While angels have played a decisive role in all the world's major religions and continue to loom large in the popular religious and creative imagination, modern theology has tended to ignore or trivialize them. The comparatively few scholarly works on angels over the last century have typically interpreted them as mere symbols and metaphors: they are said to offer glimpses not of the divine order, but of human desires, anxieties, and ideologies. Angelology has collapsed into anthropology. ...

Michael D. Hurley and Michael O'Neill offer a perceptive and illuminating look into poetic form, a topic that has come back into prominence in recent years. Building on this renewed interest in form, Hurley and O'Neill provide an accessible and comprehensive introduction that will be of help to undergraduates and more advanced readers of poetry alike. The book sees form as neither ornamenting nor mimicking content, but as shaping and animating it, encouraging readers to cultivate technique...

In this ambitious book, Michael D. Hurley explores how five great writers – William Blake, Alfred Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and T. S. Eliot – engaged their religious faith in poetry, with a view to asking why they chose that literary form in the first place. What did they believe poetry could say or do that other kinds of language or expression could not? And how might poetry itself operate as a unique mode of believing? These deep questions meet at the crossroad...

What is 'style', and how does it relate to thought in language? It has often been treated as something merely linguistic, independent of thought, ornamental; stylishness for its own sake. Or else it has been said to subserve thought, by mimicking, delineating, or heightening ideas that are already expressed in the words. This ambitious and timely book explores a third, more radical possibility in which style operates as a verbal mode of thinking through. Rather than figure thought...

Both marshals had pledged to one another that not another soul would be injured or killed--not on their watch--by Damien. The urgent questions now are where do we look? How do we find him? What if he is running in the opposite direction? How would we know? The answer is always the same: To catch a criminal one must think like a criminal. That's why Buster Gibbs and Ruston Lovell are now heading back up the Chisholm. The criminal escaped from them in the southern tip of Texas. There was no ...

BESIDE MY SELF is 'about growing up, growing older and coming to terms with the world.' It reveals some of the things Michael has valued and treasured and combines them with stories of people, places, events and ideas that have shaped his queer sensibilities.

Great Olympic Moments looks at great Olympic moments through the history of the modern Olympics and reasons why these moments were so memorable and made such an impact. It also includes a spread of Olympic records and an Olympic timeline.

United States of America offers complete coverage of this fascinating country, including sections on history, geography, wildlife, infrastructure and government, and culture. It also includes a detailed fact file, maps and charts, and a traceable flag.

John Richardson was Canada's first native-born poet-novelist and 'The Father of Canadian Literature.' Michael Hurley offers the first detailed account of Richardson's fiction rather than of his life or sociological importance.Hurley makes a convincing case for Richardson as an important early cartographer of the Canadian imagination and the originator of 'Southern Ontario Gothic.' He explores Richardson's influence on James Reaney, Alice Munro, Robertson Davies, Christopher Dewdney...

Michael Hurley watched his world unravel in the wake of infidelity, divorce and failure. In August 2009, he was short of money, out of a job, and seeking to salvage a life that had foundered. Deeply in need of perspective, he took to the open seas in a 32-foot sailboat, Gypsy Moon. The story of his 2-year outward odyssey, deterred by rough weather and mechanical troubles, combines keen observation, poignant thoughts, and deeper introspection with glorious prose.Once Upon a Gypsy...

DO YOU BELIEVE IN EVERLASTING LOVE?Jay Danforth Fitzgerald, known as “Fitz” to his few remaining friends, has learned from long and painful experience that there is no such thing as love that lasts. A failed an aging stockbroker full of angst and self-loathing, he fritters away his nights in Tiddly’s Bar and his days aboard a derelict sailboat stuck in the mud of Charleston Harbor. But when he meets a much younger woman named Gemma, his world changes forever.Aw...

A collection of readings and reflections for participants in the Inspiring Faith Communities programme.