Wooing in Wyoming: Erin Krol contacts Matchrimony's owner, Dr. Lachele Simpson, in hopes of finding love and starting a family. She is matched with a chocolate maker and plans a honeymoon in Switzerland to tour chocolate factories. Al Frank, who values work over love, also wants children. When he meets Erin, he realizes he may have met his match. Anxious in Atlanta: Jean Winters is a hard-working stock broker, but she realizes life is passing her by. After attending her college roommate’s wedding and seeing the success of Matchrimony, she decides to use their services to find a husband without the hassle of dating. Dillon Jeffries has worked hard to create his business, but is surprised when he learns he must get married within three months to receive his inheritance. Anchored in Alaska: Beverly Snow’s life changed drastically after a car accident at eighteen. She cared for her quadriplegic mother for twenty years, but now she’s lost and grieving after her passing. An arranged marriage to a stranger in Alaska adds to her confusion. Colin Geller is a park ranger who never wanted children, but when he meets Beverly, he feels like his dreams have come true. Sweethearts in South Dakota: Willa Griffin has always known she'd inherit her grandfather's ranch. When he dies and his will requires her to marry within a month to keep it, she hires a matchmaker. Ryder Pearce, bored with retirement, agrees to the arranged marriage. When they meet, they're unsure how they'll make it work, but their attraction is strong. Treasured in Tennessee: Emily Murphy discovers she is inheriting a nephew and can't handle him alone. She contacts Dr. Lachele from Matchrimony in hopes of finding a husband fast. Brodie Callahan, who witnessed his employer’s successful match through the same service, decides to try it for himself. They move to a horse farm in Tennessee with Emily's nephew and face challenges while trying to make their marriage work. Nesting in North Carolina: Becca Jones is a shy twenty-nine year old who feels like an old maid. A friend suggests she call Dr. Lachele at Matchrimony, and she agrees in hopes of making changes in her life. Archer Hayes is tired of his mother setting him up with young debutantes and wants someone with substance who can handle his difficult family. After contacting Dr. Lachele, he meets Becca and knows the matchmaker did a great job. Always in Albuquerque: After achieving all her goals, Alexis Casey wants to settle down and start a family. She turns to her mentor, Dr. Lachele Simpson, who promises to find her a match at the altar. Dirk Blanton, a serious researcher looking for love, also seeks help from a company. Maybe in Moab: Sydney Harris is hooked on mail-order bride romances. She can't wait to read the books and watch the couples' love stories unfold. When she gets the chance to have her own modern-day version, she jumps at it. Her only request: her new husband has to come to her since she's a national park ranger who can't relocate. Jackson Pine lost his true love two years ago in a hit-and-run accident. He never expects to find love again, until he meets a quirky matchmaker who convinces him to give it a try. Charmed in Charleston: Single mom Emma calls Dr. Lachele at Matchrimony, agreeing to marry a man she's never met at the altar. Wealthy Beau needs a wife and finds Emma immediately attractive. Matched in Minnesota: After her fiancé's infidelity, Marissa seeks a drastic change and turns to Matchrimony for a sight-unseen marriage. On the other hand, Dr. Aaron Christiansen, a professor in Minnesota, uses the service to find a wife in hopes of achieving tenure without distractions.

One Sunday morning in 1993 a 16-year-old girl named Eliza Claps goes missing from a church in the centre of Potenza, Italy. Shortly before her disappearance, Elisa had met Danilo Restivo, a strange local boy with a fetish for cutting women's hair on the back of buses. Elisa's family are convinced that Resitvo is responsible for their daughter's disappearance, but he is protected by local big-wigs: by his Sicilian father, by a doctor with links to organised crime, by a priest who had vices of his own. Years went by and Elisa's family could find only false leads. 2002, and Restivo is now living in Bournemouth. In November that year, his neighbour is found murdered, with strands of her own hair in her hands. Once again the police are at a loss to pin anything on him. It's not until 2010, when Elisa's decomposed body is found in the church where she went missing, that the two cases are linked and Restivo is finally dealt with. Blood on the Altar combines a gripping true crime case with Jones's deep understanding of Italian culture - the impunity it offers to the powerful - he so expertly demonstrated in his bestseller: The Dark Heart of Italy.

