Why is there suffering? When will it end? Where is God in it? Despite how common suffering is, we still struggle to understand it, and even more to bear through it. Between Pain and Grace gets to the heart of this struggle. Its honest and detailed portrait of life challenges our assumptions about pain, emotion, and God himself. Born from a popular college course on suffering, this book answers critical questions like: Is God personally involved in our pain and suffering? How should Christians handle emotions like grief and anger? What does the Bible say about issues like mental illness, sexual abuse, and family betrayal? Striking an elegant balance between being scholarly and pastoral, Between Pain and Grace is useful in the classroom, churches, and for personal reading. The authors draw from Scripture, personal experience, and even psychological research to offer a well-rounded and trustworthy take on suffering. Between Pain and Grace will give you confidence in God’s sovereignty, comfort in His presence, and wisdom for life this side of paradise. It will also make you more tender and better prepared to respond to the suffering of others. Read it today for a richer, more realistic relationship with God.

A decade ago Brian Cahill became the victim of the greatest tragedy any parent can endure with the loss of his firstborn son, a veteran police officer in the aftermath of a painful divorce, to suicide. Far from the carefree retirement he had envisioned, the devastated father faced a journey back from the brink of utter despair. As the author of numerous opinion pieces and essays on religion, the lifelong Catholic was familiar with the concept that the cross is followed by the resurrection, and that from death comes new life. In the devastating years following his beloved son's suicide, the abstract became very real. Cahill's work volunteering with two different groups--cops and cons--saved him, allowing him to eventually experience a measure of grace. The unlikely combination of working with SFPD officers on suicide prevention and leading a spirituality group for San Quentin lifers brought him enough of a sense of peace and acceptance to truly want to continue living.

The present book deals with Sarah Kane’s dramatic text Cleansed to show a specific negotiation of violence, pain, life and death – one that is not necessarily causal or dichotomous. Instead, a new mode of reading, based on Bruno Latour’s take on Actor-Network-Theory, helps to make fictional worlds simultaneously intelligible in a mediate and in an immediate way. This results in an unprecedented understanding of how language can influence and modify ontological configurations. Eventually, this allows for a re-evaluation of political problems that occur in the 20th and 21st century.

How do we live well? The first sentence of Grace and Gravity raises the fundamental question that constantly occupies our minds-and of all those who lived before us. Paradoxically, the impossibility of answering this question opens up the very room needed to find ways of living well. It is the gap where all disciplines fall short, where architecture does not fit its inhabitants, where economy is not based on shortage, where religion cannot be explained by its followers, and where technology works far beyond its own principles. According to Lars Spuybroek, the prize-winning former architect, this marks the point where the “paradoxical machine” of grace reveals its powers, a point where we “cannot say if we are moving or being moved”. Following the trail of grace leads him to a new form of analysis that transcends the age-old opposition between appearances and technology. Linking up a dazzling and often delightful variety of sources-monkeys, paintings, lamp posts, octopuses, tattoos, bleeding fingers, rose windows, robots, smart phones, spirits, saints, and fossils-with profound meditations on living, death, consciousness, and existence, Grace and Gravity offers an eye-opening provocation to a wide range of art historians, architects, theologians, anthropologists, artists, media theorists and philosophers.

How can God be in the mess I'm wrapped up in? Why does he allow this pain? Where is he in this world of sexual abuse, child molestation, addiction, bullying, harassment, disease, and drugs? In Unwrapped At the Edge of Grace, How to Overcome in a World that Overwhelms, Carol shares her story of redemption and transformation and how God was present in the evil and delivered her from a destiny of darkness. She shows the reader how God weaved himself in her tragedies even when there was little light in her life. This is the most courageous and honest Christian book in my library. And frankly, I couldn't put it down. I lost track of the times I said, "What?" or "Wow!" Carol is real, relatable, unfailingly honest "" a breath of fresh air in what is often a stale Christian culture. This is about character development instead of image management! It's about time. -Pastor Ray Johnston, Bayside Church and author of Jesus Called-He Wants His Church Back, The Hope Quotient and, This Changes Everything: Unleashing the Power of the Resurrection in Your Life Carol's story, like the woman at the well, is a true life journey into freedom and wholeness. I know, because I\'ve witnessed it. She doesn't offer lofty platitudes that are unattainable. Instead her story will give you hope and real steps of how to get unwrapped from the things that keep you bound and move forward with the freedom that God offers. Join Carol in drinking from the 'living water' that Jesus promised would make you never thirst again. -Barbara Wilson M.A. Author/Speaker The Invisible Bond; how to break free from your sexual past Kiss Me Again; Restoring Lost Intimacy in Marriage Free: Finding Freedom and Healing from your Past for women and young women. Break Free for Men www.carolbarron.com

V. 12 contains: The Archer...Christmas, 1877.

In this uplifting novel, a woman recovering from trauma finds compassion and connection with a rescue dog as they help each other overcome fear. Lila Elliot knows she's lucky to be alive. A shooting rampage at her office left several colleagues dead and others seriously wounded. Though Lila's injuries will heal in time, she's having trouble moving past her fear and anger. Being drafted into caring for Grace—a shaggy, formerly abused golden retriever—only adds to her stress. Lila has been terrified of dogs since childhood. But Grace, like Lila, needs time and space to recover. Grace keeps her distance, sensing Lila's wariness, and only perks up for Adam, the neighbor who rescued her. But as an accomplished artist, Lila begins to see the beauty in Grace's wisps of fur and haunted eyes. Each of them has suffered through no fault of her own. And in helping Grace to trust, Lila begins to develop the courage she needs to do the same. Includes reading group guide

Grace Willow is on the brink of suicide. She is widowed, raising a young son, struggling with mental illness and a prescription drug addiction. Her desperate world is turned upside down after an encounter with a mysterious stranger claiming to be a family member, who also happens to be dead, gives her a gift that changes her forever. Grace discovers the family secret that leads her into a world she cannot possibly imagine where her greatest nightmares become reality. A world where terrifying and deadly creatures are real. When her hometown, the picturesque southern town of Chattanooga, Tennessee is threatened to be taken over by vampires, Grace unwittingly discovers she the only person in the world who can fight them. She grapples with her mental illness and how to keep safe the new family that has come into her life who knows her secret. A secret that dates back a thousand years. She must fight to survive while secretly wishing she was dead. Her problems become much larger than her mental illness. In her frantic battle to save others she must find the hero inside herself.