Spirituality

For centuries, poems have been written describing God's simple graces. Saint Alphonsus Liguori, the founder of the Redemptorist Order, was a great poet who conveyed God's love through meaningful and poignant verse.

Some of the most prolific and well-known poets of the past 150 years are included in this compilation and continue the tradition of using poems for prayer, meditation, and loving God.

The selected poems in this body of work are divided into themes common to all human experiences, including love, forgiveness, commitment, faith, and hope. The chapters are shaped to give the reader a chance to hear the deep stirring of their hearts put into words, and this can be done on an individual basis or as lectio divina, or group prayer, when a verse is read aloud to the group.

Some of the poets included in the book are Anna Akhmatova, Emily Dickinson, Robert Hayden and Naomi Shihab Nye writing about God's love, nature, hope, faith, and heaven. Wendell Berry writes of peace and salvation, and Patrick Kavanagh of love and forgiveness.

Poetry is a way of expressing extraordinary thought in a simple fashion; these poems express intense emotions of love, thankfulness, wonder, and peace. Throughout the years, simple graces have inspired poets to write and readers to reflect on God's beauty and love that is all around us.

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Hardcover

The bishop, Bible scholar, modern heir to C. S. Lewis, and revered author of Simply Christian and Simply Jesus offers a fresh look at the Gospel, explaining why Jesus' message is "good news" and why it is more timely and transforming today than we know.

The Gospel means good news. But if the message has been around for 2,000 years, what makes it significant today? What's so "good" about stories involving damnation, violence, and a God who sacrifices his only son?

Noted Bible scholar N.T. Wright shows us how Christians today have lost sight of what the "good news" of the gospel really is. In Simply Good News, he takes us back in time to reveal how the people of the first-century--the gospel's original audience--would have received Jesus' message. He offer a clear and thoughtful analysis of what the "good news" really is, and applies it to our lives today, revealing its power to transform us.

As a long-time Christian, Heather Kopp never expected to become an out-of-control alcoholic who kept private stashes of booze all over the place--tucked behind books in her study, zipped into a special compartment in her oversized purse, at the back of her closet stuffed inside her boots.

Even as her career and marriage teetered on the brink, Kopp couldn't get a grip, desperately hiding the true extent of her drinking from the rest of the world--her husband included. During the day she wrote books about God and prayer and family. At night she'd locked herself in her bathroom to guzzle chardonnay.

For her, as for many Christians who struggle with addiction, overwhelming shame and confusion only made things worse. Why wasn't her faith enough to save her? Why didn't repentance, Bible reading and prayer work? Where was God?

Meanwhile, as she watched in horror, her grown son descended into his own nightmare of drugs and alcohol. She feared for his life, yet she couldn't stop drinking long enough to help him--or find a way out for herself.

Until the day everything changed.

Engaging, funny and bracingly honest, Kopp shares her remarkable journey into darkness...and back to the light again. Her story reveals the unique challenges and spiritual conundrums Christians face when they become ensnared in an addiction, and the redemption that's possible when we finally reach the end of ourselves.

If you love Jesus but shop too much, drink too much, eat too much, crush on men who aren't your husband, or otherwise fixate on doing things you hate but can't stop doing, SOBER MERCIES is for you.

As you follow Kopp's sincere, stumbling journey toward freedom and a deeply satisfying relationship with God, you'll find renewed hope--and practical steps of recovery--for your own journey.

A lush, lyrical debut from a vibrant new poetic voice

A sparrow like a "fumbled punch line" is lost in an airport; a man translating Ovid is transfigured by witnessing a massacre in Jamestown in 1621; a woman smiles seductively as the skin on her back is opened out like a wing; a lizard upon a laptop shimmers with the true life, primitive and binary, of our modern information age.
In the sonically rich, formally restless poems of this debut collection, Song & Error, the thread that unravels all we think we know of the world is plucked loose and drawn from a seal's beached corpse. Uniting past and present, history and autobiography, Averill Curdy's poems strive to endure within "the crease of transformation" and to speak-sing-of that terrible beauty.

The Song of Songs is one of the greatest pieces oferotic literature ever written. Consisting of intenseexpressions of physical love, this classic poem describesthe voluptuous beauty of lovers longing forone another. With a uniquely feminine perspective, its language is seductive and intimate, conveyingan immediate, sensuous, and intoxicating desire.

This new, illustrated adaptation of the Songof Songs by Judith Ernst renders this literary jewelaccessible to a new generation of readers. Whileretaining much of the beloved phrasing from theKing James Bible, Ernst has made stylistic changesthat give the text a fresh and arresting charm. Inaddition, twelve detailed gouache paintings appropriatelycapture the poem's moods of love by portrayinga woman longing for her lover. Interspersedbetween sections of the poem and their accompanyingillustrations is short, thoughtful commentaryto help readers understand ancient references inthe text.

Brilliantly regaining the erotic power, poeticbeauty, and authentic experience of the text, thisupdated and reenvisioned Song of Songs restoresfor modern audiences the same seductive spellthat has captivated readers for thousands of years.