A Radiant Birth: Advent Readings for a Bright Season
Edited by Leslie leyland Fields and Paul J. Willis
A new book of readings for the coming season of Advent through Epiphany by a group of writers I greatly respect and learn from. It's an honor to be in conversation with them. A luminous book for a dark time.
— Marilyn McEntyre
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The Mindful Grandparent: The Art of Loving Our Children’s Children
Written primarily for those with very young grandchildren, The Mindful Grandparent doesn't shy away from challenging issues. Offering simple practices and engaging stories, The Mindful Grandparent covers wide-ranging topics such as cultivating curiosity, giving meaningful gifts, helping children explore difficult topics, honoring adult children's boundaries, and managing technology.
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Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies
Caring for language is a moral issue. Caring for one another is not entirely separable from caring for words. Words are entrusted to us as equipment for our life together, to help us survive, guide, and nourish one another. If language is to retain its power to nourish and sustain our common life, we have to care for it in something like the way good farmers care for the life of the soil.
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Word by Word: A Daily Spiritual Practice
Holding a word for a week, reflecting on it daily, allowing it to open new avenues of reflection, can be a rich practice. Drawing from the long tradition of lectio divina these meditations invite and model ways of living with a word and letting it lead one into new places of the heart, mind, and spirit.
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Speaking Peace in a Climate of Conflict
This “sequel” to Caring for Words shows how to speak and write clearly and generously. For example, we can attend more carefully to the effects of metaphors, recognize and avoid glib euphemisms, define terms in ways that retrieve core meanings and revitalize them, and enrich our sense of history by deft use of allusion.
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Make A List
Lists serve a variety of purposes. Not just reminders of things to do or buy, they can also become short exercises in reflection on what more there may be to see about our desires, fears, hopes, uncertainties, or unexplored possibilities. This book offers a variety of reflections on the uses of lists, prompts and exercises in list-making, and sample lists from the author’s own long list of lists.
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Where the Eye Alights
Lent is about more than going to church on weekdays and giving up chocolate or social media. It’s also a time to form one’s heart and mind through study and prayer. Where the Eye Alights offers forty short meditations, based on excerpts from Scripture and poetry, that guide readers on a devotional journey from Ash Wednesday through Holy Saturday.
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When Poets Pray
These reflections on poems that are prayers and poems about prayer suggest how much we can learn from poets whose art lies very close to the practice of prayer, and who open for their readers a pathway that leads toward a God who listens.
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Adverbs for Advent
Advent is a time to reflect on the great gift of our own lives and of the divine life into which we are invited. It is a good time to consider how to live. These short meditations offer reflections that question–how we might live hopefully, resiliently, repentantly, faithfully, wisely, lovingly.
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A Long Letting Go: Meditations on Losing Someone You Love
These meditations are for family members and friends who are doing the life-changing work of accompanying someone on the final stretch of his or her journey. A Long Letting Go invites caregivers to slow down for reflection and prayer as they prepare to say good-bye to a beloved friend or family member and grieve that loss.
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A Faithful Farewell: Living Your Last Chapter With Love
These reflections and prayers address a range of concerns that arise in situations of terminal illness: discouragement, embarrassment, boredom, loss of privacy, family conflict, indignities, spiritual torpor, sadness. Based on the writer’s personal experiences with the dying, they are written in the first person, with the intent of giving them an immediacy and candor they might not have otherwise. Frequent references to scripture and poetry serve as reminders of the rich resources available to those whose faith has equipped them for this final journey. A prayer follows each reading.
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What’s in a Phrase? - Pausing Where Scripture Gives You Pause
Lectio divina is an ancient way of reading scripture that invites personal reflection and contemplation. Readers listen for the word or phrase that summons them to pause, moving “inward” before moving “onward.” The author’s reflections on phrases from Scripture are offered in the hope that readers will find their own places to pause and enter the sacred space scripture provides for our habitation.
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Patient Poets: Illness from Inside Out
As a way of communicating the lived experience of illness or disability, poetry opens a very different window from narrative, emphasizing in its singular way discontinuity, surprise, and the uneasy relationship between words and the life of the body. These reflections on poetry by patients offer kinds of information unlikely to emerge in case histories or clinical dialogue.
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Reading Like a Serpent: What the Scarlet A is About
Reading Like a Serpent invites readers to reconsider Hawthorne’s American classic, The Scarlet Letter, as his challenge to the public of his time to become more generous, versatile, and responsible readers–especially of the Bible, a book Hawthorne hoped to rescue from moralistic literalists and legalists, reminding us that “the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.”
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Christ, My Companion
Christ promises to be with you always. Yet how often do you feel misunderstood, scared, and abandoned? In the much beloved "St. Patrick's Prayer" the patron saint of Ireland passionately invokes the ways Christ is present to us. Inspired by this litany, Marilyn Chandler McEntyre shares her contemporary reflections on St. Patrick's ancient, yet timeless, prayer.
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Drawn to the Light: Poems on Rembrandt’s Religious Paintings
It is the artist’s vocation to surprise us into remembering that the ordinary elements of our messy, material lives are gifts. Rembrandt restores us to a sense of the sacramentality of daily life. This daily life provides the terms in which he “reads” the biblical stories and invites us to read them—moments of real encounter among real people working out their salvation with a God who made and makes himself known in palpable, visible, surprising ways.
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The Color of Light: Poems on Van Gogh’s Late Paintings
He left us an invitation: say yes. The paintings call for our consent—to relinquish, to reorganize, to reimagine, to see into, to see through. To let solid objects be verbs rather than nouns and to recognize the surging life force in an olive tree or a bank of wild iris urgent with the work of growing purple. If you soften your vision just a little and let your eye relax into submission, you may get a glimpse of the “unified field” where forces come together and negotiate their differences in intimate and energetic play.
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Dear Doctor
With two extra minutes and a widened repertoire of questions, doctors and patients might open a way toward healing that would take into account dimensions of life that are, in fact, more medically relevant than either has been trained to think. These reflections, written as an open letter from a patient to a doctor, invite both doctors and patients to reimagine how to use their valuable minutes together.
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Dear Doctor
With two extra minutes and a widened repertoire of questions, doctors and patients might open a way toward healing that would take into account dimensions of life that are, in fact, more medically relevant than either has been trained to think. These reflections, written as an open letter from a patient to a doctor, invite both doctors and patients to reimagine how to use their valuable minutes together.
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New Thoughts on Old Books: Why Read Homer, Milton, or a Medieval Nun at a Time like This?
The reasons to read works by people of color, indigenous peoples, and other historically underrepresented groups should be obvious by now. The reasons to continue reading “classic” texts that have held places of honor in anthologies and English curricula are, however, less obvious. This book is emphatically not a defense of the traditional literary “canon,” but does address a question about which many readers wonder. These personal responses to it are invitations to revisit old books in new terms.
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Occasions: Selected Poems
These poems, written for occasions, remind us of those occasions that recur—celebrations, commemorations, rites of passage, and ordinary moments of being that linger in memory as turning points or extraordinary encounters or summonings. Tied as they are to particular times and places, readers may recognize in them echoes of their own beginnings, partings, and moments of awakening.
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