Book picks similar to
Idiot Psalms: New Poems by Scott Cairns


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Looking Up When Life Is Looking Down


Beth Moore - 2008
    In Looking Up When Life is Looking Down, Beth Moore shares a prosaic message of hope and deliverance taken from Psalm 40, helping readers discover they indeed are not alone and that God's gracious provision of love and faithfulness is at work in their circumstances.This lovely full-color gift book is based on Beth Moore's best selling book, Get Out of That Pit.

Petit à Petit


Ambica Uppal - 2020
    It assures you that tomorrow will be a better day and encourages you to realise your potential and achieve your aspirations. Petit à Petit is centred on themes like self-love, self-confidence and taking life into your own hands.No matter how far-away and impossible your dreams seem, don't be afraid to reach for them.

Making Jesus Lord: The Dynamic Power of Laying Down Your Rights


Loren Cunningham - 1989
    Decades later, Loren's vision has grown into an interdenominational movement of Christians from around the world who are dedicated to presenting the gospel to this generation. Loren speaks and teaches internationally, and his missionary travels have taken him to every nation on earth. We live in a world where the exaltation of individual rights has become an obsession. Because personal rights do hold great value, we can perform no greater act of faith and worship than to consciously lay down these rights at the feet of the One who has gone before us! Loren Cunningham details prove steps to a life of freedom, joy, and intimate fellowship with God.

Doing the Truth in Love: Conversations about God, Relationships and Service


Michael J. Himes - 1995
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Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life


Richard Rohr - 2004
    Richard Rohr seeks to help readers understand the tasks of the two halves of life and to show them that those who have fallen, failed, or gone down are the only ones who understand up. Most of us tend to think of the second half of life as largely about getting old, dealing with health issues, and letting go of life, but the whole thesis of this book is exactly the opposite. What looks like falling down can largely be experienced as falling upward. In fact, it is not a loss but somehow actually a gain, as we have all seen with elders who have come to their fullness.Explains why the second half of life can and should be full of spiritual richness Offers a new view of how spiritual growth happens?loss is gain Richard. Rohr is a regular contributing writer for Sojourners and Tikkun magazines This important book explores the counterintuitive message that we grow spiritually much more by doing wrong than by doing right.

Reduced to Joy


Mark Nepo - 2013
    Nepo has a singular way of distilling great truths down to their essence. Moreover, during his cancer journey, Nepo relied on the power of expression and the writing process to keep him tethered to life. In Reduced to Joy, Mark Nepo explores the places where pain and joy are stitched to resilience, uncovering them with deep wisdom, poetic passages and personal revelations. Nepo reminds us all of the secret and sacred places within, forgotten in the noise and chatter of our busy distracted 21st Century lives. Reduced to Joy is a lesson in stillness, in standing in the mystery and, above all, in the work of love.

Moving in His Majesty and Power


Neal A. Maxwell - 2004
    By that time he had little energy, but in the last weeks of his life, he was focused intently on two almost-consuming priorities: spending time with his family, including giving blessings to grandchildren who had not yet received one, and finishing his last manuscript. As these priorities exemplify, Neal A. Maxwell was a teacher. He loved the word of the Lord. He believed with the psalmist that the word of the Lord "is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path" (Psalm 119:105). He observed, "When one sees life and people through the lens of His gospel, then one can see forever" ( Ensign,  May 1974, 112). That perspective guided his life's work. Dad often said the gospel was inexhaustible, and his actions underscored that belief. The gospel was for him an endless source of truth and joy; he found the study of it invigorating. He taught it in his daily walk and talk and through his sermons and books. His desire to capture in words the insights and connections his perceptive mind noted stayed with him throughout his mortal life. At my father's funeral, President Gordon B. Hinckley noted: "I know of no other who spoke in such a distinctive and interesting way. When he opened his mouth we all listened. We came alive with expectation of something unusual, and we were never disappointed. . . . Each talk was a masterpiece, each book a work of art, worthy of repeated reading. I think we shall not see one like him again" ( Church News,  31 July 2004, 3). Moving in His Majesty and Power  is the last installment in Elder Maxwell's printed legacy. It includes, in revised form, three talks he gave in the last two years of his life and which he felt were worthy of publication. It also includes a section of succinct, penetrating gospel insights on a wide variety of topics, similar in format to that of his previous work, W hom the Lord Loveth. I hope you will enjoy this book. More importantly, though, I hope my father's objective in writing it will be achieved, namely, to help us resolve to become more committed disciples and to deepen our gratitude for the inexhaustible gospel he loved so deeply and proclaimed so tirelessly. Cory H. Maxwell

