The role of religious education/faith development among Unitarian Universalists marks the uniqueness of this religious movement. Without dependence on dogma or creed, it is essential that a religious community be free to develop its own distinctive identity. The centrality of religious education was evident in the very beginnings of this liberal denomination. Rev. Richard Gilbert collects many of the most influential statements of religious education philosophy in the anthology In the Middle of a Journey. From William Ellery Channings eloquent Sunday School Address to the writings of stalwarts Sophia Lyon Fahs and Angus H. MacLean, these carefully selected essays trace the evolution of faith development from a Christian catechism to a broadly based faith-based quest for values, meanings and convictions. In an age that tends to belittle the past, it is refreshing to realize that if we are to chart where we are going, it is wise to know where we have been. The Unitarian Universalist movement has been in some interesting places, and eagerly seeks an adventurous future.

Elisabeth Tonnard's In This Dark Wood is a study of urban alienation in America. In a haunting, modern-gothic style, it pairs images of people walking alone in nighttime city streets with 90 different English translations, collected by Tonnard, of the famous first lines of Dante's Inferno: "Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita / mi ritrovai per una selva oscura / ché la diritta via era smarrita." ("In the middle of the journey of our life / I found myself in a dark wood / for the straight way was lost"). The images were selected from the Joseph Selle collection at the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York, which contains over a million negatives from a company of street photographers who worked in San Francisco from the 1940s to the 70s. This edition is a reprint of a work originally self-published in 2008.

On 1 January 1999, Travis Gale (aged 17) and Stephen Bonaconsa (aged 27) left Johannesburg on a mission to cycle across four continents and raise R1 million for children living with, and affected by HIV/AIDS in KwaZulu-Natal. They pedalled out of Johannesburg, riding mountain bikes equipped with panniers, carrying the basic requirements for an adventure. They rode unsupported. No Instagram or Facebook. It was just the two of them and the open road. The pair successfully cycled over 16 000 kilometres, across four continents, through 16 countries, raising R1.7 million for their cause. When asked to share about his experience, Travis very rarely spends time talking about the start or the finish of the tour. The stories Travis shares are from The Middle. It's The Middle that tests us with challenges, yielding a multitude of emotions. It's The Middle that involves the raw and often painful need to dig deep, to push through the barriers that stand in our way, and show ourselves what we are capable of. The Middle is what we, as human beings, were designed for. We can all pitch up at start lines. We can all celebrate a finish. But no finish is without a Middle and every Middle is where WHO WE ARE is revealed. This book, The Middle, includes eight stories, drawn from eight key days of a world cycle tour, which will encourage and equip people through The Middle, the territory we must navigate in pursuit of our goals. Keep going. Increase momentum towards meaningful goals. Develop grit and resilience in the midst of tough terrain. Push through barriers that consistently get in the way. Learn practical frameworks for making things happen. Stretch yourself to do more than you thought possible. Finish well!

The year is 999 A.D. Christians in Europe are preparing themselves for the arrival of the Messiah at the millennium and religious fervour is in the air. Sailing from the North African port of Tangier to a small, distant town called Paris are a Jewish merchant, Ben Attar, his two beloved wives and his Arab partner, Abu Lutfi. They have come for a meeting with their third partner the widower, Raphael Abulafia who has been forced to turn his back on their previous trading partnership because of his new wife's distrust of the dual marriage of Ben Attar. The latter turns this annual trading voyage into a personal quest to legitimise his second wife, restore his honour and, equally important, to show others the richness and humanity in his way of life. A confrontation ensues between people of different cultures whose ways of living and loving are so different, and yet who are of the same religion, believe in the same God and in the same morality. Thus we enter a profound human drama whose moral conflicts of fidelity and desire resonate deeply with our times. A. B. Yehoshua has imaginatively recreated a medieval world with its merchant trade in great depth and sensuous detail. His evocation of one man's love is lyrical, erotic even, and A Journey to the End of the Millennium will rank with the best of Yehoshua's work.

"In the electric, pulsating world around us, the essay lives a life of abandon, posing questions, speaking truths, fulfilling a need humans have to know what other humans think and wonder so we can feel less alone." -Katherine Bomer Sadly, many students only know "essay" as a 5-paragraph, tightly structured writing assignment that must check all the boxes of a standardized formula. How did essays in school get so far away from essays in the world? Katherine makes a powerful case for teaching the essay as a way to restore writing to think-that it is in fact necessary for students' success in college and career. "Essay helps students write flexibly, fluently, and with emboldened voices," she writes in The Journey Is Everything, "qualities they can translate into any assigned writing task in school or in life." She argues that the close reading of essays fulfills the recommendations of state and national standards, while practice in essay writing leads to better academic and test writing. More importantly, "Essay gives its author the space, time, and freedom to think about and make sense of things, take a journey of discovery, and speak her mind, without boundaries." Don't students deserve the chance to develop their own topics, discover their own writing voices, and learn to structure prose organically, according to the content? Katherine gives you tools, strategies, and activities to bring a unit on more authentic writing into your practice. Rediscover the power of the essay to bring out students' true thinking-their true selves. Because after all, the journey is everything.