Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver


Mary Oliver - 2017
    Throughout her celebrated career, Mary Oliver has touched countless readers with her brilliantly crafted verse, expounding on her love for the physical world and the powerful bonds between all living things. Identified as "far and away, this country's best selling poet" by Dwight Garner, she now returns with a stunning and definitive collection of her writing from the last fifty years. Carefully curated, these 200 plus poems feature Oliver's work from her very first book of poetry, No Voyage and Other Poems, published in 1963 at the age of 28, through her most recent collection, Felicity, published in 2015. This timeless volume, arranged by Oliver herself, showcases the beloved poet at her edifying best. Within these pages, she provides us with an extraordinary and invaluable collection of her passionate, perceptive, and much-treasured observations of the natural world.

The Givenness of Things: Essays


Marilynne Robinson - 2015
    As a culture we have become less interested in the exploration of the glorious mind, and more interested in creating and mastering technologies that will yield material well-being. But while cultural pessimism is always fashionable, there is still much to give us hope. In The Givenness of Things, the incomparable Marilynne Robinson delivers an impassioned critique of our contemporary society while arguing that reverence must be given to who we are and what we are: creatures of singular interest and value, despite our errors and depredations.Robinson has plumbed the depths of the human spirit in her novels, including the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning Lila and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead, and in her new essay collection she trains her incisive mind on our modern predicament and the mysteries of faith. These seventeen essays examine the ideas that have inspired and provoked one of our finest writers throughout her life. Whether she is investigating how the work of the great thinkers of the past, Calvin, Locke, Bonhoeffer--and Shakespeare--can infuse our lives, or calling attention to the rise of the self-declared elite in American religious and political life, Robinson's peerless prose and boundless humanity are on display. Exquisite and bold, The Givenness of Things is a necessary call for us to find wisdom and guidance in our cultural heritage, and to offer grace to one another.Humanism --Reformation --Grace --Servanthood --Givenness --Awakening --Decline --Fear --Proofs --Memory --Value --Metaphysics --Theology --Experience --Adam --Limitation --Realism

Bhagavad Gita for Dummies


Vishnuvarthanan Moorthy - 2013
    The Human (Arjuna) had lot of Questions to Supreme God (Krishna) and he got answers from God for all those. Most of the time to understand those complex words, people giving explanations and interpretation with someone’s life. We are also very comfortable to listen them and read them, but the moment we are back to our normal life, we forget everything. This book is written for you! Considering a common man life like yours! And how to live our life as per the Supreme God’s wordings! What it offers to you:>> All the 18 Chapters of Gita in Plain English>> Interpretations with our Common life examples>> You have funny and logical questions to god; it’s there inside this book>> Guides you to self evaluate, are you ready for it?>> How far you are from your God? Check hereRecommended:>> For the one, who wants to practice and experience Bhagavad Gita in Life>> For the one, who wants to understand Gita in its real essence>> For the one, who wants to understand Hinduism in true meaningYou too have these Views, then Read this Book:>> There can’t be multiple gods in one world>> If my birth is given by god, then why am i not part of God>> Science is a language to explain his creations and not a mode to reach>> Belief and honesty can take me to my Supreme Power>>Why don’t new Living beings born as per Darwin>>How to see others grow in life>>The Richest and Poorest all have Equanimity with happiness and sadnessAnd So on.•Order Bhagavad Gita here for practicing and experiencing it in your life

Pew


Catherine Lacey - 2020
    The person is genderless, racially ambiguous, and refuses to speak. One family takes the strange visitor in and nicknames them Pew.As the town spends the week preparing for a mysterious Forgiveness Festival, Pew is shuttled from one household to the next. The earnest and seemingly well-meaning townspeople see conflicting identities in Pew, and many confess their fears and secrets to them in one-sided conversations. Pew listens and observes while experiencing brief flashes of past lives or clues about their origins. As days pass, the void around Pew’s presence begins to unnerve the community, whose generosity erodes into menace and suspicion. Yet by the time Pew’s story reaches a shattering and unsettling climax at the Forgiveness Festival, the secret of their true nature—as a devil or an angel or something else entirely—is dwarfed by even larger truths.Pew, Catherine Lacey’s third novel, is a foreboding, provocative, and amorphous fable about the world today: its contradictions, its flimsy morality, and the limits of judging others based on their appearance. With precision and restraint, one of our most beloved and boundary-pushing writers holds up a mirror to her characters’ true selves, revealing something about forgiveness, perception, and the faulty tools society uses to categorize human complexity.

