When my parents were fighting the same lung cancer at the same time in 2009, my world suddenly turned upside down. I had reached a point where I did not care about anything. I believed the Lord had abandoned me in my darkness. I was ready to toss the towel in on everything and walk away. I had no idea how to regain my faith or if I wanted to find it. Through Tear-Filled Eyes is my story.

Martyr was written over a three year period between 2015 and 2018. It was begun while Kathleen was living in Algiers, Algeria with her daughter and continues through the summer of 2018 in Oran, Tlemcen, Sidi Bel Abbes, Algeria and through the fall of 2018. In 2008, Kathleen's son Rayan Mehdi passed away and she was inconsolable. This book, MARTYR, is the result of three years of therapeutic writing. Kathleen writes in English but often incorporates Algerian Dardja or Algerian Arabic into her writing. Martyr is the sequel to THE BOOK OF MOULAY, published in 2015. There are also poems written after Kathleen visited Morocco in 2015. There are influences from both countries in the body of her work. Kathleen took her daughter Zahra to Algeria in the winter of 2015 2016 and lived in Algiers in an apartment in a neighborhood called Birmourad Rais. She returned to Algeria in the summer of 2018 and travelled to Batna and drove across the country and wrote and filmed.

A crucial period for the birth of the modern subject, France's 'long eighteenth century' (approximately 1650-1820) was an era marked by the formulation of a new aesthetic and ethical code revolving around the intensification of emotions and the hyperbolic use of weeping. Precisely because tears are not a simple biological fact but rather hang suspended between natural immediacy, on one side, and cultural artifice, on the other, the analysis of crying came to represent an exemplary testing ground for investigations into the enigmatic relations binding the realm of physiology to that of psychology. Thinking About Tears explores how the link between tears and sensibility in France's long eighteenth century helps shed light on the process through which the European emotional lexicon has been built: from viewing tears as governed by the sphere of 'passions' and 'feelings', thinkers began to view crying as first a matter of sensibility and then of sensiblerie (a pathological excess of sensibility), thereby presupposing an intimate connection with the category of 'sentiments'. For this reason, this volume examines not only or even primarily the actual emotion of crying, but also the attempt to think about and explain this feeling. Drawing on a wide range of early modern philosophical, medical, religious, and literary texts-including moral treatises on the passions, medical textbooks, letters, life-writings, novels, and stage-plays-Thinking About Tears reveals another side to a period that has too often been saddled with the cursory label of 'the age of reason'.

God. Family. Work. Church responsibilities. Volunteer work. Finances. Friends. Relationships. Do you ever get overwhelmed trying to juggle all the facets of your life? Do you ever push God out of the picture because you don't feel like you have time to spend with Him in your hectic day? Well, it's time to make a change. It's time to start your day with God and spend time being spiritually fed through His Word and thoughts that point to Jesus. Fear Not! Is There Anything Too Hard For God? Trusting His Love When You Cannot See His Hand takes you on a daily journey into the Word of God, providing object lessons, inspirational stories, personal testimonies, and thought-provoking insight to start your day. We have nothing to fear with God by our side, but we must develop a personal relationship with Him if we want to have peace and security in our chaotic world. Make a commitment today to spend time with God each day by reading Fear Not! Is There Anything Too Hard For God? Trusting His Love When You Cannot See His Hand and seeking a deeper relationship with the best Friend anyone could ever ask for. Take this challenge, and you will be forever changed!

Written with a dash of vinegar, A FRESH START tells nine wry, happy, bitter, funny, and ironic tales of fate and destiny, pipe dreams and fortune hunters, vanity and pleasures of the rich, curdled love and finaglers, skeptics and scoffers, fools and simpletons, all put together with satire and witticism and great big smiles in the face of adversity.

The way in which a society expresses grief can reveal how it views both intense emotions and public order. In thirteenth-century Italian communes, a conscious effort to change appropriate public reaction to death threw into sharp relief connections among urban politics, gender expectations, and understandings of emotionality. In Passion and Order, Carol Lansing explores a dramatic change in thinking and practice about emotional restraint. This shift was driven by politics and understood in terms of gender. Thirteenth-century court cases reveal that male elites were accustomed to mourning loudly and demonstratively at funerals. As many as a hundred men might gather in a town's streets and squares to weep and cry out, even tear at their beards and clothing. Yet these elites enacted laws against such emotional display and proceeded to pay the fines levied against themselves for violating their own legislation. Political theorists used gender norms to urge men to restrain their passions; histrionic grieving, like lust, was now considered "womanish." Lawmakers drew on a complex of gendered ideas about grief and public order to characterize governance in ways that linked the self and the state. They articulated their beliefs in terms of rules of decorum, how men and women need to behave in order to live together in society. Lansing demonstrates this change through a rich combination of sources: archival records from Orvieto, Bologna, and Perugia; political treatises; literary works, notably Petrarch's letters; and representations of grief in painting and sculpture.