What does it mean to be in the presence of God's holiness? How can it affect us whether we seek it out or stumble upon it? Can it truly change our very reality to encounter it? The essayists in this volume explore these questions at the heart of Christian worship, considering the oft-neglected Old Testament as essential to understand our purpose in worship. Following the structure of the Hebrew canon -- beginning with the Pentateuch, moving through to the Psalms, then wisdom literature -- each chapter considers a separate aspect of worship, from theater to the Sabbath to sacred space, offering new inspiration. In the final essay Carol Bechtel "rereads the book of Job through the lens of our human limitations (as opposed to the usual theme of theodicy)," with compelling applications for both life and worship. Each of these essays concludes with two appropriately themed hymns and a "For Further Reading" list. Five of the seven contain sidebars that illustrate and enrich key points. Evocative woodcut artwork by Margaret Adams Parker provides a striking backdrop to the text. Taken together, these essays testify powerfully to the belief that the Old Testament is not only valuable but also essential to "whole" and fully foundational preaching and worship. Written primarily by Old Testament professors, Touching the Altar will make an engaging supplemental text for introductory or elective Old Testament courses and will also go far toward providing deeper worship for any Christian. Contributors: Carol M. Bechtel Thomas A. Boogaart Corrine L. Carvalho Ellen F. Davis J. Clinton McCann Jr. Dennis T. Olson Margaret Adams Parker John D. Witvliet

A deathbed confession ignites a globe-spanning race for answers in this page-turning thriller described as The Da Vinci Code meets The Bourne Identity. “They didn’t have to kill him…He never drank from the altar of bones.” Cryptic dying words from a murdered homeless woman in present-day San Francisco unlock a long-buried secret that alters history. Now, a pair of ruthless assassins are sent to cut the few living “loose ends.” And a young, resourceful woman on the run encounters a determined man with his own connected past and vengeful agenda. Forced to partner for survival and answers, a fast-paced and deadly game of cat and mouse ensues, whisking the duo from the winding streets of Paris to the faded palaces of Budapest to the frozen lakes of Mongolia...where destiny, passion, and further betrayal await them. Jam-packed with pulse-pounding action and featuring a high-profile assassination, a doomed Hollywood legend, and guardians of an ancient religious icon housing a secret others will kill to possess, The Altar of Bones is certain to leave readers stunned and breathless.

In the 1930s, Catholics helped create Franklin Roosevelts New Deal coalition; they remained a loyal constituency of the Democratic Party for decades. In 1960, Catholics and Democrats united to elect John F. Kennedy, Americas first Catholic preside...

"More kids are dying right now in obedience to the Jehovah''s Witness ban on blood transfusions than perished in the fire at Waco, Texas," says former Witness elder David A. Reed. "How can a major sect with headquarters in New York City and twelve million attending its religious services worldwide quietly lead victims to early deaths without public outcry?" Reed cites dozens of well-documented casesmedia reports naming victims, doctors, and hospitals issuing their death certificatesas he blows the whistle on a deadly cult that secretly instructs members to kidnap children from hospital beds and teaches children to resist doctors violently and give false testimony in court. This former minister, now widely recognized as an authority on the sect, explains his own role in bringing new members under mind control. With captivating anecdotes he details an enforcement apparatus that reaches even into clinics and hospitals. He brings to light secret instructions for hospital employees to turn over confidential patient records to the church, and tells how the hierarchy conducts bedside trials of members who accept forbidden medical treatment. Reed joined the sect as a naive young adult and rose through the ranks until he learned how the secretive leadership operated. Realizing that his friends were dying for beliefs supposedly channeled from God, but actually fabricated by the church hierarchy. After leaving the sect, he spent years researching its history and activitiesevidence revealed here for the first time. Reed''s warning cannot be ignored.

