Love can exit your life as quickly as it enters it, shattering your heart in the process. It's been a year since my husband was taken from me in a tragic accident. I thought it would kill me. Now, I think I'm ready to start healing. My mother says my idea of taking a solo cross-country road trip is crazy, but I see it as my road to recovery. Along the way, I'll have to deal with the poor choices I've made since Ricky died. I'll have to overcome the terror that his death has caused me. I'll have to find my balance again. And once I meet Luke and his young son, I'll have to decide if I can take the risk to do more than exist and learn to love again.

In this astonishing and profound work, an irreverent sleuth traces the riddleof existence from the ancient world to modern times.

Change your way of thinking and you can change your life. In You Can Do It--Even If Others Say You Can't, bestselling author John Mason offers readers inspirational truth in bite-sized pieces, making them easy to remember and apply to life's issues, big and small. He powerfully shows that the past does not equal the future and readers can live fruitful and fulfilling lives when they step forward in faith, believing that God will provide the means to accomplish the impossible.

A “provocative and seductive debut” of desire and doubleness that follows the life of a young Palestinian American woman caught between cultural, religious, and sexual identities as she endeavors to lead an authentic life (O, The Oprah Magazine). On a hot day in Bethlehem, a 12–year–old Palestinian–American girl is yelled at by a group of men outside the Church of the Nativity. She has exposed her legs in a biblical city, an act they deem forbidden, and their judgement will echo on through her adolescence. When our narrator finally admits to her mother that she is queer, her mother’s response only intensifies a sense of shame: “You exist too much,” she tells her daughter. Told in vignettes that flash between the U.S. and the Middle East—from New York to Jordan, Lebanon, and Palestine—Zaina Arafat’s debut novel traces her protagonist’s progress from blushing teen to sought–after DJ and aspiring writer. In Brooklyn, she moves into an apartment with her first serious girlfriend and tries to content herself with their comfortable relationship. But soon her longings, so closely hidden during her teenage years, explode out into reckless romantic encounters and obsessions with other people. Her desire to thwart her own destructive impulses will eventually lead her to The Ledge, an unconventional treatment center that identifies her affliction as “love addiction.” In this strange, enclosed society she will start to consider the unnerving similarities between her own internal traumas and divisions and those of the places that have formed her. Opening up the fantasies and desires of one young woman caught between cultural, religious, and sexual identities, You Exist Too Much is a captivating story charting two of our most intense longings—for love, and a place to call home.

From social psychologist Dr. Devon Price, a conversational, stirring call to “a better, more human way to live” (Cal Newport, New York Times bestselling author) that examines the “laziness lie”—which falsely tells us we are not working or learning hard enough. Extra-curricular activities. Honors classes. 60-hour work weeks. Side hustles. Like many Americans, Dr. Devon Price believed that productivity was the best way to measure self-worth. Price was an overachiever from the start, graduating from both college and graduate school early, but that success came at a cost. After Price was diagnosed with a severe case of anemia and heart complications from overexertion, they were forced to examine the darker side of all this productivity. Laziness Does Not Exist explores the psychological underpinnings of the “laziness lie,” including its origins from the Puritans and how it has continued to proliferate as digital work tools have blurred the boundaries between work and life. Using in-depth research, Price explains that people today do far more work than nearly any other humans in history yet most of us often still feel we are not doing enough. Filled with practical and accessible advice for overcoming society’s pressure to do more, and featuring interviews with researchers, consultants, and experiences from real people drowning in too much work, Laziness Does Not Exist “is the book we all need right now” (Caroline Dooner, author of The F*ck It Diet).

Get a head start with eXist, the open source NoSQL database and application development platform built entirely around XML technologies. With this hands-on guide, you’ll learn eXist from the ground up, from using this feature-rich database to work with millions of documents to building complex web applications that take advantage of eXist’s many extensions. If you’re familiar with XML—as a student, professor, publisher, or developer—you’ll find that eXist is ideal for all kinds of documents. This book shows you how to store, query, and search documents with XQuery and other XML technologies, and how to construct applications on top of the database with tools such as eXide and eXist’s built-in development environment. Manage both data-oriented and text-oriented markup documents securely Build a sample application that analyzes and searches Shakespeare’s plays Go inside the architecture and learn how eXist processes documents Learn how to work with eXist’s internal development environment Choose among various indexes, including a full-text index based on Apache Lucene Dive into eXist’s APIs for integrating or interacting with the database Extend eXist by building your own Triggers, Scheduled Tasks, and XQuery extension modules

