Weights and Stumbling Blocks is a book of poetry that will encourage, inspire, and comfort you. The words of the poems are considered gifts and are inspired by God. God led Jessica through many trials and tribulations by placing the words in her heart to write during her journey. Many of the poems were inspired by failed relationships, times of loneliness, heartaches, and the tears she shed throughout the years. Others were written for people who suffered through divorce, job loss, death of loved ones, and so forth. Others were written in times of joy, healing, and peace.

Weights and Stumbling Blocks is a book of poetry that will encourage, inspire, and comfort you. The words of the poems are considered gifts and are inspired by God. God led Jessica through many trials and tribulations by placing the words in her heart to write during her journey. Many of the poems were inspired by failed relationships, times of loneliness, heartaches, and the tears she shed throughout the years. Others were written for people who suffered through divorce, job loss, death of loved ones, and so forth. Others were written in times of joy, healing, and peace.

Focuses on values and attitudes drawn from the Gospels and the literature of Christian spirituality to discover solutions to psychological problems. Father Benedict offers a series of therapeutic meditations for readers with an interest in spirituality.

"Bold, deeply learned, and important, offering a provocative thesis that is worked out through legal and archival materials and in subtle and original readings of literary texts. Absolutely new in content and significantly innovative in methodology and argument, Stumbling Blocks Before the Blind offers a cultural geography of medieval blindness that invites us to be more discriminating about how we think of geographies of disability today." ---Christopher Baswell, Columbia University "A challenging, interesting, and timely book that is also very well written . . . Wheatley has researched and brought together a leitmotiv that I never would have guessed was so pervasive, so intriguing, so worthy of a book." ---Jody Enders, University of California, Santa Barbara Stumbling Blocks Before the Blind presents the first comprehensive exploration of a disability in the Middle Ages, drawing on the literature, history, art history, and religious discourse of England and France. It relates current theories of disability to the cultural and institutional constructions of blindness in the eleventh through fifteenth centuries, examining the surprising differences in the treatment of blind people and the responses to blindness in these two countries. The book shows that pernicious attitudes about blindness were partially offset by innovations and ameliorations---social; literary; and, to an extent, medical---that began to foster a fuller understanding and acceptance of blindness. A number of practices and institutions in France, both positive and negative---blinding as punishment, the foundation of hospices for the blind, and some medical treatment---resulted in not only attitudes that commodified human sight but also inhumane satire against the blind in French literature, both secular and religious. Anglo-Saxon and later medieval England differed markedly in all three of these areas, and the less prominent position of blind people in society resulted in noticeably fewer cruel representations in literature. This book will interest students of literature, history, art history, and religion because it will provide clear contexts for considering any medieval artifact relating to blindness---a literary text, a historical document, a theological treatise, or a work of art. For some readers, the book will serve as an introduction to the field of disability studies, an area of increasing interest both within and outside of the academy. Edward Wheatley is Surtz Professor of Medieval Literature at Loyola University, Chicago.

A smart and funny book by a prominent Harvard psychologist, which uses groundbreaking research and (often hilarious) anecdotes to show us why we’re so lousy at predicting what will make us happy – and what we can do about it. Most of us spend our lives steering ourselves toward the best of all possible futures, only to find that tomorrow rarely turns out as we had expected. Why? As Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert explains, when people try to imagine what the future will hold, they make some basic and consistent mistakes. Just as memory plays tricks on us when we try to look backward in time, so does imagination play tricks when we try to look forward. Using cutting-edge research, much of it original, Gilbert shakes, cajoles, persuades, tricks and jokes us into accepting the fact that happiness is not really what or where we thought it was. Among the unexpected questions he poses: Why are conjoined twins no less happy than the general population? When you go out to eat, is it better to order your favourite dish every time, or to try something new? If Ingrid Bergman hadn’t gotten on the plane at the end of Casablanca, would she and Bogey have been better off? Smart, witty, accessible and laugh-out-loud funny, Stumbling on Happiness brilliantly describes all that science has to tell us about the uniquely human ability to envision the future, and how likely we are to enjoy it when we get there.

What is "too fat"? what is "too thin"? Interpretations of body weight vary widely across and within cultures. Meeting weight expectations is a major concern for many people because failing to do so may incur dire social consequences, such as difficulty in finding a romantic partner or even in locating adequate employment. without these social and cultural pressures, body weight would only be a health issue. while socially constructed standards of body weight may seem immutable, they are continuously recreated through social interactions that perpetuate or transform expectations about fatness and thinness. Written by sociologists, psychologists, and nutritionists, all of the chapters in this book focus on how people construct fatness and thinness, examining different strategies used to interpret body weight, such as negotiating weight identities, reinterpreting weight, and becoming involved in weight-related organizations. Together these chapters emphasize the many ways that people actively define, construct, and enact their fatness and thinness in a variety of settings and situations.

A no-nonsense, unique approach to losing weight that starts with the premise that getting fit and healthy does require work, and that you must be willing to roll up your sleeves, accept that challenge.. Focuses on what has consistently been the missing link to lasting weight loss—the powerful role of the mind. The most critical key to losing weight and keeping it off lies in the way we think, and in what we tell ourselves when we mess up. One’s ability to switch to a positive state of mind in the face of setback determines who makes it to the finish line and who stays down and defeated. The good news is: rational optimism is a learned skill; not something you have to be born with. Reacting negatively to weight-loss setbacks leads to a state of psychological helplessness—a kind of mental inertia that leads to anxiety and depression and sabotages your efforts to lose weight. Learning to react to setbacks with rational optimism—remaining positive while maintaining a strong foothold in reality—lays the foundation for success. When you prove to yourself that setbacks are just temporary and surmountable,t they lose the power yo unravel you. There is something that you can do. Change Your Mind, Change Your Weight shows how.

The following was my inspiration to write and share my daily weight loss journey with the world: 1) God's vision for me. 2) My two young sons (now 6 & 8). 3) My Dr. report of high blood pressure and border line diabetic. 4) The obesity epidemic that's plaguing America. I pray this book helps you all in your weight loss efforts. The weight loss don't stop at the end of the year, this book will help you set guidelines for upcoming years and remind you of how much weight you can lose in one year. No matter how many times you fail in your weight loss efforts, you must not qui! Keep on praying, watch God help you change in your spirit and body. Take one day at a time and continually tell yourself "I know I can, with God's help."

Eric Santner offers a radically new interpretation of Marx's labor theory of value as one concerned with the afterlife of political theology in secular modernity. What Marx characterized as the dual character of the labor embodied in the commodity, he argues, is the doctrine of the King's Two Bodies transferred from the political theology of sovereignty to the realm of political economy. This genealogy, leading from the fetishism of the royal body to the fetishism of the commodity, also suggests a new understanding of the irrational core at the center of economic busyness today, its 24/7 pace. The frenetic negotiations of our busy-bodies continue and translate into the doxology of everyday life the liturgical labor that once sustained the sovereign's glory. Maintaining that an effective critique of capitalist political economy must engage this liturgical dimension, Santner proposes a counter-activity, which he calls "paradoxological." With commentaries by Bonnie Honig, Peter Gordon, and Hent de Vries, an introduction by Kevis Goodman, and a response from Santner, this important new book by a leading cultural theorist and scholar of German literature, cinema, and history will interest readers of political theory, literature and literary theory, and religious studies.