Now, he shares his explosive story-in his own words... In this deeply personal and controversial memoir, Father Albert Cutié tells about the devastating struggle between upholding his sacred promises as a priest and falling in love. Already conflicted with growing ideological differences with the Church, Cutié was forced to abruptly change his life the day that he was photographed on the beach, embracing the woman he would later call his wife.Once a poster boy of the Roman Catholic Church-loved and admired by millions-Cutié found that he was not happy and able to live as a celibate priest, especially having to defend the number of positions he was no longer in agreement with. For years he kept his relationship a secret, while he soul searched and prayed for answers. The love that he deemed a blessing was bringing him closer to God, but further from the Church. In Dilemma, Cutié tells about breaking that promise, reigniting the very heated debate over mandatory celibacy for Catholic priests, beginning a new way of life and discovering a new way of serving God.

     For most Pagans of any denomination, Yule is a high holy season. The ancient festival was a 12 daylong celebration beginning on the eve of the Winter Solstice (known to most Pagans as Yule) and ending at the new calendar year. This celebration was so important in ancient times that it was converted by the Christians to the 12 Days of Christmas. Many Pagans, especially those devoted to the Norse and Anglo Saxon Gods and Goddesses try to find some way to keep these 12 days, yet many are unsure exactly how to celebrate. Social media blows up in the weeks leading up to the Solstice with questions like: How do you celebrate? What do you do exactly? What activities, what rituals, what prayers and celebrations? For the past several years I have been working on this guide in an attempt to answer some of those questions for my own family and for others. This guide is a result of creating family traditions for this special and most sacred (not to mention FUN!) time of year. I put it all together into one little, handy and easy to follow guide, so that you and your family can celebrate the 12 Days of Yule together, with a little inspiration from what our family has been doing. Please enjoy!

    

    He would go on to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and he also received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and a United Nations Medal of Peace. Marley’s compilation album Legend is one of the bestselling recordings of all time, going platinum ten times in the United States and selling twenty million copies worldwide.Bob Marley’s wisdom came not only through his songs but also from his poetic, spoken words. The short selections in this book, which are compiled from interviews he gave over the years, will give readers a true sense of who Bob Marley really was and are bound to inspire them with his timeless message of faith, unity, and love.“It’s Bob, as he was, as he is, as he will always be, talking personally to you.”—Gerald Hausman,from the editor’s note“My father spoke plain and simple words, the least tricky of all. These came from Proverbs in the Bible and also the folk sayings of the people of Jamaica. . . . He was wise beyond education, beyond information.”—Cedella Marley,from the introduction

    After delivering the final proofs of his landmark study, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling to Knopf in July 2005, Bushman crisscrossed the country from coast to coast, delivering numerous addresses on Joseph Smith at scholarly conferences, academic symposia, and firesides. This startlingly candid memoir concludes eleven months later with an article written for Common-Place in August 2006. Bushman confesses to hope and humility, an unexpected numbness when he expected moments of triumph, and genuine apprehension as he awaits reviews. He frets at the polarization that dismissed the book as either too hard on Joseph Smith or too easy. He yields to a very human compulsion to check sales figures on amazon.com, but partway through the process stepped back with the recognition, "The book seems to be cutting its own path now, just as [I] hoped." For readers coming to grips with the ongoing puzzle of the Prophet and the troublesome dimensions of their own faith, Richard Bushman, a temple sealer and stake patriarch but also a prize-winning scholar, openly but not insistently presents himself as a believer. "I believe enough to take Joseph Smith seriously," he says. He draws comfort both from what he calls his "mantra" ("Today I will be a follower of Jesus Christ") and also from ongoing engagement with the intellectual challenges of explaining Joseph Smith.

    Written in the mystical tradition of the Sufi poets, this book recounts the odyssey of the human soul as it travels from the world of creation to the sphere of the absolute, its ultimate goal being reunion with God.

