Winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, the Drama Desk Award, the Outer Critics Circle Award, the Lucille Lortel Award, and the Oppenheimer Award. Adapted to an Emmy Award-winning television movie, directed by Mike Nichols, starring Emma Thompson. Margaret Edson's powerfully imagined Pulitzer Prize–winning play examines what makes life worth living through her exploration of one of existence's unifying experiences—mortality—while she also probes the vital importance of human relationships. What we as her audience take away from this remarkable drama is a keener sense that, while death is real and unavoidable, our lives are ours to cherish or throw away—a lesson that can be both uplifting and redemptive. As the playwright herself puts it, "The play is not about doctors or even about cancer. It's about kindness, but it shows arrogance. It's about compassion, but it shows insensitivity." In Wit, Edson delves into timeless questions with no final answers: How should we live our lives knowing that we will die? Is the way we live our lives and interact with others more important than what we achieve materially, professionally, or intellectually? How does language figure into our lives? Can science and art help us conquer death, or our fear of it? What will seem most important to each of us about life as that life comes to an end? The immediacy of the presentation, and the clarity and elegance of Edson's writing, make this sophisticated, multilayered play accessible to almost any interested reader. As the play begins, Vivian Bearing, a renowned professor of English who has spent years studying and teaching the intricate, difficult Holy Sonnets of the seventeenth-century poet John Donne, is diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer. Confident of her ability to stay in control of events, she brings to her illness the same intensely rational and painstakingly methodical approach that has guided her stellar academic career. But as her disease and its excruciatingly painful treatment inexorably progress, she begins to question the single-minded values and standards that have always directed her, finally coming to understand the aspects of life that make it truly worth living.

Whether they are well-known or long-forgotten, the stories of women throughout the Bible are among the most remarkable in all of literature. Many of these women have inspired faith and been shining examples of God's place in our lives. In a set of captivating and thought-provoking sermons, Robert Allen takes a closer look at ten of these women and reveals how they share a common humanity with modern Christians.

With The Gospel of Pure Human Kindness, Charles F. Tekula, Jr. brings to light the very nature of Jesus the Nazorean in an eminently readable interpretive adaptation of the Gospel According to St. John, taken from the King James. By updating the phraseology with familiar terms and idioms and putting the chapters into standard book format, sans numbered verses, Tekula has put the fullness of the story back into the message. He illuminates the true heart of the Gospel by replacing the narrator's identification of Jesus from his angelically given Greek name (meaning God Saves") to the English "Pure Human Kindness." In this way it is transformed from a name that modern civilization gives as many meanings to as there are philosophies and cultures within it, to one whose interpretation is singular, point on and unmistakable. As the author explains in his introduction, Jesus showed Himself to be, by His very words and actions, a "pure human kindness with the power and authority of Almighty God to back it up." To read "The Gospel of Pure Human Kindness" is to meet the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the form of His living metaphor, Jesus, the Davidic Galilean Jew, who inspired the Apostle John to write the everlasting words, "God is love."(I John 4:16)

In this brilliant, epigrammatic book, the eminent psychoanalyst Adam Phillips and the social historian Barbara Taylor examine the terrors of kindness and return to the reader the intense satisfactions of generosity and compassion. Kindness is the foundation of the world's great religions and most-enduring philosophies. Why, then, does being kind feel so dangerous? If we crave kindness with such intensity, why is it often the last pleasure we permit ourselves? And why—despite our longing—are we often suspicious when we are on the receiving end of it? Drawing on intellectual history, literature, psychoanalysis, and contemporary social theory, this brief and essential book will return to its readers what Marcus Aurelius declared was mankind's "greatest delight": the intense satisfactions of generosity and compassion.