In the shadow of World War II, four friends return to their hometown of Savannah, Georgia, forever changed by their experiences overseas. As they return to the familiar streets of their youth, the camaraderie they once cherished feels comforting and alien.Tybee Beach, a symbol of their laid-back summer days, beckons them to reconnect and reclaim the joy they once knew. Together, they embark on an ambitious project: to purchase a plot of land and construct a beach house-an eternal s...

Learn to get in touch with silence within yourself and know that everything in this life has purpose, all events are blessings given to us to learn from.George Bernard ShawIn these essays the author, having gained experience through a remarkable series of diverse occupations and associations, provides his seasoned, is sometimes acerbic opinions on matters of faith, morals, politics, the national economy, foreign affairs and family values.Some of the opinions echo Albert Camus...

Poems compiled of life experiences and observations

Born into heartbreak before he even took his first breath, Thomas Murphy entered the world carrying the weight of tragedy. His father's life was cut short in a devastating motorcycle accident before Thomas was born, leaving a void that would shape his journey. Through pain, loss and ultimately, redemption, growing up on the streets of Liverpool, Thomas faced a world that offered little comfort and even fewer chances. His search for his identity led him through dark and dangerous chapters, ...

These are poems compiled over twenty years of life experiences.

How can a pastor, whether fresh out of training or with many years of experience, be effective in his ministry?Thomas Murphy, a renowned Presbyterian minister from the late 1800s set out to answer that question in this book.Being effective starts with the pastor's close personal relationship with God, so Murphy spends time exhorting pastors to make their relationship with God paramount in their ministry and teaching them how they should cultivate it over time.Murphy...

The author draws on his own hard-earned wisdom for this series of reflections on spirituality and mental health. He covers a range of experiences including: upsides, downsides, recovery, balance, loving life and spirituality. Bringing together wisdom from psychology and spirituality, he acknowledges the enormous benefit of psychological tools for wellness as well as a spirituality that aims to tell a different story. Ignatian Spirituality is a consistent thread throughout that offers a psy...

In March 1824 a group of angry and intoxicated settlers brutally murdered nine Indians camped along a tributary of Fall Creek. The carnage was recounted in lurid detail in the contemporary press, and the events that followed sparked a national sensation. Murder in Their Hearts: The Fall Creek Massacre tells that, although violence between settlers and Native Americans was not unusual during the early nineteenth century, in this particular incident the white men responsible for the murders ...

Thomas K. Murphy explores the shifting history of European attitudes toward America, utilizing British and French writing from the late eighteenth through the middle of the nineteenth centuries. Murphy studies a rich collage of literary, philosophical, and political writing by Europeans during this era. The book covers four stages in the development of European attitudes: traditional theories and their modification in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the influence of early American...

During the Cold War, the West--especially in the popular media--tended to view communism as a monolithic phenomenon, with little variation throughout the Eastern Bloc. Yet culture and geography contributed to social diversity among and within communist systems.Drawing on interviews with approximately 100 Czechs and Slovaks, the author provides new perspectives on day-to-day life in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. Their recollections paint a more complex picture of the life on ...

A precise and poetic argument for the renewal of transcendental philosophy.The great poets and thinkers of modernity described a situation we still inhabit today: the catastrophic undermining of all foundations, the disorienting relativization of all reference points, the prospect of abandonment to chance and contingency alone--the shipwreck of Mallarmé's Coup de dés. In this precise and poetic work of philosophy, Gabriel Catren sketches out a new "phenoum...

Montaigne called it a ramble; Chesterton the joke of literature; and Hume an ambassador between the worlds of learning and of conversation. But what is an essay, and how did it emerge as a literary form? What are the continuities and contradictions across its history, from Montaigne's 1580 Essais through the familiar intimacies of the Romantic essay, and up to more recent essayists such as Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, and Claudia Rankine? Sometimes called the fourth genre, the e...