Friendships serve as a cornerstone to a rich life. Each of these twenty-four accomplished authors share authentic stories that consider the meaning of life affirming, sometimes life-saving or gut-wrenching, and fun realities of investing in each other: think Chicken Soup with adult beverages. The investment in friendship offers a reciprocal return that may support you and your friend throughout life's challenges and joys. Friends: Voices On The Gift Of Companionship presents genuine and literary accounts of shared experiences with those who energize and shape all our days. Share these stories with your friends. Celebrate and clarify the value of friendships. Honor those who have helped you through life's challenges. Acknowledge the profound value of the big friend, the one who moved through life's phases with you. Recognize the importance of the friends who have served as witness to your growth and change. Remember the friends you lost along the way but who brought you and still bring you joy. Learn the value of a friendship that changes. Accept the times no one stood with you. Consider the meaning of the memories no one ever speaks of. Navigate the mostly virtual friendships. Thank the teachers and the givers. Say good-by because it's time or because you have no other choice. Navigate relationships when paths diverge. Thank a friend, by sharing these stories. You are invited to consider, value, and celebrate the friendships of your past, present, and future. We recommend reading with a friend or book group-a great gift.

Live in the love of a God who desires a relationship with you. Throughout A Friendship Like No Other, renowned spiritual director William A. Barry, SJ, explores the premise that God wants to relate to us as a close friend. Barry has contemplated this idea—radical for many Christians—throughout his lifetime, and he explains that it actually traces back to the “developing revelation of God contained in the Bible.” A Friendship Like No Other offers three well-supported and practical sections: prayerful exercises to help lead you to the conviction that God wants your friendship; a close look at objections to this idea; and reflections on experiencing the presence of God and discerning those experiences. Brief, personal meditations are woven throughout. Grounded in biblical tradition and with a clear focus on Ignatian spirituality, this book offers a fresh, heart-changing approach to living joyfully in the freedom of the divine embrace.

In this small but fully packed book, ths authors reflect on one of life's most important experiences. And they do so from the vantage point of a friendship that evolved from a professional acquaintanceship--author and editor--offering firsthand wisdom on being a friend and recognizing a friend.

Interdisciplinary in scope, this collection examines the varied and complex ways in which early modern Europeans imagined, discussed and enacted friendship, a fundamentally elective relationship between individuals otherwise bound in prescribed familial, religious and political associations. The volume is carefully designed to reflect the complexity and multi-faceted nature of early modern friendship, and each chapter comprises a case study of specific contexts, narratives and/or lived friendships. Contributors include scholars of British, French, Italian and Spanish culture, offering literary, historical, religious, and political perspectives. Discourses and Representations of Friendship in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1700 lays the groundwork for a taxonomy of the transformations of friendship discourse in Western Europe and its overlap with emergent views of the psyche and the body, as well as of the relationship of the self to others, classes, social institutions and the state.