Facing East

The Classic Story of a Family's Pilgrimage into the Orthodox Church Veiled in the smoke of incense, the Eastern Orthodox Church has long been an enigma to the Western world. Yet, as Frederica Mathewes-Green discovered, it is a vital, living faith, rich in ritual beauty and steadfast in integrity. Utilizing the framework of the Orthodox calendar, Mathewes-Green chronicles a year in the life of her small Orthodox mission church, eloquently illustrating the joys and blessings an ancient faith can bring to the worshipers of today.

Facing East, Praying West is a collection of poetic reflections based on Ignatius's Spiritual Exercises. The prayer poems in this book are arranged according to the four-week structure of the Exercises. They convey the reader through the four movements of Christ's story: creation, living, dying, and rising to new life. The poems in this volume are not merely literary pieces, but have a practical spiritual purpose. They draw on the reader's imaginative and intellectual response to God's grace. They sustain and encourage the reader through the consolations and desolations of the soul's journey. The flow of words and metaphors creates a holistic way of praying, one that develops body, mind, and spirit. Like the Psalms, these prayer poems will enhance the reader's ability to see transcendent beauty in the darkness of life. This book not only offers a new way of experiencing the essence of the Exercises, but it will also inspire readers to compose their own prayer poems and express the deepest longings of their souls. +

In the beginning, North America was Indian country. But only in the beginning. After the opening act of the great national drama, Native Americans yielded to the westward rush of European settlers. Or so the story usually goes. Yet, for three centuries after Columbus, Native people controlled most of eastern North America and profoundly shaped its destiny. In Facing East from Indian Country, Daniel K. Richter keeps Native people center-stage throughout the story of the origins of the United States. Viewed from Indian country, the sixteenth century was an era in which Native people discovered Europeans and struggled to make sense of a new world. Well into the seventeenth century, the most profound challenges to Indian life came less from the arrival of a relative handful of European colonists than from the biological, economic, and environmental forces the newcomers unleashed. Drawing upon their own traditions, Indian communities reinvented themselves and carved out a place in a world dominated by transatlantic European empires. In 1776, however, when some of Britain's colonists rebelled against that imperial world, they overturned the system that had made Euro-American and Native coexistence possible. Eastern North America only ceased to be an Indian country because the revolutionaries denied the continent's first peoples a place in the nation they were creating. In rediscovering early America as Indian country, Richter employs the historian's craft to challenge cherished assumptions about times and places we thought we knew well, revealing Native American experiences at the core of the nation's birth and identity.

Drawing from 2,500 years of wisdom that has been adapted to today’s lifestyles, Facing East teaches you how to restore your Qi—the vital energy at the root of every function in the human body—to become both internally healthy and externally radiant. In Facing East, Dr. Jingduan Yang, a fifth-generation practitioner of Chinese medicine and a respected authority in integrative medicine, joins forces with wellness advocate Norma Kamali to reveal ancient healing secrets, adapted for the modern age, that will help preserve, maintain, and restore vitality, health, and beauty in all its forms. Style icon Norma Kamali, having felt deeply and noticeably rested and rejuvenated after Dr. Jingduan Yang’s unique acupuncture treatments, encouraged her remarkable physician to share his mastery of both traditional Chinese medicine and modern medicine with the world. The result is Facing East, a book filled with practical day-to-day health, beauty, wellness, and lifestyle practices that can radically enhance the way you look, feel, and interact with everything and everyone around you! Inside you’ll discover: The ways each of the primary organs can affect every aspect of your life—from your physical health to your mental well-being—and how to keep them in balance Tips to help revitalize the hair, skin, eyes, lips, teeth, and nails Self-assessments to help determine your unique general energy constitution Personal checklists for preventative care A year-round wellness plan that includes advice on sleep, sex, exercise, and nutrition And much more! By exploring the mind-body-spirit connection from a truly integrative perspective, Facing East helps you maintain wellness in every aspect of your life. “Dr. Yang and Norma Kamali share ancient wisdom in a friendly, modern, and engaging dialogue, making timeless Eastern health practices relevant to the present and easy for everyone to apply in their lives. If you want to design happy, vibrant wellness for yourself, read Facing East!”—VINCENT PEDRE, M.D., author of Happy Gut: The Cleansing Program to Help You Lose Weight, Gain Energy, and Eliminate Pain Harness the power of the East to feel better, look younger, and live healthier, no matter your age! Are you easily fatigued? Is there too much fat around your belly? Are you often unhappy? Do you have chronic nasal congestion? Do you have black circles under your eyes? Does your skin often feel dry? Do your hands and feet feel cold? Is your skin prone to acne? If you answered yes to any of these questions, your Qi—the vital energy essential to your body’s every function—is probably out of balance. Filled with ancient health and beauty secrets, Facing East can help you rebalance your body and turn back the hands of time. “Facing East looks to the past for a vision of the future, drawing on ancient knowledge to devise simple strategies to allow you to stay young, vibrant, and healthy. This book by Dr. Yang, a foremost expert on Chinese medicine, and his patient, Norma Kamali, will help you to correct imbalances with techniques so simple anyone can use them with success.”—Andrew Weil, M.D., #1 New York Times bestselling author