From the 2020 winner of the Thomas Shapcott Award comes a sophisticated, impressive and rich collection of poetry that unpacks the complexity of family, grief, and cross-cultural and queer identity. These richly allusive poems weigh violence and tenderness, wound and cure, history and future. Boldly and tenderly, they balance loss and gain, adventure and quiet, as they hum to one another of love and loss. This is a scintillating and exhilarating collection from an accomplished and distinctive new voice.

"The intention of my work is to dislodge assumptions about the fixity of the three-dimensional body."--Deborah Hay Her movements are uncharacteristic, her words subversive, her dances unlike anything done before--and this is the story of how it all works. A founding member of the famed Judson Dance Theater and a past performer in the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Deborah Hay is well known for choreographing works using large groups of trained and untrained dancers whose surprising combinations test the limits of the art. Lamb at the Altar is Hay's account of a four-month seminar on movement and performance held in Austin, Texas, in 1991. There, forty-four trained and untrained dancers became the human laboratory for Hay's creation of the dance Lamb, lamb, lamb . . . , a work that she later distilled into an evening-length solo piece, Lamb at the Altar. In her book, in part a reflection on her life as a dancer and choreographer, Hay tells how this dance came to be. She includes a movement libretto (a prose dance score) and numerous photographs by Phyllis Liedeker documenting the dance's four-month emergence. In an original style that has marked her teaching and writing, Hay describes her thoughts as the dance progresses, commenting on the process and on the work itself, and ultimately creating a remarkable document on the movements--precise and mysterious, mental and physical--that go into the making of a dance. Having replaced traditional movement technique with a form she calls a performance meditation practice, Hay describes how dance is enlivened, as is each living moment, by the perception of dying and then involves a freeing of this perception from emotional, psychological, clinical, and cultural attitudes into movement. Lamb at the Altar tells the story of this process as specifically practiced in the creation of a single piece.

Welcome to the City. In this place of peace and plenty, with no disease, no suffering, and no want, people find meaning in service to their gods. They know the gods were created by humans, of course. But the gods protect and provide for the people, so why wouldn't the people serve the gods? In a Utopian society, what better way to express service than through pleasure and faith? For Kheema and her seven fellow Potentials, that means entering the temple of the Sun God to undergo months of training and practice to determine which of them will be chosen as Sacrifice. On the day of the summer Solstice, the one chosen as Sacrifice must recite the entire litany from atop the temple, while enduring nonstop forced orgasms from dawn 'til dusk. For Terlyn, service means becoming part of the Garden, bound naked and asleep while worshippers help themselves to her body. Terlyn wakes in ecstasy over and over, only to fall asleep again. The experience changes her, and her relationship with her friend and lover Donvin, who visits her while she is part of the Garden. Ashi's service to the god known as the Wild entails competing with other worshippers in a forest that appears overnight to demonstrate her resilience and will, so that she might become part of a ritual involving an altar, a long row of cages, and the complete abandonment of the self. The three stories brush against each other, revealing the heart of the City, as the people of the City serve, or ask for enlightenment from, multiple gods at once.

Stern parents, awkward circumstances, misunderstandings, lovers’ quarrels – and one very determined cat – are some of the many hindrances that Montgomery’s characters find themselves battling on the way to the altar. But Montgomery helps her lovers overcome these obstacles to true love by a wonderful assortment of means: maiden aunts come to the rescue; two pairs of twins play major roles; a marauding pig is an unusual cupid; the lovers themselves come up with striking solutions. Whatever storms they must weather on the sea of love, whether they are rich or poor, young or old, trembling with romance or properly practical, in Montgomery’s hands courting couples seem destined to live “happily ever after.” Funny, heartwarming, and full of romance, these eighteen stories are sure to delight Montgomery’s many fans. From the Hardcover edition.