    Most women (if they're honest) see the selfishness of Sapphira or the deception of Delilah. They catch of glimpse of Jezebel's take-charge pride or Eve's disastrous disobedience. Like Bathsheba, Herodias, and the rest, today's modern woman is surrounded by temptations, exhausted by the demands of daily living, and burdened by her own desires. So what's a good girl to do? Learn from their lives, says beloved humor writer Liz Curtis Higgs, and by God's grace, choose a better path. In Bad Girls of the Bible, Higgs offers a unique and clear-sighted approach to understanding those other women in Scripture, combining a contemporary retelling of their stories with a solid, verse-by-verse study of their mistakes and what lessons women today can learn from them. Whether they were Bad to the Bone, Bad for a Season, but Not Forever or only Bad for a Moment, these infamous sisters show women how not to handle the challenges of life. With her trademark humor and encouragement, Liz Curtis Higgs teaches us how to avoid their tragic mistakes and joyfully embrace grace.

    Anne Gehman gave her first spirit readings to her teddy bears at age five. Raised in the Mennonite tradition, she left home at age 14 to finish her schooling. A life-changing near-death experience led Anne to develop her natural gifts, including an uncanny ability to predict future events. She has gained international attention for her help in solving crimes, locating oil and missing persons, healing illnesses, and connecting family members with their loved ones in spirit. She has worked with top government agencies and officials, police departments, judges, and corporate CEOs. While remarkable for her spiritual gifts and experiences, Anne’s life is all the more fascinating due to an unusual twist: she is married to Wayne Knoll, Ph.D., a former Jesuit priest. A brilliant student devoted to his faith, Wayne also left home at 14 to join a Roman Catholic seminary. Even while pursuing his life’s dream as a professor of literature at Georgetown University, Wayne felt an emptiness that only a woman could fill. After more than a decade of religious training, he made the wrenching decision to leave the priesthood, not knowing if he would find the love he sought. The Priest and the Medium shares the remarkable story of two soul mates on parallel paths with divergent beliefs, yet united in their love for God and each other.

    Since then, they have become embroiled in allegations of state capture, of dishing out cabinet posts to officials who would do their bidding, and of benefiting from lucrative state contracts and dubious loans. The Republic of Gupta investigates what the Gupta brothers were up to during Thabo Mbeki’s presidency and how they got into the inner circle of President Jacob Zuma. It shines new light on their controversial ventures in computers, cricket, newspapers and TV news, and coal and uranium mining. And it explores their exposure by public protector Thuli Madonsela, their conflict with finance minister Pravin Gordhan, and the real reasons behind the cabinet reshuffle of March 2017.Pieter-Louis Myburgh delves deeper than ever before into the Guptas’ business dealings and their links to prominent South African politicians, and explains how one family managed to transform an entire country into the Republic of Gupta.

    In Pope John XXIII, he combines his remarkable insight and knowledge to portray this legendary and beloved pontiff. Pope John XXIII opens with a concise but sweeping history of the Catholic Church and the papacy, culminating in the brief but unforgettable reign of Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli as Pope John XXIII, in the mid-twentieth century. At seventy-six years of age, neither an intellectual nor a highly trained theologian, he was at first regarded as a transitional pope. During his reign, however, he awed the world with the seminal and unprecedented change he brought about in his concern for the fundamental plight of humankind. In rich, impassioned prose, Cahill follows Roncalli's life from his peasant roots to his landmark Second Vatican Council, with its emphasis on worldwide social justice, which marked the beginning of a true shift in the Catholic Church and its relationship to the modern world. In a biography that will captivate Catholics and non-Catholics alike, Cahill's signature blend of interpretive insight and scholarship mirrors Pope John's own intuition, spontaneity, and all-embracing vision.

