Mother of Amish Schoolhouse Shooter Gives Message of Hope and HealingWho would have believed all the beauty God would create over the nine years since that awful day. On October 2, 2006, a gunman entered an Amish one-room schoolhouse, shooting ten girls, killing five, then finally taking his own life. This is his mother's story. Not only did she lose her precious son through suicide, but she also lost her understanding of him as an honorable man. Her community and ...

Finalist for the 2023 Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award“When I’m dead and buried . . . you get the hell out of here . . . Make a life somewhere else . . . a life that I can’t even imagine.”Jo has a gift. She is a mathematical prodigy—a woman who sees and thinks in numbers. She secures a job as a teller at Central Bank & Trust, where she recreates herself as a modern woman and rises through the professional ranks. While working a...

Return to 1920s Appalachia in this thrilling fourth installment of The Stephen Robbins Chronicles, as Robbins and his former lover seek atonement for their past mistakes amid the threatening events surrounding them in the present.In the autumn of 1924, Anna Ulmann arrives in Hot Springs, North Carolina, hoping to be reunited with her former lover, Stephen Robbins. In returning to Hot Springs, she is gambling on the power of forgiveness to somehow reknit the relatio...

That Bright Land is a new Southern gothic thriller from Terry Roberts, winner of the 2012 Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction.In the summer of 1866, Jacob Ballard, a former Union soldier and spy, is dispatched by the War Department in Washington City to infiltrate the isolated North Carolina mountain community where he was born and find a serial killer responsible for the deaths of Union veterans. Based on true events, That Bright Land is the story of a viole...

1866: One year after the surrender of the Confederate army in Appomattox signaled the end of the Civil War, a veteran Union soldier will try to track down a killer who is waging his own war against the members of an isolated community in the North Carolina mountains.

Jedidiah Robbins is a man on a crusade. From town to town, his Gospel train rides the rails of 1920s Appalachia, spreading the Good News with his daughter and a loyal group of roustabouts in tow. But Jedidiah’s traveling revival company has a secret: in addition to offering the gifts of the Holy Spirit, it also delivers spirits of another kind. Prohibition is in full swing, but The Sword of the Lord train keeps the speakeasies in the towns it visits in business by providing the be...

The summer of 1917 should have been a summer like any other. Stephen Robbins should have been doing the same thing he’d been doing for years past. As a young boy he’d fled his life in a secluded mountain cove and risen through the ranks to become the manager of the South’s finest resort, the elegant Mountain Park Hotel. By all rights, he should have spent this summer as host to some of the wealthiest gentry on the East Coast. Hans Ruser, German commodore of the world’s largest and most lux...

Summer, 1920. The immigration and public health authorities on Ellis Island in New York Harbor are slowly recovering from the war years, even as a new influx of European and African immigrants is flooding the Great Hall. A young, pregnant, Irish woman, Ciara McManaway, disappears from the Isolation Hospital on Ellis Island. Stephen Robbins, a specialist in finding the missing?persons as well as things?is sent to Ellis Island by his boss in the Bureau of Investigation to locate the McManawa...

Dr. Terry Roberts, the Director of the National Paideia Center, explores how creativity is the new measure of true intelligence and how we should educate our children for success in a increasingly complex world. In their world, neither static definitions of intelligence nor traditional ideas of training stand us in good stead. Rather, we need to reframe the question given what lies before us and come to terms with a different answer posited in different language.This, then, are tho...

Have you ever had a Christmas gathering or family vacation that was way too interesting? Have you had a family member in the military or deployed to a combat zone? Have you struggled with your Christian faith? Have you or a family member faced cancer or another serious illness? If so, you are not alone, although you may sometimes feel like it.Author Terry A. Roberts has felt that way. He shares his experiences in his memoir, Youve Got to Be Somewhere. This slice of Americana, somet...

Read straight from the heart through the eyes of Terry A. Roberts hand written letters home to family from the front lines as he relays his fears, frustrations, trials and triumphs. This work chronicles the gritty and often harsh expedition of one man in three wars as both an enlisted Marine and later as a Navy/Marine Corps Chaplain with the ever present Hand of God leading his every boot step. This patriot odyssey begins with the rigors of Marine Corps boot camp in Parris Island, South Ca...

Every teacher knows the challenge of trying to engage reluctant readers and struggling writers—students whose typical response to a writing prompt is a few sentence fragments scribbled on a sheet of paper followed by an elaborate shrug of the shoulders.The best way to engage less confident readers and writers is to give them something powerful to think about. The Discourse and Writing Cycle explores writing as a means to focus student thinking, fuel deeper learning, and build compl...