Matchsticks Contemplating Eternity

These essays invite the reader to join the author’s quest for meaning and wonder in the natural world. After the journey out of evangelical fundamentalism recorded in Unified Field Theology, the journey continues. Through years with more darkness than anticipated, the light shines through. And darkness turns out to be the best place for discerning faint and distant lights. The natural forces studied in the search for the unified theory reveal that the creative sustaining power of the universe is real and observable through science. Humility and wonder are found responding to the size of the cosmos. The strangeness of the quanta invites us to mystery and things beyond rational comprehension accompanied by the assurance that our most basic level is as eternal as the universe. Significance appears in caring for each other, a trait which is now found in both the animal and plant world as well. Returning to traditional sources of faith, the Bible remains an amazing library of voices revealing one people’s evolution of understanding of the ultimate. Like practices of other cultures, it invites us to be still and know. Life is indeed good. We are here, together, choosing how we respond to a very real God.

These essays invite the reader to join the author's quest for meaning and wonder in the natural world. After the journey out of evangelical fundamentalism recorded in Unified Field Theology, the journey continues. Through years with more darkness than anticipated, the light shines through. And darkness turns out to be the best place for discerning faint and distant lights. The natural forces studied in the search for the unified theory reveal that the creative sustaining power of the universe is real and observable through science. Humility and wonder are found responding to the size of the cosmos. The strangeness of the quanta invites us to mystery and things beyond rational comprehension accompanied by the assurance that our most basic level is as eternal as the universe. Significance appears in caring for each other, a trait which is now found in both the animal and plant world as well. Returning to traditional sources of faith, the Bible remains an amazing library of voices revealing one people's evolution of understanding of the ultimate. Like practices of other cultures, it invites us to be still and know. Life is indeed good. We are here, together, choosing how we respond to a very real God.

"The book is like a dream you want to last forever" (Roberta Silman, The New York Times Book Review), now with a gorgeous new cover by the famed designer Peter Mendelsund A masterwork of W. G. Sebald, now with a gorgeous new cover by the famed designer Peter Mendelsund The Rings of Saturn—with its curious archive of photographs—records a walking tour of the eastern coast of England. A few of the things which cross the path and mind of its narrator (who both is and is not Sebald) are lonely eccentrics, Sir Thomas Browne’s skull, a matchstick model of the Temple of Jerusalem, recession-hit seaside towns, wooded hills, Joseph Conrad, Rembrandt’s "Anatomy Lesson," the natural history of the herring, the massive bombings of WWII, the dowager Empress Tzu Hsi, and the silk industry in Norwich. W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants (New Directions, 1996) was hailed by Susan Sontag as an "astonishing masterpiece perfect while being unlike any book one has ever read." It was "one of the great books of the last few years," noted Michael Ondaatje, who now acclaims The Rings of Saturn "an even more inventive work than its predecessor, The Emigrants."

This landmark work of modernist literature explores the inner lives of a typical English family while vividly exploring the nature of loss and memory. Following her celebrated masterpiece Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf continues to develop her groundbreaking stream-of-consciousness technique in To the Lighthouse. Every summer, the Ramsey family returns to the Isle of Skye for a tranquil holiday, where the imposing lighthouse seems to promise everlasting constancy. But as their idyllic holiday confronts the realities of World War I, the Ramseys must also face the inescapable nature of change. A profound evocation of marriage, parenthood, aging, and grief, To the Lighthouse is regarded as one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.

Finalist for a 2019 Sidewise Award “Conceptually adventurous yet full of feeling. . . . smart, thought-provoking, and thoroughly enjoyable.” —Charles Yu, author of Interior Chinatown Wherever Hel looks, New York City is both reassuringly familiar and terribly wrong. As one of the thousands who fled the outbreak of nuclear war in an alternate United States—an alternate timeline, somewhere across the multiverse—she finds herself living as a refugee in our own not-so-parallel New York. The slang and technology are foreign to her, the politics and art unrecognizable. While others, like her partner, Vikram, attempt to assimilate, Hel refuses to reclaim her former career or create a new life. Instead, she obsessively rereads Vikram’s copy of The Pyronauts—a science fiction masterwork in her world that now only exists as a single flimsy paperback—and becomes determined to create a museum dedicated to preserving the remaining artifacts and memories of her vanished culture. But the refugees are unwelcome and Hel’s efforts are met with either indifference or hostility. And when the only copy of The Pyronauts goes missing, Hel must decide how far she is willing to go to recover it and finally face her own anger, guilt, and grief over what she has truly lost. With Famous Men Who Never Lived, K Chess has created a compelling and inventive speculative work on what home means to those who have lost it forever.

TRACES THE DEVELOPMENT OF PHOTOGRAPHIC TECHNOLOGY AND LOOKS AT THE WORK OF IMPORTANT PHOTOGRAPHERS WHO HAVE EXPANDED THE POSSIBILITIES OF THE ART.

Many of us have questions about the Bible: Can we believe the Bible? What was Jesus’ mission? What is sin? Does hell exist? Is anyone beyond God’s forgiveness? In A Jesuit Off-Brodway, James Martin, SJ, answers these questions about the Bible, and other big questions about life, as he serves as a theological advisor to the cast of The Last Days of Judas Iscariot. Grab a front-row seat to Fr. Martin's six months with the LAByrinth Theater Company and see first-hand what it's like to share the faith with a largely secular group of people . . . and discover, along with Martin, that the sacred and the secular aren't always that far apart.