It's hard to say, exactly, what's meant by the modern world, but Henry Buckberry never really hooked into it. Born before the First World War and the oldest boy in a family of thirteen kids, he left the open, rolling, potholed prairie of North Dakota in 1921 for the dark, dense, dangerous woods of northern Wisconsin, where he learned to fish, trap, hunt, lumberjack, and farm. Although he lived into the twenty-first century (the second volume of these stories, A Windfall Homestead, will inch us closer to the information super-highway), it could be said that Henry played hooky from the twentieth. With a few allowances for a little new technology, like the Model T, Henry's life represents the end phase of a rural folk culture that has its roots in the Neolithic. Through Henry's stories it's possible to see a long way into the past and then to turn the telescope around in order to put the present under an improvised microscope. Henry didn't have an easy life, but he had a vivid life, a life amazingly free of boredom, aimlessness, or distraction, and his stories convey that vividness from beginning to end. Henry's son Charles Darwin Buckberry--also known as C.D. or Seedy Buckberry--interviewed Henry and arranged the stories in some sort of more or less working order. (Seedy insists he put those stories down with complete fidelity, although he refuses to take a lie-detector test or submit to a Minnesota Multi-Phasic Personality Inventory analysis.) Henry's life, as conveyed here, is also a way to measure the intellectual bulimia (or is it the intellectual anorexia?) of present-day empire consumerism. Here is life before Wal-Mart. Here is life that lives in nature with intense and even fierce physicality. Here is life that sings.

What does it mean to devote yourself wholly to helping others? In Strangers Drowning, Larissa MacFarquhar seeks out people living lives of extreme ethical commitment and tells their deeply intimate stories; their stubborn integrity and their compromises; their bravery and their recklessness; their joys and defeats and wrenching dilemmas. A couple adopts two children in distress. But then they think: If they can change two lives, why not four? Or ten? They adopt twenty. But how do they weigh the needs of unknown children in distress against the needs of the children they already have? Another couple founds a leprosy colony in the wilderness in India, living in huts with no walls, knowing that their two small children may contract leprosy or be eaten by panthers. The children survive. But what if they hadn’t? How would their parents’ risk have been judged? A woman believes that if she spends money on herself, rather than donate it to buy life-saving medicine, then she’s responsible for the deaths that result. She lives on a fraction of her income, but wonders: when is compromise self-indulgence and when is it essential? We honor such generosity and high ideals; but when we call people do-gooders there is skepticism in it, even hostility. Why do moral people make us uneasy? Between her stories, MacFarquhar threads a lively history of the literature, philosophy, social science, and self-help that have contributed to a deep suspicion of do-gooders in Western culture. Through its sympathetic and beautifully vivid storytelling, Strangers Drowning confronts us with fundamental questions about what it means to be human. In a world of strangers drowning in need, how much should we help, and how much can we help? Is it right to care for strangers even at the expense of those we are closest to? Moving and provocative, Strangers Drowning challenges us to think about what we value most, and why.

In volume one of Henry Buckberry's stories (Get Poor Now, Avoid the Rush), we followed Henry from his early childhood in central North Dakota to the dark, dangerous woods of northern Wisconsin. Get Poor Now concluded in September of 1933, with Henry about to survey the devastation of a forest fire that almost burned up his log shack. A Windfall Homestead takes us into the next two decades of Henry's productive, energetic life, as he logs and hunts, clears land for farming, marries, has children, builds a new barn and house from windfall lumber. Henry's life exemplifies the fate of an essentially preindustrial rural culture about to be overwhelmed by post-World War II technology with its comprehensive commercial "culture" extruded by fossil fuel affluence. Henry's was not so much the "greatest" generation as it was the last unself-conscious rural subsistence generation of European heritage. These stories, all told in Henry's voice, were taken down shortly before Henry's death in 2009 by Henry's son Charles Darwin Buckberry, also known as C. D. or Seedy Buckberry. Seedy claims these stories are accurate and true. Readers are advised to suspend their civilized disbelief.

The common understanding of "apocalypse" suggests End Times, Armageddon, and the end of the world. But the Greek word apokalypsis means none of these things. What it does mean is uncovering, disclosing, and revelatory. That "apocalypse" is so widely misunderstood as predestined disaster isn't due to natural evolution in meaning. To penetrate the misuse of apokalypsis is to discover mythic misrepresentation. That is, "apocalypse" doesn't generate End Times but--just the opposite--End Times compels apokalypsis. The actual threat of End Times--explicitly so with weapons of mass destruction and Anthropocene climate change--forces thoughtful people into a search for fundamental causes: Where do these destructive energies originate? Why are we so reluctant to recognize the obvious consequences and resistant to embrace available remedies? Why do we persist in denial and indifference? In these essays, Paul Gilk explores the underlying cultural and religious conventions (both "conservative" and "liberal") that constitute our resistance and refusal. To disclose and uncover those conventions, to dissolve our oblivion, is to awaken to apokalypsis and to realize the depth of our captivity within prevailing mythology, both religious and civilizational. If End Times is the disease, apokalypsis is the cure.

ECPA BESTSELLER • A compelling emotional and spiritual case against hurry and in favor of a slower, simpler way of life “As someone all too familiar with ‘hurry sickness,’ I desperately needed this book.”—Scott Harrison, New York Times best-selling author of Thirst “Who am I becoming?” That was the question nagging pastor and author John Mark Comer. Outwardly, he appeared successful. But inwardly, things weren’t pretty. So he turned to a trusted mentor for guidance and heard these words: “Ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life. Hurry is the great enemy of the spiritual life.” It wasn’t the response he expected, but it was—and continues to be—the answer he needs. Too often we treat the symptoms of toxicity in our modern world instead of trying to pinpoint the cause. A growing number of voices are pointing at hurry, or busyness, as a root of much evil. Within the pages of this book, you’ll find a fascinating roadmap to staying emotionally healthy and spiritually alive in the chaos of the modern world.