In Irish Celtic lore, "thin places" are those locales where the veil between this world and the otherworld is porous, where there is mystery in the landscape. The earth takes on the hue of the sacred among peoples whose connection to place has remained unbroken through the ages. What happens, then, when a Celtic view of nature is brought home to a North American landscape in which many inhabitants' ancestral connections to place are surface-thin? In a quest to find a deeper spiritual landscape in his own home, Kevin Koch applies eight principles of a Celtic spiritual view of nature to places in Ireland and to the American Midwest's rugged Driftless Area, an unglaciated region of river bluffs, rock outcrops, and steeply wooded hills. The Thin Places brings onsite mountaineering guides, spiritual leaders, geologists, and archaeologists alongside scholars in the fields of Celtic studies, religion, and conservation. But the text never strays far from story, from a trek through the Wicklow Mountains and the bogs of Western Ireland or among ancient Native American burial mounds and abandoned nineteenth-century lead mines in the bluffs above the Mississippi River.

A “thin place” is where God’s grace is waiting to happen. Your thin place might be an important threshold, a soul friendship, a fresh chapter in your own life story, a painful secret or fear, or a time of hardship. Whatever the circumstance, a thin place is where God and humanity meet in a mysterious way. These moments open us to places of rawness and beauty. When we enter into a thin place, something seems to break open inside us, and words are inadequate to describe what we are experiencing. In these moments, we feel a sense of breakthrough as we break free of the ordinary and experience the extraordinary amid our daily lives. Drawing on her Irish-Celtic heritage, Julianne Stanz helps us explore those times and holy places of transformation. Inspired by faith and guided by spiritual practices, we can experience each thin place as a point of departure on a sacred journey to a truer understanding of who we are meant to be.

The Williamson family went through the normal day routine, doing the activities of each day which needed to be done. Then the week turned into a whirl wind of actions and emotions. Daddy took a turn for the worse as he struggled with Congestive Heart Failure. The week days could have become overpowering with challenges and with exhausting work which had to be done, but not with God in control. The day struggles involved trying to keep Daddy comfortable. Oddly enough, the tasks became loving rather than exhausting and there was joy rather than despair. It is amazing how God makes situations easier to face if we will just ask! The Thin Place offers the reader an experience into a time and place very close to God. The Thin Place offers the reader an experience in the presence of the Holy Spirit. This all took place during a real life situation which most everyone has already faced or will face. But, this common, unpleasant situation was transformed into a place where heaven and earth almost coincide. The Thin Place is for those seeking peace and comfort, oddly enough, after suffering great loss. God creates a place where holiness is all around and instantly peace and comfort fall on all creation. The Holy Spirit and the angels must be present, and God is in control. You know, the "thin place".

In this provocative essay collection, an award-winning writer shares her personal and reportorial investigation into America’s search for meaning. A Los Angeles Times Bestseller A Lit Hub | Chicago Review | Ms. Magazine March Pick A Lambda Literary Most Anticipated Book When Jordan Kisner was a child, she was saved by Jesus Christ at summer camp, much to the confusion of her nonreligious family. She was, she writes, “just naturally reverent,” a fact that didn’t change when she—much to her own confusion—lost her faith as a teenager. Not sure why her religious conviction had come or where it had gone, she did what anyone would do: “You go about the great American work of assigning yourself to other gods: yoga, talk radio, neoatheism, CrossFit, cleanses, football, the academy, the American Dream, Beyoncé.” A curiosity about the subtle systems guiding contemporary life pervades Kisner’s work. Her celebrated essay “Thin Places” (Best American Essays 2016), about an experimental neurosurgery developed to treat severe obsessive-compulsive disorder, asks how putting the neural touchpoint of the soul on a pacemaker may collide science and psychology with philosophical questions about illness, the limits of the self, and spiritual transformation. How should she understand the appearance of her own obsessive-compulsive disorder at the very age she lost her faith? Intellectually curious and emotionally engaging, the essays in Thin Places manage to be both intimate and expansive, illuminating an unusual facet of American life, as well as how it reverberates with the author’s past and present preoccupations. “An unsettling and an endlessly curious read.” —Sarah Neilson, Electric Literature

What makes the places we inhabit extraordinary? Why are some urban spaces more vital and restorative? Wonderful landscapes, inspiring works of architecture and urban design, and the numinous experiences that accompany them have been an integral dimension of our culture. Up-lifting spaces, dramatic use of natural light, harmonic proportional geometry, magical landscapes, historic sites and vital city centers create special, even sacred moments in architecture and planning. This quality of experience is often seen as an aesthetic purpose intended to inspire, ennoble, ensoul and spiritually renew. Architecture and urban spaces, functioning in this way, are considered to be thin places.

