Maxine has pledged her heart and ring finger to Theodore Charles, the man she'll promise to love, honor, and obey in front of God and everybody. At least that's what she's telling anybody who will listen. The only folks buying it are the dog and the readers of her column, however. Her best friend and family aren't having it. As her wedding day marches ever closer, Maxine confronts what it means to be really known and loved by examining what's buried in her own heart and exposing truth that has never seen the light of day.

This special gift edition features more than six hundred hymns. It is designed for use by a variety of denominations and ecumenical settings.

When three women receive an unexpected phone call that leaves them reeling, they have no other choice but to reckon with a lifetime of memories they’ve long tried to bury. Only in facing the past will they find their path forward. Frances Mae Livingston’s firm grip of her family’s destructive history makes her hold her husband and four children even closer. But she’s losing bits of herself while proving to everybody and her mama that she’s enough. There’s no way she’ll repeat her mama’s mistakes, even if it kills her. Annabelle McMillan didn’t have trouble kicking the Eastern North Carolina dust off her feet. The tough part was replanting herself in familiar soil. Now she’s blending her old life with her new husband, stepson, and unborn child. And battling old memories of abandonment and new fears of rejection. Dr. Charlotte Winters has built a career around helping others sort through their emotional baggage. She’s also spent a lifetime refusing to unpack her own. So what if Charlotte doesn’t recall all that her mama did to her and what her daddy didn't do for her? Her only mission is to help others help themselves…until the women from her past and the man in her future undo her well-sewn life. At the junction of healed and hurting, broken and whole, and past and present, three women wrestle with their inability to forgive and forget in this riveting Southern family drama about sisterhood from award-winning author Robin W. Pearson. Southern family saga Discussion questions for book groups For fans of Black authors like Patricia Raybon, Toni Shiloh, and Brit Bennett

Paulette and Fred Baldwin are in a new season of life in Hickory Grove, North Carolina. Their son, McKinley, has moved away to live his own life, and the couple is struggling to connect with one another. In addition, Paulette suspects Fred and McKinley are hiding something that could change the whole family. As they face a coming storm, faith may be the only thing to get them through.

In this follow-up work to his earlier In the Land of the Living: Prayers Personal and Public, Kenneth L. Sehested sustains his evocative poetic imagination and capacity "for finding the right text at the right time," as Walter Brueggemann notes in his foreword. Sehested, an award-winning author and activist as well as a poet, pastor, and sometime stonemason, knows that serious thinking about Jesus is transacted on the road and then translated in liturgy to provoke the kind of praise that rankles the world (as it is) with a foretaste of what it might be. Most of the pieces in this work have been used first in worship in his own Circle of Mercy Congregation. "This book is a great gift," Brueggemann writes, and "it issues in a calling that befits the coming rule of God." Or, as Sehested writes in his meditation on John the Baptizer, "There's no getting right with God. There's only getting soaked."

Leading researchers shed new light on the history of the standardisation of English.