Written in a theopoetic key, this book challenges Christian reliance on the motif of promise, especially where promise is regarded as a prerequisite for the experience of hope. It pursues instead an unpromising hope available to the agnostic or belief-fluid members and leaders of faith communities. The book rejects any theological judgement about doubt and hopelessness being sinful. It also rejects any hope which is grounded in a sense of Christian supremacy. Chapter 1 focuses on Ernst Bloch’s antifascist concept of utopian surplus, putting Bloch in conversation with queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz and womanist theologian M. Shawn Copeland. Chapter 2 explores the saudadic and theopoetic hope of Rubem Alves. Chapter 3 turns to the womanist theologies of Delores Williams, Emilie Townes, and A. Elaine Brown Crawford. Finally, chapter 4 engages the post-colonial eschatology of Vítor Westhelle, framing hope as nearby in space, rather than nearby in time. Each chapter offers an unpromising hope that may be tapped into by those who wish to affirm belief-fluidity in their own communities, and by those who wish to speak of hope honestly, whether or not, at any given moment, they believe in God or in the promises of a god.

Drawing from two decades as a hospice chaplain, nurses’ aide, and emergency medical technician, the Rev. Matthew J. Holmes invites us to peer into the often occulted dimensions of life’s endings. From bedsores to isolation, impacted bowels to the nursing home economy, from neglect to deep, desperate love, modern death’s characteristics are navigated here with insight, honesty, depth, and clarity. Following the sense of horror and humor evoked in each narrative are theopoetic and theological reflections from the Rev. Thomas R. Gaulke, PhD. Tom brings a playfulness to the conversation, engaging issues of hope, meaningless, disenchantment, sacramentology, grace, and religiosity in relation to modern death and postmodern longing. Every day, worlds end. Armageddon is not a battle far removed into the future. It is taking place right now—in the hospital, at the nursing home, across the street, and inside our very bodies. The world ends in ways big and small. It ends in pain and in love. It ends with tears and with relief. The ends of worlds are often grotesque, final battles the bloodiest. This book is an opening into those endings and an invitation into the search for whatever meaning and whatever of God might lie therein.

In the second book of Cole's Potion Masters series, the secrets of the potion-making world are at stake when Gordy has to unravel a mystery at B.R.E.W. headquarters and defeat the threat of a powerful new group of potion masters.

Injustice and the Care of Souls, Second Edition, explores injustices in church and society and their impact on pastoral caregiving. The book offers pastoral and spiritual caregivers broader contexts, knowledge, and skills to respond effectively to marginalized people and to reflect on how their own social locations affect their work.

Here, in a fitting recognition of a life of scholarship, is an esteemed collection of writing by liturgical and homiletical scholars honoring and engaging with Gail Ramshaw's work and extending it to new questions, contexts, and concerns. The volume is organized around themes of her work: lectionary patterns, prayer forms, and theological horizons.

A New York Times and Los Angeles Times Bestseller “Doughty chronicles [death] practices with tenderheartedness, a technician’s fascination, and an unsentimental respect for grief.” —Jill Lepore, The New Yorker Fascinated by our pervasive fear of dead bodies, mortician Caitlin Doughty embarks on a global expedition to discover how other cultures care for the dead. From Zoroastrian sky burials to wish-granting Bolivian skulls, she investigates the world’s funerary customs and expands our sense of what it means to treat the dead with dignity. Her account questions the rituals of the American funeral industry—especially chemical embalming—and suggests that the most effective traditions are those that allow mourners to personally attend to the body of the deceased. Exquisitely illustrated by artist Landis Blair, From Here to Eternity is an adventure into the morbid unknown, a fascinating tour through the unique ways people everywhere confront mortality.

"Aspiring Potion Master Gordy Stitser must prevent the Eternity Elixir from falling into the hands of the rebel Elixirists who are working to release the most powerful potion master of all time and take over the world"--Provided by publisher.

Transparency and Dissimulation analyses the configurations of ancient neoplatonism in early modern English texts. In looking closely at poems and prose writings by authors as diverse as Thomas Wyatt, Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, John Donne, Edward Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Thomas Traherne, Thomas Browne and, last not least, Aphra Behn, this study attempts to map the outlines of a neoplatonic aesthetics in literary practice as well as to chart its transformative potential in the shifting contexts of cultural turbulency and denominational conflict in 16th- and 17th-century England. As part of a “new”, contextually aware, aesthetics, it seeks to determine some of the functions neoplatonic structures – such as forms of recursivity or certain modes of apophatic speech – are capable of fulfilling in combination and interaction with other, heterogeneous or even ideologically incompatible elements. What emerges is a surprisingly versatile poetics of excess and enigma, with strong Plotinian and Erigenist accents. This appears to need the traditional ingredients of petrarchism or courtliness only as material for the formation of new and dynamic wholes, revealing its radical metaphysical potential above all in the way it helps to resist the easy answers – in religion, science, or the fashions of libertine love.

DIVINE COSMOS SERIES This is the sequel to volume 1. MATRIX and WITNESS are now in the 8th Heaven. They are in the Nowhere-Everywhere Place from where we all come from. For we are all Clones of God, Cells of the SUPREME BEING/Universe. As well as we are the gods of the Universe of our cells. In 2012, the Earth Magnetic Field started to split, allowing 2 worlds: 3-D & 4-D! Did you notice? You did! So, you know you have a double, and you both will like this sequel of Clones of God. In Volume 1, MATRIX and WITNESS, two ETs came to Earth. They initiated Humans to the Inner Dialogue with the Divine Within. This initiation spread all over the world; then they were raptured to the 8-D World. There are many Densities, Dimensions of Divine Consciousness in this Cosmos. You will see in this volume 2 that the 3-D and 4-D worlds are coexisting on Earth. You will see that at the scale of the Universe, only the Fantastic has a chance to be true.