The author, blinded by a rare eye disease, recounts his experiences hiking with his guide dog, Orient, from Georgia to Maine on the Appalachian Trail and describes how his faith helped sustain him along the trail

Rejecting the standard method of obtaining a guide dog, Julie, a blind woman, sets out on a quest to train her own dog as a guide. With a deep desire to combine her joy of dogs and her soul's need to come to terms with the most secret, never confessed, doubts about her capabilities as a blind person, Julie chooses Monty, a stray, who tries hard to become a respectable guide dog. Together they set out on a year long journey to find trust in each other and in themselves. The pair struggle to find their way, delighting in the triumphs and trying not to be overcome with doubts they experience in the year leading up to the day Monty accompanies Julie to work for the first time.

Develop and enhance Leadership Courage to exceed every expectation Everyday Courage for School Leaders examines the inner strength, will power, and resilience with which principals and administrators can face the daily challenges and expectations of educating all students. Based on three foundational ideas at the core of courage, this thought-provoking guide includes: - How to Take Action: make specific plans to activate moral courage, intellectual courage, empathetic courage, and disciplined courage - Daily Practices: exercises in accountability, trust, and risk-taking maintain courageous leadership for equity, excellence, and inclusion - Courage Quotient: assess and consider your areas of strength and opportunities for growth

What is courage and why is it one of the oldest and most universally admired virtues? How is it relevant in the world today, and what contemporary forms does it take? In this insightful and crisply written book, Geoffrey Scarre examines these questions and many more. He begins by defining courage, asking how it differs from fearlessness, recklessness and fortitude, and why people are often more willing to ascribe it to others than to avow it for themselves. He also asks whether courage can serve bad ends as well as good, and whether it can sometimes promote confrontation over compromise and dialogue. On Courage explores the ideas of Aristotle, Aquinas and many later philosophers who have written about courage, as well as drawing on classic and recent examples of courage in politics and fiction, including the German anti-Nazi "White Rose Movement", the modern phenomenon of "whistle-blowing", and Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage.

Harper's Spiritual Teacher Speaks is an excellent follow-up to his popular and powerful book, God's Gifts: Spiritual Writings. Spiritual Teacher Speaks contains a series of brief prose or vignettes wherein a wise spiritual teacher answers questions on the topics of love, peace, giving, forgiveness, purpose and mission in life, freedom, truth, courage, and pain versus pleasure. Also, Harper continues his tradition of sculpting words into beautiful poems that have therapeutic, educational, and inspirational value. In Spiritual Teacher Speaks, thepoems are very much centered on the timely subjects of purpose and mission in life, Divine love, forgiveness, self- and other-acceptance, justice, pain and human suffering, spirit of goodness within us, and self-management of negative impulses and emotions in daily living. His powerful poem, "Intellectual Renegade," which is four pages in length, addresses universal justice and fairness now and throughout history for all human beings and groups. Reviewers of the book manuscript comment that "Intellectual Renegade" is destined to become a favorite and a classic poem. Along with prose and poems, Spiritual Teacher Speaks includes more than 25 pages of insightful and inspirational quotations by the author.

This two-volume work examines far-reaching debates on the concept of courage from Greek antiquity to the Christian and mediaeval periods, as well as the modern era. Volume 1 explains how competing accounts of epistêmê, rational wisdom, and truth dominated classical antiquity. Early Christian and mediaeval thinkers, in contrast, favoured fortitude founded on faith and fear of God over philosophical reasoning left to its own devices. Volume 2 turns to theories of courage from the early modern period to the present. It shows how the twin laws of polis and physis are at the heart of post-medieval thought. Courage is found at the crossroads of love and dread, freedom and fate, happiness and suffering, as well as power and submission to the ruling order. The later influence of evolutionism, existentialism, and the social and natural sciences on moral philosophy is also addressed at some length. The protection of people's best interests, the passions and powers of the human will, and the rule of active energy in all aspects of life supplant courage formerly viewed through the lens of reason or faith, or a combination of the two. These new ideas, paradoxically, herald the end of the ethics of courage. They also undermine the courage of ethical thinking. Courage is no longer an end in itself, nor is it a means to happiness "at the end." Regardless of what Gandhi, Tillich, and Foucault have to say about the topic, late modernity and the global age witness a marked loss of interest in courage as an idea worthy of conceptual investigation. Debates about the moral implications of courage give way to the value-free science of resilience, which studies how people can recover from past trauma and find wellness, primarily in the realm of physis.

ABOUT THE BOOK As Harper's 10th book of poetry with prose, Beyond Fear beautifully addresses life fears and daily fears, both real and imagined, that we encounter and perceive as human beings. Typical of all of Dr. Harper's creative books, Beyond Fear also contains insightful and inspirational quotes in a section at the end of the book. Examples of poem titles from Beyond Fear include "Courage Has No Fear," "Beyond Fear," "Our Greatest Fears," "Suffering Can Be a Blessing," "Living Outside Our Body," "Intentional Happiness," "Trials and Triumphs," "Apology from Honorable Men to Woman and Girl," "In Honor of a Beggar Woman," "Don't Be Afraid to Help," "A Prayer for Courage," "Letter to God and Ancestors," "Words, So Essential to Our Lives," "Which Way Is It to Sleepy Town?," "Living Within an Oyster Shell," "Emotional Freedom," and "Do You Have the Strength To Be?"