An invasion of supernatural “other worldly” beings has exploded into this world with one purpose in mind. They have come to be used by God, Jesus Christ, to be a blessing to the inhabitants of a world that seems to be bent on bringing about its own destruction. They are so consumed and filled to overflowing with golden drops of the comfort of who they are that they are willing to sacrifice their own lives out of a love for us in order that we may see the love that Jesus Christ has for us. The question is, do we have eyes to see these “other worldly” beings who are all around us everyday? Maybe if we will look through the eye-gate of our heart we may see them more clearly. There is enduring “Kindness” looking for ways to pour out the golden drops of comfort of who she is upon us to help us in our time of need. There is the unending stamina of beautiful “Joy” bringing the golden drops of who she is and pouring this joy upon us in our time of need. Then we find the strength of “Gentleness” sharing her gentle touch of love upon a cold, hard, and cruel world. As these “other worldly” beings shower their golden drops of comfort upon us how will we receive them? Will we embrace them and allow them to introduce us to Jesus Christ, or will we seek to crucify them and have nothing to do with them? The choice is ours!

The essays in this collection offer readers vivid and varied evidence of the female response to recurring attempts by culture to artificially limit identity along the gendered lines of private and public experience. Calling on voices both familiar and little-known, British and American, black and white, young and old, poor and rich, heterosexual and lesbian, the essayists explore how women within unique personal and historical conditions used life-writing as a means of both self-understanding and connection to a community of sympathetic others, real or imagined. The life-writings within this anthology span the modern history of the genre itself, with writers drawn from as early as the seventeenth century and as late as the 1990s.

Published to mark the 500th anniversary of the events of 1517, Reformation Divided explores the impact in England of the cataclysmic transformations of European Christianity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The religious revolution initiated by Martin Luther is usually referred to as 'The Reformation', a tendentious description implying that the shattering of the medieval religious foundations of Europe was a single process, in which a defective form of Christianity was replaced by one that was unequivocally benign, 'the midwife of the modern world'. The book challenges these assumptions by tracing the ways in which the project of reforming Christendom from within, initiated by Christian 'humanists' like Erasmus and Thomas More, broke apart into conflicting and often murderous energies and ideologies, dividing not only Catholic from Protestant, but creating deep internal rifts within all the churches which emerged from Europe's religious conflicts. The book is in three parts: In 'Thomas More and Heresy', Duffy examines how and why England's greatest humanist apparently abandoned the tolerant humanism of his youthful masterpiece Utopia, and became the bitterest opponent of the early Protestant movement. 'Counter-Reformation England' explores the ways in which post-Reformation English Catholics accommodated themselves to a complex new identity as persecuted religious dissidents within their own country, but in a European context, active participants in the global renewal of the Catholic Church. The book's final section 'The Godly and the Conversion of England' considers the ideals and difficulties of radical reformers attempting to transform the conventional Protestantism of post-Reformation England into something more ardent and committed. In addressing these subjects, Duffy shines new light on the fratricidal ideological conflicts which lasted for more than a century, and whose legacy continues to shape the modern world.