Winner of the 2017 Virginia Marie Folkins Award, Association of King County Historical Organizations (AKCHO) Winner of the 2017 Hal K. Rothman Book Prize, Western History Association Seattle would not exist without animals. Animals have played a vital role in shaping the city from its founding amid existing indigenous towns in the mid-nineteenth century to the livestock-friendly town of the late nineteenth century to the pet-friendly, livestock-averse modern city. When newcomers first arrived in the 1850s, they hastened to assemble the familiar cohort of cattle, horses, pigs, chickens, and other animals that defined European agriculture. This, in turn, contributed to the dispossession of the Native residents of the area. However, just as various animals were used to create a Euro-American city, the elimination of these same animals from Seattle was key to the creation of the new middle-class neighborhoods of the twentieth century. As dogs and cats came to symbolize home and family, Seattleites’ relationship with livestock became distant and exploitative, demonstrating the deep social contradictions that characterize the modern American metropolis. Throughout Seattle’s history, people have sorted animals into categories and into places as a way of asserting power over animals, other people, and property. In The City Is More Than Human, Frederick Brown explores the dynamic, troubled relationship humans have with animals. In so doing he challenges us to acknowledge the role of animals of all sorts in the making and remaking of cities.

Christian Theology: An Introduction, one of the most internationally-acclaimed Christian theology textbooks in use, has been completely rewritten for the 6th edition. It now features new and extended material and companion resources, ensuring it retains its reputation as the ideal introduction for students. A new edition of the bestselling Christian theology textbook to celebrate its 25th anniversary Rewritten throughout for exceptional clarity and accessibility, and adds substantial new material on the Holy Spirit Features increased coverage of postcolonial theology, and feminist theology, and prodigious development of world theology Increases the focus on contemporary theology to complement the excellent coverage of historical material A new 2-color design includes more pedagogical features including textboxes and sidebars to aid learning

Does science prove God's existence or provide more reasons to doubt? Does God truly exist? That is the age-old seemingly unanswerable question. But what if there was an answer? What if the answer has been staring us right in the face for centuries, but we've been too busy missing the forest for the trees? This book invites you to take a step back and look at the broader picture. It offers anecdotes, observations and, most importantly, scientific evidence of the universal, all-encompassing, culture-transcending purpose that connects us all. In that purpose, we find many paths to a knowledge that has eluded humankind for as long as we have had the ability to wonder: proof that God does indeed exist. We find this knowledge in the stars, in the nature of time, in the laws of physics, in our own bodies, and in equations as complex as advanced calculus and unconditional love. It's just a matter of knowing where (and how) to look. In a centuries-old debate that has always placed science in an adversarial role with faith, this book brings the two camps together, using logic and reason to prove the existence of God. For the atheist, these pages eschew scriptural references in favor of evolutionary, philosophical, cultural, and natural evidence. For the believer, this book enhances your faith with affirmative arguments steeped in mathematics, particle physics, and a host of other scientific and real-world observations. And for anyone who has ever looked up at the sky and wondered what might lie beyond, this book provides a clear, compelling, life-affirming answer. "Desire is the starting point of all achievement, not a hope, not a wish, but a keen pulsating desire which transcends everything." "" Napoleon Hill "As a secularist and humanist who doesn't share the same conclusions, I was surprised with what an enjoyable read this is. This is the strongest summary to date that I've seen for the Theist position." "" Jeremy Runnells, author of the CES Letter "Written through a Euro-centric philosophical and western science lens, one has the opportunity to consider not only the argument for and against the belief in a God, but to contemplate a middle ground where the dualities of such sit squarely within the most important part of the equation- the one who asks the question. This book is a worthwhile read, particularly for those seeking to dive more deeply into the self." "" Jonathan Webb, Dr. of Theology

The combination of current cosmology, physical theories, ancient cosmogonies, theologies, and metaphysics poses three main questions: Why is there something rather than nothing? Why does being take many forms? What is the origin of everything? Many different answers have been given in various different fields to these questions. In theological, creationist metaphysics, the only answer is the existence of a creator who has given rise not only to everything, but also to the laws that govern existence. Non-theological metaphysics, instead, has engaged in the determination of some first principles (archái), from which derives the reality in its various forms. Science, for a long time, evaded these questions, focusing instead on particular aspects of reality by formulating explanations of natural phenomena. In the course of their current development, physics (including quantum theory) and cosmology have posed questions concerning the origin of the whole universe and the reasons for its existence. They believe it is possible to formulate a theory of everything, just as metaphysical cosmologists and theologians thought. The papers collected in this volume offer interesting contributions to the debates surrounding this ultimate “why” question.