Joseph Smith as Scientist


John A. Widtsoe - 1908
    The struggle for reconciliation between the contending forces is not an easy one. It cuts deep into the soul and usually leaves scars that ache while life endures. There are thousands of young people in the Church to-day, and hundreds of thousands throughout the world, who are struggling to set themselves right with the God above and the world about them. It is for these young people, primarily, that the following chapters have been written...

The 19th Wife


David Ebershoff - 2008
    It is 1875, and Ann Eliza Young has recently separated from her powerful husband, Brigham Young, prophet and leader of the Mormon Church. Expelled and an outcast, Ann Eliza embarks on a crusade to end polygamy in the United States. A rich account of a family’s polygamous history is revealed, including how a young woman became a plural wife.Soon after Ann Eliza’s story begins, a second exquisite narrative unfolds–a tale of murder involving a polygamist family in present-day Utah. Jordan Scott, a young man who was thrown out of his fundamentalist sect years earlier, must reenter the world that cast him aside in order to discover the truth behind his father’s death.And as Ann Eliza’s narrative intertwines with that of Jordan’s search, readers are pulled deeper into the mysteries of love and faith.

The Instructions


Adam Levin - 2010
    Expelled from three Jewish day-schools for acts of violence and messianic tendencies, Gurion ends up in the Cage, a special lockdown program for the most hopeless cases of Aptakisic Junior High. Separated from his scholarly followers, Gurion becomes a leader of a very different sort, with righteous aims building to a revolution of troubling intensity.The Instructions is an absolutely singular work of fiction by an important new talent. Combining the crackling voice of Philip Roth with the encyclopedic mind of David Foster Wallace, Adam Levin has shaped a world driven equally by moral fervor and slapstick comedy—a novel that is muscular and exuberant, troubling and empathetic, monumental, breakneck, romantic, and unforgettable.

Fire Sermon


Jamie Quatro - 2018
    What begins as a platonic intellectual and spiritual exchange between writer Maggie and poet James, gradually transforms into an emotional and erotically charged bond that challenges Maggie's sense of loyalty and morality, drawing her deeper into the darkness of desire.

A Prayer Journal


Flannery O'Connor - 2013
    "There is a whole sensible world around me that I should be able to turn to Your praise." Written between 1946 and 1947 while O'Connor was a student far from home at the University of Iowa, A Prayer Journal is a rare portal into the interior life of the great writer. Not only does it map O'Connor's singular relationship with the divine, but it shows how entwined her literary desire was with her yearning for God. "I must write down that I am to be an artist. Not in the sense of aesthetic frippery but in the sense of aesthetic craftsmanship; otherwise I will feel my loneliness continually . . . I do not want to be lonely all my life but people only make us lonelier by reminding us of God. Dear God please help me to be an artist, please let it lead to You."O'Connor could not be more plain about her literary ambition: "Please help me dear God to be a good writer and to get something else accepted," she writes. Yet she struggles with any trace of self-regard: "Don't let me ever think, dear God, that I was anything but the instrument for Your story."As W. A. Sessions, who knew O'Connor, writes in his introduction, it was no coincidence that she began writing the stories that would become her first novel, Wise Blood, during the years when she wrote these singularly imaginative Christian meditations. Including a facsimile of the entire journal in O'Connor's own hand, A Prayer Journal is the record of a brilliant young woman's coming-of-age, a cry from the heart for love, grace, and art.

Welcome to Islam: A Step-by-Step Guide for New Muslims


Mustafa Umar - 2012
    'Welcome to Islam' is a step-by-step guide to help people who have just accepted Islam. It teaches them the absolute basics of Islam that they should learn within their first month of being a Muslim. This work is not another introductory book on Islam but rather a step-by-step instruction manual that allows you to start practicing what you learn immediately. It also contains valuable advice on some common challenges that new Muslims often face.

Craddock Stories


Fred B. Craddock - 2001
    This collection offers for the first time hundreds of Craddock stories told in his own words and a glimpse of his life.

