Waiting for the Apocalypse: A Memoir of Faith and Family

Waiting for the Apocalypse: A Memoir of Faith and Family PDF Author: Veronica Chater
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393073548
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Growing up Catholic in a family where the reforms of Vatican II are seen as the work of Satan. It is 1972, and Veronica Chater's parents believe that Vatican II's liberalization has corrupted the Catholic Church, inviting the Holy Chastisement—an apocalypse prophesied by three shepherds in Fatima, Portugal. To spare his family this horror, Veronica's father quits the highway patrol, sells everything, and moves the family of eight from California to an isolated village near Fatima. But Portugal is no Catholic utopia, and the family schleps home penniless to join the nascent Catholic counterrevolution: attending the Latin Mass in truck garages and abandoned buildings, serving meals to religious soldiers, breeding a new member of the faithful every year. As Veronica comes of age on the fringes of the American Dream, she rebels against a fanaticism that forbids anything modern—clothes, movies, or music. This is the story, both sad and funny, of a family torn apart by religion and brought back together in spite of the injuries it inflicted on itself.

Waiting for the Apocalypse: A Memoir of Faith and Family

Waiting for the Apocalypse: A Memoir of Faith and Family PDF Author: Veronica Chater
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393073548
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Growing up Catholic in a family where the reforms of Vatican II are seen as the work of Satan. It is 1972, and Veronica Chater's parents believe that Vatican II's liberalization has corrupted the Catholic Church, inviting the Holy Chastisement—an apocalypse prophesied by three shepherds in Fatima, Portugal. To spare his family this horror, Veronica's father quits the highway patrol, sells everything, and moves the family of eight from California to an isolated village near Fatima. But Portugal is no Catholic utopia, and the family schleps home penniless to join the nascent Catholic counterrevolution: attending the Latin Mass in truck garages and abandoned buildings, serving meals to religious soldiers, breeding a new member of the faithful every year. As Veronica comes of age on the fringes of the American Dream, she rebels against a fanaticism that forbids anything modern—clothes, movies, or music. This is the story, both sad and funny, of a family torn apart by religion and brought back together in spite of the injuries it inflicted on itself.

Waiting for the Apocalypse: A Memoir of Faith and Family

Waiting for the Apocalypse: A Memoir of Faith and Family PDF Author: Veronica Chater
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393066037
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
Recounts the author's unusual early life growing up in a large, very conservative Catholic family soon after the changes resulting from the Second Vatican Council, dealing with the family's extreme reaction to these changes with humor and openness.

Spirituality and the Writer

Spirituality and the Writer PDF Author: Thomas Larson
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 0804041040
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
Today, the surprisingly elastic form of the memoir embraces subjects that include dying, illness, loss, relationships, and self-awareness. Writing to reveal the inner self—the pilgrimage into one’s spiritual and/or religious nature—is a primary calling. Contemporary memoirists are exploring this field with innovative storytelling, rigorous craft, and new styles of confessional authorship. Now, Thomas Larson brings his expertise as a critic, reader, and teacher to the boldly evolving and improvisatory world of spiritual literature. In his book-length essay Spirituality and the Writer, Larson surveys the literary insights of authors old and new who have shaped religious autobiography and spiritual memoir—from Augustine to Thomas Merton, from Peter Matthiessen to Cheryl Strayed. He holds them to an exacting standard: they must render transcendent experience in the writing itself. Only when the writer’s craft prevails can the fleeting and profound personal truths of the spirit be captured. Like its predecessor, Larson’s The Memoir and the Memoirist, Spirituality and the Writer will find a home in writing classrooms and book groups, and be a resource for students, teachers, and writers who seek guidance with exploring their spiritual lives.

When Art Disrupts Religion

When Art Disrupts Religion PDF Author: Philip S. Francis
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190279788
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
The stories gathered in these pages lay bare the power of the arts to unsettle and rework deeply ingrained religious beliefs and practices. This book grounds its narrative in the accounts of 82 Evangelicals who underwent a sea-change of religious identity through the intervention of the arts. "There never would have been an undoing of my conservative Evangelical worldview" confides one young man, "without my encounter with the transcendent work of Mark Rothko on that rainy afternoon in London's Tate Modern." "The characters in The Brothers Karamazov began to feel like family to me," reports another individual, "and the doubts of Ivan Karamazov slowly saturated my soul." As their stories unfold, the subjects of the study describe the arts as sources of, by turns, "defamiliarization," "comfort in uncertainty," "a stand-in for faith" and a "surrogate transcendence." Drawing on memoirs, interviews, and field notes, Philip Salim Franics explores the complex interrelationship of religion and art in the modern West, and offers an important new resource for on-going debates about the role of the arts in education and social life.

