"Sarah Kaufman offers an old-fashioned cure for a modern-day ailment. The remedy for our culture of coarseness is grace…This is an elegant, compelling, and, yes, graceful book." —Daniel H. Pink, author of Drive In this joyful exploration of grace’s many forms, Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Sarah L. Kaufman celebrates a too-often-forgotten philosophy of living that promotes human connection and fulfillment. Drawing on the arts, sports, the humanities, and everyday life—as well as the latest findings in neuroscience and health research—Kaufman illuminates how our bodies and our brains are designed for grace. She promotes a holistic appreciation and practice of grace, as the joining of body, mind, and spirit, and as a way to nurture ourselves and others.

“I hole up in my own cozy cubicle and write, considering ways to make the approaching Thanksgiving holiday not just another day in this place. In prison, hope faces east; time is measured in wake-ups.” Time of Grace is a remarkable book, written with great eloquence by a former science teacher who was incarcerated for twelve years for his sexual liaison with a teenage student. Far more than a “prison memoir,” it is an intimate and revealing look at relationships—with fellow humans and with the surprising wildlife of the Sonoran Desert, both inside and beyond prison walls. Throughout, Ken Lamberton reflects on human relations as they mimic and defy those of the natural world, whose rhythms calibrate Lamberton’s days and years behind bars. He writes with candor about his life, while observing desert flora and fauna with the insight and enthusiasm of a professional naturalist. While he studies a tarantula digging her way out of the packed earth and observes Mexican freetail bats sailing into the evening sky, Lamberton ruminates on his crime and on the wrenching effects it has had on his wife and three daughters. He writes of his connections with his fellow inmates—some of whom he teaches in prison classes—and with the guards who control them, sometimes with inexplicable cruelty. And he unflinchingly describes a prison system that has gone horribly wrong—a system entrapped in a self-created web of secrecy, fear, and lies. This is the final book of Lamberton’s trilogy about the twelve years he spent in prison. Readers of his earlier books will savor this last volume. Those who are only now discovering Lamberton’s distinctive voice—part poet, part scientist, part teacher, and always deeply, achingly human—will feel as if they are making a new friend. Gripping, sobering, and beautifully written, Lamberton’s memoir is an unforgettable exploration of crime, punishment, and the power of the human spirit.

Featuring detailed analysis of medieval homilies and sermons from St. Augustine, St. Gregory the Great, St. Bonaventure, John Colet, and Henry Suso, as well as original sermons available for the first time in English from Peter Damien and Stephen Langdon, this book is an ideal tool for pastors, deacons, retreat leaders, and homiletic students. It also serves to introduce readers into the theology and the history of the period.

Winner of the 2005 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry. Grace is John Hodgen’s third book of poetry. He is a poet of extreme contrasts, offering us the dregs of despair, yet instantly recalling hope in the beauty of nature or in a moment in time when all is right, when we realize grace. In “For the Leapers” the narrator relates, “We will fall past the angels, / we will fall from such height, / our tears will lift up from our eyes. / We will fall straight through hell. / And then we will rise.” Hodgen’s poems roam through history, religion, man-made disasters, baseball, pop culture, and Wal-Marts, on paths that come full circle with remarkable completeness, maturity, and dexterity.

“God has appointed preaching in worship as one great means of accomplishing his ultimate goal in the world.” —John Piper John Piper makes a compelling claim in these pages about the purpose of preaching: it is intended not merely as an explanation of the text but also as a means of awakening worship by being worship in and of itself. Christian preaching is a God-appointed miracle aiming to awaken the supernatural seeing, savoring, and showing of the glory of Christ. Distilling over forty years of experience in preaching and teaching, Piper shows preachers how and what to communicate from God’s Word, so that God’s purpose on earth will advance through Biblesaturated, Christ-exalting, God-centered preaching—in other words, expository exultation.

FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE SUNDAY TIMES NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER THE ETYMOLOGICON. 'An informative but highly entertaining journey through the figures of rhetoric ... Mark Forsyth wears his considerable knowledge lightly. He also writes beautifully.' David Marsh, Guardian. Mark Forsyth presents the secret of writing unforgettable phrases, uncovering the techniques that have made immortal such lines as 'To be or not to be' and 'Bond. James Bond.' In his inimitably entertaining and witty style, he takes apart famous quotations and shows how you too can write like Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde or John Lennon. Crammed with tricks to make the most humdrum sentiments seem poetic or wise, The Elements of Eloquencereveals how writers through the ages have turned humble words into literary gold - and how you can do the same.

To succeed in the world today, students need an education that equips them to recognize current trends, to be creative and flexible to respond to changing circumstances, to demonstrate sound judgment to work for society's good, and to gain the ability to communicate persuasively.