With insights into the thought of Gabriel Marcel, Tragic Humanity and Hope recognizes that in our age scientific knowing is becoming a dominant form of knowledge. The leadership, influence, growth, and gravitational center of human existence depend, it seems, on scientific knowledge. As a result, we live in an information age that prizes production and immediate satisfaction but devalues the cultivation of wisdom. We risk diminishing the significance of sapiential knowing to deal with the immensely complex and intricate domains of human relationality. Furthermore, inquiry into moral discernment methods expands, becoming more diverse; yet, scholarly conversations that engage the vital exigencies as founding moral sensibility seem noticeably insufficient. Tragic Humanity and Hope strives to overcome this lack. But Ojara also seeks ethical groundings that exceed the language of pragmatic utility and aesthetic preference. Foundations of morality cannot exclude questions of the common good and shared moral obligations that free people to reach out to one another with hopes and memories that endow life with shared meaning. Through continuity and cohesion that the interlacing of scientific, sapiential, and moral knowing bring, life becomes a marvelous expression of light, joy, and fervor.

When Alicia Carlyle returns to the home of her childhood after the tragic death of her husband, she is hoping to put the past behind her. But first she must come face to face with the woman who nearly destroyed her marriage and tore her family in two - her sister-in-law, Sabrina. Their enmity runs deep, but Alicia is determined to make a fresh start for herself and her two children, Nathan and Darcie, and to heal her fractured relationship with her beloved brother. However, just when it looks as if they might have a chance at a brighter future, Sabrina's fifteen-year-old daughter, Annabelle, accuses seventeen-year-old Nathan of a crime he insists he didn't commit. And once more the two families are locked in a battle that is fraught with mistrust, betrayal and lies - a battle that threatens to destroy them all...

Elizabeth Bowen was a prolific writer; her publishing career spanned five decades and during this time she wrote ten novels, over one hundred short stories and countless reviews and journal articles. While earlier novels are now acknowledged as Modernist texts, her later novels can be read through the lens of postmodernism; they can be considered variously as romantic fiction, marriage novels, war time spy thrillers and psychological drama but, throughout her novels, she consistently questioned notions of identity, sexuality and the loss of innocence. A World of Lost Innocence: The Fiction of Elizabeth Bowen offers a reading of Elizabeth Bowen’s fiction which focuses specifically on this loss, foregrounding the psychological conflicts experienced by her protagonists. It examines the subject not only across the range of her fiction, but also in relation to her unfolding narrative structures through a chronologically based discussion of her novels and selected short stories, interwoven with biographical information and drawing on unpublished letters. This book investigates the dominant kinds of innocence that Bowen represents throughout her fiction: the innocence attributed to childhood, sexual innocence and sexual morality, and political innocence, and argues that the transition from innocence to experience plays an important role in the epistemological journey faced both by Bowen’s characters and her readers.

Arianne knew Luc before he went away, of course she did. Everyone in Samaroux knows each other. When he returns after five years, the spark between them reignites and becomes something more, but will the war let them be together? As the two teens fall deeply in love, their world starts to crumble around them. German forces, reeling from defeats in the east, are closing in, and Luc, desperate to atone for his family's past, wants to join the resistance. Arianne will do anything to keep him safe, but in such a small village, Luc is not alone in his love for Arianne. And Luc's rival just might be a traitor. How far will they go to protect what they believe in? And what will they do for love?

A parable on the human need for conflict.

Exquisitely and hypnotically written, like a bold and terrifying dream, The Kiss is breathtaking in its honesty and in the power and beauty of its creation. In this extraordinary memoir, one of the best young writers in America today transforms into a work of art the darkest passage imaginable in a young woman's life: an obsessive love affair between father and daughter that began when Kathryn Harrison, twenty years old, was reunited with a parent whose absence had haunted her youth. A story both of taboo and of family complicity in breaking taboo, The Kiss is also about love—about the most primal of love triangles, the one that ensnares a child between mother and father. Praise for The Kiss “I couldn’t stop reading this. I’ll never stop remembering it.”—Mary Karr, author of The Liars’ Club “Only a writer of extraordinary gifts could bring so much light to bear on so dark a matter, redeeming it with the steadiness of her gaze and the uncanny, heartbreaking exactitude of her language.”—Tobias Wolff, author of This Boy’s Life “Beautifully written . . . jumping back and forth in time yet drawing you irresistibly toward the heart of a great evil.”—The New York Times “Like all good literature, The Kiss illuminates something that we knew already, while also teaching us things we had not even suspected.”—Los Angeles Times “A darkly beautiful book, fearless and frightening, ironic and compassionate.”—Mary Gordon, author of Circling My Mother “Harrison’s story is her own, but it is also a brilliant fiction, densely mythic, sometimes almost liturgical sounding and raw. She is both author and protagonist of a dark pilgrim’s progress.”—The Atlanta Journal and Constitution

Awarded an American Legion Scholarship I am also an award winning author and have published numerous articles and books. Having attended several colleges and universities eventually earning my Ph. D. in Human Behavior I hold several life credentials in education earned during many years as an educator together with years spent working in the Aerospace Industry and other occupations. But to call Einstein's famous equation E=MC2 incomplete because it does not account for life and death does seem quite extraordinary, yet these remain the two greatest mysteries they have ever been denying us thus far a "theory of everything." Something animates life and departs with death, but what this "something" is not all our science has yet discovered, though things like the Large Hadron Collider may provide needed insight, and it has been in the pursuit of knowledge about these two greatest mysteries that has compelled me into so many varied academic studies and careers attempting to make sense of the world and our place in it and how people think and deal with the issues of life and death philosophically, religiously, and politically. The things I have discovered along the way compelled me to much research and speculation about these mysteries and how they impact our lives, to communicate my thoughts about them to share with others in a daily journal and posted to my website and provided in book format each year. These writings are of importance in an increasingly dangerous world with a most uncertain future due to so much corruption, ineptitude and lack of accountability in our own government as well as that of others, the abject failure of our schools due to the very same things especially the same lack of accountability we find in government, the religious and political hatreds with protracted wars worldwide and little to give hope for world peace I believed my articles about these important enough to publish in book format. Some years ago I removed from the greater part of society to live in semi-seclusion alone with my books and thoughts in a quiet part of the Sequoia National Forest devoting myself to contemplation, speculating about many things and committing my thoughts in writing fulltime. As a writer and author given to much introspection and fascinated by human behavior, nature, and our universe it was important to me to simplify my life as much as possible as anyone given to philosophical speculation about many things must. That much of my writing covers some metaphysical thoughts about God, angels and demons, an afterlife and Biblical stories of origins, of prophecies of the End Times and so much more have been absorbing studies as well and I freely share my thoughts about these in this volume.