Vast Intimate

The ability to see intimate beauty in what appears initially as infinite is not a science or an art. Author Larry Cheek calls it a skill.Cheek says photographer David Muench, discovers art in the meaning of nature. Most people with a camera take photographs; David discovers photographs. He exhibits an astounding gift for seeing patterns and relationships in the landscape that escape most of us.For this book, David has walked patiently and thoughtfully around a score of the Southwest's most inspiring landscapes, from the low desert of California's Joshua Tree National Monument to the 9,157-foot peak of Arizona's Santa Catalina Mountains.Geographically, the work for Vast & Intimate separates into three sections: deserts; sky islands, or forested mountains rising from the desert; and the high Colorado Plateau. Vast & Intimate presents each place, then focuses on intimate details that illustrate natures richness and complexity.

Dearly Beloved, we are gathered here to witness, celebrate, and take part in something holy. We are caught in a love story. The Bible describes our relationship with God as a marriage. But what exactly does that mean? Author and pastor Vermon Pierre ushers us into an understanding of that beautiful, life-giving relationship. By tracing this love story throughout the Bible, Pierre shows how the Lord's beloved love for us can better unite us to one another as we experience: how to love with words how to love with delight how to love with presence how to love through difficulty We are living in a time of greater isolation, disunity, and loneliness. As we learn what it means to be Dearly Beloved, that all changes. Through the metaphor of marriage, we learn how we are loved, how to love God, and how to love one another. This timely resource helps us establish a truer fellowship and deeper unity within the church and a more holistic devotion to Jesus.

When we always try to have a positive mindset, it turns out to be negativity, usually called toxic positivity and that possibly can happen in the way we do or what we see on social media. Even though the problem above arises from the goodness of small statements, which is one of the factors of social media activity, who knows the goodness will negatively impact teenagers and adults, even pregnant moms. But, there’s some way for avoiding and prevent; and how it all works?

Back in print after nearly fifty years–the acclaimed fiction debut of novelist H. L. Humes, co-founder of The Paris Review “Immensely intelligent and energetic, intensely dramatic and melodramatic, heroically overwritten yet sharp, insightful, and precise, The Underground City is an astonishing book by a writer of abundant gifts whose resurrection is long overdue.” –Peter Matthiessen It is the late 1940s and Paris is in turmoil. A man named Dujardin is sentenced to death for treason, sparking general strikes and threats of riots across the city. In the meantime, John Stone, a war-weary American and former secret agent, finds himself being investigated as a suspected Communist. What has brought these two men to their fates? H.L. Humes spins a thrilling account of the French underground during the last years of World War II, and the events that lead to the Dujardin affair. His many memorable characters include Adriane, loved by both Stone and Carnot, a fanatic Communist; Bruce Sheppard, the American ambassador to France, a statesman of vision and compassion; and Solange Récamier, the sophisticated young Parisian widow who finds meaning in trying to salvage Stone’s broken life. The Underground City displays H.L. Humes’s youthful literary skill and a striking capacity for fast-paced narrative. This is a brilliant tour de force. “A major achievement . . . [The Underground City] attains its full stature in poetry and truth. . . . [This is a] many-sided, absorbing novel, written on a grand scale, that holds the reader’s attention from the first to the last of its many pages.” –New York Herald Tribune “Magnificent . . . [The Underground City] has verisimilitude and scope, action and depth of emotion.” –Chicago Tribune “A work of power, maturity and distinction.” –Newsweek

Includes music.

WINNER OF THE 2021 PULITZER PRIZE IN POETRY FINALIST FOR THE 2020 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY Natalie Diaz’s highly anticipated follow-up to When My Brother Was an Aztec, winner of an American Book Award Postcolonial Love Poem is an anthem of desire against erasure. Natalie Diaz’s brilliant second collection demands that every body carried in its pages—bodies of language, land, rivers, suffering brothers, enemies, and lovers—be touched and held as beloveds. Through these poems, the wounds inflicted by America onto an indigenous people are allowed to bloom pleasure and tenderness: “Let me call my anxiety, desire, then. / Let me call it, a garden.” In this new lyrical landscape, the bodies of indigenous, Latinx, black, and brown women are simultaneously the body politic and the body ecstatic. In claiming this autonomy of desire, language is pushed to its dark edges, the astonishing dunefields and forests where pleasure and love are both grief and joy, violence and sensuality. Diaz defies the conditions from which she writes, a nation whose creation predicated the diminishment and ultimate erasure of bodies like hers and the people she loves: “I am doing my best to not become a museum / of myself. I am doing my best to breathe in and out. // I am begging: Let me be lonely but not invisible.” Postcolonial Love Poem unravels notions of American goodness and creates something more powerful than hope—in it, a future is built, future being a matrix of the choices we make now, and in these poems, Diaz chooses love.

Diane Miller examines recent arguments supporting lesbian and gay civil rights, exploring the ways these arguments are both constructive - helping to win court cases seeking basic human rights, and limiting - narrowly framing how the general public views lesbians and gays, and how lesbians and gays view themselves. Incorporating case studies of lesbians in the military and in politics, Miller discusses in detail the experiences of Colonel Margarethe Cammermeyer, who was discharged from the National Guard after twenty-seven years of service when she revealed that she was a lesbian, and Roberta Achtenberg, who was nominated by Clinton for the job of Assistant Director of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and became the first lesbian or gay man to face the Senate confirmation process. Drawing on these cases and their outcomes, Miller evaluates the advantages and disadvantages of civil rights strategies in the struggle for lesbian and gay rights.