What is prayer? How may we approach our Maker in a simple, direct way? In listening to the Silence within. For if once we begin to attend to our deeper Self then we begin that most enriching encounter: to see Self enclosed within our Maker. Julian of Norwich tells us: 'God is nearer to us than our own Soul. Educated by the Jesuits from the age of nine, John Skinner left school to join the Society of Jesus. For thirteen years he followed their formation, especially the Ignatian method of prayer. But ahead of ordination, he changed course to join The Times. Five years on Fleet Street left him breathless, so that he became a children's bookseller to found The Red House. Returning to his former trail twenty years on, he managed to spend a bare fortnight living, praying and working alongside the Carthusians of Parkminster. His narrative of that healing time, Hear our Silence, tells that tale; it also led to an invitation to those outside the cloister to deepen their own experience of prayer. 'I told the Prior: I am going to steal your Silence, and take it outside.' 'His answer: use our name.' What better invitation... Gracewing is also the publisher of John Skinner's two companion volumes of silent prayer, Sounding the Silence and Echoing the Silence, and his translation into modern English of Revelation of Love by Julian of Norwich.

They say that to really know a person you need to understand their past. If that is true, then Mary Beker did not know her husband at all.

When infertility painfully interrupted Elizabeth Hagan's plan to start a family, the path of grace offered her another way. Instead of giving birth to a child, she birthed herself instead. Along the way, she learned you can't control how fast your dreams come true, if they come true at all, but you can find grace for embracing your life in the present tense, grief and all. Through her new book Birthed, Elizabeth Hagan offers her story as a companion and guide for living through your own pain and loss. For the one in eight couples who face infertility, you will know you are not alone and a long season of grief does not have to destroy your marriage or your friendships with childbearing friends. For those friends and family members of infertile couples, there are no "one size fits all" answers to a fertility journey-medically, emotionally, or spiritually-and the worst thing you can say is nothing at all. Adoption is never the complete solution to infertility, and through it all, pain can never be fixed, only lived through. So allow grace to help you begin to live today in the present moment.

An exploration of how engaging identity and cultural heritage can transform teaching and learning for Black women educators in the name of justice and freedom in the classroom In The Spirit of Our Work, Dr. Cynthia Dillard centers the spiritual lives of Black women educators and their students, arguing that spirituality has guided Black people throughout the diaspora. She demonstrates how Black women teachers and teacher educators can heal, resist, and (re)member their identities in ways that are empowering for them and their students. Dillard emphasizes that any discussion of Black teachers’ lives and work cannot be limited to truncated identities as enslaved persons in the Americas. The Spirit of Our Work addresses questions that remain largely invisible in what is known about teaching and teacher education. According to Dillard, this invisibility renders the powerful approaches to Black education that are imbodied and marshaled by Black women teachers unknown and largely unavailable to inform policy, practice, and theory in education. The Spirit of Our Work highlights how the intersectional identities of Black women teachers matter in teaching and learning and how educational settings might more carefully and conscientiously curate structures of support that pay explicit and necessary attention to spirituality as a crucial consideration.

Anne Bogart is an award-winning theatre maker, and a best-selling writer of books about theatre, art, and cultural politics. In this her latest collection of essays she explores the story-telling impulse, and asks how she, as a ‘product of postmodernism’, can reconnect to the primal act of making meaning and telling stories. She also asks how theatre practitioners can think of themselves not as stagers of plays but ‘orchestrators of social interactions’ and participants in an on-going dialogue about the future. We dream. And then occasionally we attempt to share our dreams with others. In recounting our dreams we try to construct a narrative... We also make stories out of our daytime existence. The human brain is a narrative creating machine that takes whatever happens and imposes chronology, meaning, cause and effect... We choose. We can choose to relate to our circumstances with bitterness or with openness. The stories that we tell determine nothing less than personal destiny. (From the introduction) This compelling new book is characteristically made up of chapters with one-word titles: Spaciousness, Narrative, Heat, Limits, Error, Politics, Arrest, Empathy, Opposition, Collaboration and Sustenance. In addition to dipping into neuroscience, performance theory and sociology, Bogart also recounts vivid stories from her own life. But as neuroscience indicates, the event of remembering what happened is in fact the creation of something new.

The book Arabellas journey from shadow to sunshine is the story of a teenage orphan girl 'Arabella' who with her actions overcomes the adversities of life. It is a story of overcoming adversities, of finding ones voice and a strong belief that every ending can lead to a new beginning filled with hope and happiness.