Thirteen-year-old Joey Johnson has a problem. He hears voices, only he can't find the people who belong to them. His curiosity leads him on a quest where he learns more than just history about "the Nation's Oldest City." He discovers he has a special connection to the past -- something that changes his life forever.

This book considers how a combination of place-based writing and location responsive technologies produce new kinds of literary experiences. Building on the work done in the Ambient Literature Project (2016–2018), this books argues that these encounters constitute new literary forms, in which the authored text lies at the heart of an embodied and mediated experience. The visual, sonic, social and historic resources of place become the elements of a live and emergent mise-en-scène. Specific techniques of narration, including hallucination, memory, history, place based writing, and drama, as well as reworking of traditional storytelling forms combine with the work of app and user experience design, interaction, software authoring, and GIS (geographical information systems) to produce ambient experiences where the user reads a textual and sonic literary space. These experiences are temporary, ambiguous, and unpredictable in their meaning but unlike the theatre, the gallery, or the cinema they take place in the everyday shared world. The book explores the potentiality of a new literary form produced by the exchange between location-aware cultural objects, writers and readers. This book, and the work it explores, lays the ground for a new poetics of situated writing and reading practices.

In Trouble on the St. Johns River, the Johnson kids Joey, Bobby and Katy are up to their adventurous ways again. But this time, instead of exploring history, they're making it! Joey and Bobby start their summer vacation by setting out for their favorite fishing pond, but end up leading a crusade to clean up the environment instead.Finding the pond covered with green muck and dead fish, the brothers decide to do something about it. That leads to a close encounter with a manatee, a visit to a center that rehabilitates injured sea turtles, and a boat tour on the St. Johns River. What they learn through these experiences inspires them to create The Greenies and chart a course of action that captures the attention of many, including a local TV station. By the end of the story, Joey, who thought there was nothing kids could do to make a difference, realizes that perhaps they are the very ones who can. Its a story of awakening that will inspire young readers to become more aware of their environment and give them some ideas on how to preserve it.

"Who are we?" Ms. Johansson asks her class of fifth graders. Her perplexed students soon discover the lesson she wants them to learn. While studying the founding of their country, the class is challenged to understand the melting pot that makes up the American people-both past and present. With the help of a genealogist, students learn to navigate websites that introduce them to written records that have documented their families' histories. Because the class is comprised of students with roots to many nationalities and ethnic groups, including African American, Native American, Mexican, Cuban, Irish, Italian, Polish, Scandinavian, Lebanese, and Japanese immigrants, the diversity in their own class becomes apparent. To assist in their research, the teacher gives the students an assignment of interviewing their parents and grandparents, to learn more about the members of their families. One by one, the young people hear family stories connecting them to America's earliest immigrants and settlers. The students also learn about historical events their ancestors witnessed or experienced, including the early settlement of Virginia, the American Revolution, the Underground Railroad, the Trail of Tears, the Lewis and Clark Expedition, early immigration processing at Ellis Island, the Tuskegee Airmen, and the Holocaust. As the story unfolds, some personal conflicts occur among the students, long-standing family tensions surface, and intergenerational relationships evolve. Complex issues such as privacy, adoption, diversity, immigration, slavery, and antisemitism are addressed in an age-appropriate manner. Excited by what they have discovered, the students plan a program to share their findings with their families. Working together in small groups, they create a slide presentation of vintage photographs, a fashion show demonstrating various ethnic attire, music and food from different cultures, and visual displays showcasing military medals, artifacts, musical instruments, and family heirlooms. Their family history project further inspires the students to want to do something more to honor past generations. With the help of a cemetery preservationist, they plan a clean-up day at a local graveyard in need of attention. Parents, grandparents, brothers, and sisters join the class on a Saturday to help restore the final resting place of those who came before them. As a result of their research project, the students not only discover personal connections to the past but also, in some cases, to each other.

Historian Vinson Synan has gathered sixty representative testimonies of the Spirit's power from the twentieth-century Pentecostal movement and beyond. Readers will discover the inspiring personal witnesses of such well-known and diverse figures as Amy Semple McPherson, Oral Roberts, Billy Graham, Jack Hayford, Agnes Ozman, Kenneth Hagin, Pope John Paul II, and many others. Synan has also included a few pre-twentieth-century testimonies, including John Wesley and Francis of Assisi. Readers and serious students will value these accounts of people receiving the baptism of the Holy Spirit; yielding to gifts such as tongues and prophecy; and receiving healings and other gifts of the Spirit.

The inspiring stories of 365 holy men and women-from the best known to some of the most obscure-come to life in an engaging collection of biographical profiles, quotations from the saints themselves, meditations, and prayers. Voices of the Saints opens with an instruction from Saint Philip Neri: "The best preparation for prayer is to read the lives of the saints, not from mere curiosity, but quietly and with recollection a little at a time. And to pause whenever you feel your heart touched with devotion." With these words of faith and wisdom as his guiding principle, Bert Ghezzi presents the lives of such familiar and beloved saints as Saint Peter and Saint Catherine of Siena; Saint Jerome and Saint Thérèse of Lisieux; of humble, little-known figures like Felix of Nola, Pelagia the Penitent, and Leonard of Port Maurice; and of sainted men and women associated with a particular place, including Margaret of Scotland, Rose of Lima, Elizabeth Ann Seton, and Junípero Serra. In lively profiles written for contemporary readers, Ghezzi chronicles their journeys of faith and their contributions to the vitality of the Church. The voices of the saints resound throughout the book, in quotations drawn from their own writings, the works of biographers, and the recollections of witnesses. Readers can use Voices of the Saints in several different ways. Organized alphabetically, it serves as a helpful, easy-to-use dictionary. It also features a day-by-day numbering system, ideal for daily readings; notations at the end of each entry, enabling the exploration of the lives in historical order; an index that highlights particular themes (including the intriguing "Porcupine Saints"), and a calendar of saints' days. A fascinating look at disparate and unusual lives-each one a rich source of illumination, inspiration, encouragement, and motivation-along with prayers and meditations, Voices of the Saints is a valuable companion for members of Catholic, Episcopal, and other traditional churches, and an enlightening introduction to the saints for general readers.

A comprehensive exploration of the history, phenomenology, meanings and causes of hearing voices that others cannot hear (auditory verbal hallucinations).