This poignant and heartwarming story explores the many faces of sadness and addresses the importance of mental health in a child-friendly way. A small boy creates a shelter for his sadness so that he can visit it whenever he needs to, and the two of them can cry, talk, or just sit. The boy knows that one day his sadness may come out of the shelter, and together they will look out at the world and see how beautiful it is. In this timely consideration of emotional wellbeing, Anne Booth has created a beautiful depiction of allowing time and attention for difficult feelings. Stunningly atmospheric illustrations by David Litchfield personify sadness as a living being, allowing young readers to more easily connect with the story's themes of emotional literacy.

“Camille Sapara Barton is a gift to all of us. ... This is what emergent strategy looks like at the precipice.” —adrienne maree brown, author of Pleasure Activism An embodied guide to being with grief individually and in community—practical exercises, decolonized rituals, and Earth-based medicines for healing and processing loss We live in a culture that suppresses our ability to truly feel our grief—deeply, safely, and on our own terms. But each person’s experience is as unique as the grief itself. Here, Camille Sapara Barton’s take on grief speaks directly to the ways that BIPOC and queer readers disproportionately experience unique constellations of loss. Deeply practical and easy to use in times of confusion, trauma, and pain, Tending Grief includes rituals, reflection prompts, and exercises that help us process and metabolize our grief—without bypassing or pushing aside what comes to the fore. Sapara Barton includes exercises that can be done both alone and in community, including: Altar practices to honor and connect with ancestors known and unknown Locating, holding, and dancing your grief Sharing circles for processing communal loss Water, fire, and nature-based rituals Honoring the survival utility of numbness—and knowing when it’s time to release it Peer support and integration Herbal medicines and plant-based healing Sapara Barton honors each and every experience: The loss of displacement from homelands, from severed lineages and ancestral ways of knowing. The grief of colonization and theft. The deep heaviness that burrows into our bodies when society tells us our bodies are wrong. Practical tools and rituals help readers feel into their grief, honor what comes up, and move forward in healing. Written specifically to center and hold the grief of BIPOC readers, Tending Grief is an invitation to reconnect to what we’ve lost, to find community in our grief, and to tend to our own suffering for our individual and collective wellbeing.

A book of poetic essays written in English, Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet is full of religious inspirations. With the twelve illustrations drawn by the author himself, the book took more than eleven years to be formulated and perfected and is Gibran's best-known work. It represents the height of his literary career as he came to be noted as ‘the Bard of Washington Street.’ Captivating and vivified with feeling, The Prophet has been translated into forty languages throughout the world, and is considered the most widely read book of the twentieth century. Its first edition of 1300 copies sold out within a month.

2008 Winner, MLA First Book Prize Charting the proliferation of forms of mourning and memorial across a century increasingly concerned with their historical and temporal significance, Arranging Grief offers an innovative new view of the aesthetic, social, and political implications of emotion. Dana Luciano argues that the cultural plotting of grief provides a distinctive insight into the nineteenth-century American temporal imaginary, since grief both underwrote the social arrangements that supported the nation’s standard chronologies and sponsored other ways of advancing history. Nineteenth-century appeals to grief, as Luciano demonstrates, diffused modes of “sacred time” across both religious and ostensibly secular frameworks, at once authorizing and unsettling established schemes of connection to the past and the future. Examining mourning manuals, sermons, memorial tracts, poetry, and fiction by Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Apess, James Fenimore Cooper, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Susan Warner, Harriet E. Wilson, Herman Melville, Frances E. W. Harper, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Elizabeth Keckley, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Luciano illustrates the ways that grief coupled the affective body to time. Drawing on formalist, Foucauldian, and psychoanalytic criticism, Arranging Grief shows how literary engagements with grief put forth ways of challenging deep-seated cultural assumptions about history, progress, bodies, and behaviors.

How does anyone 'put on the mind of Christ', as Scripture commands? Can people really get so close to Christ that they not only know his mind but also take on his thinking? And what does this mean for Christian discipleship, the Church, the ordinary person of faith? David Scott, writer and poet, has reflected on this central theme of Christianity over a lifetime's ministry in the Anglican church. He writes with engaging honesty about his personal thoughts and yet brings a theological rigour to his analysis. He combines a down-to-earth practicality with profound engagement with the texts of Scripture. The result is a gem of a book. He writes as follows in his introduction. 'Put on the mind of Christ: what that phrase, with its concentration on 'mind', does not immediately evoke is the way in which the rattle-bag of feelings about things, the heartaches, the heart searchings, the lifting up of the heart have coalesced and been informed by the sharper, tougher attitudes of mind. We shall see, in the case of Jesus, that those two concepts heart and mind, become one orientation, attitude, and spring for action. They also provide one unmoveable pointer for us to a destination we trust in, as we set out to know Christ, and be known by him, and so to enter into a creative relationship with the very centre of our faith.'

From the famous deathbed scene of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Little Eva to Mark Twain's parodically morbid poetess Emmeline Grangerford, a preoccupation with human finitude informs the texture of nineteenth-century US writing. This collection traces the vicissitudes of this cultural preoccupation with the subject of death and examines how mortality served paradoxically as a site on which identity and subjectivity were productively rethought. Contributors from North America and the United Kingdom, representing the fields of literature, theatre history, and American studies, analyze the sexual, social, and epistemological boundaries implicit in nineteenth-century America's obsession with death, while also seeking to give a voice to the strategies by which these boundaries were interrogated and displaced. Topics include race- and gender-based investigations into the textual representation of death, imaginative constructions and re-constructions of social practice with regard to loss and memorialisation, and literary re-conceptualisations of death forced by personal and national trauma.

Setting out from the observation made in the social sciences that maternal grief can at times be a motor of societal change, Ekaterina E. Kozlova demonstrates that a similar mechanism operates also in the biblical world. Kozlova argues that maternal grief is treated as a model or archetype of grief in biblical and Ancient Near Eastern literature. The work considers three narratives and one poem that illustrate the transformative power of maternal grief in the biblical presentation: Gen 21, Hagar and Ishmael in the desert; 2 Sam 21: 1-14, Rizpah versus King David; 2 Sam 14, the speech of the Tekoite woman; Jer 31: 15-22, Rachel weeping for her children. Although only one of the texts literally refers to a bereaved mother (2 Sam 21 on Rizpah), all four passages draw on the motif of maternal grief, and all four stage some form of societal transformation.

Argues that the Eucharist is deeply political and potentially subversive and explores some of the many different aspects of the inseparable relationship between Eucharist and social justice.

What would you say to a deceased loved one if they could come back for one day? What if you can’t just ‘move on’ from grief? At Home with Grief: Continued Bonds with the Deceased chronicles Blake Paxton’s autoethnographic study of his continued relationship with his deceased mother. In the 90s, Silverman, Klass, and Nickman argued that after the death of a loved one, the bond does not have to be broken and the bereaved can find many ways to connect with memories of the dead. Building on their work, many other bereavement scholars have discussed the importance of not treating these relationships as pathological and have suggested that more research is needed in this area of grief studies. However, very few studies have addressed the communal and everyday subjective experiences of continuing bonds with the deceased, as well as how our relationship with our grief changes in the long term. In this book, Blake Paxton shows how a community in southern Illinois continues a relationship with one deceased individual more than ten years after her death. Through this gripping autoethnographic account of his mother’s struggles with a rare cancer, her death, and his struggles with sexuality, he poses possibilities of what might happen when cultural prescriptions for grief are challenged, and how continuing bonds with the dead may help us continue or restore broken bonds with the living.