    Mecca is Islam's most sacred city and strictly off limits to non-Muslims. On a journey perilous enough for any American reporter, Nomani is determined to take along her infant son, Shibli -- living proof that she, an unmarried Muslim woman, is guilty of zina, or "illegal sex." If she is found out, the puritanical Islamic law of the Wahabbis in Saudi Arabia may mete out terrifying punishment. But Nomani discovers she is not alone. She is following in the four-thousand-year-old footsteps of another single mother, Hajar (known in the West as Hagar), the original pilgrim to Mecca and mother of the Islamic nation.Each day of her hajj evokes for Nomani the history of a different Muslim matriarch: Eve, from whom she learns about sin and redemption; Hajar, the single mother abandoned in the desert who teaches her about courage; Khadijah, the first benefactor of Islam and trailblazer for a Muslim woman's right to self-determination; and Aisha, the favorite wife of the Prophet Muhammad and Islam's first female theologian. Inspired by these heroic Muslim women, Nomani returns to America to confront the sexism and intolerance in her local mosque and to fight for the rights of modern Muslim women who are tired of standing alone against the repressive rules and regulations imposed by reactionary fundamentalists.Nomani shows how many of the freedoms enjoyed centuries ago have been erased by the conservative brand of Islam practiced today, giving the West a false image of Muslim women as veiled and isolated from the world. Standing Alone in Mecca is a personal narrative, relating the modern-day lives of the author and other Muslim women to the lives of those who came before, bringing the changing face of women in Islam into focus through the unique lens of the hajj. Interweaving reportage, political analysis, cultural history, and spiritual travelogue, this is a modern woman's jihad, offering for Westerners a never-before-seen look inside the heart of Islam and the emerging role of Muslim women.

    

    In his lifetime he established a new religion, Islam; a new state, the first united Arabia; and a new literary language, the classical Arabic of the Qur'an, for the Qur'an is believed to be the word of God revealed to Muhammad by the angel Gabriel. A generation after his death he would be acknowledged as the founder of a world empire and a new civilisation. Any one of these achievements would have been more than enough to permanently establish his genius. To our early twenty-first century minds, what is all the more astonishing is that he also managed to stay true to himself and retained to his last days the humility, courtesy and humanity that he had learned as an orphan shepherd boy in central Arabia. Barnaby Rogerson's scintillating biography not only looks directly at the life of the Prophet Muhammad, but beautifully evokes for western readers the Arabian world into which he was born in 570 AD.

    George Harrison was a working class mystic. Born in Liverpool as the son of a bus conductor and a shop assistant, for the first six years of his life he lived in a house with no indoor bathroom. This book gives an honest, in-depth view of his personal journey from his blue-collar childhood to his role as a world-famous spiritual icon.Author Gary Tillery’s approach is warmly human, free of the fawning but insolent tone of most rock biographers. He frankly discusses the role of drugs in leading Harrison to mystical insight but emphasizes that he soon renounced psychedelics as a means to the spiritual path. It was with conscious commitment that Harrison journeyed to India, studied sitar with Ravi Shankar, practiced yoga, learned meditation from the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and became a devotee of Hinduism. George worked hard to subdue his own ego and to understand the truth beyond appearances. He preferred to keep a low profile, but his empathy for suffering people led him to spearhead the first rock-and-roll super event for charity. And despite his wealth and fame, he was always delighted to slip on overalls and join in manual labor on his grounds. At ease with holy men discussing the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita, he was ever the bloke from Liverpool whose father drove a bus, whose brothers were tradesmen, and who had worked himself as an apprentice electrician until the day destiny called.Tillery’s engaging narrative depicts Harrison as a sincere seeker who acted out of genuine care for humanity and used his celebrity to be of service in the world. Fans of all generations will treasure this book for the inspiring portrayal it gives of their beloved “quiet” Beatle.

    Using some of the great works of baseball fiction as well as the actual game's fantastic moments, its legendary characters, and its routine rituals—from the long-sought triumph of the 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers, to the heroic achievements of players like the saintly Christy Mathewson and the sinful Ty Cobb, to the loving intimacy of a game of catch between a father and son—Sexton teachers that through the game we can touch the spiritual dimension of life.Baseball as a Road to God is about the elements of our lives that lie beyond what can be captured in words alone—ineffable truths that we know by experience rather than by logic or analysis. Applying to the secular activity of baseball a form of inquiry usually reserved for the study of religion, Sexton reveals a surprising amount of common ground between the game and what we all recognize as religion: sacred places and time, faith and doubt, blessings and curses, and more. In thought-provoking, beautifully rendered prose, this book elegantly demonstrates that baseball is more than a game, or even a national pastime: It can be a road to a deeper and more meaningful life.