In Mausoleum, Baltimore Detective Max Bently and his partner race to capture a serial killer. Eight people have gone missing from the community of Dundalk, Maryland, and the latest victim is Max Bently's sister. Max has the handsome physique of a professional football player. He also has the sensitivity of a man coming to terms with the death of his infant son, and the more recent death of his father. Separated from his wife, Max struggles to find balance in his life, while dealing with the horrific crimes now engulfing the community where he grew up. For almost a year, young people have been disappearing from Dundalk, but no one has paid much attention until a prominent doctor's daughter goes missing. No bodies have ever been recovered, just bags containing the victim's belongings. Police discover that the killer is using a newly built Mausoleum to torture and kill his victims. From the blue-collar community of Dundalk to the blue-blooded world of northern Baltimore County, the killer is sought. When Max sustains a serious head injury, he ends up in a coma, during which he hears strange voices and awakens to shocking news. The surprise ending will shock everyone!
A poetry collection that celebrates Black culture, creativity, and memory. From Kendrick to Kanye, to a Sunday in Oakland with Frank Ocean's falsetto in the foreground, Mausoleum of Flowers is still life set against the backdrop of demise. Daniel Summerhill's sophomore collection grabs fate by the throat and confronts it. What does it mean to continue living when your friends are dying beside you? This collection melds an exploration of spirituality and rebellion with Black tradition. Summerhill's poems invite the reader near in order to self-excavate and explore tones of loss, love, and light.
Get ready for the adventure of a lifetime! Enter the fantasy world of the Mausoleum and the intrigue found in the passageways within the Labyrinth below. Join Knox Butler as he ventures into the Labyrinth of tunnels to find pieces of an amulet, the only thing that will save his grandmother. Knox, traveling into the past, present, and future is joined by his friend and romantic interest Jade Schmidt. Little does Knox know, this quest is going to get much more complicated and very DANGEROUS! Powerful forces of evil are out to stop him or kill him if necessary. His friend Jade is in mortal danger! They travel together to wondrous places, discover a terrible secret, and a mysterious old woman keeps showing up at the most peculiar times. Who is this stranger? Can Knox rescue Jade and his grandmother from certain death? You will find yourself postulating how the various plot twists will turn out. Can you solve these mysteries? Can Knox stay one step ahead of the terrible evil creatures that are after him? Who can help him in his quest? Is the amazing technology he uses enough to fight evil and keep the ones he loves safe? Join Knox Butler as he unlocks the mysteries of the Mausoleum!
The Constitution may guarantee it. But religious freedom in America is, in fact, impossible. So argues this timely and iconoclastic work by law and religion scholar Winnifred Sullivan. Sullivan uses as the backdrop for the book the trial of Warner vs. Boca Raton, a recent case concerning the laws that protect the free exercise of religion in America. The trial, for which the author served as an expert witness, concerned regulations banning certain memorials from a multiconfessional nondenominational cemetery in Boca Raton, Florida. The book portrays the unsuccessful struggle of Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish families in Boca Raton to preserve the practice of placing such religious artifacts as crosses and stars of David on the graves of the city-owned burial ground. Sullivan demonstrates how, during the course of the proceeding, citizens from all walks of life and religious backgrounds were harassed to define just what their religion is. She argues that their plight points up a shocking truth: religion cannot be coherently defined for the purposes of American law, because everyone has different definitions of what religion is. Indeed, while religious freedom as a political idea was arguably once a force for tolerance, it has now become a force for intolerance, she maintains. A clear-eyed look at the laws created to protect religious freedom, this vigorously argued book offers a new take on a right deemed by many to be necessary for a free democratic society. It will have broad appeal not only for religion scholars, but also for anyone interested in law and the Constitution. Featuring a new preface by the author, The Impossibility of Religious Freedom offers a new take on a right deemed by many to be necessary for a free democratic society.
Sorrow and Solace focuses on the importance of cemeteries in the lives of everyday mourners, and ways in which our bereaved give meaning to and draw value from their commemorative activities. The death of someone dear to us is among the most momentous life event that we experience. In many societies, visiting the grave or memorial is a common behavioural response to bereavement. Memorial sites provide vital connections to our deceased loved ones with whom we wish to maintain ongoing social bonds, and cemeteries are crucial places of deep healing and growth. Millions of visits are made to cemeteries every day, but the extent of this activity and its value to those who mourn - the topics of this volume - have long remained largely unrecognised. Large urban memorial parks are hives of activity for recently bereaved persons, and are among the most visited places in Western communities. Some cemeteries, hosting millions of annual visits, are more popular than many major tourist attractions. Cemetery visitation is a high-participatory, value-laden, expressive activity, and a most significant observable behaviour of the recently bereaved. This work will be invaluable to those seeking a scholarly understanding of bereavement, mourning, and commemoration. Written principally for professionals with a tertiary educational interest in related fields, such as grief educators, nurses, palliative carers, and social workers, it is also an important resource for the further education of other carers and service providers, including psychologists, physicians, counsellors, clergy, funeral directors, cemetery administrators, and monumental masons. The book is also a significant contribution to the field of social anthropology.
Envisaging Death: Visual Culture and Dying enters the expanding field of Death Studies and connects some of its key interpretive frameworks – such as issues of internment practice, trauma, or end of life care – to visual culture, and, more than that, to visual culture’s socio-political, geographic and aesthetic specificities. Where the prevailing picture of death within this field is as a Western experience framed by its denial on one side and its sensationalism on the other, this collection confronts the specifics of death’s marginalisation: its experience as local rather than universal, and the precise relationship between the context and the cultural mediation of death. Who and where you are – which part of the world you live in, whether you are famous or wealthy, subject to “natural” catastrophe, civil unrest or high-tech healthcare – has enormous influence on how your death is marked, imaged and imagined. As such, this book addresses the socio-cultural factors permeating and styling the visual and inevitably material treatment of death and dying in a broad array of personal and national settings. “Advanced” society has been characterised by an increased distancing of death from the everyday, and its distortion or invisibility within the public sphere. The essays collected here return some shape and context, and geo-politics, to the treatment of death and dying within contemporary culture, and specifically within contemporary visual culture which provides an ever more dominating forum for society’s depiction of and dealings with death. Charting important new interdisciplinary terrain, scholars and practitioners from a wide range of fields address an assortment of cultural mediations of real, fictional or fictionalised death. They navigate, in different ways, the fraught, policed, but always relative, distance between the living and the dead which characterises these mediations, a distance which works, inevitably, to reassure and re-secure those supposedly untouched by death and dying. Envisaging Death, whether through discussion of the cemetery landscape, the still or moving image, the therapeutic or educational art practice, addresses how such a distance is reinforced. It also, crucially, explores countless cases of, and increasing possibilities for, the disruption of this distance. With the various crises of current times, be they economic, environmental or regional, such possibilities for this disruption, and the altered dynamics of human connection that they represent, can only gain in significance.
