Ackerman, parish pastor, spiritual director, and consultant on spiritual formation, provides an excellent guide for clergy desiring a congregation-wide approach to developing spirituality rooted in the life of the congregation. A six-week program focuses on developing individuals' spirituality in small groups and includes leader training and course plans. Practical suggestions assist in developing the "corporate spirituality" of congregations.

All ancient myths comprise observations of Venus, Mars and Mercury, which approached or orbited close to the Earth between 3700 and 687 BC. Egyptian texts, correctly interpreted, contain the most detailed observations of these planets and make clear the significance of their cyclic 30-year interactions with the Earth. Every individual witnessed and experienced the resulting effects on the Earth, but the Egyptians expressed a comprehension of astrophysics far deeper than modern science, which ...

Learning how to attend to what God is doing right now is the lifelong work of (and play) of the person of faith. Helping people to attend to God is the central work of the congregation. It all begins with learning to listen to God as a community and to notice what God is doing in our life together. John Ackerman offers two four-step models and several additional tools that help us attend to the mystery at the center of our lives and our congregations.

Based upon hymns in praise of Mars, Venus, and Mercury visible in the heavens close to Earth, the Rig Veda reveals ninety-nine 30-year cyclic encounters by which the Earth's lithosphere was terra-formed between 3687 and 687 BC. During this entire Vedic Period modern Flora fell to the Earth as Soma (manna) along with the soil and water in which it flourished.Ancient texts: reveal the force that drove the 'Continental Drift' of Alfred Wegener and produced the multi-layered granite cr...

The Mindful Parent changes all that. It’s a timely and liberating journey back to the heart of what really matters — a deep and lasting relationship with our children. Its unique approach leads us to that deep connection by weaving together the latest in neuroscience, personal story and deceptively simple strategies that are so kind and effective it’s hard not to use them. Each chapter re-examines a different area of our parenting lives — our busyness and stress levels; our more difficult ...

What if rhetoric and climate are intimately connected? Taking climates to be rhetorical and rhetoric to be climatic, A Reading Group offers a generative framework for making sense of rhetorical studies as they grapple with the challenges posed by antiracist, decolonial, affective, ecological, and more-than-human scholarship to a tradition with a long history of being centered around individual, usually privileged, human agents wielding language as their principal instrument. Understanding ...

A survey of the innovative scholarship emerging at the intersections of rhetoric, and fieldworkA variety of research areas within rhetorical studies—including everyday and public rhetorics, space and place-based work, material and ecological approaches, environmental communication, technical communication, and critical and participatory action research, among others—have increasingly called for ethnographic fieldwork that grounds the study of rhetoric with...

Exploring the myriad ways in which we go about preserving what might otherwise be forfeited.Whether trained specialists or lay people who care about something, preservationists come from every stratum of life. The archivist, the linguist, the local town historian. The paleontologist, the heirloom seed-saver, the family photographer, the Monuments Men. Old two-by-two Noah and taxonomist Linnaeus. The suburban girl who collects enough yard sale books to buil...

The Winter 2023-24 Issue. Ploughshares is an award-winning journal of new writing. Since 1971, Ploughshares has discovered and cultivated the freshest voices in contemporary American literature, and now provides readers with thoughtful and entertaining literature in a variety of formats. Find out why the New York Times named Ploughshares “the Triton among minnows.”The Winter 2023-24 Issue, edited by Ladette Randolph, features poetry and prose by Richard Bausch, Jesse Lee Kercheval,...

Life is to be lived. Experiences gained, pleasures sampled. But, troublingly, when you are a classic author your thoughts sometimes lean towards darker thoughts. Within the space of a few paragraphs these literary masters shape a new world; more difficult experiences, darker pleasures. Life becomes uneasy, a queasy feeling, perhaps a repulsion here, a disgust there and very soon what was cosy, warm and comfortable becomes cold, painful, even horrific.The talents of their pens now f...

Compelling case studies and criticism of rhetorical practices aimed at social changeThe Public Work of Rhetoric presents the art of rhetorical techné as a contemporary praxis for civic engagement and social change, which is necessarily inclusive of people inside and outside the academy. In this provocative call to action, editors John M. Ackerman and David J. Coogan, along with seventeen other accomplished contributors, offer case studies and criticism on ...

This open access book focuses on the public health crisis of youth suicide and provides a review of current research and prevention practices. It addresses important topics, including suicide epidemiology, suicide risk detection in school and medical settings, critical cultural considerations, and approaches to lethal means safety. This book offers cutting-edge research on emerging discoveries in the neurobiology of suicide, psychopharmacology, and machine learning. It focuses on upstream ...