When lawyer, wife and mother Candace Wayne’s beloved husband John is diagnosed with Lewy Bodies Dementia, she finally has a name for the small changes she’s born witness to for years. In this essay collection, Candace offers snapshots of the years leading up to John’s death, and those that unfold afterward. Task-oriented and responsible, Candace is efficient in her role as caretaker, learning how to best support a husband who must come to terms with his slow-creeping loss of self-sufficiency. Meanwhile, Candace’s daughters have their own experience with their father’s changes, and the whole family must bend without breaking to accommodate his loss. By turns raw and contemplative, Candace’s essays depict family road trips, restaurant outings, and doctors appointments, and finally John’s last breaths. Much like Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, this collection is true to the experience of mourning, taking the reader through the author’s real-time experiences before revisiting episodes through the lens of retrospect. Ultimately, the author’s sadness makes way for reluctant optimism as Candace awakens to the bittersweet realization that the person her husband’s death caused her to become is a woman she’s grateful to know.

This volume is composed of a series of invited chapters from authors who are central and prolific contributors to the areas of group and team-based research. As such, each chapter provides an excellent overview of the current state of the research and a perspective on where scholars should be focusing their future research.

A personal memoir explores the intertwined natures of happiness and sadness, discussing how bitter experiences balance out the sweetness in life and how change can be an opportunity for growth and a function of God's graciousness.

Privilege Through the Looking-Glass is a collection of original essays that explore privilege and status characteristics in daily life. This collection seeks to make visible that which is often invisible. It seeks to sensitize us to things we have been taught not to see. Privilege, power, oppression, and domination operate in complex and insidious ways, impacting groups and individuals. And yet, these forces that affect our lives so deeply seem to at once operate in plain sight and lurk in the shadows, making them difficult to discern. Like water to a fish, environments are nearly impossible to perceive when we are immersed in them. This book attempts to expose our environments. With engaging and powerful writing, the contributors share their personal stories as a means of connecting the personal and the public. This volume applies an intersectional perspective to explore how race, class, gender, sexuality, education, and ableness converge, creating the basis for privilege and oppression. Privilege Through the Looking-Glass encourages readers to engage in self and social reflection, and can be used in a range of courses in sociology, social work, communication, education, gender studies, and African American studies. Each chapter includes discussion questions and/or activities for further engagement. “Privilege Through the Looking-Glass offers a varied and profound examination of how privilege functions as the underside of power. This is a powerful and important book about inequality, identity, agency, and the challenge of addressing difference as part of a democratic ethos in a time of growing authoritarianism all over the world. Every educator should read this book.” – Henry A. Giroux, Professor, McMaster University “A courageous volume that blends theory, personal experiences, and reflections on contemporary debates over identity. This is a book that is more about the politics of identity than identity politics. It is a powerful testament to the urgency of understanding privilege and deserves to be read widely.” – Peter McLaren, Distinguished Professor, Chapman University “Privilege Through the Looking-Glass unmasks the casual ‘isms’ that suppress the best aspects of our humanity, by assembling a powerful and honest collection of parables. Poignant and unflinching, the contributors eschew to the cloak of objectivism to give the hard truth about privilege as a social ill, and the collective responsibility of the conscious community to confront all forms of oppression... this book has lessons for anyone with the spirit to explore better ways to be themselves and relate to others.” – Ivory A. Toldson, Professor, Howard University, and Editor-in-Chief for The Journal of Negro Education Patricia Leavy, Ph.D., is an award-winning independent sociologist and best-selling author.

M. Jacqui Alexander is one of the most important theorists of transnational feminism working today. Pedagogies of Crossing brings together essays she has written over the past decade, uniting her incisive critiques, which have had such a profound impact on feminist, queer, and critical race theories, with some of her more recent work. In this landmark interdisciplinary volume, Alexander points to a number of critical imperatives made all the more urgent by contemporary manifestations of neoimperialism and neocolonialism. Among these are the need for North American feminism and queer studies to take up transnational frameworks that foreground questions of colonialism, political economy, and racial formation; for a thorough re-conceptualization of modernity to account for the heteronormative regulatory practices of modern state formations; and for feminists to wrestle with the spiritual dimensions of experience and the meaning of sacred subjectivity. In these meditations, Alexander deftly unites large, often contradictory, historical processes across time and space. She focuses on the criminalization of queer communities in both the United States and the Caribbean in ways that prompt us to rethink how modernity invents its own traditions; she juxtaposes the political organizing and consciousness of women workers in global factories in Mexico, the Caribbean, and Canada with the pressing need for those in the academic factory to teach for social justice; she reflects on the limits and failures of liberal pluralism; and she presents original and compelling arguments that show how and why transgenerational memory is an indispensable spiritual practice within differently constituted women-of-color communities as it operates as a powerful antidote to oppression. In this multifaceted, visionary book, Alexander maps the terrain of alternative histories and offers new forms of knowledge with which to mold alternative futures.

“We can achieve an experience of love that is beyond anything we can imagine: a universal love..." Relationships give us some of our best moments...and also our worst. It’s no wonder we’re so preoccupied with them—whether it’s fantasizing aboutg your ideal partner or trying to save a marriage, pacifying a difficult colleague or struggling to control a rebellious child. There are thousands of books promising to reveal the secret of how to improve your relationships. A course in Miraclestakes a unique approach, teaching that relationships are the classrooms in which we learn to awaken to our true nature, which is only love. In From Loving One to One Love, Discover that: We don’t “get” love from a partner nor do we have to give up anything in order to get it We don’t search for it out there in the world The love comes first, from within, then infuses all of our relationships To be open to this love, we release our judgments and grievances about others—”forgiveness”—and free ourselves! By applying the Course’s principles, discover how to achieve an experience of love that shines on all alike through the eyes of love—to love as God loves.

Backpack Prophet is a compilation of poems that fully captures the heart and passion of the poet at the heart of their creation. Divided into five sections, each poem lends itself to the entirety of a journey that has been fully experienced and wholly embraced in order to share a completely immersive experience. From the pains of aging and understanding love and lust to the inequalities still experienced by multiple people across the country, there is a aspect of life that will resonate with everyone interested in this read.