Suspense, action, murder, romance, mystery. Different than anything you’ve ever read. A young man’s nude body is found in a dumpster; it has a finger freshly amputated. A beautiful well-dressed woman lives in a cave. A lawyer in Florida hauls an old woman’s body in the back of his truck too long. A 24-year-old Adonis has the mind of a four-year-old...but remembers too well. A man jumps from the Golden Gate Bridge onto the windshield of the car of the one man in the world who can least endure the trauma. A trucker in New England barely misses death by an avalanche of deer. A horse rancher in Montana returns home to find his wife dead. The drug trade from South America filters into a mountain village in North Carolina. A man is killed by a used bullet. The Death Card keeps coming in Tarot. Four men from four sections of the country each experience a life-changing tragedy. They pack up and leave, looking for a new beginning...and find one another in a swirling microcosm of emotions. What effect does each have on the other and those around him? And each has something left undone.

An original and thoughtful approach to a grace-filled theology of leadership. In a post-Christian culture, parish clergy can find themselves at a loss, ill-equipped to deal with a reality for which seminary did not prepare them. As a result, the Church and its clergy can seem to flounder from one “program” to the next or get enamored with secular self-help strategies. To learn to lead well in this new context, the Church needs to help clergy refocus on what both works and is true to their tradition and theology. Enter Scott Benhase, whose Done and Left Undone proposes an ascetical theology of leadership based in St. Benedict’s Promise of Stability, Obedience, and Conversion of Life. The Promise helps clergy move forward from their inward identity to their outward askesis (discipline), their inner life experience of resting in the mercy of God’s grace in harmony with their outward role in the church. Benhase believes parish clergy can lead faithfully and well without following a program or leadership style that does not fit them. Leading from ascetical grace does not require parish clergy to be something they are not. It invites them, rather, to a way of being and an askesis that will help them be both faithful and effective in parish leadership.

In a series of letters written to those who influenced his life and who have since long passed, a man pays tribute to those he loved. Moments in time, some tender, some troubling and sad, reveal the character of family, friends, teachers and acquaintances. Intertwined in these events of the past are snippets of the present which sometimes contrast sharply with the economic, political and societal changing mores of Americans. This snapshot of the past opens to view what was, what could have been and what might be for the reader. Some letters will make the reader cry, others will bring a smile to your face and even make you laugh. But, like the writer, you will remember Letters Late...

With the deep emotion and insight of “a true storyteller” (Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times), Christopher Tilghman, the author of the acclaimed Mason’s Retreat and In a Father’s Place, has written a powerful new novel of men and women, fathers and families. Eric Alwin has gone to visit his elderly father, a once commanding and charismatic Maryland senator who has seen his public service soured–and his family broken–by a sex scandal. Realizing that his own unfaithfulness, his disaffection with his career and marriage, seem to be a continuation of a family pattern, Eric is astonished to find his father proposing a bold expedition. The ensuing trip through the Deep South and the American heartland becomes both a journey into the emotional truth of the Alwin family and a breakthrough into a new kind of resilience and understanding, and love. Along the way, Eric will know anew not only his mother, Audrey, but his sisters, Alice and Poppy, and his own wife and son. As he discovers the surprising secret behind the scandal that defined his father’s fate, he will also realize what he must do to shape a more authentic and coherent life for himself. Christopher Tilghman’s Roads of the Heart is a brilliant achievement by an author who, grappling with the strains and discords of contemporary American culture, achieves a special understanding of how family members love and lose and find one another every day.