James Greenaway offers a philosophical guide to understanding, affirming, and valuing the significance of belonging across personal, political, and historical dimensions of existence. A sense of belonging is one of the most meaningful experiences of anyone’s life. Inversely, the discovery that one does not belong can be one of the most upsetting experiences. In A Philosophy of Belonging, Greenaway treats the notion of belonging as an intrinsically philosophical one. After all, belonging raises intense questions of personal self-understanding, identity, mortality, and longing; it confronts interpersonal, sociopolitical, and historical problems; and it probes our relationship with both the knowable world and transcendent mystery. Experiences of alienation, exclusion, and despair become conspicuous only because we are already moved by a primordial desire to belong. Greenaway presents a hermeneutical framework that brings the intelligibility of belonging into focus and discusses the works of various representative thinkers in light of this hermeneutic. The study is divided into two main parts, “Presence” and “Communion.” In the first, Greenaway considers the abiding presence of the cosmos as the context of personhood and the world, followed by the presence of persons to themselves and others by way of consciousness and embodiment, culminating in a discussion of the unrestricted horizon of meaning that love makes present in persons. In the second part, belonging in community is explored as a crucial type of communion that is both politically and historically structured. Moreover, communion has direction and a quality of sacredness that offers itself for consideration. Greenaway concludes with a discussion of the consequences of refusing presence and communion, and what is involved in the repudiation of belonging.

A look at how ideas of translation, migration, and displacement are embedded in the works of prominent artists, from Ovid to Tacita Dean On Belonging and Not Belonging provides a sophisticated exploration of how themes of translation, migration, and displacement shape an astonishing range of artistic works. From the possibilities and limitations of translation addressed by Jhumpa Lahiri and David Malouf to the effects of shifting borders in the writings of Eugenio Montale, W. G. Sebald, Colm Tóibín, and many others, esteemed literary critic Mary Jacobus looks at the ways novelists, poets, photographers, and filmmakers revise narratives of language, identity, and exile. Jacobus’s attentive readings of texts and images seek to answer the question: What does it mean to identify as—or with—an outsider? Walls and border-crossings, nomadic wanderings and Alpine walking, the urge to travel and the yearning for home—Jacobus braids together such threads in disparate times and geographies. She plumbs the experiences of Ovid in exile, Frankenstein’s outcast Being, Elizabeth Bishop in Nova Scotia and Brazil, Walter Benjamin’s Berlin childhood, and Sophocles’s Antigone in the wilderness. Throughout, Jacobus trains her eye on issues of transformation and translocation; the traumas of partings, journeys, and returns; and confrontations with memory and the past. Focusing on human conditions both modern and timeless, On Belonging and Not Belonging offers a unique consideration of inclusion and exclusion in our world.

With disarming authenticity Mehmet Kilic appeals to each and every one of us to wake up and take action now to save all life on Earth before it is too late. His clarity of speech pulls on the very heartstrings of humanity, urging us to join together and create a world of peace for everyone. In a voice of profound simplicity and practical wisdom Mehmet outlines his vision of a world state. His manifesto is based on a deep-seated awareness of the intercon-nectedness of all living beings on this planet. He calls on us with an uncompromising sense of duty to face up to our responsibili-ties as world citizens and challenges us to take that first step.

"A social-emotional approach to classroom management teachers that helps teachers create positive learning environments where all students belong and thrive"--

A leading expert shows how, by learning from refugee teachers and students, we can create for displaced childrenÑand indeed all childrenÑbetter schooling and brighter futures. Half of the worldÕs 26 million refugees are children. Their formal education is disrupted, and their lives are too often dominated by exclusion and uncertainty about what the future holds. Even kids who have the opportunity to attend school face enormous challenges, as they struggle to integrate into unfamiliar societies and educational environments. In Right Where We Belong, Sarah Dryden-Peterson discovers that, where governments and international agencies have been stymied, refugee teachers and students themselves are leading. From open-air classrooms in Uganda to the hallways of high schools in Maine, new visions for refugee education are emerging. Dryden-Peterson introduces us to people like JacquesÑa teacher who created a school for his fellow Congolese refugees in defiance of local lawsÑand Hassan, a Somali refugee navigating the social world of the American teenager. Drawing on more than 600 interviews in twenty-three countries, Dryden-Peterson shows how teachers and students are experimenting with flexible forms of learning. Rather than adopt the unrealistic notion that all will soon return to Ònormal,Ó these schools embrace unfamiliarity, develop studentsÕ adaptiveness, and demonstrate how children, teachers, and community members can build supportive relationships across lines of difference. It turns out that policymakers, activists, and educators have a lot to learn from displaced children and teachers. Their stories point the way to better futures for refugee students and inspire us to reimagine education broadly, so that children everywhere are better prepared to thrive in a diverse and unpredictable world.

