Poetry in America offers extravagantly formed lyric and narrative poems that function like works of social realism for our times: hard times, wartime, divorce, times of downturn and dissipated resources. Where, in such times, can poetry emerge, the book asks—and answers—again and again. Largely set in rural places and small towns, these poems are politically committed but deeply sensuous, emotionally complex and compassionate. They take up the everyday in meaningful ways, and deliver it with blunt force, yet not without hope [...]

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The Renovaré Spiritual Formation Guides, by Lynda L. Graybeal and Julia L. Roller The Renovaré Spiritual Formation Guides, created by Richard J. Foster and the team that developed The Life With God Bible and the longstanding A Spiritual Formation Workbook, provide tangible lessons that help us become spiritually formed, conformed, and transformed into the image of Jesus Christ. Geared for either individual study or use in small groups, each Renovaré Spiritual Formation Guide explores one facet of our life with [...]

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Celebration of Discipline Since its publication in 1978, Celebration of Discipline has helped millions of seekers discover a richer spiritual life infused with joy, peace, and a deeper understanding of God. Hailed by many as the best modern book ever written on Christian spirituality and described by Christianity Today as one of the ten best books of the twentieth century, Celebration of Discipline explores the classic “Disciplines,” or central spiritual practices, of the Christian faith. Along the way, Richard J. [...]

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In 2011, the University of Nebraska Press published The Dream of a Broken Field, a new collection of essays about writing, faith, family, teaching and retirement.  (The dream of the broken field, by the way, is to bear crops.) At the same time in 2011, on my own, I published another collection of essays, Now it is Snowing Inside A Psalm, a 75-page meditation on the book of Psalms.  “In the past when I’ve been hollowed out by the rigors [...]

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Erin McGraw’s fiction has been hailed as “graceful…gratifyingly substantial” (New York Times Book Review) and “brilliant…[she’s] a writer to watch” (Los Angeles Times).  Wry but poignant, her new collection brims with priceless insights and fresh descriptions.  The Good Life features characters battling daily demons of envy, fear, and disillusionment while somehow maintaining an abiding optimism.  Here are characters trying to weather the confounding  people of the world—the chronically successful, the lucky in love, the athletically gifted—characters clinging to their cynicism [...]

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Harvesting Fog is the most recent book of more than 30 by Luci Shaw. The metaphor behind her book’s title derives from the odd factoid (found in The National Geographic) that very little rain falls in Lima, Peru, and the locals “harvest fog” for water, hanging rags or nets in the persistent clammy mist, then wringing them out the condensed moisture for their daily needs. Shaw likens this gathering to the writing of poems. In the writer’s mind ideas and [...]

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As the subtitle of this book suggests, The Mind and the Machine explores the question of what it means to be human by contrasting the implications of two different philosophies of the human mind. One popular philosophy is that the human mind is completely reducible to a biological brain, and thus humans are simply complex biochemical machines: robots controlled by computers. This secular materialist worldview has been presented and defended by well-known figures including biologist Richard Dawkins, philosophers Daniel Dennett [...]

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Book 4 of the Auralia Thread series The king is missing. His people are trapped as the woods turn deadly. Underground, the boy called Rescue has found an escape. Hopes are failing across The Expanse. The forests, once beautiful, are now haunted and bloodthirsty. House Abascar’s persecuted people risk their lives to journey through those predatory trees. They seek a mythic city – Abascar’s last, best hope for refuge – where they might find the source of Auralia’s colors. They [...]

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“The extreme greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural remedy for suffering, but a supernatural use for it.” –Simone Weil “Like most people I, too, have been blindsided by personal grief now and again over the years. And I have an increasingly keen sense that, wherever I am, someone nearby is suffering now. For that reason, I lately have settled in to mull the matter over, gathering my troubled wits to undertake a [...]

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Too often, our study of the Bible focuses on searching for specific information or some formula that will solve our pressing needs of the moment. But what if we approached the Bible differently, and instead of transforming the text to meet our needs, allowed it to transform us? That’s exactly the idea behind Life with God, Richard J. Foster’s much-anticipated book on the Bible. Foster, bestselling author of Celebration of Discipline and general editor of The RenovarÉ Spiritual Formation Bible, [...]

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