A disruptive and surprising journey through the Beatitudes. Most of the time, life doesn’t work out like we expect it will. We spend time and energy trying to climb some sort of spiritual ladder, oblivious to the fact that it is God who is moving toward us. We want answers to our problems, yet what is offered is presence. What if we were to become united with our brokenness rather than our victories? What if God moves closest to us in the absence, the ache, and the longing? Words from the Hill turns each beatitude on its head to see the unexpected beneath the understood—diving into the story of a woman on death row to speak about mercy, personal stories from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to talk about peace, and much more. Stu Garrard has walked with these people in their stories, and he vulnerably offers his own as he unpacks the Good News of the Beatitudes. God is on your side, and He is closer than you think.

Explore with Spot and learn 100 first words along the way in this chunky lift-the-flap board book! Join Spot and his family and friends as they go on adventures to the park, the beach, the playground, and more—and discover 100 key first words along the way. Little ones will love exploring the colorful scenes and lifting lots of flaps on every page as they learn and play with Spot.

Crossing countries and continents, this narrative follows a son lost for words over the death of his father. Unable to write the phrase "My father is dead" in either his native Greek or his adopted French, he heads for Africa to undertake the learning of Sango. Traveling across both borders and time, he examines his past, his family history, and the colonial and political ties of his homelands. While at first he does not know why learning a new and uncommon language has become vital to him, he comes to discover that the new language enables him to easily write of his father's passing. But as he truly experiences Sango--meets its speakers, travels where it emerged and has struggled to survive--his intimacy with it grows, and he is once again unable to utter the telling phrase. Meditating on language, loss, and the power of words to express or constrain human emotion, this tale of speaking, living, and letting go is filled with delicate suspense, humor, and honesty.

The history of writing, or so the standard story goes, is an ascending process, evolving toward the alphabet and finally culminating in the "full writing" of recorded speech. Writing without Words challenges this orthodoxy, and with it widespread notions of literacy and dominant views of art and literature, history and geography. Asking how knowledge was encoded and preserved in Pre-Columbian and early colonial Mesoamerican cultures, the authors focus on systems of writing that did not strive to represent speech. Their work reveals the complicity of ideology in the history of literacy, and offers new insight into the history of writing. The contributors--who include art historians, anthropologists, and literary theorists--examine the ways in which ancient Mesoamerican and Andean peoples conveyed meaning through hieroglyphic, pictorial, and coded systems, systems inseparable from the ideologies they were developed to serve. We see, then, how these systems changed with the European invasion, and how uniquely colonial writing systems came to embody the post-conquest American ideologies. The authors also explore the role of these early systems in religious discourse and their relation to later colonial writing. Bringing the insights from Mesoamerica and the Andes to bear on a fundamental exchange among art history, literary theory, semiotics, and anthropology, the volume reveals the power contained in the medium of writing. Contributors. Elizabeth Hill Boone, Tom Cummins, Stephen Houston, Mark B. King, Dana Leibsohn, Walter D. Mignolo, John Monaghan, John M. D. Pohl, Joanne Rappaport, Peter van der Loo

The story of Mason Steele, an African American boy in 1960s Greenville, North Carolina, who relies on his inner strength and his typing skills to break racial barriers after he begins attending a whites-only high school.