Silent Visions

Immensely popular and prolific, Harold Lloyd sold more movie tickets during the Golden Age of Comedy than any other comedian. From Coney Island to Catalina Island, and from Brooklyn to Beverly Hills, Lloyd’s movies captured visions of silent-era America unequaled on the silver screen. A stunning work of cinematic archeology, Silent Visions describes the historical settings found in such Lloyd classics as Safety Last!, Girl Shy, and Speedy, and matches them with archival photographs, vintage maps, and scores of then-and-now comparison photographs, illuminating both Lloyd’s comedic genius, and the burgeoning Los Angeles and Manhattan landscapes preserved in the background of his films. The book represents John Bengtson’s completion of his trilogy of works focusing on the three great geniuses of silent film comedy (Keaton, Chaplin, and Lloyd) in what Oscar-winning historian Kevin Brownlow calls “a new art form.”

About the book This is a true story of a little girl, Sibu, who was totally consumed by the beauty and the silence of the world of the unseen; nothing of this material world seemed to make sense to her. She kept secrets about her life and her spiritual relationship with God. She explored the spiritual world through dreams and visions, and that was her way of communicating with God. Her spiritual exploration denied her of her childhood and other life experiences that most children of her age had. Sibu spent most of her time in isolation communicating with her imaginary friend God. This book reveals how children can keep secrets about their lives, their personal and spiritual relationship with God. As she develops into a young woman, she gets married, and her life changes dramatically. She becomes trapped by the luxuries of the material world, and completely forgets about her imaginary friend. After some time, God seizes all the beauties and luxuries which separated Sibu from Him. Her whole luxurious life turns into a nightmare. Finally, Sibu repents and accepts Gods calling. [email protected]

Like the biblical Job, many people suffer under the silence of God. This book shows that it is enlightening to retrace the origins of the concept of divine speech and silence in the ancient Near East and Greece.

Poet, musician, computer analyst, and mystic Francis Knoll, in his second collection of poetry, considers the perspective of our modern age, which is facing a stressed and dying world, while also embracing the hope and realization of another hidden destiny. Through more than forty poems, Piercing through the Silent Veil takes a close look at our apparent world and the thin veil that separates us from a heightened vision and experience of reality. Cognizant of an eventual death, the verses examine life, with its many contradictions and failings, seeking to extract a meaningful and real existence. With a sense of destiny and higher purpose, these poems intertwine the frailty and problems of human life while struggling toward an inner silence and a separate parallel universe of presence. This poetry offers a lyric, metered, and accessible style, alluring with the hope of transporting the reader to a new state of being with a direction that leads one beyond the apparent and static world of forms. Written from the unique viewpoint, this poetry collection explores the world of appearances, forces, and eventual death, considering another reality defined by spiritual existence.

Even a brief comparison with its canonical counterparts demonstrates that the Gospel of Luke is preoccupied with the power of spoken words; still, words alone do not make a language. Just as music without silence collapses into cacophony, so speech without silence signifies nothing: silences are the invisible, inaudible cement that hold the entire edifice together. Though scholars across diverse disciplines have analyzed silence in terms of its contexts, sources, and functions, these insights have barely begun to make inroads in biblical studies. Utilizing conceptual tools from narratology and reader-response criticism, this study is an initial exploration of largely uncharted territory – the various ways that narrative intersections of speech and silences function together rhetorically in Luke’s Gospel. Considering speech and silence to be mutually constituted in intricate and inextricable ways, Dinkler demonstrates that attention to both characters’ silences and the narrator’s silences helps to illuminate plot, characterization, theme, and readerly experience in Luke’s Gospel. Focusing on both speech and silence reveals that the Lukan narrator seeks to shape readers into ideal witnesses who use speech and silence in particular ways; Luke can be read as an early Christian proclamation – not only of the gospel message – but also of the proper ways to use speech and silence in light of that message. Thus, we find that speech and silence are significant matters of concern within the Lukan story and that speech and silence are significant tools used in its telling.