Unfinished Conversation

Unfinished Conversations is a story of profound grief and the journey to healing that followed. Based on a journal Robert Lesoine kept during the two years following the suicide of his best friend, Unfinished Conversations will help readers through the process of reflecting on and affirming the raw immediacy of survivors’ emotions. Each short chapter focuses on a different aspect of the author’s experience as he transforms his anger and guilt to understanding and forgiveness. Licensed psychotherapist Marilynne Chöphel brings her professional background to Robert Lesoine’s deeply personal story to create an accessible path to self-directed healing based on mindful awareness and sound clinical practices. Readers work through their own grieving and healing process with end-of-chapter exercises and activities. An appendix and website, unfinishedconversation.com, provide additional resources to survivors. The tools and techniques in Unfinished Conversations will help readers release past trauma, honor their relationship with their lost loved one, and find greater perspective, meaning, and well-being in their lives.

Unfinished Conversations is a story of profound grief and the journey to healing that followed. Based on a journal Robert Lesoine kept during the two years following the suicide of his best friend, Unfinished Conversations will help readers through the process of reflecting on and affirming the raw immediacy of survivors’ emotions. Each short chapter focuses on a different aspect of the author’s experience as he transforms his anger and guilt to understanding and forgiveness. Licensed psychotherapist Marilynne Chöphel brings her professional background to Robert Lesoine’s deeply personal story to create an accessible path to self-directed healing based on mindful awareness and sound clinical practices. Readers work through their own grieving and healing process with end-of-chapter exercises and activities. An appendix and website, unfinishedconversation.com, provide additional resources to survivors. The tools and techniques in Unfinished Conversations will help readers release past trauma, honor their relationship with their lost loved one, and find greater perspective, meaning, and well-being in their lives.

Brought up in a strict fundamentalist household, Evangeline Thiessen, like many Christians, found herself at odds with complex dogma that kept her from a lucid understanding of her relationship with God. It was the death of her father, himself a former minister, that finally brought her troubling spiritual disconnect into sharp focus and set her on a path that would afford her a new understanding of her own faith. Stepping away from the petrified state of twenty-first century fundamentalist Christian thought, she decided to re-examine the Greco-Judeo-Christian roots from which modern Christianity has grown. What she found was that a great deal of what informs the many far flung Christian denominations has very little basis in the gospel of Christ. These other influences can, however, be explained and even understood if one is willing to look at the broader contexts from which they arose. The tone and message of the remarkable spiritual conversation started by Jesus has been shifted and stifled over the centuries, but for those willing to listen it can still be discerned. The Unfinished Conversation is at once erudite and readable. It is an invitation for Christians to reconnect with the still-vital core of faith voiced two thousand years ago....

A century ago, European and North American archaeologists first came upon the extraordinary ruins of Chichen Itza and Tulum—and started to converse with the Mayas who inhabited the forests of the Yucatan. In this thought-provoking history of a century-long "unfinished conversation" between the indigenous Indians and the white intruders, paul Sullivan shows how each party to the dialogue shaped the cross-cultural encounters to their own ends. North American anthropologists preferred to see the Mayas as a primitive people and studied them, they claimed, with scientific neutrality. Yet the anthropologists hid their real intentions and lied to the Mayas, pretending to be chicle dealers or explorers, and they also (in certain important cases) worked for the United States government as covert intelligence agents. Similarly, the Mayas had their own hidden agendas—wanting guns and money from the Americans to fight the central Mexican government—and consequently charged the Americans for the tribal lore and religious secrets they imparted. Sullivan asks us to view the history of Western-Maya dialogue as a Maya would—setting the prophecies of his ancestors, the advice of his grandparents, and the events of last week in a long continuum that extends way into the future and can foretell the end of the world. By taking this view, once can see how this particular Central American people has constituted a new life, a new past, and a new future out of the ruins of great suffering and defeat. This surprising, moving, and intellectually stimulating book will remind us how even actions initiated with the best intentions can be perverted when tested by the realities of political violence, acute dependency, mutual ignorance, and fear.

This volume chronicles the development of communication studies as a discipline, providing a history of the field and identifying opportunities for future growth. Editors Pat J. Gehrke and William M. Keith have assembled an exceptional list of communication scholars who, in the thirteen chapters contained in this book, cover the breadth and depth of the field. Organized around themes and concepts that have enduring historical significance and wide appeal across numerous subfields of communication, A Century of Communication Studies bridges research and pedagogy, addressing themes that connect classroom practice and publication. Published in the 100th anniversary year of the National Communication Association, this collection highlights the evolution of communication studies and will serve future generations of scholars as a window into not only our past but also the field’s collective possibilities.

