The key to change is to let go of fear. Can Emma overcome her loneliness, and be open to the new adventures that await her? Emma endures hardships throughout her young adult life. When she finds out that her new caretaker is Tag, the pompous jerk that her grandfather adopted, she fears the worst. As years pass, Tag and Emma discover their indifference towards each other is wasted energy. When they realize they enjoy spending their inheritance together, their dreams become reality. If you like caring, driven, loyal and independent characters, you will be proud to read Haley Rhoades 6th book in the 7 Deadly Sins Series, Unmasked: Pride When lust meets fate, the 7 deadly sins await.

A relic from our pagan past; a fertility symbol; the spirit of vegetation; Jack-in-the-Green, Herne the Hunter or Robin Hoodall of these descriptions and many more have been advanced to explain the identity of the strange and often outlandish image which glares so balefully from rood screen and roof boss in so many places of Christian worship throughout Western Europe. Invariably depicting a male human head, it is by any reckoning a most unusual image and while exhibiting countless variations, the predominant feature common to all is the vegetation issuing in luxuriant profusion from the mouth and coiling around the head in fantastic shapes and patterns; a feature which has no known counterpart in nature. It is the Green Man so-called by generations of environmentalists and folklore enthusiasts. But such interpretations beg the questionwhy does the image occur predominantly within a Christian context with a frequency second only to that of Christ Himself. . Who is the Green Man and what does his widespread presence signify? The author believes that the answer to this age-old riddle may be found in a number of medieval works such as the apocryphal gospels, the Bestiary and the Legend of the Rood all of which would have been familiar to scholars and teachers of the period. Although never part of the official canon, these nevertheless had a considerable influence on the teaching of the medieval Church and the imagery which it employed to illustrate it for the benefit of illiterate or semi-literate congregations. The present study represents a radical departure from the previously received wisdom on the subject and advances the hypothesis that far from being a pagan fertility symbol, the Green Man is a lead player in the great scriptural drama of the Creation, the Fall of Man and his ultimate redemption.

The focus of this book is on the reality of evil for medieval and Renaissance dramatists and their audiences. What propels the work beyond similar critiques is the author's insistence that evil is not an outmoded feature of past societies, but an active ingredient of contemporary life. Davidson fast forwards from distant times once described as calamitous to a century of far more violence and atrocity - our own twentieth and its overflow. drama through Marlowe and Shakespeare, Davidson refers to contemporary events that scream for an adjective for which there is no better - evil. In passing, he faults the Nietzsche-Foucault line for contributing to the trivializing of evil in postmodern times. In a survey that ranges from Greek drama and the Church Fathers through De Sade, Dostoyevsky, Beckett, and Ingmar Bergman, Davidson drives to his conclusion that an important function of drama has always been to bring a realization of evil into our consciousness and indeed, through giving symbolic form to it, to make us feel its power as a demonic force in human lives.

'This masterly work ought to be The Elizabethan Encyclopedia, and no less.' - Cahiers Elizabethains Edmund Spenser remains one of Britain's most famous poets. With nearly 700 entries this Encyclopedia provides a comprehensive one-stop reference tool for: * appreciating Spenser's poetry in the context of his age and our own * understanding the language, themes and characters of the poems * easy to find entries arranged by subject.

The winning contestants on University Challenge could not identify lines from one of the best-known English poems, Keats Ode to Autumn, and seemed unconcerned about their ignorance. This book provides an engaging retrospect for readers who have forgotten, or who have never had much chance to study, their own literature and history. In presenting a kind of cross-section of this abundant inheritance, it supplies ample selective quotes, and suggests an antidote to the strange sickness of modernity, which seems to have forgotten that memory is the mother of the muses. Literature, one of the bulwarks of defence against unwarranted authority, has been attacked, distorted, and eliminated from curricula because its traditional teachings, handed on for generations, oppose a determined modernist agenda. The age demands conformity ; the poets are independent. The traditional writings banished from shelves and the popular imagination educate the soul, inculcating such qualities as fortitude, one of the forgotten virtues. Criticism of and from the media, the self-appointed commentators who make up the narratives of the day, has been undertaken by analysts as diverse as Noam Chomsky and William Buckley. Some of their works are listed in the bibliography. Myths and heroic tales that inform western literature and adjust our perspective come principally from the Greeks, especially from Homer, and from Vergil, who told the great tale of Troy that fulfilled the dreams of Rome. Homer delighted in the natural world, in beautifully made arms, cups, tapestries, all bathed in a pitiless light. The old Anglo Saxon poets who also wrote in the epic tradition felt particularly the mightiness of evil, the transience of life, and the power of the word to shape the world, and to hold themselves in remembrance. The Middle Ages achieved the greatest dream of all, uniting the mythical with the practical, painting great panoramas of life, meditating upon the unseen, and the Elizabethan age rediscovered heroism and the power of personality. After the free discourse and argument of the seventeenth century, with its resulting wars and fragmentation, a more cohesive nation emerged, one that came to believe in reason and mans own mind ; while the Romantic poets who followed show, sometimes disastrously, the wildness of individualism, of diversity apart from social integration and a common faith. The long Victorian afternoon and golden evening of the nineteenth century saw an expansion of these tendencies and a renewing of faith, but there has been no significant new development from the revolution and romanticism of a century earlier. Rather the movement has played itself out with post modernism.

Spiritual writer, theologian, and philosopher Jesuit Fr. Robert Spitzer tackles the topic of recognizing and overcoming spiritual evil. His focus is the human heart. His goal: our moral and spiritual transformation, which leads to true peace and genuine happiness. The book is divided into two main parts: the realities of God's goodness and of spiritual evil, and recognizing and overcoming diabolical tactics, which range from temptation and deception to the Deadly Sins. Father Spitzer shows readers how to experience God's peace even during times of suffering and persecution. He examines the basics of the spiritual life and Christian mysticism, including the contemplative dimension. He explains the purgative, illuminative, and unitive aspects of spirituality, as well as the Lord's consolation and the passive Dark Night of the Spirit. Father Spitzer provides the biblical and theological background of Jesus' victory over Satan. The author also explores the reality of the Devil, including extraordinary manifestations of diabolic activity such as possession. He recalls the true story of the famous possession case on which the novel and film The Exorcist were based. In the final sections of the book the author explains: how diabolical spiritual forces operate how temptation works, and what to do to defeat it the "deadly sins" and how to overcome them