Card brings a special blend of artistic craft and scholarly research to this candid look at the text of John--including his own translation of the gospel from the original Greek text. He introduces readers to the apostle in a fresh new way and offers insight into the apostle's unique outlook on life.

Card brings a special blend of artistic craft and scholarly research to this candid look at the text of John--including his own translation of the gospel from the original Greek text. He introduces readers to the apostle in a fresh new way and offers insight into the apostle's unique outlook on life.

A timely collection of deeply personal, uplifting, and powerful essays that celebrate the redemptive strength of Black joy--in the vein of Black Girls Rock, You Are Your Best Thing, and I Really Needed This Today. When Tracey M. Lewis-Giggetts wrote an essay on Black joy for The Washington Post, she had no idea just how deeply it would resonate. But the outpouring of responses affirmed her own lived experience: that Black joy is not just a weapon of resistance, it is a tool for resilience. With this book, Tracey aims to gift her community with a collection of lyrical essays about the way joy has evolved, even in the midst of trauma, in her own life. Detailing these instances of joy in the context of Black culture allows us to recognize the power of Black joy as a resource to draw upon, and to challenge the one-note narratives of Black life as solely comprised of trauma and hardship. Black Joy is a collection that will recharge you. It is the kind of book that is passed between friends and offers both challenge and comfort at the end of a long day. It is an answer for anyone who needs confirmation that they are not alone and a brave place to quiet their mind and heal their soul.

Based on the Parable of the Great Banquet in Luke 14:15–23, this is the perfect picture book to teach young children that we are all welcome to God’s banquet in heaven—we only need to accept his invitation. In Princess Joy’s Birthday Blessing, Princess Joy loves celebrating her birthday! But when no one accepts the princesses’ invitation to their sister Joy’s surprise birthday party, she finds out and is sad. But her father, the king, helps her understand that there are more ways to celebrate a special day and much better gifts to get than ones wrapped in pretty paper and bows, so Joy comes up with a new and very special party plan. She invites some very special guests to help her celebrate and turns it into a party for everyone, not just her own birthday! Princess Joy’s Birthday Blessing: Has beautiful full-color illustrations Is based on the Parable of the Great Banquet found in Luke 14:15-23 Is the perfect book for princess lovers ages 4-8 Features a lovely princessy cover

The Parable of the Invitation comes alive for little princesses just learningto read, in this new I Can Read!, Level One story. Full color.

“My vocation was supposed to be joy, and I was speaking at funerals.” Shortly after being hired by Yale University to study joy, Angela Gorrell got word that a close family member had died by suicide. Less than a month later, she lost her father to a fatal opioid addiction and her nephew, only twenty-two years old, to sudden cardiac arrest. The theoretical joy she was researching at Yale suddenly felt shallow and distant—completely unattainable in the fog of grief she now found herself in. But joy was closer at hand than it seemed. As she began volunteering at a women’s maximum-security prison, she met people who suffered extensively yet still showed a tremendous capacity for joy. Talking with these women, many of whom had struggled with addiction and suicidal thoughts themselves, she realized: “Joy doesn’t obliterate grief. . . . Instead, joy has a mysterious capacity to be felt alongside sorrow and even—sometimes most especially—in the midst of suffering.” This is the story of Angela’s discovery of an authentic, grounded Christian joy. But even more, it is an invitation for others to seize upon this more resilient joy as a counteragent to the twenty-first-century epidemics of despair, addiction, and suicide—a call to action for communities that yearn to find joy and are willing to “walk together through the shadows” to find it.

In her first novel since the Pulitzer Prize–nominated The Quick and the Dead, the legendary writer takes us into an uncertain landscape after an environmental apocalypse, a world in which only the man-made has value, but some still wish to salvage the authentic. "She practices ... camouflage, except that instead of adapting to its environment, Williams’s imagination, by remaining true to itself, reveals new colorations in the ecology around her.” —A.O. Scott, The New York Times Book Review Khristen is a teenager who, her mother believes, was marked by greatness as a baby when she died for a moment and then came back to life. After Khristen’s failing boarding school for gifted teens closes its doors, and she finds that her mother has disappeared, she ranges across the dead landscape and washes up at a “resort” on the shores of a mysterious, putrid lake the elderly residents there call “Big Girl.” In a rotting honeycomb of rooms, these old ones plot actions to punish corporations and people they consider culpable in the destruction of the final scraps of nature’s beauty. What will Khristen and Jeffrey, the precocious ten-year-old boy she meets there, learn from this “gabby seditious lot, in the worst of health but with kamikaze hearts, an army of the aged and ill, determined to refresh, through crackpot violence, a plundered earth”? Rivetingly strange and beautiful, and delivered with Williams’s searing, deadpan wit, Harrow is their intertwined tale of paradise lost and of their reasons—against all reasonableness—to try and recover something of it.

John Paul II, the most charismatic religious leader of our time, is a man whose actions truly reflect his beliefs. At the dawn of the new Millennium, AN INVITATION TO JOY brings together a selection of John Paul's messages with the most poignant photographs documenting his life both before and after his election to papacy. For the first time, here is an illustrated devotional keepsake album that distills the essence of his message and shows the intimate connection between his words and deeds. Three main sections, THE HUMAN FAMILY, THE PEOPLE OF GOD, THE DIGNITY OF THE HUMAN PERSON, encompass the themes that are most important to the Pontiff. Resonant passages on everything from love and family, suffering and evil, freedom and human rights, other religions and the role of women are coupled with striking photographs. A fourth section, A LIFETIME OF DEVOTION, provides a portrait of the Pope's entire life in pictures, from his early childhood to his current day-to-day activities in the Vatican. Reflecting the Pope's all-embracing outreach to people around the world, AN INVITATION TO JOY will inspire both those inside and outside the Catholic Church.

The perfect gift! A specially priced, beautifully designed hardcover edition of The Joy of the Gospel with a foreword by Robert Barron and an afterword by James Martin, SJ. “The joy of the gospel fills the hearts and lives of all who encounter Jesus… In this Exhortation I wish to encourage the Christian faithful to embark upon a new chapter of evangelization marked by this joy, while pointing out new paths for the Church’s journey in years to come.” – Pope Francis This special edition of Pope Francis's popular message of hope explores themes that are important for believers in the 21st century. Examining the many obstacles to faith and what can be done to overcome those hurdles, he emphasizes the importance of service to God and all his creation. Advocating for “the homeless, the addicted, refugees, indigenous peoples, the elderly who are increasingly isolated and abandoned,” the Holy Father shows us how to respond to poverty and current economic challenges that affect us locally and globally. Ultimately, Pope Francis demonstrates how to develop a more personal relationship with Jesus Christ, “to recognize the traces of God’s Spirit in events great and small.” Profound in its insight, yet warm and accessible in its tone, The Joy of the Gospel is a call to action to live a life motivated by divine love and, in turn, to experience heaven on earth. Includes a foreword by Robert Barron, author of Catholicism: A Journey to the Heart of the Faith and James Martin, SJ, author of Jesus: A Pilgrimage