The book is filled with over 50 diverse stories chronicled over 60 years of amazing and engaging encounters. Simons stories span through mind boggling but captivating experiences gathered across continents. The stories are all brief and but real life and impactful. Some of the stories cover early child hood, being raised in a very large poor African family with little or no hope for the future. Yet they ended up in great turnarounds. Yet some stories are anchored along travels and tours while some others were centered along the office /job environments. The stories are loaded with everyday life transforming lessons. In summary Simons stories basically say one thing: “YOUR STORIES CAN BE TURNED AROUND BECAUSING ALL THINGS ARE POSSIBLE.”

DIVUsing Scripture, church history, testimonies, and personal experience, the Golls describe the different categories of angels, explains their ministry as God’s agents, and shows how to perceive and engage them. /div

Engaged Encounters: Thinking about Forces, Fields and Friendships with Monique Nuijten is a festschrift celebrating the scholarly, professional and personal contributions and insights of Monique Nuijten. As a creative scholar, Monique is known for her theoretical contributions to the study of development, social movements, the state, organizations, and corruption - to name a few topics. She inspires many senior and junior colleagues, as well as students, with innovative concepts like 'force fields' and development as a 'hope-generating machine'. Nuijten grounds her theoretical interventions in fine-grained ethnographic observations with a keen and sympathetic eye for the diverse actors that inhabit the structures of power and patterns of inequality she encounters. For Nuijten, theoretical and ethnographic endeavors are deeply interwoven with personal and political engagements, most recently illustrated through her research on social movements in urban settings in Brazil and Spain. The intersection of these three integrated dimensions in Monique Nuijten's oeuvre and life - the theoretical, collegial and personal - are brought out clearly in the forty contributions that each in their own way, acknowledge her unique combination of intellectual sharpness and personal warmth. As such, Monique Nuijten's scholarly life embodies an exemplary model of engaged scholarship.

DIV Welcome to Encounters, a groundbreaking Chinese language program that features a dramatic series filmed entirely in China. The program’s highly communicative approach immerses learners in the Chinese language and culture through video episodes that directly correspond to units in the combination textbook-workbook. By combining a compelling story line with a wealth of educational materials, Encounters weaves a tapestry of Chinese language and culture rich in teaching and learning opportunities. Encounters follows a carefully structured and cumulative approach. Students progress from listening and speaking to the more difficult skills of reading and writing Chinese characters, building grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation skills along the way. The Encounters program includes: • Two Full-color Student Books for introductory Chinese study • Annotated Instructor’s Editions with answer keys and suggested class activities • Two Character Writing Workbooks linked directly to the Student Book • Ten hours of video materials, comprising dramatic episodes, cultural segments, and animations, all integrated with the Student Books • A total of 200 minutes of audio material, linked to the Student Books, for listening and speaking practice • A website, www.encounterschinese.com, providing a year’s free access to all audiovisual material of the program upon adoption /div

"Playing a role-playing game is a delicate dance. If everything runs smoothly, it feels like you and your friends are able to maneuver effortlessly through dramatic, epic, and uproariously silly scenes where everyone gets a chance to shine. And yet, other times it just doesn't come together. Combat slows to a repetitive grind, the Game Master runs out of good Non-Player Character (NPC) ideas, or after twenty-six rounds maybe even the most beautifully designed encounter just gets a bit stale. Sure, you could prep an absolute powerhouse of an all-killer-no filler role-playing session. Spend time getting fun character voices ready for every NPC. But that sounds like way too much work. This is the book you turn to for help. It's a big book of ideas designed to slot right into your existing campaign, organized into neat little tables. If you salivate at chaos magic effect tables and daydream about wild, unexpected die results, you already know it can also be fun to throw caution to the wind and let randomness determine as much as possible. Even the most organized GMs and the tightest adventure modules benefit from a little spice!"--