East Asia is now the world’s economic powerhouse, but ghosts of history continue to trouble relations between the key countries of the region, particularly between Japan, China and the two Koreas. Unhappy legacies of Japan’s military expansion in pre-war Asia prompt on-going calls for apologies, while conflicts over ownership of cultural heritage cause friction between China and Korea, and no peace treaty has ever been signed to conclude the Korean War. For over a decade, the region’s governments and non-government groups have sought to confront the ghosts of the past by developing paths to reconciliation. Focusing particularly on popular culture and grassroots action, East Asia beyond the History Wars explores these East Asian approaches to historical reconciliation. This book examines how Korean historians from North and South exchange ideas about national history, how Chinese film-makers reframe their views of the war with Japan, and how Japanese social activists develop grassroots reconciliation projects with counterparts from Korea and elsewhere. As the volume’s studies of museums, monuments and memorials show, East Asian public images of modern history are changing, but change is fragile and uncertain. This unfinished story of East Asia’s search for historical reconciliation has important implications for the study of popular memory worldwide. Presenting a fresh perspective on reconciliation which draws on both history and cultural studies, this book will be welcomed by students and scholars working in the fields of Asian history, Asian culture and society as well as those interested in war and memory studies more generally.

A moving portrait of three generations of the Chan family living in Vancouver’s Chinatown Sammy Chan was sure she’d escaped her family obligations when she fled Vancouver six years ago, but with her sister’s upcoming marriage, her turn has come to care for their aging mother. Abandoned by all four of her older sisters, jobless and stuck in a city she resents, Sammy finds herself cobbling together a makeshift family history and delving into stories that began in 1913, when her grandfather, Seid Quan, then eighteen years old, first stepped on Canadian soil. The End of East weaves in and out of the past and the present, picking up the threads of the Chan family’s stories: Seid Quan, whose loneliness in this foreign country is profound even as he joins the Chinatown community; Shew Lin, whose hopes for her family are threatened by her own misguided actions; Pon Man, who struggles with obligation and desire; and Siu Sang, who tries to be the caregiver everyone expects, even as she feels herself unravelling. And in the background, five little girls grow up under the weight of family expectations. As the past unfolds around her, Sammy finds herself embroiled in a volatile mixture of a dangerous love affair, a difficult and duty-filled relationship with her mother, and the still-fresh memories of her father’s long illness. An exquisite and evocative debut from one of Canada’s bright new literary stars, The End of East sets family conflicts against the backdrop of Vancouver’s Chinatown – a city within a city where dreams are shattered as quickly as they’re built, and where history repeats itself through the generations.

This book, the first in the field for two decades, looks at the relationships between geography and religion. It represents a synthesis of research by geographers of many countries, mainly since the 1960s. No previous book has tackled this emerging field from such a broad, interdisciplinary perspective, and never before have such a variety of detailed case studies been pulled together in so comparative or illuminating a way. Examples and case studies have been drawn from all the major world religions and from all continents from both a historical and contemporary perspective. Major themes covered in the book include the distribution of religion and the processes by which religion and religious ideas spread through space and time. Some of the important links between religion and population are also explored. A great deal of attention is focused on the visible manifestations of religion on the cultural landscape, including landscapes of worship and of death, and the whole field of sacred space and religious pilgrimage.