The pressure of expectations often means that priests fail to care for themselves and neglect their own spiritual life. Christopher Chapman draws on more than thirty years’ experience of spiritual direction, as well as his own experience of priesthood, to offer life-giving practices and personal disciplines for spiritual health.

Langley offers comfort and encouragement to those struggling with recent loss or grief, helping them find language for complex emotions, and open their hearts through poetry. Send My Roots Rain is a companion full of stories—sometimes wry and funny, always observant and accepting—for letting grief unfold and teach us. Langley invites a keen awareness that the passage through grief is the navigation of a narrow strait, requiring patience, skill, and worthy companions. These poems can be those companions on the journey. Langley has carefully selected 60 poems and arranged them in a meaningful arc, beginning with the shock of early grief, leading through a sensitive exploration of a new inner space. She introduces each section, encouraging the ongoing embrace of the healing power of poems, writing, and entry into the grieving process. Each poem is followed by a brief meditation and quotation, with questions for contemplation, journaling, or group discussion.

Megan McKenna has long been well known in the Catholic community as a writer, speaker, and teacher. In her lectures and writings, McKenna focuses on the central place of storytelling in the spiritual life and on the role of the storyteller as a teacher. She explores the illuminating power of stories, examining both traditional and contemporary tales that are integral parts of Christian, Zen, Jewish, Sufi, Native American, and many other spiritual traditions.

An urban woman artist arrives in a small southwestern town near the Mexican border at the invitation of the town priest. She has come to paint murals in his church, not knowing that the church has burned down in a catastrophic fire. The artist becomes the catalyst for the town's release of its collective guilt, allowing the rebuilding of the church & a truce between the Catholic priest & the town's old woman healer. In the process she faces her own terrifying nightmares, their source & the resolution of her sexual identity. A wonderful, fast-paced novel by a new talent.

An urban woman artist arrives in a small southwestern town near the Mexican border at the invitation of the town priest. She has come to paint murals in his church, not knowing that the church has burned down in a catastrophic fire. The artist becomes the catalyst for the town's release of its collective guilt, allowing the rebuilding of the church & a truce between the Catholic priest & the town's old woman healer. In the process she faces her own terrifying nightmares, their source & the resolution of her sexual identity. A wonderful, fast-paced novel by a new talent.

Advocates and demonstrates women's path to personal wholeness and self-healing through an eco-feminist, reader-response analysis of four fictional narratives.

This book is about my journey from flesh to spiritual freedom through sermons, poetry and short stories - I open my life to you. I took the wide road to salvation and was knocked off course by fear, addiction, and low self-esteem. I stopped listening to God and tried to do what people wanted me to do. Now I realize my life is not controlled by man, "It's Just Between God and Me." If you have been looking for yourself through the eyes of God then this book is for you.

If you love poetry, this book is about you and for you. It doesn't matter whether you are a scholar or a lover of beautiful poetry, this book brings everyone together by responding to a current crisis: the falling interest in and support for the humanities, especially poetry. This book argues that the most fruitful place to begin to reinvigorate literary reading, and thus the humanities, is with the close and careful attention to the experience of non-academic readers. This book explores their experiences, listening carefully to what they have to say, how they--you!--respond to poetry, why you love it. The book shows, in other words, at least a partial cure for that falling interest in the humanities which gets so much attention in newspapers and on TV. The book employs the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins and lets him supply the illustrative material. Hopkins is one of the seven most-read poets in the English language, but you do not have to know Hopkins well to understand the revolutionary approach to poetry and literary study that this book offers.

The ministry of the Rev. Stephen F. Dill was forged in the turbulent civil rights years when he stood for social justice and spoke against racial segregation. In this collection of sermons--many from his 20 years as pastor of Dauphin Way United Methodist Church in Mobile, Alabama--Dill reflects on the implications of his faith for the lives of individuals and for the life of the world. Robin Wilson, one of Dill's successors at Dauphin Way, praises "the bold humility" of his message, and author Frye Gaillard, in the book's introduction, offers this description of Dill and his sermons: "Almost inevitably, the poetry of his preaching caught the quick of my imagination and quietly, inevitably made me think." Appropriately, the publication of The Poetry of Faith coincides with the 100th anniversary of Dauphin Way. But these challenging and reassuring sermons resonate far beyond those walls. As Methodist educator Gorman Houston put it, this is the Christian faith at its finest, for Stephen Dill has always been "one of those ministers ... able to see the church as it should be and not as it was."

The second of an extraordinary two-volume work chronicling forty-five years of painting by our most important artist, Colin McCahon. Colin McCahon (1919–1987) was New Zealand's greatest twentieth-century artist. Through landscapes, biblical paintings, abstraction, and the introduction of words and Maori motifs, McCahon's work came to define a distinctly New Zealand modernist idiom. Collected and exhibited extensively in Australasia and Europe, McCahon's work has not been assessed as a whole for thirty-five years. In this richly illustrated two-volume work, written in an accessible style and published to coincide with the centenary of Colin McCahon's birth, leading McCahon scholar, writer, and curator Dr Peter Simpson chronicles the evolution of the artist's work over McCahon's entire forty-five-year career. Simpson has enjoyed unprecedented access to McCahon's extensive correspondence with friends, family, dealers, patrons, and others. This material enables us to begin to understand McCahon's work as the artist himself conceived it. Each volume includes over three-hundred illustrations in colour, with a generous selection of reproductions of McCahon's work (many never previously published), plus photographs, catalogue covers, facsimiles, and other illustrative material. These books will be the definitive work on New Zealand's leading artist for many years to come.