Love has a story. It’s bigger than you. It’s bigger than me. It comes from old, an overflow of the beautiful love shared between the Father whose heart bursts for the Son, the Son who adores His Father, all wrapped in the glorious, life-giving love of the Spirit. And this great Love knows and cherishes every secret and intimate detail of your story. In fact, this story is for you. So where and how do we fit in this grand story of love? In Love Has a Story, author and poet Quina Aragon shares how, before the foundations of the earth, the great storyteller was penning a story that included you. Love was thinking about you, imagining ways to showcase His love for you, and planning to rescue you. This was not one of those sentimental loves, but a love that would traverse the wilderness in search of and for His beloved . . . and give everything—His life, blood, wounds, hope, and an invitation to be family. Join Quina in entering the greatest love story ever told. Through the prose and poetry of these meditations, you will come to know the great love of God for the world and for you. When you reach the end of this book, you will want to begin all over again. And you will want to share this great love story with your friends and family. Before you danced in your mother’s womb, before Adam and Eve, your greatest-grandparents ever walked the earth, before stars lit up the night sky, there was God—handpicking you to inherit a bottomless ocean: His love. —Quina Aragon

A young missionary working with Sudanese children sees transformation one child at a time, changed form the inside by Jesus' heart of love and power.

Discover the joy of stepping out and intentionally loving the people around you. “Love has a name, and that name isn’t Mark or Adam or even yours! That name is Jesus, and when we make love about him, everything else falls into place. Struggling to love? Pick up this book!”—Mark Batterson, New York Times bestselling author of The Circle Maker and lead pastor of National Community Church Who does Jesus love? The stranger who looks strange. The driver who cuts us off in traffic. The person online who thinks differently than we do. Loving people is hard. Especially when it involves the difficult people in our lives and those different from us. We say we love others, but really we don’t. Instead of loving, we hurt, belittle, and overlook people. Which is precisely why we need to learn how to love—from Jesus and from one another. Adam Weber knows firsthand how important it is to learn to love. And he’s learned incredible lessons from incredible people—some of them quite unexpected. With hope, humor, stretched comfort zones, biblical truth, and (maybe) a few tears, Love Has a Name looks at the most powerful of these stories, showing us twenty-seven people (and one school) who have taught Adam how to love like Jesus. One name at a time.

This book takes you from the lonely dark woods of Waldo, Arkansas, to the city of Santa Ana, California, in sixty-eight years. It talks about characters who are sad and desperate for closure and truth.

Kivuli Farley is an East African teen who has already suffered a tumultuous childhood when she arrives in America to meet the Roses who had been patrons and friends of her great-grandfather for four decades. Spirited and generous, Kivuli is anxious to learn more about her Maasai ancestor buried in Nevada before she was born. But the present journey proves to be as challenging as the past when she discovers a secret the old African had kept that led to a devastating tragedy for the Rose family. What Kivuli desires above all is to find a way for those still wounded to heal and a path to redemption for two women worlds apart: an incarcerated child abductor, and the killer she knows best – her own mother. As she opens herself to the teachings of a Lakota Sioux horse master, the lesson in a provocative painting, the friendship of an adopted Indian boy with two dads, the surprising spiritual views of a South African Catholic priest, and ultimately a dangerous communication with the seemingly unredeemable kidnapper, the way becomes clear. In a whirlwind tale of diverse cultures, faiths, and passions, victims and perpetrators draw inexorably together in a search for the meaning of forgiveness.

Winner of the 2009 Christianity Today Award for Biblical Studies, Stories with Intent offers pastors and students a comprehensive and accessible guide to Jesus' parables. Klyne Snodgrass explores in vivid detail the historical context in which these stories were told, the part they played in Jesus' overall message, and the ways in which they have been interpreted in the church and the academy. Snodgrass begins by surveying the primary issues in parables interpretation and providing an overview of other parables—often neglected in the discussion—from the Old Testament, Jewish writings, and the Greco-Roman world. He then groups the more important parables of Jesus thematically and offers a comprehensive treatment of each, exploring both background and significance for today. This tenth anniversary edition includes a substantial new chapter that surveys developments in the interpretation of parables since the book's original 2008 publication.

