For those who feel broken, lost, or spiritually depleted, Inner Healing the Franciscan Way offers a roadmap to rediscovering God's presence and finding restoration and healing.At some point, we all experience loss or disappointment—when our best efforts and carefully laid plans simply fall apart. As we struggle to put the pieces back together through sheer willpower, the intense loneliness can be crushing. Fortunately, th...

Francis of Assisi is Catholicism's most popular saint. Tens of millions of spiritual seekers summon his name and example. But the real Francis-both his complicated personality and his complex theology-have been misunderstood for centuries.In 1228, Pope Gregory IX rushed to canonize St. Francis only two years after his death. Soon thereafter, the Church eliminated significant aspects of his biography from the public record. For Francis's early life was defined by his profli...

Clare of Assisi: A Woman of Light, Grit, and FaithFor centuries, Clare of Assisi has been known primarily as the devoted companion of Saint Francis. But Clare was far more than just a follower—she was a bold and visionary woman who chose a life of radical faith, sacrificing wealth, comfort, and status to embrace a calling unlike any other.In Clare of Assisi, acclaimed author Wendy Murray brings this extraordinary medieval saint to life, uncovering ...

Has Evangelical Christianity become a political entity?What is the difference between “evangelical” and “evangelism”?Do evangelicals literally believe the Bible?Thirty-five percent of Americans today are evangelical Christians, yet many people are uncertain of what that term actually means. The Beliefnet® Guide to Evangelical Christianity offers a clear, unbiased description of evangelical beliefs and practices—including how they have change...

The Missouri River Basin is home to thousands of bird species that migrate across the Great Plains of North America each year, marking the seasonal cycle and filling the air with their song. In time immemorial, Native inhabitants of this vast region established alliances with birds that helped them to connect with the gods, to learn the workings of nature, and to live well.This book integrates published and archival sources covering archaeology, ethnohistory, historical ethnography...

Katherine, the winning and slightly disturbing twenty-three-year-old narrator of A Carnivore's Inquiry, journeys from literary New York to rural Maine and Mexico City trailed, everywhere she goes, by a string of murders.

Positive shifts in attitudes mean that emphasis is now being placed on the person with dementia and their personal relationships, rather than the illness. There is also growing recognition of the significance of a person's spiritual life in forming an essential basis for their sense of identity, and in providing them with a resource for coping.Offering an inter-disciplinary approach to spirituality and personhood in dementia care, the contributors to this book are leading practitio...

Winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Non-FictionWinner of the 2011 National Book Award for Non-FictionOne of the world's most celebrated scholars, Stephen Greenblatt has crafted both an innovative work of history and a thrilling story of discovery, in which one manuscript, plucked from a thousand years of neglect, changed the course of human thought and made possible the world as we know it.Nearly six hundred years ago, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late...

One man shares the story of his transformation from evangelical Christian to atheist and examines the train of thought that brought him there.After almost twenty years of evangelical preaching, missionizing, and Christian songwriting, Dan Barker "threw out the bathwater and discovered that there is no baby." In Godless, Barker describes the intellectual and psychological path he followed in moving from fundamentalism to freethought. Godless include...

"Unexpectedly delightful reading—there is much to learn from the buck-toothed rodents of yore" ( National Post).Beavers, those icons of industriousness, have been gnawing down trees, building dams, shaping the land, and creating critical habitat in North America for at least a million years. Once one of the continent's most ubiquitous mammals, they ranged from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the Rio Grande to the edge of the northern tundra. Wherever...

The riveting story of Pope St. Celestine V, the pope who retired from the papacy.At the close of the tumultuous Middle Ages, there lived a man who seemed destined from birth to save the world. His name was Peter Morrone, a hermit, a founder of a religious order, and, depending on whom you talk to, a reformer, an instigator, a prophet, a coward, a saint, and possibly the victim of murder. A stroke of fate would, practically overnight, transform this humble servant of God into the mo...

When four religious leaders walk across the road, it's not the beginning of a joke. It's the start of one of the most important conversations in today's world.Can you be a committed Christian without having to condemn or convert people of other faiths? Is it possible to affirm other religious traditions without watering down your own?In his most important book yet, widely acclaimed author and speaker Brian McLaren proposes a new faith alternative, one built...