A Stranger Is Calling

A child development and relationship perspective on why traumatized children think, feel and act the way they do

Rachel works at a suicide prevention center. Stuck in a loveless relationship with a man with OCD, she longs for something different. One night, she receives a call at the center from a strange man. He is distraught but not to the point of suicide. He describes what he wants in life and what he's missing. Soon they are talking every night and they develop a bond beyond that is strictly forbidden at the call center. Still, Rachel decides to meet the man...in secret...and finds herself in a world of danger...

This book is a cross-cultural, gendered study of both self and curriculum. Initiating a conversation between and among Michel Foucault, Confucius, and Julia Kristeva, it searches for a new (third) cultural and psychic space of transformation and creativity. Weaving together philosophy, psychoanalysis, and autobiography through lived experiences of curriculum, it calls for new configurations of subjectivity at the intersection of culture and gender, through the meeting between selfhood and the human psyche, in the dynamics of the semiotic and the symbolic, and through the interaction between the Western subject and the Chinese self. These multiple layers of inquiry provide unique perspectives for readers who are interested in curriculum theory, feminist analysis, philosophy of education, or East/West dialogue.

Rachel works at a suicide prevention center. Stuck in a loveless relationship with a man with OCD, she longs for something different. One night, she receives a call at the center from a strange man. He is distraught but not to the point of suicide. He describes what he wants in life and what he's missing. Soon they are talking every night and they develop a bond beyond that is strictly forbidden at the call center. Still, Rachel decides to meet the man...in secret...and finds herself in a world of danger...

THE PHONE RINGS...

I Was a Stranger will help you build empathy for the strangers and foreigners among you. Through personal experience and through the narratives of people who have moved to a foreign country for a variety of reasons, Jodi Mullen Fondell offers encouragement for churches desiring to be a place of welcome and embrace for those who often find themselves rejected by the broader society. Packed with tips on how to help your church navigate the road toward greater openness, this book offers advice on how to avoid the pitfalls that prevent churches from truly welcoming and embracing the stranger among them. Rev. Fondell gently guides readers in examining their own experiences of alienation in order to understand the profound disorientation that being a stranger in a strange land entails. This identification with the pain of being an outsider, she asserts, can move, motivate, and mobilize the church to live out God's calling to welcome in the stranger. As the body of Christ embraces the members we are tempted to exclude, a new level of joy and a taste of heaven await our congregations. Includes a small-group Bible-study guide for communities ready to grow in ministry and hospitality.

Malcolm Gladwell, host of the podcast Revisionist History and author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Outliers, offers a powerful examination of our interactions with strangers and why they often go wrong—now with a new afterword by the author. A Best Book of the Year: The Financial Times, Bloomberg, Chicago Tribune, and Detroit Free Press How did Fidel Castro fool the CIA for a generation? Why did Neville Chamberlain think he could trust Adolf Hitler? Why are campus sexual assaults on the rise? Do television sitcoms teach us something about the way we relate to one another that isn’t true? Talking to Strangers is a classically Gladwellian intellectual adventure, a challenging and controversial excursion through history, psychology, and scandals taken straight from the news. He revisits the deceptions of Bernie Madoff, the trial of Amanda Knox, the suicide of Sylvia Plath, the Jerry Sandusky pedophilia scandal at Penn State University, and the death of Sandra Bland—throwing our understanding of these and other stories into doubt. Something is very wrong, Gladwell argues, with the tools and strategies we use to make sense of people we don’t know. And because we don’t know how to talk to strangers, we are inviting conflict and misunderstanding in ways that have a profound effect on our lives and our world. In his first book since his #1 bestseller David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell has written a gripping guidebook for troubled times.