Profound reflections on the cross that help you to meditate on and marvel at the sacrificial love of Jesus. This book can be used as a devotional, especially during Lent and Easter. These profound reflections on the cross from David Mathis, author of The Christmas We Didn’t Expect, will help you to meditate on and marvel at Jesus’ life, sacrificial death, and spectacular resurrection-enabling you to treasure anew who Jesus is and what he has done. Many of us are so familiar with the Easter story that it becomes easy to miss subtle details and difficult to really enjoy its meaning. This book will help you to pause and marvel at Jesus, whose now-glorified wounds are a sign of his unfailing love and the decisive victory that he has won: “He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed.” (Isaiah 53:5) This book can be used as a devotional. The chapters on Holy Week make it especially helpful during the Lent season and at Easter.

This fourth instalment of Harry Redner's tetralogy on the history of civilization argues that intellectuals have a brilliant past, a dubious present, and possibly no future. He contends that the philosophers of the seventeenth century laid the ground for the intellectuals of the eighteenth century, the Age of Enlightenment. They, in turn, promoted a fundamental transformation of human consciousness: they literally intellectualized the world. The outcome was the disenchantment of the world in all its cultural dimensions: in art, religion, ethics, politics, and philosophy.In this fascinating study, Redner demonstrates how secularization took the sting out of both the dread and promise of an afterlife and intellectuals learned to die without the hope of immortality popularized by philosophy and religion. Ultimately, they produced the ideologies that generated the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, which subsequently exterminated these intellectuals through mass murder on a scale never before experienced. The book traces the sources of this fatal entanglement and goes on to examine the contemporary condition of intellectuals in America and the world.Wherein lies the future of the intellectuals? Redner suggest that in the present state of globalization, dominated by technocrats, experts, and professionals, their fate remains uncertain.

The Triumph of Death (1894) is a novel by Gabriele D’Annunzio. The third in a cycle of novels exploring the lives of the Italian bourgeoisie, The Triumph of Death was inspired by the author’s interpretation of the work of Friedrich Nietzsche and Walter Pater. Considered a central text of Italian Decadentism, the novel has earned comparisons to the work of Oscar Wilde and Joris-Karl Huysmans. “When she perceived a group of men leaning against the parapet and looking down into the street below, Hippolyte stopped and exclaimed: ‘What has happened?’ With a slight gesture, betraying fear, she placed her hand involuntarily on George's arm as if to restrain him. After watching the men a moment George said: ‘Someone must have leaped from off the terrace.’” After witnessing a suicide, Giorgio Aurispa leaves Rome and his lover Ippolita to return to his family in Guardigrele. Reminded of the beauty of the mountains where he was born, he is soon drawn into conflict with his father, a vain nobleman who has left his mother for a mistress and spent every last penny of their immense family fortune. Reminded of his uncle’s tragic death, overwhelmed with his responsibilities as a son, Giorgio flees the mountains for the coast, buying a home in San Vito Chietino where he attempts to pick up where he left off with Ippolita. Gloomy and paranoid, Giorgio struggles to regain his sense of beauty, the only thing in life he ever loved. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Gabriele D’Annunzio’s The Triumph of Death is a classic work of Italian literature reimagined for modern readers.

Originally published: Ghent: Ludion, c2007.

The famous frescos in the Campo Santo at Pisa painted in the 1340's include striking images of "The Triumph of Death," "The Devil," "Hell", and "The Last Judgement." The cemetery of the Campo Santo contains shiploads of earth imported from the Holy Land. The Campo Santo was damaged by Allied air strikes during World War II. The restoration of the frescos revealed the drawings beneath the frescos, which have also been meticulously and wonderully restored. I visited Pisa three times to see the Leaning Tower, which I climbed on my first visit, now no longer permitted. It was a dizzying and unbalanced experience, a feeling that produced new insights and ideas. At my home one evening rocking in my family rocker where my mother rocked and nursed her eight children, I almost lost my balance and tipped over backward, which made me think of The Leaning Tower of Pisa and Galileo's experiments with gravity there. I also remembered that Copernicus lived in a leaning tower. The opening passage of my poem reproduces the feeling of being out-of-balance. The "Premonitions" poems are fitting prophecies.