The Triumph Of Marriage

Cassoni is the Italian word for the chests, painted with scenes from myth and literature, central to upper-class weddings of the 15th century. This book includes essays, which shed light on the meaning of cassoni through informative discussions of Renaissance wedding rituals, male-female relations and daily domestic life.

Recent years have witnessed an astonishing cultural and legal shift when it comes to homosexuality and same-sex marriage. Many Christians see these changes as a defeat for Christian values, often painting Christian opponents as sell-outs to secular culture. But can there be a genuinely Christian case for same-sex marriage? This book makes that case. While sensitive to scriptural issues, it focuses on a question that cannot be answered by Scripture alone: What does love for our gay and lesbian neighbors demand? This question calls us to pair theological, philosophical, and scriptural reflection with something else: attention to gay and lesbian lives. We must attend to the psychological research and, more importantly, to the stories our gay and lesbian neighbors tell us about themselves and their experience. Love does not permit us to plug our ears with Bible verses. While this book argues that Christian love calls us to make same-sex marriage available, the deeper conclusion is that Christian values prevail when we wrestle with these questions in a spirit of love: love for those with whom we disagree, and love for those most affected by the decisions we reach.

This book provides an up-to-date account of how reality TV has developed, why it has become the most popular genre on television today, and how the explosion in reality TV signals new developments in American media culture. The reasons behind reality TV's continued popularity go beyond the sensationalism and low production cost of these programs: there is much more to the genre's continued success than just escapism or "guilty pleasure" TV. The Triumph of Reality TV: The Revolution in American Television identifies and explores five key media trends reality TV has used to continually draw in viewers and ensure success. These media trends include innovations in storytelling, making emotional appeals to viewers, and applying content from television to other media such as films, music albums, webisodes, online games, and smart phone apps. Author Leigh H. Edwards also analyzes how reality TV shows target themes of social conflict, such as changing ideas of the American family, and address common anxieties and tensions in American society such as gender, race, class, and economic struggle. A wide variety of reality shows—including American Idol, Celebrity Rehab, Jackass, Run's House, Survivor, and The Hills—are profiled. An appealing read for students, scholars, and general readers alike, this book provides fascinating insights into the complexities of a seemingly simplistic form of mass entertainment.

Normally, we come to the world from parents who are not educated in the way they raise us. Often, our parents dump their pathology on us, and keep us struggling in our lives to free ourselves from such burdens. Following that, we enter the outside world and we observe a lot of dysfunctions in society. We then continue to sail through the journey of our lives with painful dysfunctions. We become confused, frustrated, less happy, and disappointed in ourselves and in the world around us, because we have not being taught or guided to discover who we are, and to know our true essence. We have not been provided the right tools to manage our lives effectively. The way we learned to do things is merely trial and error. Furthermore, among all other species, human beings take longer to be independent from parents or caregivers. We need more time to mature so we can rely on ourselves. Therefore, a book such as this can be useful to guide us through the labyrinth of our lives.

In the long-awaited follow-up to her groundbreaking, million-copy bestseller The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands, Dr. Laura now focuses on how men and women need to understand and appreciate the uniqueness of masculinity and femininity; what the best ways to relate, caretake, and nurture each other are; and how to bring a marriage back from the brink of disaster. Dr. Laura asserts that in order to produce and sustain a wonderfully satisfying marriage, spouses must recognize and appreciate the polarity between the masculine and the feminine. Both husband and wife have power in the relationship, and each needs to realize this in order to ensure personal satisfaction. Using real-life examples from her call-in radio show, and giving real-life solutions, Dr. Laura focuses on the typical mistakes made by men and women in their relationships and shows how marriages can not only survive but thrive.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A powerful memoir of a love that leads two people to find a courageous way to part—and a woman’s struggle to go forward in the face of loss—that “enriches the reader’s life with urgency and gratitude” (The Washington Post) “A pleasure to read . . . Rarely has a memoir about death been so full of life. . . . Bloom has a talent for mixing the prosaic and profound, the slapstick and the serious.”—USA Today ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: NPR Amy Bloom began to notice changes in her husband, Brian: He retired early from a new job he loved; he withdrew from close friendships; he talked mostly about the past. Suddenly, it seemed there was a glass wall between them, and their long walks and talks stopped. Their world was altered forever when an MRI confirmed what they could no longer ignore: Brian had Alzheimer’s disease. Forced to confront the truth of the diagnosis and its impact on the future he had envisioned, Brian was determined to die on his feet, not live on his knees. Supporting each other in their last journey together, Brian and Amy made the unimaginably difficult and painful decision to go to Dignitas, an organization based in Switzerland that empowers a person to end their own life with dignity and peace. In this heartbreaking and surprising memoir, Bloom sheds light on a part of life we so often shy away from discussing—its ending. Written in Bloom’s captivating, insightful voice and with her trademark wit and candor, In Love is an unforgettable portrait of a beautiful marriage, and a boundary-defying love.

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