“This is not a time to hunker down and lock our doors. I see clearly that the Lord is calling us out of ourselves, to get up and walk.” —From the Foreword by POPE FRANCIS Drawing on the wisdom of Pope Francis and the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola, Austen Ivereigh has written a captivating spiritual guide for our turbulent age. Designed as an eight-day Ignatian retreat, First Belong to God serves as a roadmap to deeper discipleship. It does this by focusing on the three foundational forms of belonging: to God, to creation, and to others. Structured around the core principles of St. Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises, First Belong to God encapsulates the key aspects of the Francis pontificate: the essence of being “God-belonging” entities the way God’s mercy challenges our self-reliance the journey to building the Kingdom in the footsteps of Christ heeding the cry of the earth and the stranger striving for fraternity by championing synodality Whether you’re embarking on a solitary spiritual expedition or a journey with like-minded individuals, First Belong to God offers the next best thing to a personal retreat with Pope Francis: a full-soul immersion into his wisdom via the classic Jesuit retreat that shaped him so profoundly.

Belong is the story of Divaker - a common and ordinary man like one of us. Belong is the tale of ordinary human life with all its problems and challenges, as seen and experienced through the eyes and life of Divaker. He is one of us, an average human being. He belongs to a 'lower-middle income' family of a remote village in West Bengal, but the family kept on moving from place to place ever since Divaker was a child with all the utensils, table-fan, mattress and radio. Papa was an average government servant. As a child, Divaker had seen people moving away before becoming friends, people who never came back ever. Before he could mix-up with local kids at school, it was time for Divaker to move off to a new place. Divaker saw a lot of turbulence in his teen years. Mama and Papa separated, and he was sent to a Hindu boy's missionary school up in the hills, where life started everyday at five-thirty in the morning, all twelve months of the year. He had jumped into manhood by the time he passed high school. He somewhere missed the inquisitiveness and curiosity of teen age and the heavenly-dreamy period of youth. He was a full-grown man at twenty, a man with invisible wrinkles on face. Divaker crawled, stood on his feet, walked and ran for career, life and money. He tasted varied flavors of success, failures and disgust. He carved out a small position for himself in this big-biiiiig world. Life taught him the way this world goes round the sun- harder way round. Divaker married, after a full-time romance of four years, it was then he discovered and learnt few other things in life, not all of them pleasant- yes, the harder way round.

From birth, David Rozinsky fought to belong, first within his dysfunctional family—a mother who hated him and favored his twin brother, and a milquetoast father who obediently kept his distance—then, as he matured, for acceptance in the land of his birth, only to find that he must pay for its undeniable freedoms and creature comforts with barbs of intolerance and a threatened loss of identity. When he and his wife finally say "enough" and emigrate to Israel, the struggle for a place to belong takes on a different reality, as they try to adjust to a foreign mentality and David fights to pierce the bond between ex-army cronies, who feel threatened by his talents and special skills. At the end comes the question: "Which world will he choose?"

A second chance at finding home A Cold Creek Homecoming by New York Times bestselling author RaeAnne Thayne When Quinn Southerland discovers his foster mom’s hospice nurse is Tess Claybourne, he’s surprised—and not in a good way! He still hasn’t forgiven the former high school queen bee for how she treated him. But recently widowed Tess has learned a lot about life—and herself. And Quinn starts to wonder if he could be wrong about her. Is there room in his damaged heart for forgiveness…or love? FREE BONUS STORY INCLUDED IN THIS VOLUME! Coming Home to Crimson by Michelle Major Escaping from a cheating fiancé in a “borrowed” car, Sienna Pierce can’t think of anywhere to go but Crimson, the hometown she swore she’d never go back to. And Crimson sheriff Cole Bennett has a lot at stake in keeping the town on an even keel. On the surface, they have nothing in common. But there's nothing superficial about their feelings for each other!

This book explores the way in which singing can foster experiences of belonging through ritual performance. Based on more than two decades of ethnographic, pedagogical and musical research, it is set against the backdrop of "the new Ireland" of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Charting Ireland's growing multiculturalism, changing patterns of migration, the diminished influence of Catholicism, and synergies between indigenous and global forms of cultural expression, it explores rights and rites of belonging in contemporary Ireland. Helen Phelan examines a range of religious, educational, civic and community-based rituals including religious rituals of new migrant communities in "borrowed" rituals spaces; baptismal rituals in the context of the Irish citizenship referendum; rituals that mythologize the core values of an educational institution; a ritual laboratory for students of singing; and community-based festivals and performances. Her investigation peels back the physiological, emotional and cultural layers of singing to illuminate how it functions as a potential agent of belonging. Each chapter engages theoretically with one of five core characteristic of singing (resonance, somatics, performance, temporality, and tacitness) in the context of particular performed rituals. Phelan offers a persuasive proposal for ritually-framed singing as a valuable and potent tool in the creation of inclusive, creative and integrated communities of belonging.