Images Of Hope

This is a book about hope. Part 1 is a compact but necessarily limited attempt to describe the actual structure and concrete forms of hope and hopelessness; Part 2 is an exploration of a psychology of hope, the beginning of an investigation of what psychic forms and dynamisms move most toward hope and against hopelessness; and Part 3 is an analogous effort to suggest the outlines of a metaphysics of hope.

Presents a series of thirteen meditations on important days in the church year, each focused around a work of art related to the holy day, that discuss the significance of Christmas, Easter, Pentecost, and All Souls' Day.

If you could lead a life free of sorrow, would you? You cannot, of course. But even if we did have the choice, would we deny one of the deepest set of emotions that our Creator has placed within us? This book is about grief, not so much as it relates to death but about how it is a meaningful, even enriching, aspect of life. This is not a textbook. There are good ones that examine the process and stages of grief. Images of Sorrow, Visions of Hope is a book of stories and anecdotes from the author's life as well as iconic scenes from our culture that add flesh, bone, and life to the useful structure of the stages of grief. The hope is that the words contained here will create an inner and outer dialogue about sorrow-one of life's most individual, yet common experiences. J. Randy Hall serves as the pastor of Fairmont Presbyterian Church in Lexington, North Carolina. He and his wife, Jane, a school psychologist, have four children-Zach, Daniel, Anna, and Alex. They live in a log home that Randy designed and built. Randy, in addition to living through his own sorrows, has offered pastoral care to those in sorrow for over thirty years. He has led workshops and seminars on the subject for churches, helping organizations, crisis ministries, and adoption agencies. Randy holds degrees from Appalachian State University and Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. Having served churches in Chapel Hill, Elizabeth City, and Hickory, North Carolina, he has pastored Fairmont for seventeen years. Mission work involving vocational training in sewing machine repair has taken him to Haiti and Ghana. Hobbies include travel, golf, exercise, dancing, and being with good friends who know what and when to take things seriously, including themselves.

In a thought-provoking and challenging enterprise to rethink inter-human relationships, this book brings together a range of international scholars and peace practitioners who share their expertise and knowledge about the relationship between religion, conflict, and violence. Focusing on images of enmity, they show fascinating possibilities of how these images might be transformed into perspectives of hope and peace. (Series: ContactZone. Explorations in Intercultural Theology - Vol. 15)

“[A] landmark book . . . Solnit illustrates how the uprisings that begin on the streets can upend the status quo and topple authoritarian regimes” (Vice). A book as powerful and influential as Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me, her Hope in the Dark was written to counter the despair of activists at a moment when they were focused on their losses and had turned their back to the victories behind them—and the unimaginable changes soon to come. In it, she makes a radical case for hope as a commitment to act in a world whose future remains uncertain and unknowable. Drawing on her decades of activism and a wide reading of environmental, cultural, and political history, Solnit argues that radicals have a long, neglected history of transformative victories, that the positive consequences of our acts are not always immediately seen, directly knowable, or even measurable, and that pessimism and despair rest on an unwarranted confidence about what is going to happen next. Now, with a moving new introduction explaining how the book came about and a new afterword that helps teach us how to hope and act in our unnerving world, she brings a new illumination to the darkness of our times in an unforgettable new edition of this classic book. “One of the best books of the 21st century.” —The Guardian “No writer has better understood the mix of fear and possibility, peril and exuberance that’s marked this new millennium.” —Bill McKibben, New York Times–bestselling author of Falter “An elegant reminder that activist victories are easily forgotten, and that they often come in extremely unexpected, roundabout ways.” —The New Yorker

Building the Human City is a first overview of the award-winning yet quite diverse works of Jesuit philosopher William F. Lynch. Writing from the 1950s to the mid-1980s, Lynch was among the first to warn against the fierce polarizations prevalent in our culture wars and political life. He called for a transformation of artistic and intellectual sensibilities and imaginations through the healing discernments and critical ironies of an Ignatian (and Socratic) spirituality. Yet the breadth of his concerns (from cinema and literature to mental health and hope to secularization and faith) as well as the depth of his thought (philosophical as much as theological) led to little initial awareness of the overall vision uniting his writings. This book, while exploring that vision, also argues that the spirituality Lynch proposes is more needed today than when he first wrote.