Thin Places is an eloquent meditation on what it means to move between cultures and how one might finally come home, a particular paradox in a culture that lacks deep ties to the natural world. During the 1990s, Ann Armbrecht, an American anthropologist, made several trips to northeastern Nepal to research how the Yamphu Rai acquired, farmed, and held onto their land; how they perceived their area's recent designation as a national park and conservation area; and whether-as she believed-they held a wisdom about living on the earth that the industrialized West had forgotten. What Armbrecht found instead were men and women who shared her restlessness, people also driven by the feeling that there must be more to life than they could find in their village. Charting Armbrecht's travels in the mountains of Nepal and in the United States, as well as her disintegrating marriage back home, Thin Places is ultimately an exploration not of the sacred far-off but of the sacredness of places that are between?between the internal and external landscape, the self and others, and the self and the land. She finds that home is not a place where we arrive but a way of being in place, wherever that place may be.

Breaking things is easy. Rebuilding things is much more difficult. Once you have “deconstructed” from toxic religious beliefs, what is next? Moving from being “religious” to a rich life of spirituality is easier said than done. The temptation for many people who deconstruct from an unhealthy form of dogmatic fundamentalism is to adopt a new form of non-religious dogmatic fundamentalism that is just as toxic. Religious deconstruction is not a linear process. We won’t one day “arrive” and figure it all out. There is no “end” to the deconstructing and reconstructing cycle. In this book, Dana Robert Hicks outlines a cyclical model of continuous deconstruction and reconstruction. The model helps facilitate the deepest longings of the human heart: the experiences of awe, wonder, and transcendence.

A beautiful collection of poems inspired by Durham Cathedral and its saints, visitors and pilgrims.

Ragtime is new, Victorians are out, and free love is on the rise. New York dandies Bryce, Jack, and Morgan open an emporium in the nascent art colony of Taos, New Mexico, promising to bring metropolitan culture and the latest wonders from the St. Louis World's Fair. The problem—none of them knows how to run a business. Free love? That they understand. Soon, the handsome young New Yorkers meet freethinking women ready to test the mores of a new century. With too little capital, their venture struggles until a leading member of Taos society begins holding teas for her inner circle at their store. But just as the business starts to thrive, the ladies usurp the tea parties to hire a Protestant pastor and are sent a recently ordained Universalist minister. Calamities pile up. The Universalist's sermons don’t go over well in Catholic Taos and the ensuing religious conflict hurts the emporium's business. Meanwhile, the men lose a lucrative Gramophone deal, and while Morgan’s trying to fix that, they get shaken down by a brothel owner. Then, Jack’s landlady dies, leaving him responsible for her nearly grown daughters. Oh yeah, and Bryce quits to join a peyote cult. Yet even as the partners fail at transforming Taos, Taos begins to transform them. And by the time the emporium goes belly up, they are ready to start their lives over again.

In Buddhist teaching, "the thin places" are the most precarious parts of our existence. Judi Benson's third collection explores this precariousness with sympathy, but also with vigour, wit and amusement. Her poems range over many subjects - Burying the Ancestors (about her slave-owning forebears) was the runner-up in the Forward Prize for a Single Poem in 2004. Judi Benson is an American who has lived in Britain since 1978. She edited Foolscap magazine for nine years. She also edited What Poets Eat and co-edited an anthology of contemporary poems on bereavement, as well as (with her late husband the poet, Ken Smith) the anthology Klaonica: Poems for Bosnia. She is currently poet-in-residence at a cancer hospital in Scotland. 'There is a sense of life fully embraced and people, from Kosovo to London, from Europe to the USA, fully regarded. The relish with which the poems are made - the voice always clear in the ear - reveals a warm, confiding humanity which will gain her many new readers.' - Carol Ann Duffy on Judi Benson's previous collection Call It Blue.