For I know the plans that I have for you, declares the LORD, plans to prosper you and not harm you, plans to give you hope, and a future. Then you will call upon me, and I will listen to you, you will seek me, with all your heart. (Jeremiah 29:1113) Destiny in Empty Places is a book that is a result of every man and womans journey, a journey many lives follow every day, going through life just merely existing. The average life is lived trying to seek out and fulfill a purpose, looking for meaning and seeking an understanding of the broken pieces in their lives. The average life in humanity is also void for years and years without a single purpose. One never knows where his or her absolute destiny lies. We spend a lifetime fulfilling either our parents dreams or that which we think we should be. We have even convinced ourselves that our chosen purpose is clearly what we were created to be. If one would go beyond their past and look beyond their natural essence, back to their spiritual essence, one would then find purpose for his or her own life. This book, Destiny in Empty Places, challenges every traveler on the road of destiny. Your road to destiny is predetermined but not by you who travels it. This simply means that God has given you a destiny that is predetermined. Whether or not you will travel or find that road of destiny will be up to your wisdom, knowledge, and understanding of God, of who he is, and your purpose in destiny. According to statistical research, there are approximately 6,670,985,957 people in the world who live their lives from day to day without purpose, plan, or form. Purpose is the intent that is set up for us as an object or an end to attain; the intention at the end; a resolution, determination, the action in course of execution. People have arrived at a place in life where it looks like they are not accomplishing anything. Their lives are spent as if they are traveling in a circle. People are seeking out randomly, striving to fill the void in their lives, leaving them discouraged and vacillated into an empty place. This emptiness is only on the surface of the face of the deep. At your choice lies your destiny.

"Empty Spaces, Empty Places" revisits the manger, cross and tomb through interviews with the innkeeper's wife, the Centurion and Mary Magdalene. By remembering the stories of Jesus' birth, death and resurrection, believers see the lives He touched then and continues to touch today.

Gottlob Frege (1848–1925) was unquestionably one of the most important philosophers of all time. He trained as a mathematician, and his work in philosophy started as an attempt to provide an explanation of the truths of arithmetic, but in the course of this attempt he not only founded modern logic but also had to address fundamental questions in the philosophy of language and philosophical logic. Frege is generally seen (along with Russell and Wittgenstein) as one of the fathers of the analytic method, which dominated philosophy in English-speaking countries for most of the twentieth century. His work is studied today not just for its historical importance but also because many of his ideas are still seen as relevant to current debates in the philosophies of logic, language, mathematics and the mind. The Cambridge Companion to Frege provides a route into this lively area of research.

The midwestern pastoral is a literary tradition of place and rural experience that celebrates an attachment to land that is mystical as well as practical, based on historical and scientific knowledge as well as personal experience. It is exemplified in the poetry, fiction, and essays of writers who express an informed love of the nature and regional landscapes of the Midwest. Drawing on recent studies in cultural geography, environmental history, and mythology, as well as literary criticism, The Midwestern Pastoral: Place and Landscape in Literature of the American Heartland relates Midwestern pastoral writers to their local geographies and explains their approaches. William Barillas treats five important Midwestern pastoralists—Willa Cather, Aldo Leopold, Theodore Roethke, James Wright, and Jim Harrison—in separate chapters. He also discusses Jane Smiley, U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser, Paul Gruchow, and others. For these writers, the aim of writing is not merely intellectual and aesthetic, but democratic and ecological. In depicting and promoting commitment to local communities, human and natural, they express their love for, their understanding of, and their sense of place in the American Midwest. Students and serious readers, as well as scholars in the growing field of literature and the environment, will appreciate this study of writers who counter alienation and materialism in modern society.

In this thoughtful book, Gary Fine explores how Americans attempt to give meaning to the natural world that surrounds them. Although nature has often been treated as an unproblematic reality, Fine suggests that the meanings we assign to the natural environment are culturally grounded. In other words, there is no nature separate from culture. He calls this process of cultural construction and interpretation, naturework. Of course, there is no denying the biological reality of trees, mountains, earthquakes, and hurricanes, but, he argues, they must be interpreted to be made meaningful. Fine supports this claim by examining the fascinating world of mushrooming. Based on three years of field research with mushroomers at local and national forays, Morel Tales highlights the extensive range of meanings that mushrooms have for mushroomers. Fine details how mushroomers talk about their finds--turning their experiences into fish stories (the one that got away), war stories, and treasure tales; how mushroomers routinely joke about dying from or killing others with misidentified mushrooms, and how this dark humor contributes to the sense of community among collectors. He also describes the sometimes friendly, sometimes tense relations between amateur mushroom collectors and professional mycologists. Fine extends his argument to show that the elaboration of cultural meanings found among mushroom collectors is equally applicable to birders, butterfly collectors, rock hounds, and other naturalists.

The author pairs her own photographs of the sites with the paintings of Edward Hopper.

Christian Knoeller presents a radical reinterpretation of environmental history set in the heartland of America. In an excellent model of narrative-based scholarship, this book dynamically reimagines American environmentalism across generations of writers, artists, and scientists. Knoeller starts out with Audubon, and cites Thoreau’s journals in the 1850s as he assesses an early 17th century account of New England’s natural resources by William Wood, showing the epic decline in game and bird populations in Concord. This reading of environmental history is replicated throughout with a gallery of novelists, poets, essayists, and other commentators as they explore ecological memory and environmental destruction. In apt discussions of Matthiessen, Lopez, Wendell Berry, William Stafford and many others, Knoeller offers vibrant insights into literary history. He also cites his own memoir of perpetual development on his family’s farm in Indiana, enriching the scholarship and making an urgent plea for the healing aesthetics of the imagination. Reading across centuries and genres, Knoeller gives us a vibrant new appraisal of Midwestern/North American interior literary traditions and makes clear how vital environmental writing is to this region. To date, no one has written such an eloquent and comprehensive cross-genre analysis of Midwestern environmental literature.