Does God Lie? How am I supposed to turn the other cheek? What is a balanced life? Is the statue of David pornography or art? What does it mean to be a Christian? A topical compilation of thoughts and feelings on faith, family, and the work of God in our lives.

In an era of scientific dominance, why does religion still maintain an unshakeable grip over so many lives, dramatically impacting world events? Why did humanity first develop religious constructs and institutions? How has our relationship with the divine evolved over civilisation's history? This book chronicles religion's enduring role across millennia - its profound shaping of both individuals and societies. Reviewing psychological theories, it explores the evolution of our inherent need...

From the longtime host of the New York Yankees’ television broadcasts, ESPN Radio’s The Michael Kay Show, and YES Network’s Emmy Award–winning CenterStage comes an “entertaining…greatest-hits collection” (Kirkus Reviews) of his most memorable interviews with the most intriguing personalities in sports and entertainment—from Jay-Z to Mike Tyson to Serena Williams to Adam Sandler to Bon Jovi to Larry David.Emmy Award–winning television anno...

Combining coverage of both XSLT 2.0 and XPath 2.0, this book is the definitive reference to the final recommendation status versions of both specifications. The authors start by covering the concepts in XSLT and XPath, and then delve into elements, operators, expressions with syntax, usage, and examples. Some of the specific topics covered include XSLT processing model, stylesheet structure, serialization, extensibility, and many others. In addition to online content that includes error co...

Narrative non-fiction about the spiritual lessons learned through the author's experience of watching mother die with Brain an Lung Cancer. The book comprises ten observations of biblical stories of sickness, how the characters dealt with those circumstances, and what we can learn today from these stories. The ten "Lessons" include narrative dialogue from the author's struggle with death, miracles, faith and belief systems.

Michael Kay and Lorin Cary illuminate new aspects of slavery in colonial America by focusing on North Carolina, which has largely been ignored by scholars in favor of the more mature slave systems in the Chesapeake and South Carolina. Kay and Cary demonstrate that North Carolina’s fast-growing slave population, increasingly bound on large plantations, included many slaves born in Africa who continued to stress their African pasts to make sense of their new world. The authors illustrate thi...

My Cannibalized Self: An Autoethnography of Biliteracy Development in Japanese Heritage Language Study is the author's personal account of his attempt to learn Japanese through a masters program in Japanese-English technical translation. Through descriptions of his lived experience as a biracial Japanese American and a lifetime of attempts to learn his heritage language in various contexts, this narrative captures how he used autoethnography and a framework of cannibalism to transform the ...

Of all operas in the standard repertory, none has had a more complicated genesis and textual history than Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann. Based on a highly successful 1851 play inspired by the short stories by the German Romantic writer E.T.A. Hoffmann, the work occupied the last decade of Offenbach’s life. When he died in October 1880, the work was being rehearsed at the Opéra-Comique. At once cut and rearranged, the work was performed from the start in versions that ignored the composer’s...

Maisie Greene, an inquisitive, smart fi ve year old, has an insatiable curiosity for insects, math puzzles, shapes, sounds and the universe in general. But Maisie’s life takes unpredictable turns when she meets, out of the blue, surprising strangers who will change her world forever. ‘Moments that Matter’ is the fi rst book in the trilogy ‘Unexpected Friends’.

Now young adults, composers Maisie Greene and Winstone Garner are looking forward to new opportunities and challenges, surrounded as always by loving parents and meaningful friendships. But not all is smooth sailing as the pair encounters their fair share of trials and tribulations as they seek to continue their promising musical journey together. ‘Sometimes Sadness, Sometimes Smiles’ is the second book in the trilogy ‘Unexpected Friends’.

When esteemed novelist, Vanessa Parker, spends a month in Maine finishing the last book of a trilogy, she vaguely recognizes an elderly couple who are staying at the same hotel. Over the course of the next few weeks Vanessa's remembrances take her back over fifty years, as she begins to recall the couple's affect on her and her friends' lives.

Those of you who consider yourselves freethinkers of whatever type or combination of typesatheist, agnostic, ignostic, humanist, Unitarian, nonreligious, antireligious, secularist, ethical culturist, bright, realist, skeptic, and so forthmay enjoy seeing whether you have or had similar thoughts, ideas, or experiences as me throughout your lives. Or perhaps, as freethinkers often do, you have had totally unique, individual, or different thoughts from those of this particular self-proclaimed...