Sacred Languages of the World

Sacred Languages of the World PDF Author: Brian P. Bennett
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118970764
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
A fascinating comparative account of sacred languages and their role in and beyond religion —written for a broad, interdisciplinary audience Sacred languages have been used for foundational texts, liturgy, and ritual for millennia, and many have remained virtually unchanged through the centuries. While the vital relationship between language and religion has been long acknowledged, new research and thinking across an array of disciplines including religious studies, sociolinguistics, sociology, linguistics, and even neurolinguistics has resulted in a renewed interest in the area. This fascinating and informative book draws on Christian, Islamic, Hindu, Judaic, and Buddhist traditions to provide a concise and accessible introduction to the phenomenon of sacred languages. The book takes a strongly comparative, wide-ranging approach to exploring ways in which ancient religious languages, such as Latin, Pali, Church Slavonic, and Hebrew continue to shape the beliefs and practices of religious communities around the world. Informed by both comparative religion and sociolinguistics, it traces the histories of sacred languages, the myths and doctrines that explain their origin and value, the various ways they are used, the sectarian debates that shadow them, and the technological innovations that propel them forward in the twenty-first century. A comprehensive but succinct account of the role and importance of language within religion Takes an interdisciplinary approach which will appeal to students and scholars across an array of disciplines, including religious studies, sociology of religion, sociolinguistics, and linguistics Provides a strongly comparative exploration, drawing on Christian, Islamic, Hindu, Judaic, and Buddhist traditions Uses numerous examples and ties historic debates with contemporary situations Satisfies the rapidly growing demand for books on the subject among both academics and general readers Sacred Languages of the World is a must-read for students of religion and language, scripture, religious literacy, education and language, the sociology of religion, sociolinguistics. It will also have strong appeal among general readers with an interest comparative religion, history, cultural criticism, communication studies, and more.

Apocalypse Child

Apocalypse Child PDF Author: Flor Edwards
Publisher: Turner Publishing Company
ISBN: 1683367707
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
For the first thirteen years of her life, Flor Edwards grew up in the Children of God. The group's nomadic existence was based on the belief that, as God's chosen people, they would be saved in the impending apocalypse that would envelop the rest of the world in 1993. Flor would be thirteen years old. The group's charismatic leader, Father David, kept the family on the move, from Los Angeles to Bangkok to Chicago, where they would eventually disband, leaving Flor to make sense of the foreign world of mainstream society around her. Apocalypse Child is a cathartic journey through Flor's memories of growing up within a group with unconventional views on education, religion, and sex. Whimsically referring to herself as a real life Kimmy Schmidt, Edwards's clear-eyed memoir is a story of survival in a childhood lived on the fringes.

Library Journal

Library Journal PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Libraries
Languages : en
Pages : 874

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Book Description


Saints As They Really Are

Saints As They Really Are PDF Author: Michael Plekon
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN: 0268089825
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
In his new book, Saints As They Really Are, priest and scholar Michael Plekon traces the spiritual journeys of several American Christians, using their memoirs and other writings. These “saints-in-the-making” show all their doubts and imperfections as they reflect on their search for God and their efforts to lead holy lives. They are gifted yet ordinary women and men trying to follow Christ within their flawed and broken humanity—“saints as they really are,” as Dorothy Day put it. Saints As They Really Are is the third book in Plekon’s critically acclaimed series on saints and holiness in our time. He draws on the autobiographical work of Dorothy Day, Peter Berger, Thomas Merton, Kathleen Norris, and Barbara Brown Taylor, among others, as well as from his own experiences as a Carmelite seminarian and brother. Plekon shares the power of these individuals’ stories as they unfold. The book offers a strong argument that our failings and weaknesses are not disqualifications to holiness. Plekon further confronts the institutional church and its relationship to individuals seeking God, focusing on some of the challenges to this search—the destructive potential of religion and religious institutions, as well as our personal tendencies to extremism, overwork, pious obsessions, and legalism. But he also underscores the healing qualities of faith and the spiritual life. Plekon's insights will help readers better understand their own spiritual pilgrimages as they learn how others have dealt with the trials and joys of their path to everyday holiness.

The Book of Mormon Girl

The Book of Mormon Girl PDF Author: Joanna Brooks
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1451699697
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
From her days of feeling like “a root beer among the Cokes”—Coca-Cola being a forbidden fruit for Mormon girls like her—Joanna Brooks always understood that being a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints set her apart from others. But, in her eyes, that made her special; the devout LDS home she grew up in was filled with love, spirituality, and an emphasis on service. With Marie Osmond as her celebrity role model and plenty of Sunday School teachers to fill in the rest of the details, Joanna felt warmly embraced by the community that was such an integral part of her family. But as she grew older, Joanna began to wrestle with some tenets of her religion, including the Church’s stance on women’s rights and homosexuality. In 1993, when the Church excommunicated a group of feminists for speaking out about an LDS controversy, Joanna found herself searching for a way to live by the leadings of her heart and the faith she loved. The Book of Mormon Girl is a story about leaving behind the innocence of childhood belief and embracing the complications and heartbreaks that come to every adult life of faith. Joanna’s journey through her faith explores a side of the religion that is rarely put on display: its humanity, its tenderness, its humor, its internal struggles. In Joanna’s hands, the everyday experience of being a Mormon—without polygamy, without fundamentalism—unfolds in fascinating detail. With its revelations about a faith so often misunderstood and characterized by secrecy, The Book of Mormon Girl is a welcome advocate and necessary guide.

New Books on Women and Feminism

New Books on Women and Feminism PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Feminism
Languages : en
Pages : 112

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Book Description