Writing Naked delivers raw, skin-scratched emotion from a writer who has struggled his entire to life to look himself in the mirror and say, "Michael, I love you." In this debut essay collection, Michael Murray invites you to follow him on a meandering journey to witness glimpses of the moments in his life that have brought him to here-- a place of solace and heart.Essays, each one ripe with story, work to understand his purpose in life. From his first day on earth to his st...

THIS IS NOT A CULTIVATION BOOK! THIS IS A FIELD GUIDE TO HOWCARNIVOROUS PLANTS ACTUALLY FUNCTION.Carnivorous plants have a way of waking up the child in all of us. I wrote Plant Carnivory to capture that moment of surprise when you realize the plant in front of you is not simply alive, but active, responsive, and hunting.Written for nature lovers, science enthusiasts, and curious general readers, Plant Carnivory explores the how and why behind these extraordinary pla...

Valley Ridge, Virginia is the kind of small town that believes itself beyond the reach of darkness —a place tucked against the Blue Ridge Mountains where people know hard winters, but not the kind of loss that leaves an empty chair at the dinner table. That illusion shatters the night eighteen-year-old star pitcher Alex Trent throws a no-hitter and vanishes.What looks at first like a missing-person case soon reveals something far worse moving through the woods surrounding Valley Ri...

We all want a world where God shields us from suffering. But Jesus' final day on earth is a reminder that God is in the suffering with us. When we walk the broken road with Jesus, light glimmers in darkness, and hope peeks out from despair.Every Easter Sunday, Christians celebrate the resurrection of Jesus. But the empty tomb is not a story of instant hope. It's the end of a long journey marked by suffering.The painful road Jesus traveled on the da...

The Book of Jonah Is More Than a Fish Tale…Jonah is one of the most famous stories in the Bible. Your classic "guy meets fish" story.Guy meets fish. Fish swallows guy. Fish spits guy out on God's command.It's easy to view Jonah as a nice little Bible story with a clear moral: Obey God or get eaten by a whale. (Or big fish.)But it's so much more than that!Jonah flips everything we'd expect from a Bible story upside d...

Have You Ever Considered the Fiction of Jesus?And by that, I mean the short, fictitious stories he told as he traveled from village to village. Stories about…A generous boss who paid all his employees the same wage, no matter what time they clocked into work.A man who threw a grand dinner banquet but welcomed a bunch of nobodies to crash the party.A despised stranger who stopped to help an injured ma...

When Jesus Walked This Earth, He Spent Time With the Messes...A lonely thief.An unwelcome dinner guest.A death-row criminal facing his final hours on earth.What do all of these people have in common?They all faced the messiness of life. Some made the mess themselves. Some were thrown headfirst into a mess through no fault of their own.Then something changed. It wasn't that they suddenly became unmessy. But they each ...

Pilgrimage, as a global activity linked to the sacred, speaks to the special significance of persons, places and events. This book relates these sentiments to the curatorship of the Camino de Santiago that comprises a lattice of European pilgrimage itineraries converging at Santiago de Compostela in northwest Spain. The detailed analysis focuses on the management of pilgrimage settings as heritage and tourism linked to the shrine of Saint James and gives particular attention to investment ...

This book provides a concise introduction to the theoretical and methodological issues around the social representation of health and illness across the lifespan. Moving from the traditional conception of health and illness as clinical entities to a more wide-ranging definition, it considers the value of social representation theory in offering innovative insights into the popular understanding of health and illness, and the interplay between individual experiences and broader socio-cultur...

WRITING NAKED delivers raw, skin-scratched emotion from a writer who has struggled his entire to life to look himself in the mirror and say, "Michael, I love you." In this debut essay collection, Michael Murray invites you to follow him on a meandering journey to witness glimpses of the moments in his life that have brought him to here—a place of solace and heart.Essays, each one ripe with story, work to understand his purpose in life. From his first day on earth t...

What if the secret to becoming a great athlete wasn't about talent or perfect timing, but about resilience and refusing to quit?We've all been told that to succeed in sports, you need raw talent, flawless technique, and specializing at an early age. But what if the real key to greatness is something much deeper?If you've ever felt like an underdog, wondering if you have what it takes to make it, Chasing the Goal shows you how the average athlete ca...

Health Psychology takes a truly international and critical biopsychosocial approach, providing students with a holistic understanding of health behaviour, culture and change. Thoroughly updated with the latest research, this comprehensive introduction to foundational and cutting-edge topics in health psychology gives you the tools you need to critically appraise theory and research, and to apply this knowledge to real-world public health issues.Praised for its coverage of ...