Fragile Hope

Written by a mother whose son has fragile X syndrome and autism this book is about her reaction and coping strategies in relating to her son. She openly discusses working through her grief, anger and fears that her son's diagnosis brought and reinforces that it is possible to survive and find joy in parenting a special needs child.

We are living in challenging times. And it is easy to escape, pine for the “good old days,” or unrealistically dream our way into the future. Instead, we are invited, in this book, to face our troubled world, to identify our inner struggles of faith, and to voice our anxieties and pain. And most importantly we are invited to wrestle with the God who so often seems absent. Living with a fragile hope, we are called by the gospel to nurture an inner life that responds with faith and courage to the brokenness of our world and the woundedness of our inner being.

Against the backdrop of the global Black Lives Matter movement, debates around the social impact of hate crime legislation have come to the political fore. In 2019, the UN Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice urgently asked how legal systems can counter bias and discrimination. In India, a nation with vast socio-cultural diversity, and a complex colonial past, questions about the relationship between law and histories of oppression have become particularly pressing. Recently, India has seen a rise in violence against Dalits (ex-untouchables) and other minorities. Consequently, an emerging "Dalit Lives Matter" movement has campaigned for the effective implementation of India's only hate crime law: the 1989 Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes Prevention of Atrocities Act (PoA). Drawing on long-term fieldwork with Dalit survivors of caste atrocities, human rights NGOs, police, and judiciary, Sandhya Fuchs unveils how Dalit communities in the state of Rajasthan interpret and mobilize the PoA. Fuchs shows that the PoA has emerged as a project of legal meliorism: the idea that persistent and creative legal labor can gradually improve the oppressive conditions that characterize Dalit lives. Moving beyond statistics and judicial arguments, Fuchs uses the intimate lens of personal narratives to lay bare how legal processes converge and conflict with political and gendered concerns about justice for caste atrocities, creating new controversies, inequalities, and hopes.

Josiah Chamberlain's life's work revolves around repairing other people's marriages. When his own is threatened by his wife's unexplained distance, and then threatened further when she's unexpectedly plunged into an unending fog, Josiah finds his expertise, quick wit and clever quips are no match for a relationship that is clearly broken. Feeling betrayed, confused, and ill-equipped for a crisis this crippling, he reexamines everything he knows about the fragility of hope and the strength of his faith and love. Love seems to have failed him. Will what’s left of his faith fail him, too? Or will it be the one thing that holds him together and sears through the impenetrable wall that separates them?

How do we practice hope after trauma? What shape does hope take after abuse? In grappling with these questions, Ashley E. Theuring implicates the entire church and advocates changing our theologies of hope and our understanding of resurrection. Reimagining the Empty Tomb narrative from the Gospel of Mark in light of the experiences of domestic violence survivors, Fragile Resurrection reveals the possibility for everyday practices and relationships to mediate hope and resurrection. Theuring constructs an embodied imaginative hope found in the wake of trauma, which can speak to our current context of trauma and uncertainty.

As the SuperGates open, civilizations once separated by unimaginable distances can now interact for the first time. And of course, what follows is tension. In a desperate attempt to preserve the fragile peace, Antaur calls a summit to discuss a potential alliance with Leyria. Jack Hunter and Anna Lenai are assigned to protect the delegation from mercenaries loyal to Admiral Telixa Ethran. Melissa Carlson investigates a growing fascist movement on Leyria, hoping that her world can change course before it's too late. Meanwhile, her father, Harry Carlson, is tested like he has never been tested before.

Who are these homeless teens wandering the streets of America, backpacks slung over their shoulders, cigarettes dangling from their hands? Why are they on the streets instead of safely harbored at home? A Fragile Thread of Hope answers these questions in the words of four young women rescued from the streets by the author, Andi Buerger. Her own childhood abuse made her keenly aware of three homeless teenaged mothers when she volunteered at a shelter on Thanksgiving of 2008. That day she decided to do something to help. A Fragile Thread of Hope is the story of Andi's redemption from the abuse that sought to define her intertwined with the eventual birth of Beulah's Place, a refuge for lost and wandering teens caught up in drugs, alcohol and even sex trafficking. The women speak their hearts, not just their experiences. The reader will see young street people in a whole new light.

Sixteen-year-old Nate is a GEM—a Genetically Engineered Medi-tissue—created by Gathos City scientists as a cure for the elite from the fatal lung rot ravaging the population. As a child, Nate was smuggled out of the laboratory where he was held captive and taken into the Withers—a quarantined, lawless region. He manages to survive by becoming a Tinkerer, fixing broken tech in exchange for food or a safe place to sleep. When he meets Reed, a kind and fiercely protective boy who makes his heart race, and his misfit gang of scavengers, Nate finds the family he’s always longed for—even if he can’t risk telling them what he is. But Gathos created a genetic fail-safe in their GEMs—a flaw in their DNA that causes their health to rapidly deteriorate as they age unless they are regularly dosed with medication controlled by Gathos City. When violence erupts across the Withers, Nate’s illegal supply of medicine is cut off, and a vicious attack on Reed threatens to expose his secret. With time running out, Nate is left with only two options: work for a shadowy terrorist organization that has the means to keep him alive, or stay—and die—with the boy he loves.