Graven

Paul Fleischman spins three engrossing stories about the unexpected ways an artist's creations reveal truths - tales whose intriguing plots and many moods will entertain readers and inspire future writers. Can wood, copper, or marble communicate? They can if they are the graven images in Newbery Medalist Paul Fleischman's trio of eerie, beguiling short stories. If you whisper a secret into a wooden statue's ear, will anyone find out? Can a wobbly weathervane bearing the image of Saint Crispin, the patron saint of shoemakers, steer a love-struck apprentice toward the girl of his dreams? And if a ghost hires a sculptor to carve a likeness of him holding a drink to a baby's lips, what ghastly crime might lie behind his request? And, in a brand-new afterword, the acclaimed storyteller reveals how he found his own author's voice.

The classic study of gravestone art

Examining the thought of key postmodern thinkers like Nietzsche, Derrida and Marion, Bruce Ellis Benson offers profound insight into the nature of conceptual idolatry and our need for the biblical revelation of God in Jesus Christ.

A far from willing conscript into a war instigated by a foreign empire, Graven, not much more than a boy, is forced to take up the sword - or die. He finds his life spiraling into a web of violence and betrayal. In a world of uncertain alliances and where life is cheap, he must stay alive and prove his worth. His simple, sheltered village upbringing has not prepared him for the carnage and horror he must now face if ever he is to see his homeland again. In a bitter struggle that will rip away the innocent youth and leave a harsh and uncompromising man, his arduous journey begins.

Comic books have increasingly become a vehicle for serious social commentary and, specifically, for innovative religious thought. Practitioners of both traditional religions and new religious movements have begun to employ comics as a missionary tool, while humanists and religious progressives use comics' unique fusion of text and image to criticize traditional theologies and to offer alternatives. Addressing the increasing fervor with which the public has come to view comics as an art form and Americans' fraught but passionate relationship with religion, Graven Images explores with real insight the roles of religion in comic books and graphic novels. In essays by scholars and comics creators, Graven Images observes the frequency with which religious material—in devout, educational, satirical, or critical contexts—occurs in both independent and mainstream comics. Contributors identify the unique advantages of the comics medium for religious messages; analyze how comics communicate such messages; place the religious messages contained in comic books in appropriate cultural, social, and historical frameworks; and articulate the significance of the innovative theologies being developed in comics.

No one is more surprised than Philip Nason when an uprising occurs within the walls of a New York rehabilitation hospital. Moments after Phil, director of recreation, hears that a group of mostly paraplegic patients have staged a rebellion, he learns that the hospital’s director is furious and thinks the patients were inspired by Phil’s current-events reading program. Now with his job in jeopardy, Phil is torn between his desire to empower his patients and pleasing hospital bureaucrats. After the rebel patients beg Phil to create an activity program to help them win the respect of hospital staff and improve their lives, he eventually complies. When Phil acts on a hunch and pops the end of a paint brush into young quadriplegic Clayton Thomas’s mouth, Clayton begins creating beautiful paintings inspired by the Bible. Phil, spurred by his artistic goals, begins developing a program to showcase the patients’ artwork. Now all he has to do is convince the hospital’s reluctant administrators that unleashing their patients’ creativity is a good thing. In this inspiring story, hundreds of chronically ill patients realize the power of art while rising up against the stifling restrictions of institutional bureaucracy—with help from their determined recreational director.

In this thrillingly entertaining book, Nicola Shulman interweaves the bloody events of Henry VIII's reign with the story of English love poetry and the life of its first master, Henry VIII's most glamorous and enigmatic subject: Sir Thomas Wyatt. Poet, statesman, spy, lover of Anne Boleyn and favorite both of Henry VIII and his sinister minister Thomas Cromwell, the brilliant Wyatt was admired and envied in equal measure. His love poetry began as risqué entertainment for ambitious men and women at the slippery top of the court. But when the axe began to fall and Henry VIII's laws made his subjects fall silent in terror, Wyatt's poetic skills became a way to survive. He saw that a love poem was a place where secrets could hide.