Reprint of the original, first published in 1875.

Embark on an incredible transformative adventure and witness one woman’s life-changing journey from despair to liberation. Beautifully written as an authentic window into one single mother’s remarkable journey through the rich culture of Barcelona, Venturing Forth is a fascinating and deeply inspiring memoir that explores the hard-won lessons she discovered while caring for two young toddlers and navigating a global pandemic. Caught in the aftermath of an unraveling marriage, author and wellness coach Hsin Chen bares her soul, revealing how she rose from the ashes and tapped into a wellspring of inner resilience to overcome COVID, mental health struggles, and parenting doubts to forge a flourishing future for her children. Sharing the raw and gritty details of her tumultuous four-year-long journey, alongside her many dating adventures in the wake of her divorce, Hsin’s story will speak to the souls of anyone who has struggled with seemingly insurmountable hardship. Venturing Forth gently reminds us that we hold immense power for self-transformation, inviting us to break free from our comfort zones, embrace risks, practice deeper self-awareness, and tackle uncertainty with a revitalized sense of curiosity and adventure. As a powerful read for single parents – or for anyone who feels overwhelmed by the challenges of life – Hsin’s story is a breath of fresh air, standing as a testament to the unending resilience of the human spirit. This memoir shows us there’s a beautiful journey awaiting us if we take the plunge and cross the bridge of adversity. Venturing Forth is more than a memoir – it’s a lifeline for anyone who needs a guiding light or a word of wisdom for their journey. Are you ready to discover how Hsin’s story could change your life?

We live in a profoundly spiritual age, but not in any good way. Huge swaths of American culture are driven by manic spiritual anxiety and relentless supernatural worry. Radicals and traditionalists, liberals and conservatives, together with politicians, artists, environmentalists, followers of food fads, and the chattering classes of television commentators: America is filled with people frantically seeking confirmation of their own essential goodness. We are a nation desperate to stand of the side of morality--to know that we are righteous and dwell in the light. In An Anxious Age, Joseph Bottum offers an account of modern America, presented as a morality tale formed by a collision of spiritual disturbances. And the cause, he claims, is the most significant and least noticed historical fact of the last fifty years: the collapse of the mainline Protestant churches that were the source of social consensus and cultural unity. Our dangerous spiritual anxieties, broken loose from the churches that once contained them, now madden everything in American life. Updating The Protestant Ethic and the Sprit of Capitalism, Max Weber's sociological classic, An Anxious Age undertakes two case studies of contemporary social classes adrift in a nation without the religious understandings that gave them meaning. Looking at the college-educated elite he calls "the Poster Children," Bottum sees the post-Protestant heirs of the old mainline Protestant domination of culture: dutiful descendants who claim the high social position of their Christian ancestors even while they reject their ancestors' Christianity. Turning to the Swallows of Capistrano, the Catholics formed by the pontificate of John Paul II, Bottum evaluates the early victories--and later defeats--of the attempt to substitute Catholicism for the dying mainline voice in public life. Sweeping across American intellectual and cultural history, An Anxious Age traces the course of national religion and warns about the strange angels and even stranger demons with which we now wrestle. Insightful and contrarian, wise and unexpected, An Anxious Age ranks among the great modern accounts of American culture.

In medieval and Renaissance Europe, mercenaries--professional soldiers who fought for money or other rewards--played violent, colorful, international roles in warfare, but they have received relatively little scholarly attention. In this book a large number of vignettes portray their activities in Western Europe over a period of nearly 900 years, from the Merovingian mercenaries of 752 through the Thirty Years' War, which ended in 1648. Intended as an introduction to the subject and drawing heavily on contemporary first-person accounts, the book creates a vivid but balanced mosaic of the many thousands of mercenaries who were hired to fight for various employers.