These creative works and brief essays by accomplished immigrant writers offer fresh perspectives, images, and insights that richly enhance our cultural imagination. Short creative works in a variety of genres-poetry, fiction, drama, and screenplay-address issues of truth, secrecy, love, loss, connections, and community. The contributors to this volume come from Egypt, Argentina, Chile, Syria, Pakistan, India, Somalia, Ethiopia, Germany, China, Mexico, Philippines, and Nepal.

How many times have you poured your heart and soul into something for your youth ministry—only to have it fall flat, leaving not much more than a fond memory in the minds of students, let alone amazing life-change in their hearts? You’re not alone. Far too often, we build plans and programs and then stop to ask God to bless them. We all want a transformational student ministry, but we need to remember that God has to be the one doing the transformations in the lives of our students. Based on the principles found in the book of Acts, Moving Forward by Looking Back will help you look back at how God transformed lives through the early church, and look forward at how those principles can be applied to your youth ministry today. As you reflect on the book of Acts, you’ll explore how your youth ministry can implement the principles of: • Adoration—engaging students with God • Community—engaging students with God’s people • Truth—engaging students with God’s Word • Service—engaging students with God’s world With practical ideas that are easy to apply in any ministry context, whether you’re a rookie or a veteran, a professional or a volunteer youth worker, this book is an invaluable resource for any youth ministry that wants to see its students transformed by God.

This book, the first full critical overview of the film avant-garde, ushers in a new approach—and in the process creates its own subject. While many books have studied particular aspects of the European film avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s, Moving Forward, Looking Back provides a much-needed summary of the theory and practice of the movement, while also emphasizing aspects of the period that have been overlooked. Arguing that a European perspective is the only way to understand the transnational movement, the book also pioneers a new approach to the alternative cinema network that sustained the avant-garde, paying particular attention to the emergence of film culture as visible in screening clubs, film festivals, and archives. It will be essential to anyone interested in the influential movement and the film culture it created.

It takes courage and perseverance to revisit the days and nights of our lives and write down what we find to make a record of our lives. Looking Back, Moving On provides the guide to begin the adventure and helps us through the pleasures and pitfalls, the joys and the sorrows that may be encountered. Rubin enables us to discover that, ultimately, the project is the gift of self-discovery we give to ourselves, which enables us to go on to enjoy life to the fullest. Excerpts from her students writing contribute to our feeling of being part of the creative community

You can deal with an issue all your life, but until you choose to move on with a positive attitude, you will remain stuck in your past. There's power in a single positive thought. Therein lies the flashlight to shine your path to recovery, which reveals that you hold the power to your mind because it's you who feeds it, and you hold the switch to a brighter day. So turn it on. My experience in moving forward in life began with me looking back and understanding the hurts of life I went through, which led me to discover the power of forgiveness. And when I did, I made the decision to forgive and understand that everything happens for a reason-it could be a life lesson. Your future has a lot to do with your past. You might not have had the chance to determine your past, but you have a choice to turn your life around, as well as the lives of the people around you. So choose to use it wisely, and so it matters with what attitude you are reflecting on your past. I give you two options: (1) the positive or (2) the positive.

Looking Back, Moving Forward investigates the embodied practices, interpersonal relationships, and moments of self-reflection in the lives of members of the Church of Pentecost in Ghana and amongst the Ghanaian diaspora in London.

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.