Human beings are interpreters. •When, what, and how do we interpret? •Which is more reliable: literal information or symbolic expression? •What consequences—in school and in all of life—are attached to our interpretative judgments? We find answers to these questions in stories. Beginning with the question “What do these stones mean?” in Joshua 4, Stones and Stories examines the elements, purposes, and effects of storytelling and story-writing. Written for high school students, Stones and Stories is filled with questions, writing suggestions, sample essays, and drawing exercises to promote meaningful engagement with Scripture and with literature in general. Its questions are suitable for individual reflection and group study and discussion.

Stones in the Stream, the life-work of Tricia Heriz-Smith, is a beautiful collection of poems from a lifetime of practicing deep living and the writing life. Tricia gifts us with a book filled with astute observations, explorations and invitations to look deeply into this world of ours. (from the Foreword by Diana Button). There is an art to standing on one leg just as there is to balancing one rock on another. Outer balance can only happen with inner balance, and that search has been mine for as long as I can remember. These are poems of discovery, just as when you walk on a pebbly beach you find one stone calling to you to be picked up and taken home. So, these poems have been picked from moments in the stream of my life that have caught my full attention and demanded to be written. seeking that centre where all is in balance withstand waves My poems are the distillation of my own time and space, rather like messages in a bottle tossed into the stream of life. (from the Preface).

The story of our deep and multifaceted connections to geological matter—the very bedrock of our lives. From small beach pebbles to huge megaliths, stones have been revered, collected, enhanced, sculpted, or engraved for practical and artistic purposes throughout the ages. They have been used to delineate boundaries and to build homes and shelters and utilized for cooking, games, and competitions. This surprising and fascinating compendium of stone facts, myths, and stories reveals the impact and importance of stones in our history and culture. Cally Oldershaw introduces the science in an accessible way and covers the aesthetic appeal of stones, their practical uses, and metaphysical properties. With an eclectic mix of examples from the Stone Age to the present, Stones engagingly excavates the story of this essential matter.

With Wayne Bennett From the silky wax qualities of the surfaces of some quartz menhirs to the wood-grain textures of others, to the golden honeycombed limestones of Malta, to the icy frozen waves of the Cambrian sandstone of south-east Sweden, this book investigates the sensuous material qualities of stone. Tactile sensations, sonorous qualities, colour, and visual impressions are all shown to play a vital part in our understanding of the power and significance of prehistoric monuments in relation to their landscapes. In The Materiality of Stone, Christopher Tilley presents a radically new way of analyzing the significance of both 'cultural' and 'natural' stone in prehistoric European landscapes. Tilley's groundbreaking approach is to interpret human experience in a multidimensional and sensuous human way, rather than through an abstract analytical gaze. The studies range widely from the menhirs of prehistoric Brittany to Maltese Neolithic temples to Bronze Age rock carvings and cairns in southern Sweden. Tilley leaves no stone unturned as he also considers how the internal spaces and landscape settings are interpreted in relation to artifacts, substances, and related places that were deeply meaningful to the people who inhabited them and remain no less evocative today. In its innovative approach to understanding human experience through the tangible rocks and stone of our past, The Materiality of Stone is both a major theoretical and substantive contribution to the field of material culture studies and the study of European prehistory.