Tolle Lege, take up and read! These words from St. Augustine perfectly describe the human condition. Reading is the universal pilgrimage of the soul. In reading we journey to find ourselves and to save ourselves. The ultimate journey is reading the Great Books. In the Great Books we find the struggle of the human soul, its aspirations, desires, and failures. Through reading, we find faces and souls familiar to us even if they lived a thousand years ago. The unread life is not worth living, and in reading we may well discover what life is truly about and prepare ourselves for the pilgrimage of life.

When she doesn't receive the marriage proposal she'd long been expecting on her 41st birthday, Linda follows the guidance of a psychic and heads to Europe, seeking her soul mate.

If God is all powerful and entirely good and loving, why is there so much evil in the world? Based on a close canonical reading of Scripture, this book offers a new approach to the challenge of reconciling the Christian confession of a loving God with the realities of suffering and evil. John Peckham offers a constructive proposal for a theodicy of love that upholds both the sovereignty of God and human freedom, showing that Scripture points toward a framework for thinking about God's love in relation to the world.

Odyssey of Ashes: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Letting Go begins with the sudden death of Cheryl Krauter’s spouse. Five months later, in a stroke of irony and magic, her husband wins a long-desired guided fly fishing trip in a raffle—and Cheryl decides to go in his place, fulfilling a promise to scatter his ashes by a trout stream. Part I of this memoir is an account of the first year after Cheryl’s husband’s death, where she becomes an explorer in the infinite stream of grief and loss, a time traveler between the darkness of sorrow and the light of daily life. Part II concludes with stories of the poignant and humorous adventures she had during the ensuing year. Tying it all together and woven throughout is Cheryl’s account of the creation of an altar assembled during the three-day ritual of Los Días de los Muertos. Poetic and mythological, Odyssey of Ashes is a raw story of loss and the deep transformation that traveling through darkness and returning to light can bring.

Samantha King Holmes brings forth a raw, original perspective. A collection of poetry that breathes hope into the idea of love while mourning the human condition of seeking out connections, sometimes with the wrong people. Her verse takes the readers on an introspective journey of love, longing, and self-evolution. Born to Love, Cursed to Feel Revised Edition brings to life an answer to the many difficult questions involving self-love and the feelings we have for others. The book explores the need to connect and the way emotions can complicate our decision making. Ultimately this book is a poetic documentation of heartbreak, anguish, and redemption. A story told in hopes of reminding others that their mistakes do not define them and that the end is usually the beginning of something more. In this revised edition, new, never-before-seen poems are sprinkled throughout among beloved and refreshed pieces from the first edition.

From the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir Homer’s Odyssey comes a tender, joyful, utterly unforgettable novel, primarily told through the eyes of the most observant member of any human family: the cat. Humans best understand the truth of things if they come at it indirectly. Like how sometimes the best way to catch a mouse that’s right in front of you is to back up before you pounce. So notes Prudence, the irresistible brown tabby at the center of Gwen Cooper’s tender, joyful, utterly unforgettable novel, which is mostly told through the eyes of this curious (and occasionally cranky) feline. When five-week-old Prudence meets a woman named Sarah in a deserted construction site on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, she knows she’s found the human she was meant to adopt. For three years their lives are filled with laughter, tuna, catnaps, music, and the unchanging routines Prudence craves. Then one day Sarah doesn’t come home. From Prudence’s perch on the windowsill she sees Laura, the daughter who hardly ever comes to visit Sarah, arrive with her new husband. They’re carrying boxes. Before they even get to the front door, Prudence realizes that her life has changed forever. Suddenly Prudence finds herself living in a strange apartment with humans she barely knows. It could take years to train them in the feline courtesies and customs (for example, a cat should always be fed before the humans, and at the same exact time every day) that Sarah understood so well. Prudence clings to the hope that Sarah will come back for her while Laura, a rising young corporate attorney, tries to push away memories of her mother and the tumultuous childhood spent in her mother’s dusty downtown record store. But the secret joys, past hurts, and life-changing moments that make every mother-daughter relationship special will come to the surface. With Prudence’s help Laura will learn that the past, like a mother’s love, never dies. Poignant, insightful, and laugh-out-loud funny, Love Saves the Day is a story of hope, healing, and how the love of an animal can make all of us better humans. It’s the story of a mother and daughter divided by the turmoil of bohemian New York, and the opinionated, irrepressible feline who will become the bridge between them. It’s a novel for anyone who’s ever lost a loved one, wondered what their cat was really thinking, or fallen asleep with a purring feline nestled in their arms. Prudence, a cat like no other, is sure to steal your heart. Praise for Love Saves the Day “Prudence [is a] sassy but sensitive feline heroine.”—Time “Unforgettably moving . . . a hard one to put down.”—Modern Cat “If you are the Most Important Person to a cat, you will hold them much tighter by the book’s end. If you don’t have a cat, Prudence will have surreptitiously lured you into the danger zone: Falling in love with a cat because they need family, too.”—The Vancouver Sun “Cooper brings readers a fictional tale that cat lovers will treasure. . . . This book will make most readers laugh and cry, and probably lead them to wonder more often what, exactly, their pet is thinking.”—Fredericksburg Free Lance–Star “The interspersed viewpoints . . . enrich Cooper’s sensitively told novel that unravels a story (based on actual events) about a century-old tenement building—and the inhabitants therein. That story ultimately serves as the basis to understanding the emotional subtexts of these authentic, well-drawn characters.”—Shelf Awareness

Klaus Kenneth is an Orthodox Christian and spiritual child of Elder Sophrony of Essex. He was born into extremely unfortunate circumstances at the end of World War II: his father abandoned his family not long after they settled in their new home, his mother rejected him, and he was abused, mentally and physically, by a priest who promised to "educate" him. As Klaus sought to escape the hell of being unloved, he began to look for a way out of his misery, which took him on a journey through the manifold pleasures and promises of "this world": rock music, sex, drugs, the Occult, Transcendental Meditation, the religious traditions of North and South America, Africa and the Middle East (including Israel), India and the Orient. His quest literally took him around the world several times over. He tried it all. But as Klaus himself relates in this remarkable story, the longest and hardest journey of them all was the one that goes from head to heart.