Beginning with the Psalms and adding the distilled wisdom of years of study and writing, Martin Marty offers a meditation marked by insight, strength, and a sure, sober faith. Throughout A Cry of Absence, he pursues the metaphor of the "winter of the heart." Marty bases his concept of the wintry way to God on a passage from the theologian Karl Rahner, describing a "wintry sort of spirituality." It refers to movement toward faith that grapples with pain, uncertainty, evil, loss, and the mystery of death to discover "hope on the winter-fallow landscape."

For years Grant Kessler has smuggled goods from one end of the world to the next. When business turns in a direction Grant isn't willing to follow he decides to retire and by all appearances he settles down in a nowhere town called Durstrand. But his real plan is to wait a few years and let the FBI lose interest, then move on to the distant coastal life he's always dreamed of. Severely autistic, Morgan cannot look people in the eye, tell left from right, and has uncontrolled tics. Yet he's beaten every obstacle life has thrown his way. And when Grant Kessler moves into town Morgan isn't a bit shy in letting the man know how much he wants him. While the attraction is mutual, Grant pushes Morgan away. Like the rest of the world he can't see past Morgan's odd behaviors Then Morgan shows Grant how light lets you see but it also leaves you blind. And once Grant opens his eyes, he loses his heart to the beautiful enigma of a man who changes the course of his life.

A controversial, revisionist approach to autoimmune and allergic disorders considers the perspective that the human immune system has been disabled by twentieth-century hygiene and medical practices.

Soon enough, nobody will remember life before the Internet. What does this unavoidable fact mean? Those of us who have lived both with and without the crowded connectivity of online life have a rare opportunity. We can still recognize the difference between Before and After. We catch ourselves idly reaching for our phones at the bus stop. Or we notice how, midconversation, a fumbling friend dives into the perfect recall of Google. In this eloquent and thought-provoking book, Michael Harris argues that amid all the changes we're experiencing, the most interesting is the end of absence-the loss of lack. The daydreaming silences in our lives are filled; the burning solitudes are extinguished. There's no true "free time" when you carry a smartphone. Today's rarest commodity is the chance to be alone with your thoughts. Michael Harris is an award-winning journalist and a contributing editor at Western Living and Vancouvermagazines. He lives in Toronto, Canada.

Thirteen years old and a budding comedian, Cody has little to laugh about after he and his mother move from California to Texas to help his sick grandmother and he is framed by his cousin for calling in bomb threats to their school.

My name is Evelyn. I met Devon and instantly fell for him. Weeks later he fell for my best friend. Never one to make waves, I watched as they started a life together. I stood by as their family grew, was the maid of honor at their wedding and the godmother to their children. All the while, I was longing for him, watching as he became the perfect husband and father. I was never jealous. I wasn't even angry that my best friend had the only person I wanted. I had simply resigned myself to living without his love, but still being a part of his life. Then, one terrible day, my best friend died. She died and we all struggled to live life without her. Slowly, as the pain eased, our eyes opened and Devon finally saw me. This is a story about second chances and second choices. This is the story of how my life changed in the absence of Olivia.

An excerpt from the foreword by Joni Eareckson Tada: “With the book you are holding, you have stumbled upon the best of guides. I should know. I first read The Cry of the Soul decades ago when I was still sorting through a lot of hurt and frustration connected with my quadriplegia (yes, I read it on that music stand holding a mouth stick). The Cry of the Soul showed me what to do with my anger and hurt—not stuff it under the carpet of my conscience, or minimize it, but actually do something good with it.” All emotion—whether positive or negative—can give us a glimpse of the true nature of God. We want to control our negative emotions and dark desires. God wants us to recognize them as the cry of our soul to be made right with Him. Beginning with the Psalms, Cry of the Soul explores what Scripture says about our darker emotions and points us to ways of honoring God as we faithfully embrace the full range of our emotional life.

This anthology of fifteen essays provides a variety of critical perspectives on the influential ideas in Richard Kearney’s Anatheism. Blaise Pascal famously insisted that it was better to wager belief in God than to risk eternal damnation. More recently, the distinguished philosopher Richard Kearney has offered a wager of his own—the anatheistic wager, or return to God after the death of God. In this volume, an international group of contributors consider what Kearney’s spiritual wager means. This volume examines what is at stake with such a wager and what anatheism demands of the self and of others. The essays explore the dynamics of religious anatheistic performativity, its demarcations and limits, and its motives. A recent interview with Kearney focuses on crucial questions about philosophy, theology, and religious commitment. As a whole, this volume interprets and challenges Kearney’s philosophy of religion and its radical impact on contemporary views of God.

It is one of the most perplexing paradoxes of modern life. As technology dramatically expands our ways of communicating, loneliness has become one of the leading causes of premature death in all technologically advanced nations. The medical toll is made heavier by powerful social forcesschool failure, family and communal disintegration, divorce, the loss of loved ones. And while loneliness, the lack of human companionship, the absence of face-to-face dialogue, and the disembodiment of human dialogue have all been linked to virtually every major diseasefrom cancer to Alzheimer's disease, from tuberculosis to mental illnessthe link is particularly marked in the case of heart disease, the nation's leading killer. Every year, millions die prematurely, lonely and brokenhearted, no longer able to communicate with their fellow human being. Drawing on a lifetime of his own medical research, Dr. James Lynch provides in A Cry Unheard a groundbreaking sequel to his best-selling The Broken Heart. In our modern-day world, writes Lynch, telephones talk, and radios talk, and computers talk, and televisions talk, yet no-body is there.Human speech, he asserts, has literally disappeared from its own biological homethe human heart. He outlines and explains recent medical and scientific discoveries about school failure, divorce, and living alone, and goes on to demonstrate how childhood experiences with toxic talkadults' use of language to hurt, control, and manipulate rather than to reach out and listencontribute to an unbearable type of loneliness that, in the end, breaks our hearts ten to forty years later. Hailed by many of our Nation's leading medical experts as a pioneer and visionary, as well as THE expert in affairs of the heart, Dr. Lynch predicts that communicative disease will be as major a health threat as communicable disease in the new millenium. His path-breaking researchfrom showing how greatly human touch affects the hearts of patients in intensive care units (as well as the hearts of animals in laboratory settings), to his discovery that during even the most ordinary conversations, blood pressure can rise far more than it does during maximal physical exerciseare but a few pieces of the fascinating health mosaic he assembles in this seminal work.With that rare combination of poet and scientist, he describes in moving terms the vascular see-saw of all human dialogue. Blood pressure rises when we speak to others, yet falls below baseline levels whenever we listen to others, relate to companion animals, or attend to the rest of the natural world. No wonder Lynch admonishes us that exercises to improve communicative health must be undertaken with the same seriousness and commitment as exercises on treadmills to improve physical health. Echoing time-honored Biblical truths and wisdom, he seeds this landmark book with two ominous observations: that loneliness is a lethal human poison, and that failure to act as our brother's keepers forces us into communicative exile and premature death. Ultimately, though, he concludes with optimism. Heartfelt dialogue, writes Lynch, can be, and indeed must be, the true elixir of modern life.