An Open Book Work By Barbara Ellmann

'There are three kinds of strike I'd recommend: a housework strike, a labour strike, and a sex strike. I can't wait for the first two.' Things Are Against Us is the first collection of essays from Booker Prize-shortlisted Lucy Ellmann. Bold, angry, despairing and very, very funny, these essays cover everything – from matriarchy to environmental catastrophe to Little House on the Prairie. Ellmann calls for a moratorium on air travel, rages against bras, gives Doris Day and Agatha Christie a drubbing, and pleads for sanity in a world that – well, a world that spent four years in the company of Donald Trump, that 'tremendously sick, terrible, nasty, lowly, truly pathetic, reckless, sad, weak, lazy, incompetent, third-rate, clueless, not smart, dumb as a rock, all talk, wacko, zero-chance lying liar'. Things Are Against Us is electric. It's vital. These are essays bursting with energy, and reading them feels like sticking your hand in the mains socket. Lucy Ellmann is the writer we need to guide us through these crazy times.

This edited collection provides middle and high school classroom teachers of English language arts, social studies, and other disciplines the inspiration and insight necessary to utilize an arts integration approach in their teaching. Whether you want your students to create documentaries, maps, mixed media, songs, quilts, dances, masks, or a remix of multiple art forms, the point of school can and should be more about how students create their own meaning in powerful ways and harness their creativity for social good. Arts integration is one approach demonstrated to be invaluable in these terms, moving teachers and students into a mindset of ‘what can we create today?’, sure to inject energy into classrooms, learning, and lives. ENDORSEMENTS: "Arts-Integrated theory and practice create a beautiful dance, are quilted together, and even recite a theatrical monologue in this book that takes arts integration in multiple forms and puts it into terms that work for the busy classroom teacher. Written by classroom teachers, passion and professionalism are evident in each chapter as the strategies and stories about them unfold to provide a platform for teachers to grow in their practice and to create vibrant classrooms along the way." — Sean Layne, Focus 5, Inc. "For all of us working in the arts, arts integration is a term that gets thrown around with many competing definitions. The authors have taken all that and made it practical and useful for this generation of learners. This book has the special sauce for making arts integration relevant to student learning and encouraging creativity though practical examples that can and will inspire you to try them out. After reading this book you will want to sing, dance, draw, and make art in your classroom or museum." — Zev Slurzberg, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

For the past fifty years, scholars in both pastoral and practical theology have attempted to recapture human religious experience and practice as essential sites for theological engagement -- redefining in the process what theology is, how it is done, and who does it. In this book Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore shows how this trend in scholarship has led to an expanded subject matter, alternative ways of knowing, and richer terms for analysis in doing Christian theology. Tracing more than two decades of her own search for a more inclusive discipline -- one that truly grapples with theology in the midst of life -- Christian Theology in Practice shows not only where Miller-McLemore herself has traveled in the field but also how pastoral and practical theology has developed during this time. Looking forward, Miller-McLemore calls on the academy and Christian congregations to disrupt conventional theological boundaries and to acknowledge the multiplicity of shapes and places in which the "wisdom of God" appears..

A fast, funny and furious novel from the author of Dot in the Universe

A delightfully offbeat story that features an opinionated tortoise and her owner who find themselves in the middle of a life-changing mystery. Audrey (a.k.a. Oddly) Flowers is living quietly in Oregon with Winnifred, her tortoise, when she finds out her dear father has been knocked into a coma back in Newfoundland. Despite her fear of flying, she goes to him, but not before she reluctantly dumps Winnifred with her unreliable friends. Poor Winnifred. When Audrey disarms an Air Marshal en route to St. John’s we begin to realize there’s something, well, odd about her. And we soon know that Audrey’s quest to discover who her father really was – and reunite with Winnifred – will be an adventure like no other. Excerpt: Winnifred is old. She might be three hundred. She came with the apartment. The previous tenant, a rock climber named Cliff, was embarking on a rock-climbing adventure that would not have been much fun for Winnifred. Back then her name was Iris. Cliff had inherited Iris from the previous tenant. Nobody knew how old Iris was or where she had come from originally. Now Cliff was moving out. He said, Would you like a tortoise. I would not say no to a tortoise, I said. I was alone in Portland and the trees were giant. I picked her up and she blinked at me with her upside-down eyelids. I felt instantly calm. Her eyes were soft brown. Her skin felt like an old elbow. I will build you a castle, I whispered. With a pool. And I was true to my word.