As a very young girl, I became slowly aware that I was living through a childhood that was atypical. Self-expression through writing and music became both a way to survive and a resounding yet unanswered cry for help. This collection is meant to explore trauma, survival, and ultimately healing through an intensive therapeutic process and an overwhelming amount of self-reflection. Songs of Broken Clay touches on traumas associated with race, gender, sexual violence, chronic illness, and child abuse while finding a way to use these traumas to be of service to those who might feel alone or isolated in these experiences.

The daily life and customs of prehistoric southwest Indian tribes are retraced from the designs on the remains of their pottery.

This extract from the Eerdmans Commentary on the Bible provides Jarik and Rogerson’s introduction to and concise commentary on Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs. The Eerdmans Commentary on the Bible presents, in nontechnical language, the best of modern scholarship on each book of the Bible, including the Apocrypha. Reader-friendly commentary complements succinct summaries of each section of the text and will be valuable to scholars, students, and general readers. Rather than attempt a verse-by-verse analysis, these volumes work from larger sense units, highlighting the place of each passage within the overarching biblical story. Commentators focus on the genre of each text—parable, prophetic oracle, legal code, and so on—interpreting within the historical and literary context. The volumes also address major issues within each biblical book—including the range of possible interpretations—and refer readers to the best resources for further discussions.

When life is at its best, the unimaginable can shatter everything you think you know... Abigail Samuels has no reason to feel anything but joy on the morning her life falls apart. The epitome of the successful Jewish American woman, she is married to a well-known and respected accountant and is in the middle of planning her daughter Kayla's wedding. Kayla, too, wakes up that morning with the world in the palm of her hand. Having lived the charmed life of a well-loved child from a happy family, she is a bright, pretty Harvard law student who has never really questioned the path she found herself on. With a shocking suddenness, all that is smashed to pieces in ways they could never have dreamed. When a heartbroken Kayla runs away to a desert commune run by a charismatic mystic, Abigail rushes to save her, only to find that there is nothing more whole than a broken heart.

BOOK 1: STAR SONG . Mary was too young, Elizabeth too old, Joseph too gullible, the shepherds too smelly, Anna too senile, Simeon too idealistic. The wise men should have minded their own business, Zechariah should have accepted he'd never have children. King Herod dared control God, the Bible scholars dared interpret God. . This is a lyrical novel with the reader is inserted into the story. And at the end of each chapter are discussion questions, ancient historical records cited, and scriptures used as a basis for the story. . At the end of the book are suggested chapter readings for special occasions. It also has a three-page bibliography of all books consulted while writing all eight volumes of "They Met Jesus". . This is not just a novel. It is much more. . Come meet the people who met Jesus. You are one of them. Probably you are several of them. Go ahead and struggle with them as they did. Laugh. Cry. Do mental battle with him. Emotional battle too. Fight for your faith as they fought. Pause to listen for what you've never heard before. Then touch Jesus. . This is the story of faith in the impossible. Hope in the inconceivable. Love for the invincible. It is the dreams of youth, the desperations of infirmity, the hopes of age, and the song of eternity. . Follow the suspense as each person in Jesus' life comes to terms with who they are, and who Jesus is. Jesus accepts the as they are. But can they accept themselves as they are? More than that, can they accept Jesus as he is? Both God and man? Both Creator and created? Both King and servant? . It is the story of doubts explained away, animosities melted away, misunderstandings cleared away. It is your story and mine. For deep within each of us is everyone who ever met and struggled with Jesus.

Song Blue and White Porcelain on the Silk Road disproves received opinion that pre-Ming blue and white dates to the Yuan (1279-1368 A.D.) and establishes the proper foundation for 21st century study of ancient Chinese porcelain.

On any weekend in Texas, Czech polka music enlivens dance halls and drinking establishments as well as outdoor church picnics and festivals. The songs heard at these venues are the living music of an ethnic community created by immigrants who started arriving in Central Texas in the mid-nineteenth century from what is now the Czech Republic. Today, the members of this community speak English but their songs are still sung in Czech. Czech Songs in Texas includes sixty-one songs, mostly polkas and waltzes. The songs themselves are beloved heirlooms ranging from ceremonial music with origins in Moravian wedding traditions to exuberant polkas celebrating the pleasures of life. For each song, the book provides music notation and Czech lyrics with English translation. An essay explores the song’s European roots, its American evolution, and the meaning of its lyrics and lists notable performances and recordings. In addition to the songs and essays, Frances Barton provides a chapter on the role of music in the Texas Czech ethnic community, and John K. Novak surveys Czech folk and popular music in its European home. The book both documents a specific musical inheritance and serves as a handbook for learning about a culture through its songs. As folklorist and polka historian James P. Leary writes in his foreword, “Barton and Novak take us on a poetic, historical, and ethnographic excursion deep into a community’s expressive heartland. Their Czech Songs in Texas just might be the finest extant annotated anthology of any American immigrant/ethnic group's regional song tradition.”