That bad things happen to good people was as true in early China as it is today. Franklin Perkins uses this observation as the thread by which to trace the effort by Chinese thinkers of the Warring States Period (c.475-221 BCE), a time of great conflict and division, to seek reconciliation between humankind and the world. Perkins provides rich new readings of classical Chinese texts and reflects on their significance for Western philosophical discourse.

How is Yahweh to be differentiated from other deities? What is Yahweh's relationship to Israel in exile?".

Heaven's Fractal Net explores the uniquely useful geometrical forms found in nature and in cultures of the world. The visual shapes of fractals attract eyes with their fascinating beauty. They appear in images and designs with reiterated patterns whose parts are self-similar to the whole pattern--just as a fern frond is structured with smaller and smaller self-similar branches. The fractal-like imagery in religious architecture has been used to symbolize infinity, consciousness, vertigo, and wonder. In nature fractals serve as dynamic configurations for circulation, including the branching shapes of trees and lungs, rivers and nerves. A wealth of fractal examples is found in arts, symbols, and decorations. Heaven's Fractal Net is a book which explores self-similarities in worldwide cultures, providing a rich background for examining many geometrical shapes used by humanity, exploring processes of creativity in wisdom traditions, and delving into archetypal images in depth psychology. Fractals offer an organizing principle for many different kinds of hierarchies and composites, and in recent years "fractal" has become a familiar household word for a new yet ancient geometry.

The loss of a real and heartfelt belief in God—and by “real” I mean an experience that is both steady and moving, ethereal though down-to-earth, sentimental but never trite—comes from an earlier more foundational loss, namely that of an ardent and directed desire for heaven, and more specifically, that paradisal longing for the resurrected life. This book seeks to recover the neglected nature of heaven, degraded into something “out-there” and unknown, degraded further into a vague wish for immortality and the often empty words of consolation. Or even worse, the almost comic book reduction of heaven to an earthly social(ist) paradise, the immanentization of the Christian eschaton. The vague “better place,” which is meant well, often means nothing at all, or worse than that can hamper us when approaching and engaging the mystery of grief. This book will address and interrogate various questions about the nature of the afterlife—on the status of guilt, forgiveness, friendship, love, embodiment, sexuality—and propose various paths to answers. We are talking about that sacred innermost promise: the hope of paradisal reunion most secret and yet most universal, never abstract and shapeless, but embodied and individual. We must wonder whether our casual forgetting of this estuary of human hope, the resurrected life, has caused us to lose ourselves in such a way that we do not even know what we have lost.

The Colombians had Pablo Escobar, the Cubans had Scarface, the Italians had John Gotti, and the brothas had Bumpy Johnson. . . but what about the sistas? After tragedy strikes her home, Heavenly Jacobs must rely on her beauty and street smarts to survive on her own. Her choice to ride for the wrong man ultimately lands her in prison where, she decides to re-strategize her game plan for when she is released. Eartha Davis was exposed to much more than she should have been from a very young age. Between her mother, a bonafide gangster with a sexual preference for women, and the influence of the streets, it was just about impossible for Eartha not to embrace all that was going on around her. Her love for the streets, violence, and females all contribute to her imprisonment in Edna Mahan Correctional Facility in Clinton, New Jersey. As fate would have it, Eartha and Heavenly are thrown together and form an unbreakable bond, which spills over into the streets. Seeing how everyone got fat while they were starving behind the prison wall, they decide to put together a team of female hustlers that have the men in the game on edge. Jealousy, envy, ego, and pride all come into play as a beef between the opposite sex emerges. Will the brothas maintain their edge, or will they succumb to the wrath of Heaven and Earth?

"And so the way we worship apparently matters less to God than the way we make love. The diagnosis may not be limited to Roman Catholicism, for today Jewish, Protestant, and Muslim communities also struggle to decide what the next world holds for their sexual dissidents. Curiously, debates over where gay people belong now feed into debates over how much equality women deserve in the West's three major faith traditions."--BOOK JACKET.

Does heaven exist? If so, what is it like? And how does one get in? Throughout history, painters, poets, philosophers, pastors, and many ordinary people have pondered these questions. Perhaps no other topic captures the popular imagination quite like heaven. Gary Scott Smith examines how Americans from the Puritans to the present have imagined heaven. He argues that whether Americans have perceived heaven as reality or fantasy, as God's home or a human invention, as a source of inspiration and comfort or an opiate that distracts from earthly life, or as a place of worship or a perpetual playground has varied largely according to the spirit of the age. In the colonial era, conceptions of heaven focused primarily on the glory of God. For the Victorians, heaven was a warm, comfortable home where people would live forever with their family and friends. Today, heaven is often less distinctively Christian and more of a celestial entertainment center or a paradise where everyone can reach his full potential. Drawing on an astounding array of sources, including works of art, music, sociology, psychology, folklore, liturgy, sermons, poetry, fiction, jokes, and devotional books, Smith paints a sweeping, provocative portrait of what Americans-from Jonathan Edwards to Mitch Albom-have thought about heaven.

This is the story of a little girl named Heaven. Traumatized by the death of her grandparents and the eventual abuse at the hands of an uncle, heaven struggles to find her place in a world haunted by flashbacks of a childhood filled with physical and sexual abuse. She witnesses the mistreatment of her mother by family and tries to grapple with feelings of being an outcast. One evening, at church she meets a boy who helps navigate her through a terrible youth while she wars with the idea of ending her life. This book is based on a true story. No one should assume that this work is fiction or non-fiction. It is clearly memories and some imaginations.

In "Under the Heaven Tree," journalist and poet William Bridges paints a rich picture of growing up in two Indiana towns, Franklin and Vincennes, from the 1930s through the 1950s. It is the story of an unusual family of artists, of a secret marriage, of hidden scandal, and the characters who once populated small towns, including the creator of the world's only six-person harmonica and a man who climbed the town monument to disarm the Civil War soldier. Most of all, it is a valentine to the writer's mother and father, and to a long-lost America.