Brooding Italian Drago di Luca and reserved lawyer Alysa Dennis are brought together by a shocking, shared betrayal—their late partners had been having an affair! But against all the odds, they strike an unlikely friendship, and forbidden awareness simmers…. Alysa's calm facade hides a painful secret that haunts her every time she looks into the soulful eyes of Drago's motherless child. As the attraction builds between them, Christmas approaches with the promise of a new start. Can the healing miracle of love, and the joy of the season, make them a family?

The spiritual message contained in this book not only transcends organized religious groups, but is entirely blind to all national, political, racial, social, and economic boundaries.

Art and the Augustinian Order in Early Renaissance Italy views art in the formative period of the Augustinian Hermits, an order with a particularly difficult relation to art. As a first detailed study of visual culture in the Augustinian order, this book will be a basic resource, making available previously inaccessible material, discussing both well-known and more neglected artworks, and engaging with fundamental methodological questions for pre-modern art and church history, from the creation of religious iconographies to the role of gender in art.

Thirty-year old husband, father and teacher Daniel Thomas is suffering an emotional crisis, one which threatens his happy marriage, the stability of his family, the sanity of his five-year old daughter, his livelihood and career, and the ultimately the salvation of his very soul. It is not a mid-life crisis, since he is too young to experience that type of calamity, but far worse, a crisis of faith. For years, Daniel has abandoned his faith in God or has God abandoned him? His crisis of faith reaches its zenith on Christmas Eve when his verbal tirades lead to another argument with his beloved wife, Mary, a devout Christian who refuses to allow her husbands doubts to destroy their marriage or their family. After a tragic accident early Christmas morning, Daniel becomes even more certain of the non-existence of God. His spiraling descent into despair results in the elimination of anything that involves God. This overwhelming bitterness drives a wedge that breaks apart the relationship with his mother-in-law, results in emotional and psychological problems with his daughter, Faith, who claims to be visited by a mysterious man, and an outburst in his school classroom that pits him against a powerful school board president that threatens his job. During all this turmoil in his life, Daniel encounters a series of incredible events that forces him to question all his doubts. His journey from tragedy to redemption, from disbelief to faith, and from emotional upheavals to peace and contentment is an inspiring story for anyone who has lost his faith. Where Are All The Miracles? resolves all the questions posed by all those Doubting Thomases that from time to time invade our mind, body and soul.

In a flash of lightning, Count Pietro Bagnelli sees a young woman standing outside his palazzo, a battered suitcase at her feet. This solitary count has turned his back on the world, but he can't turn his back on this bedraggled waif…. Ruth has returned to Venice to uncover lost memories, yet finds comfort with this proudly damaged count. As Carnivale sweeps through the city, drama and passion ignite and secrets unravel….

Miracles and Sacrilege is the story of the epochal conflict between censorship and freedom in film, recounted through an in-depth analysis of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision striking down a government ban on Roberto Rossellini’s film The Miracle (1950). In this extraordinary case, the Court ultimately chose to abandon its own longstanding determination that film comprised a mere ‘business’ unworthy of free-speech rights, declaring for the first time that the First Amendment barred government from banning any film as ‘sacreligious.’ Using legal briefs, affidavits, and other court records, as well as letters, memoranda, and other archival materials to elucidate what was at issue in the case, William Bruce Johnson also analyzes the social, cultural, and religious elements that form the background of this complex and hard-fought controversy, focusing particularly on the fundamental role played by the Catholic Church in the history of film censorship. Tracing the development of the Church in the United States, Johnson discusses the reasons it found The Miracle sacrilegious and how it attained the power to persuade civil authorities to ban it. The Court’s decision was not only a milestone in the law of church-state relations, but it paved the way for a succession of later decisions which gradually established a firm legal basis for freedom of expression in the arts.

Until the beginning of the 18th century, to be 'Italian' meant to identify with a number of collective memories, rather than a national memory. Yet there are elements of continuity that have shaped Italian identity over the past 1,500 years. Religion, food, art and architecture, a literary language, as well as a particular relationship between cities and countryside, between family and civil society have all contributed to present day Italian culture and politics. Baldoli explores the history of Italy as a country, rather than as a nation, in order to trace its fascinating cultural and political development. Offering a way into each period of Italian history, the book brings Italy's past to life with extracts from poetry, novels and music. Drawing on the latest research published in English and Italian, this is the ideal introduction for all those interested in Italy's cultural and social past and its significance for the country's present.