Beholding

Ruth is such a gift to us—her voice is strong and honest, yet believably grace-filled and kind. We learn and grow into who we want to be when Ruth's words and art lead us. —Annie F. Downs, bestselling author of 100 Days to Brave and host of That Sounds Fun podcast Become What You Behold You are in the process of becoming. Every day is an opportunity to be shaped and formed by what moves your heart…drives your thoughts…captures your gaze. Is it any wonder that where you direct your eyes and your heart matter in your day-to-day? We become what we behold when we set our hearts and minds on Christ and His redemption story here in the details of our daily lives. Not just on Sunday, not just on holidays, not just when extraordinarily hard or wonderful things happen…but today. Bestselling author and artist Ruth Chou Simons invites you on a new journey to Beholding and Becoming. With more than 850 pieces of intricate, original artwork, Ruth encourages you to elevate your gaze to the One who created all things. Today is an opportunity for God to demonstrate His love and His faithfulness in the midst of your mundane. No circumstance is too ordinary or too forgotten for Him to meet you there in worship. His transforming grace turns your “everyday ordinary” into a holy place of becoming.

What is it that the apostle Paul speaks of that he sees in the mirror dimly? Is it the Glory of the Lord? Yes, he is explaining to us that we should be transformed into that Glorious image. In this book it is my intention to spell out the process of the Christian being transformed from the darkness of the old self, the flesh into the Glorious Light, the Light that is Christ. There are ways and means to this end, and we are not left alone to travel this pathway. The Glorious Light of the Holy Spirit navigates our way. This book is my attempt to plot the course of the Christian to attain it, as the Holy Spirit has led me.

Winner, 2021 PEN/Jean Stein Award Winner, 2021 Ohioana Book Award in Poetry Winner, 2022 Indiana Author Award in Poetry Be Holding is a love song to legendary basketball player Julius Erving—known as Dr. J—who dominated courts in the 1970s and ‘80s as a small forward for the Philadelphia ‘76ers. But this book-length poem is more than just an ode to a magnificent athlete. Through a kind of lyric research, or lyric meditation, Ross Gay connects Dr. J’s famously impossible move from the 1980 NBA Finals against the Los Angeles Lakers to pick-up basketball and the flying Igbo and the Middle Passage, to photography and surveillance and state violence, to music and personal histories of flight and familial love. Be Holding wonders how the imagination, or how our looking, might make us, or bring us, closer to each other. How our looking might make us reach for each other. And might make us be reaching for each other. And how that reaching might be something like joy.

Move from a transactional experience with God to a transformational friendship with Him through prayer. How can time with God be a source of peace in a loud and distracting world? In Beholding, spiritual director and poet Strahan Coleman invites readers to discover the joy of being with God, not just working for Him. As they inhabit the art of resting in God’s presence, prayer becomes not only a place of seeking, but becoming. Beholding calls Christians to understand how: Prayer is so much more than spoken conversation between us and God; it’s a way of existing together. Beholding God in prayer is profoundly connected to beholding and dignifying others. Embracing prayer practices from different Christian traditions digs a deep well of peace in the soul. Our everyday ordinary lives can become the meeting place for God through silence, solitude, community, creation, and hospitality.

Beholding considers the spatially situated encounter between artwork and spectator. It argues that artworks created for specific places or conditions structure a reciprocal encounter, which is completed by the presence of a beholder. These are works which demand the 'beholder's share', but not, as Ernst Gombrich famously claimed, to sustain an illusion. Rather, Beholding reconfigures Gombrich's notion of the beholder's share as a set of 'licensed' imaginative and cognitive projections. Each chapter frames a particular work of art from the remit of a complementary theoretical text. The book establishes a transhistorical notion of the spatially situated encounter, and considers the role of the architectural host in bringing the beholder's orientation into play. The book engages a diverse range of practices: from Renaissance painting and group portraiture to intermedia practices of installation and performance art. Written within the broad remit of reception aesthetics, the book proposes a phenomenological theory of beholding, argued through an in-depth examination of artworks and their spatial contexts, selected for their explanatory potential. These various encounters allocate different constitutive roles to the beholder, bringing not only spatial and temporal orientation into play, but also a repertoire of anticipated ideas and beliefs.

What you think about when you think about Jesus Christ is the most important thing about you. You are holding a unique book: Compelling, Challenging...Dangerous! Here is truth that can shape lives, families, and generations. Welcome to thirty letters written from a father to his children. These are not ordinary letters. They are about Jesus Christ, written from the heart of a father through the mind of a theologian. Their aim is to instruct the author's children in vital, life-changing, world-defying truth-sharp truth in a dull age. Truth about Jesus Christ: Who He is; What He has done; What He will do. Be prepared to have your life changed. Get ready to have your priorities revamped and your goals reset. Get ready to know Jesus Christ. John Gillespie pastored churches for thirty years in the UK and USA, and now travels with Global Training Network "off the beaten paths" to train and encourage pastors in the Majority (Third) World. John holds a PhD from Trinity College of the Bible, Newburgh, Indiana. He and his wife Tessa have been married thirty-one years, have seven children and an ever growing bushel of grand-children. Learn more at: www.johnandtessa.organd www.globaltrainingnetwork.org.

How disability and ableism took shape in Renaissance England

Interested in the ways in which medieval and early modern communities have acted as participants, observers, and interpreters of events and how they ascribed meaning to them, the essays in this interdisciplinary collection explore the concept of beholding and the experiences of individual and collective beholders of violence during the period. Addressing a range of medieval and early modern art forms, including visual images, material objects, literary texts, and performances, the contributors examine the complexities of viewing and the production of knowledge within cultural, political, and theological contexts. In considering new methods to examine the process of beholding violence and the beholder's perspective, this volume addresses such questions as: How does the process of beholding function in different aesthetic conditions? Can we speak of such a thing as the 'period eye' or an acculturated gaze of the viewer? If so, does this particularize the gaze, or does it risk universalizing perception? How do violence and pleasure intersect within the visual and literary arts? How can an understanding of violence in cultural representation serve as means of knowing the past and as means of understanding and potentially altering the present?