Holy Bible: New Living Translation


Anonymous - 1902
    This edition has a two-column layout with generous margins and font size, providing a comfortable reading experience.

Why We Eat Our Own


Michael Cheshire - 2013
    In his newest release, Why We Eat Our Own, author and pastor Michael Cheshire boldly explores some unsavory questions. Why does the world often do a better job of forgiving their fallen than the Church? When did the Church become cannibalistic? Is the decline in Christianity due to the world or have we just become horrible to each other and the world noted it?

The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins


Gerard Manley Hopkins - 1937
    based on the First ed. of 1918 and enl. to incorporate all known Poems and Fragments. Ed. with additional notes, a Foreword on the Revised Text, and a new biographical and critical introd. by W.H. Gardner and N.H. MacKenzie.

Jesus > Religion: Why He Is So Much Better Than Trying Harder, Doing More, and Being Good Enough


Jefferson Bethke - 2013
    The message blew up on social-media, triggering an avalanche of responses running the gamut from encouraged to enraged.In Jesus > Religion, Bethke unpacks similar contrasts that he drew in the poem—highlighting the difference between teeth gritting and grace, law and love, performance and peace, despair and hope. With refreshing candor he delves into the motivation behind his message, beginning with the unvarnished tale of his own plunge from the pinnacle of a works-based, fake-smile existence that sapped his strength and led him down a path of destructive behavior.Bethke is quick to acknowledge that he’s not a pastor or theologian, but simply a regular, twenty-something who cried out for a life greater than the one for which he had settled. Along his journey, Bethke discovered the real Jesus, who beckoned him beyond the props of false religion.

Becoming Human


Jean Vanier - 1998
    He proposes that by opening ourselves to others, those we perceive as weak, different, or inferior, we can achieve true personal and societal freedom.

Things Are Happening


Joshua Beckman - 1998
    The inaugural winner of the annual American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Award.

Sinners Welcome


Mary Karr - 2006
    Not since Saint Augustine wrote "Give me chastity, Lord -- but not yet!" has anyone brought such smart-assed hilarity to a conversion story.Karr's battle is grounded in common loss (a bitter romance, friends' deaths, a teenage son's leaving home) as well as in elegies for a complicated mother. The poems disarm with the arresting humor familiar to readers of her memoirs, The Liars' Club and Cherry. An illuminating cycle of spiritual poems have roots in Karr's eight-month tutelage in Jesuit prayer practice, and as an afterword, her celebrated essay on faith weaves the tale of how the language of poetry, which relieved her suffering so young, eventually became the language of prayer. Those of us who fret that poetry denies consolation will find clear-eyed joy in this collection.

Constance


Jane Kenyon - 1993
    Kenyon's fourth collection is built around two perfectly orchestrated poem sequences. In the first, the speaker contrasts memories of her baby carriage with other images from her childhood, such as her parents' toiling away at low-paying jobs. She also recalls the present-day life of her aging, increasingly dependent mother. Melancholia, the subject of the second sequence and several poems surrounding it, has been played to death in modern poetry, but still Kenyon offers new insights and gives even the most depressing poems an uplifting lilt in their final lines. In her hands a list of the latest medications becomes fit material for poetry: "The coated ones smell sweet or have / no smell; the powdery ones smell / like the chemistry lab at school / that made me hold my breath." She writes, in addition to illness, of sleep, insomnia and death. She interacts with the insects, birds and flowers in her New Hampshire landscape, relying on their fragility to teach her of her own. Kenyon describes afterlife, or "the Other Side," with the same precise, hard-edged imagery that fills her other poems." from Publisher's Weekly