The holidays can be a difficult and lonely time, especially for those who might be estranged from the family and faith traditions of their youth. Reconstructing Christmas recognizes and holds space for that pain, while also seeking to offer hope, acceptance, encouragement, and love to LGBTQ+ Christians who might be facing similar estrangements this Christmas season.The 160 page collection features poetry, sermons, devotional reflections, and short stories from 15 different...

Everyone, has a story to tell, I've just been contemplating if the world was ready to hear mine. You would be surprised by who will try to stop you from telling your story, as if it will affect them. Where were those so-called "loved ones" when I was killing myself on the streets looking for love? I am here only by the grace of God. I have scars, and they cover me from head to toe. Isn't it funny how, in the midst of your darkest hours of life and sin, darkness tries to make you laugh? It ...

The works of the Swiss children’s writer Johanna Spyri are renowned for their psychological insight, endearing humour and the author’s inimitable ability to enter into childish joys and sorrows. The beloved novel ‘Heidi’ has achieved fame across the world and was inspired by Spyri’s childhood summers near Chur in the Swiss Alps. This comprehensive eBook presents Spyri’s collected works, with numerous illustrations, rare texts appearing in digital print for the first time, informati...

Everyone, has a story to tell, I’ve just been contemplating if the world was ready to hear mine. You would be surprised at who will try to stop you from telling your story as if it will affect them. Where were those so-called family members when I was killing myself on the streets looking for love? I am here only by the grace of God. I have scars and my scars cover me from head to toe. Isn’t it funny how in the midst of your darkest hours of life and sin that darkness tries to make you lau...

Johanna Louise Spyri was a Swiss author of novels, notably children's stories, and is best known for her book "Heidi".The works of Johanna Spyri are renowned for their psychological insight, endearing humour and the author's inimitable ability to enter into childish joys and sorrows. The believed novel 'Heidi' has achieved fame across the world and was inspired by Spyri's childhood summers near Chur in the Swiss Alps.Contents:HeidiHeimatlosThe Story of Ri...

Love, Language, Place, and Identity in Popular Culture: Romancing the Other explores the varied representations of Otherness in romance novels and other fiction with strong romantic plots. Contributors’ approaches range from sociolinguistics to cultural studies, and the texts analyzed are set on four continents, with particular emphasis on Caribbean and Atlantic islands. What all the essays have in common is the exploration of representations of the Other, be it in an inter-racial or inter...

In the early twentieth century over two hundred of New York's most glamorous socialites joined the suffrage movement. Their names—Astor, Belmont, Rockefeller, Tiffany, Vanderbilt, Whitney, and the like—carried enormous public value. These women were the media darlings of their day because of the extravagance of their costume balls and the opulence of the French couture clothes, and they leveraged their social celebrity for political power, turning women's right to vote into a fashionable c...

The Gifting Logos: Expertise in the Digital Commons provides an extensive analysis of knowledge and creativity in twenty-first century networked culture. Analyzing massive projects like the Wayback Machine, the Internet Archive, and the Creative Commons licenses, The Gifting Logos responds to a fundamental question, What does it mean to know something and to make something? With the idea of a gifting logos, Hartelius integrates three habits of a rhetorical epistemology: t...

Johanna Spyri (12 June 1827 - 7 July 1901) was an author of children's stories, and is best known for Heidi. Born Johanna Louise Heusser in the rural area of Hirzel, Switzerland, as a child she spent several summers in the area around Chur in Graubunden, the setting she later would use in her novels. Excerpted from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Ancient stories invoking contemporary questions and providing insight for an uncertain futureThe Road to Kingship is the second volume in the A People and a Land trilogy and presents a chapter-by-chapter interpretation of 1–2 Samuel, based on the author’s translation. Johanna van Wijk-Bos reacquaints readers with familiar stories like David and Goliath while also introducing them to lesser-known biblical personalities like Doeg the Edomite and the wily servant Ziba. She of...

Too long restricted to children's storybooks and cinematic extravaganzas, the Torah -- comprising the first five books of the Bible -- is an underappreciated mother lode of divine instruction, vitally important for Christians and the church. Convinced that both those who take the Torah too literally and those who neglect it are guilty of a naïve simplicity, Johanna van Wijk-Bos presents guidelines to help ordinary Christians recover this treasure in their faith and practice.Having l...

In The Land and Its Kings biblical scholar Johanna van Wijk-Bos accompanies the reader across a large sweep of the story of Israel, from the end of King David's reign through the fall of Jerusalem approximately 400 years later. She views these memories of Israel's past, as they are woven together in Kings, from the perspective of the traumatic context of postexilic Judah.Van Wijk-Bos writes as a scholar of the Bible with deep commitments to feminism and issues of gender wi...