Blending pastoral warmth, philosophical depth, storytelling skill, and literary craft, Mark Buchanan encourages Christians to make heaven, literally, our "fixation" -- filling our vision, gripping our heart, and anchoring our hope. Only then, says Buchanan, can we become truly fearless on this earth, free from the fear of losing our life, property, status, title, or comfort; free from the threat of tyrants, the power of armies, and the day of trouble. Buchanan reawakens the instinctive yearning for things above, showing that only the heavenly minded are of much earthly good. Clear, stylish typeset, with user-friendly links to referenced Scripture.

Citing sleepless nights as periods that have inspired many creative works, a collection of poetry, prayers, lullabies, songs, and stories is designed to soothe readers to sleep, address nighttime fears, and offer new promise for the next day's opportunities.

Seven years ago, Christian Wiman, a well-known poet and the editor of Poetry magazine, wrote a now-famous essay about having faith in the face of death. My Bright Abyss, composed in the difficult years since and completed in the wake of a bone marrow transplant, is a moving meditation on what a viable contemporary faith—responsive not only to modern thought and science but also to religious tradition—might look like. Joyful, sorrowful, and beautifully written, My Bright Abyss is destined to become a spiritual classic, useful not only to believers but to anyone whose experience of life and art seems at times to overbrim its boundaries. How do we answer this "burn of being"? Wiman asks. What might it mean for our lives—and for our deaths—if we acknowledge the "insistent, persistent ghost" that some of us call God? One of Publishers Weekly's Best Religion Books of 2013

FRAMEWORKS is a series dedicated to interdisciplinary studies on the integration of faith and learning. Given Jesus' command to "love God with heart, soul, mind, and strength," the time is ripe for confessional scholarship and education across the disciplines. We implore God's Spirit to change us through the great works of history and literature alongside developments in science, psychology, and economics--and all of this--through intense engagement with the Scriptures. We want to celebrate God's work across the disciplines. We seek the likes of psychologists in conversation with philosophers, ethicists with historians, biblical scholars with rhetoricians, scientists with economists, environmentalists with neurologists. As these conversations continue across the disciplines, the "framework" from which to draw our individual and collective testimonies will only enlarge. We invite you to think, behave, preach, sing, pray, research and indeed to live this multi-faceted journey with us. If indeed our stories are never complete, we invite future contributors and readers to join us in pursuit of deeper personal and collective transformation.

Contains one hundred of the most anthologized poems in the English language, and includes notes, profiles of the authors, and bibliographic information; presented in chronological order with a glossary, and author, title, and first line indexes.