A Light in Dark Times: Maxine Greene and the Unfinished Conversation features a list of extraordinary contributors who have been deeply influenced by Professor Greene's progressive philosophies. While Maxine Greene in the focus for this collection, each chapter is an encounter with her ideas by an educator concerned with his or her own works and projects. In essence, each featured author takes off from Maxine Greene and then moves forward. Just as Maxine Greene herself has, this unique and fascinating collection of essays will influence a wide range of worlds: arts and aesthetics, literature and literacy studies, cultural studies, school change and improvement, the teaching of literacy, teacher education, peace and social justice, women's studies, and civil rights.

Named a 2018 Notable Work of Nonfiction by The Washington Post NOW A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Winner, The 2018 Southern Book Prize NAMED A BEST/MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2018 BY: Chicago Tribune • Time • Publisher's Weekly A stunning follow up to New York Times bestseller Tears We Cannot Stop The Washington Post: "Passionately written." Chris Matthews, MSNBC: "A beautifully written book." Shaun King: “I kid you not–I think it’s the most important book I’ve read all year...” Harry Belafonte: “Dyson has finally written the book I always wanted to read...a tour de force.” Joy-Ann Reid: A work of searing prose and seminal brilliance... Dyson takes that once in a lifetime conversation between black excellence and pain and the white heroic narrative, and drives it right into the heart of our current politics and culture, leaving the reader reeling and reckoning." Robin D. G. Kelley: “Dyson masterfully refracts our present racial conflagration... he reminds us that Black artists and intellectuals bear an awesome responsibility to speak truth to power." President Barack Obama: "Everybody who speaks after Michael Eric Dyson pales in comparison.” In 2015 BLM activist Julius Jones confronted Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton with an urgent query: “What in your heart has changed that’s going to change the direction of this country?” “I don’t believe you just change hearts,” she protested. “I believe you change laws.” The fraught conflict between conscience and politics – between morality and power – in addressing race hardly began with Clinton. An electrifying and traumatic encounter in the sixties crystallized these furious disputes. In 1963 Attorney General Robert Kennedy sought out James Baldwin to explain the rage that threatened to engulf black America. Baldwin brought along some friends, including playwright Lorraine Hansberry, psychologist Kenneth Clark, and a valiant activist, Jerome Smith. It was Smith’s relentless, unfiltered fury that set Kennedy on his heels, reducing him to sullen silence. Kennedy walked away from the nearly three-hour meeting angry – that the black folk assembled didn’t understand politics, and that they weren’t as easy to talk to as Martin Luther King. But especially that they were more interested in witness than policy. But Kennedy’s anger quickly gave way to empathy, especially for Smith. “I guess if I were in his shoes...I might feel differently about this country.” Kennedy set about changing policy – the meeting having transformed his thinking in fundamental ways. There was more: every big argument about race that persists to this day got a hearing in that room. Smith declaring that he’d never fight for his country given its racist tendencies, and Kennedy being appalled at such lack of patriotism, tracks the disdain for black dissent in our own time. His belief that black folk were ungrateful for the Kennedys’ efforts to make things better shows up in our day as the charge that black folk wallow in the politics of ingratitude and victimhood. The contributions of black queer folk to racial progress still cause a stir. BLM has been accused of harboring a covert queer agenda. The immigrant experience, like that of Kennedy – versus the racial experience of Baldwin – is a cudgel to excoriate black folk for lacking hustle and ingenuity. The questioning of whether folk who are interracially partnered can authentically communicate black interests persists. And we grapple still with the responsibility of black intellectuals and artists to bring about social change. What Truth Sounds Like exists at the tense intersection of the conflict between politics and prophecy – of whether we embrace political resolution or moral redemption to fix our fractured racial landscape. The future of race and democracy hang in the balance.

This collection brings together a prestigious group of individuals who have wondered, looked at, revised, acted on, questioned, and changed their world because of their connection to American philosopher Maxine Greene. Over 75 teachers, students, colleagues, artists, and others, such as Gloria Ladson-Billings, Herb Kohl, Mike Rose, Deborah Meier, and William Ayers have written edgy, thoughtful letters addressed to Maxine about her work, their own, and the spaces in between. Rather than just thanking this master philosopher/teacher, each sets out to discover some of what they have learned from Maxine Greene and to discuss the continued relevance of her work in aesthetics, education, and social imagination. Maxine Greene has been referred to as “the most important American philosopher (on education) since John Dewey.” This wonderful collection continues the unfinished conversation that is her work.