Teaching about the Holocaust presents one of the most formidable challenges teachers face. Meaningful Encounters is Paula Ressler and Becca Chase’s contribution to the efforts of those educators who wish to meet this challenge more knowledgeably and effectively. It tells the story of a unique, inquiry-based English teacher education course focused on Holocaust literature from several genres that integrated literacy pedagogies and literary criticism with historical, philosophical, psychological, and political theories and contexts. The book involves the reader in the complicated tangle of Holocaust education, critically illuminating how difficult this work is, but also demonstrating how teachers can introduce their students responsibly and ethically to this perennially relevant body of literature. The authors offer no facile solutions to the obstacles and pitfalls inherent in teaching this literature. They raise questions, pose problems, consider and analyze how participants responded to issues that emerged, and suggest alternative approaches. The authors recount the students’ and teacher’s unsettling and enlightening experiences, failures, and successes. By following along, preservice educators will be able to conceptualize, discuss, and practice, and inservice teachers and teacher educators rethink, how to teach Holocaust and other literatures about genocide and mass atrocities in culturally relevant and meaningful ways today.

To understand the creative fabric of digital networks, scholars of literary and cultural studies must turn their attention to crowdsourced forms of production, discussion, and distribution. Digital Encounters explores the influence of an increasingly networked world on contemporary Latin American cultural production. Drawing on a spectrum of case studies, the contributors to this volume examine literature, art, and political activism as they dialogue with programming languages, social media platforms, online publishing, and geospatial metadata. Implicit within these connections are questions of power, privilege, and stratification. The book critically examines issues of inequitable access and data privacy, technology’s capacity to divide people from one another, and the digital space as a site of racialized and gendered violence. Through an expansive approach to the study of connectivity, Digital Encounters illustrates how new connections – between analog and digital, human and machine, print text and pixel – alter representations of self, Other, and world.

An anthology of long-read book reviews by one of the European left’s foremost political economists From the acclaimed author of How Will Capitalism End? comes an omnibus of long-form critical essays engaging with leading economists and thinkers. Critical Encounters draws on Wolfgang Streeck’s inimitable writing for the London Review of Books and New Left Review, among other publications. It opens with treatments of two contrasting historical eras—factory capitalism and financialization—and three of the world’s major economies: the United States, France and Germany. A middle section surveys the hollowing out of Western democracies and reviews Yanis Varoufakis’s “strange but indispensable” memoir of the eurozone crisis. Delving into the world of ideas, Streeck discusses the work of Quinn Slobodian, Mark Blyth, Jürgen Habermas and Perry Anderson. Finally, he zooms out to compare his home discipline of sociology to natural history, giving a remarkable and non-deterministic reading of Charles Darwin. In the preface, Streeck reflects on the art (or craft) of book reviewing and the continuing merits of the book form. Critical Encounters also includes a series of “Letters from Europe,” penned as the coronavirus descended upon the Continent.

This inspiring collection of 72 critical and creative contributions honouring the life and work of Desmond Mpilo Tutu comprises a rich and diverse array of reflections on the ecumenical global struggle against Apartheid, and Archbishop Tutu’s role therein, as a political priest, prophet and intellectual. The encounters with ‘the Arch’ and his work has shaped ongoing faith-based, activist and academic pursuits for justice, peace and dignity. Anyone familiar with his outstanding contributions to the promotion of justice, dignity and peace, will know that a hallmark of Desmond Tutu’s celebrated style is his use of narrative and real-life stories. In honour of his unique and remarkable example, the contributions in this book combine oral history and written history paradigms, as well as sociological, philosophical and theological approaches. While the book is meant to be a memorial recollection of encounters with the Arch, the hope is that these recollections will continue to inspire collective struggles and hopes for justice, peace and dignity.

How can we have meaningful public conversations in the algorithmic age? This book explores how digital technologies shape our opinions and interactions, often in ways that limit our exposure to diverse perspectives and fuel polarization. Drawing on the ancient art of arguing all sides of a case, the book offers a way to revive public debate as a source of trust and legitimacy in democratic societies. This is a timely and urgent book for anyone who cares about the future of democracy in the digital era.