Offering a new understanding of canonical Romanticism, Daniela Garofalo suggests that representations of erotic love in the period have been largely misunderstood. Commonly understood as a means for transcending political and economic realities, love, for several canonical Romantic writers, offers, instead, a contestation of those realities. Garofalo argues that Romantic writers show that the desire for transcendence through love mimics the desire for commodity consumption and depends on the same dynamic of delayed fulfillment that was advocated by thinkers such as Adam Smith. As writers such as William Blake, Lord Byron, Sir Walter Scott, John Keats, and Emily Brontë engaged with the period's concern with political economy and the nature of desire, they challenged stereotypical representations of women either as self-denying consumers or as intemperate participants in the market economy. Instead, their works show the importance of women for understanding modern economics, with women's desire conceived as a force that not only undermines the political economy's emphasis on productivity, growth, and perpetual consumption, but also holds forth the possibility of alternatives to a system of capitalist exchange.

Modern Short Stories: A Book for High Schools' represents a seminal collection that embraces a kaleidoscope of literary styles and themes, reflecting the complexity and depth of human experiences. This anthology excellently showcases the diversity of the early twentieth-century short story, threading through the social fabric of different cultures and philosophical outlooks. From the adventurous landscapes of Jack London to the psychological intricacies of Leo Tolstoy, the collection is a testament to the stories ability to captivate, educate, and provoke thought, while presenting a remarkable range of narrative voices and techniques. The inclusion of tales by figures such as Rudyard Kipling and Arthur Conan Doyle highlights significant works that have influenced the contours of modern literary expression. The contributing authors and editors, drawn from a rich tapestry of cultural and literary backgrounds, collectively present an unparalleled exploration of the era's socio-cultural dynamics. Their stories, representative of various literary movements from naturalism to romanticism, together provide a panoramic view of the shifting currents of early 20th century society and thought. By juxtaposing works of authors like Mary Mapes Dodge with those of Ernest Thompson Seton, the anthology uncovers the versatile power of the short story medium to traverse thematic boundaries, from childhood innocence to the complexities of adult life, thereby enriching the readers understanding of a transformative epoch in literature. Modern Short Stories: A Book for High Schools invites readers on an enlightening journey through the landscape of early modern literature, offering a unique compilation that is as educational as it is entertaining. It serves not only as a gateway to the minds and hearts of its authors but also as a mirror reflecting the universal truths and challenges of the human condition. This anthology is an indispensable resource for anyone seeking to delve into the richness of short story literature, providing a comprehensive exploration of its multifaceted themes, styles, and cultural perspectives, thereby fostering a dialogue between the past and present literary worlds.

This volume brings together Nussbaum's published papers on the relationship between literature and philosophy, especially moral philosophy. The papers, many of them previously inaccessible to non-specialist readers, deal with such fundamental issues as the relationship between style and content in the exploration of ethical issues; the nature of ethical attention and ethical knowledge and their relationship to written forms and styles; and the role of the emotions in deliberation and self-knowledge. Nussbaum investigates and defends a conception of ethical understanding which involves emotional as well as intellectual activity, and which gives a certain type of priority to the perception of particular people and situations rather than to abstract rules. She argues that this ethical conception cannot be completely and appropriately stated without turning to forms of writing usually considered literary rather than philosophical. It is consequently necessary to broaden our conception of moral philosophy in order to include these forms. Featuring two new essays and revised versions of several previously published essays, this collection attempts to articulate the relationship, within such a broader ethical inquiry, between literary and more abstractly theoretical elements.

This book of stories examines the broad map of human love and friendship from the perspective of the Bible to conclude that love's often difficult path can be smoothed with God's help, if we muster the courage and the faith to ask. In support, the author offers classical stories from Hebrew and Christian scriptures, among many--Boaz and Ruth, Tobias and Sarah, Jonathan and David, Peter and Jesus, Joseph and his brothers, Jacob and Rachel and Leah--stories of emotional relationships both constant and supportive, faithful and content, envious and vengeful, sensuous and pure, those of families, friends, siblings, husbands and wives, and disciples. Students of the Bible, and the general public, will find this an instructive and compelling work, which comes complete with reflection questions, suitable for individual and group study, at the end of each chapter. +