Bible Prophecy & Trump: Daniel Chapter 8 A Goat Stubborn King of the West will Attack Iran (Persia) making His Nation "Very Great" in End Times Then the ... Occurs Over 150 End Time Prophecies


James Warden - 2017
    One could not help but take notice at his meteoric ascendency to the presidency after publicly breaking every norm and social mores that polite society holds dear. The name “Donald” means world ruler, and no he is not the antichrist, but he is a man of destiny. Open a King James Bible and read Daniel chapter 8 with a dictionary and you cannot help but see that he is the prophesied king of the west who “at the time of the end” will fulfill the prophecy in making his nation “very great.” (Daniel 8:9) Televangelists are failing to inform their audiences of this prophecy that once served to predict the rise of Alexander the Great, as a mighty western Grecian king, who would conquer the Mideast; that no one could withstand. He put Europe on the map as a force to be reckoned with. The prophecy states in itself that it will again serve “at the time of the end” to identify a king of the west with the disposition of a “he goat” that no nation will be able to withstand as he makes his nation “very great” prior to the rise of four other nations out of whom the antichrist will rise “in the latter times,” whom Daniel calls “the little horn.” (Daniel 8:9). Daniel was famous for interpreting “the handwriting on the wall" in the kingdom of Babylon called Iraq today. This is the same Daniel of the lion’s den who wrote of a prophetic vision he had in front of an Iraqi river that was designated for an “appointed time” - “the time of the end.” His dual purposed vision points out that in the end times a “strong” leader of the west, whom Daniel identified as “king” with the character of a Billy goat will be known for his stubborn personality. The prophet wrote that this king of the west calling him in parable a he goat who will be moved with “choler.” Webster’s defines choler as “a ready disposition to irritation. 2) Irascible marked by a hot temper and easily provoked to anger.” Oxford dictionary defines “being moved with choler” as “a peevish temperament easily provoked to anger.” Daniel forecast that “at the time of the end” this king of the west will “be moved with choler” with his ire stirred against Persia, called Iran since 1936 (Daniel 8:5). The first portion of Daniel eight is in parable form describing the western leader as launching an air attack as a “he goat” whose “feet touched not the ground” as it tackled “the ram having two horns.” The parable is reveals later in the chapter describing the “two horns” as the kings of Media and Persia/Iran. Daniel prophesied that “at the time of the end” a king of the west will trample the leaders of Iraq and Iran into the dust. On September 11, 2001, a king of the west was caught flat-footed when he was reading a children’s book “My Pet Goat” to school kids in Florida, when his nation was air attacked as. Later, this western leader, President George W. Bush under his motto “Stay the course” initiated an unprovoked attack on Iraq in a war named “Iraqi Freedom” leading to its dictator (king according to Daniel) Saddam Hussein being toppled in death in 2003. This was the first stage of Daniel’s prophecy. Presently, in 2017, this war still endures, because Daniel predicted that the West’s attack near the territory of Media conquered by Alexander must also topple Persia’s\Iran’s leader. However, when this he goat king from the west defeats Iran\Persia, Daniel writes that his nation will become “very great.

The Archivist


Martha Cooley - 1998
    S. Eliot's letters lies at the heart of this emotionally charged novel—a story of marriage and madness, of faith and desire, of jazz-age New York and Europe in the shadow of the Holocaust.

Indignation


Philip Roth - 2008
    A studious, law-abiding, intense youngster from Newark, New Jersey, Marcus Messner, is beginning his sophomore year on the pastoral, conservative campus of Ohio’s Winesburg College. And why is he there and not at the local college in Newark where he originally enrolled? Because his father, the sturdy, hard-working neighborhood butcher, seems to have gone mad -- mad with fear and apprehension of the dangers of adult life, the dangers of the world, the dangers he sees in every corner for his beloved boy.As the long-suffering, desperately harassed mother tells her son, the father’s fear arises from love and pride. Perhaps, but it produces too much anger in Marcus for him to endure living with his parents any longer. He leaves them and, far from Newark, in the midwestern college, has to find his way amid the customs and constrictions of another American world.Indignation, Philip Roth’s twenty-ninth book, is a story of inexperience, foolishness, intellectual resistance, sexual discovery, courage, and error. It is a story told with all the inventive energy and wit Roth has at his command, at once a startling departure from the haunted narratives of old age and experience in his recent books and a powerful addition to his investigations of the impact of American history on the life of the vulnerable individual.

Siddhartha, Demian, and Other Writings


Hermann Hesse - 1992
    An anthology of the writings of the celebrated German novelist and Nobel laureate.