius, and part exuberant close readings of the astonishing poems in which she wrestles with questions of faith and belief, I Told My Soul to Sing is a valuable study of the poet’s heterodox imagination. LeMay does not shackle Dickinson to a procrustean bed of doctrine and piety, dilute the poet’s astringent ironies, or flatten the provocative ambiguities. She has a gift for choosing unfamiliar poems from the canon and for judiciously quoting and interpreting them. A smart, seriously playful, winning, and readable commentary on a quintessentially elusive, thorny, and linguistically daring American poet.” – Herbert Leibowitz, editor, Parnassus: Poetry in Review “LeMay’s implied reader is someone attracted to religious faith, but even an atheist can enjoy this book’s provocative illuminations of spiritual longing, fear, and anger, in which questions cut deeper than answers.” – Mark Halliday, poet, author of Keep This Forever and Stevens and the Interpersonal “A brilliant analysis of the bond between life and poetry, written with sensitivity and talent.” – François Bovon, Frothingham Professor of the History of Religion Emeritus, Harvard Divinity School
Ever wonder about the meaning of life? Why we're here? What the Universe is all about? The force that expressed itself through Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, Mohammed, Edgar Cayce and other great avatars who served as channels for what is commonly referred to as God communicates again today as the world begins to enter a period of Spiritual Ascension with a new consciousness and awareness. This force, which refers to itself as Cosmic Awareness, has dictated this book as a set of 144 carefully structured lessons that took over 10 years to create. They are designed to lead you, step by step, from where you are to where you want to be. This amazing information begins with Cosmic Awareness explaining what It is, how the Universe was created, and leads you through birth, childhood, adulthood, magic, sex, death and far beyond into other dimensions - explaining all of the mysterious "Secrets of the Universe" that everyone is looking for the absolute answer of "Who, In Fact, You Really Are."
A former Rookie contributor and creator of the popular blog Effing Dykes investigates the disappearance of America’s lesbian bars by visiting the last few in existence. Lesbian bars have always been treasured safe spaces for their customers, providing not only a good time but a shelter from societal alienation and outright persecution. In 1987, there were 206 of them in America. Today, only a couple dozen remain. How and why did this happen? What has been lost—or possibly gained—by such a decline? What transpires when marginalized communities become more accepted and mainstream? In Moby Dyke, Krista Burton attempts to answer these questions firsthand, venturing on an epic cross-country pilgrimage to the last few remaining dyke bars. Her pilgrimage includes taking in her first drag show since the onset of the pandemic at The Back Door in Bloomington, Indiana; competing in dildo races at Houston’s Pearl Bar; and, despite her deep-seated hatred of karaoke, joining a group serenade at Nashville’s Lipstick Lounge and enjoying the dreaded pastime for the first time in her life. While Burton sets out on the excursion to assess the current state of lesbian bars, she also winds up examining her own personal journey, from coming out to her Mormon parents to recently marrying her husband, a trans man whose presence on the trip underscores the important conversation about who precisely is welcome in certain queer spaces—and how they and their occupants continue to evolve. Moby Dyke is an insightful and hilarious travelogue that celebrates the kind of community that can only be found in windowless rooms soundtracked by Britney Spears-heavy playlists and illuminated by overhead holiday lights no matter the time of year.
Time to get fit! Many have been there. You tell yourself you are going to get fit this time. Your intentions are good. This time you are going to get into better shape, get to your goal weight and a have a healthier body. You start out strong, and days to weeks lateryou are back to our old habits. Sound familiar? Whether you have had a hard time making exercise a permanent part of your life, have never begun an exercise program, or currently work with a personal trainer and are having a hard time exercising on your own, ForeverFitU is for you. This book is written to show you how to make fitness a lifestyle that will last you a lifetime. It will teach you the secrets shared by ForeverFit people who have conquered their old fitness habits. Their secrets will help you make ForeverFit habits that have endured the test of time. Mother Teresa stated, "We cannot do great things in this world. We can only do little things with great love." Make ForeverFitU that little thing for you.
Cooperatives the world over are successfully developing alternative models of decision-making, employment and operation without the existence of managers, executives and hierarchies. Through case studies spanning the US, Latin America and Europe, including valuable new work on the previously neglected cooperative movement in Cuba, Peter Ranis explores how cooperatives have evolved in response to the economic crisis. Going further yet, Ranis makes the novel argument that the constitutionally enshrined principle of 'eminent domain' can in fact be harnessed to create and defend worker cooperatives. Combining the work of key radical theorists, including Marx, Gramsci and Luxemburg, with that of contemporary political economists, such as Block, Piketty and Stiglitz, Cooperatives Confront Capitalism provides what is perhaps the most far-reaching analysis yet of the ideas, achievements and wider historical context of the cooperative movement.
