God on the Rocks

God on the Rocks PDF Author: Phil Madeira
Publisher: Jericho Books
ISBN: 1455573159
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
Musician and songwriter Phil Madeira turns his talent for evocative lyricism from the stage to the page as he invites us to wander with him on his relentless search for God. From a joke involving a glass eye in a family that doesn't always see eye-to-eye, a judgmental "Grandmonster" who makes an (almost) redeeming connection in her final moments, or a crumbling marriage and the surprise of new love, Madeira's raw and tender stories illustrate the journey we all share, along with wise reflections to get through it. Roaming from his evangelical roots to discover a successful career in Americana music, Madeira boils away the detritus of religion to discover a faith "on the rocks": sometimes leaving him stranded on the rocky shore, sometimes savored like a smooth drink on a summer's day, but always leading to a God "not worrying about changing or chastising his broken children, but singing in a low, guttural hum, forged in the heat of his passion for humans, a God almighty love song." Just like a sweet old hymn can rekindle even a doubting cynic's longing for God, Madeira's beckoning voice can turn a wandering heart toward home with laughter and hope.

God on the Rocks

God on the Rocks PDF Author: Phil Madeira
Publisher: Jericho Books
ISBN: 1455573159
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
Musician and songwriter Phil Madeira turns his talent for evocative lyricism from the stage to the page as he invites us to wander with him on his relentless search for God. From a joke involving a glass eye in a family that doesn't always see eye-to-eye, a judgmental "Grandmonster" who makes an (almost) redeeming connection in her final moments, or a crumbling marriage and the surprise of new love, Madeira's raw and tender stories illustrate the journey we all share, along with wise reflections to get through it. Roaming from his evangelical roots to discover a successful career in Americana music, Madeira boils away the detritus of religion to discover a faith "on the rocks": sometimes leaving him stranded on the rocky shore, sometimes savored like a smooth drink on a summer's day, but always leading to a God "not worrying about changing or chastising his broken children, but singing in a low, guttural hum, forged in the heat of his passion for humans, a God almighty love song." Just like a sweet old hymn can rekindle even a doubting cynic's longing for God, Madeira's beckoning voice can turn a wandering heart toward home with laughter and hope.

Jezebel's Got the Blues... and Other Works of Imagination

Jezebel's Got the Blues... and Other Works of Imagination PDF Author: Merrill Farnsworth
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780615653501
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 108

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Book Description
Jezebel's Got the Blues...And Other Works of Imagination is a series of performance pieces that puts a new spin on stories from the Old Testament. In Merrill Farnsworth's inspired telling, Jezebel, Cain, Noah, Delilah, Lot's wife, and other denizens of Bible history reveal themselves as people with very modern stories to share. Jezebel and her friends are true originals - taking readers (and audiences!) on a creative, thought-provoking, insightful ride. Author's Note: Jezebel's Got the Blues...is a collection of stories and paintings created over a nine-month period. As an artist, I often go into the studio, take up a brush filled with paint and begin making marks on paper or canvas, letting the marks take shape and allowing shapes to emerge, as they will. One day in September, a face began forming, and I followed the inclination to form a woman's face. In time, I saw the face of Jezebel staring out at me, and it occurred to me she looked frightened. I'd always imagined her as defiant. As a daughter of the South, I was warned about Jezebel and picked up on the notion she was a bad apple. I was told she wore too much rouge and knew she came to a bad end. Having gone through a period of life that didn't end so well, I felt a certain compassion for Jezebel when she showed up that day in September. I began painting more and more layers of red on her cheeks, thinking that somehow more red would keep her from feeling so blue. As I painted, I began imagining a story about Jezebel, told from the point of view of the rouge on her cheeks - a voice that became a strange witness to her story. That is how a series of stories and paintings came to be called Jezebel's Got the Blues...and Other Works of Imagination. After I finished the paintings and had written the stories, I called upon friends, all talented actors I'd performed with over the years. I asked if they'd join me to perform this series of monologues and dialogues. All said yes, as did Phil Madeira, who accompanied us with improvised blues on his guitar. It was a magical night for me. All my imagining became something real - to me, my friends, and to the audience gathered for the retelling of stories about a ragtag crew of characters who share a longing for grace to bend the notes of our blues towards love.

Freedom Dreams

Freedom Dreams PDF Author: Robin D.G. Kelley
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 0807009784
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Kelley unearths freedom dreams in this exciting history of renegade intellectuals and artists of the African diaspora in the twentieth century. Focusing on the visions of activists from C. L. R. James to Aime Cesaire and Malcolm X, Kelley writes of the hope that Communism offered, the mindscapes of Surrealism, the transformative potential of radical feminism, and of the four-hundred-year-old dream of reparations for slavery and Jim Crow. From'the preeminent historian of black popular culture' (Cornel West), an inspiring work on the power of imagination to transform society.

Jezebel

Jezebel PDF Author: Lesley Hazleton
Publisher: Doubleday Religion
ISBN: 0385516150
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
There is no woman with a worse reputation than Jezebel, the ancient queen who corrupted a nation and met one of the most gruesome fates in the Bible. Her name alone speaks of sexual decadence and promiscuity. But what if this version of her story, handed down to us through the ages, is merely the one her enemies wanted us to believe? What if Jezebel, far from being a conniving harlot, was, in fact, framed? In this remarkable new biography, Lesley Hazleton shows exactly how the proud and courageous queen of Israel was vilified and made into the very embodiment of wanton wickedness by her political and religious enemies. Jezebel brings readers back to the source of the biblical story, a rich and dramatic saga featuring evil schemes and underhanded plots, war and treason, false gods and falser humans, and all with the fate of entire nations at stake. At its center are just one woman and one man—the sophisticated Queen Jezebel and the stark prophet Elijah. Their epic and ultimately tragic confrontation pits tolerance against righteousness, pragmatism against divine dictates, and liberalism against conservatism. It is, in other words, the original story of the unholy marriage of sex, politics, and religion, and it ends in one of the most chillingly brutal scenes in the entire Bible. Here at last is the real story of the rise and fall of this legendary woman—a radically different portrait with startling contemporary resonance in a world mired once again in religious wars.

Skinny Legs and All

Skinny Legs and All PDF Author: Tom Robbins
Publisher: Bantam
ISBN: 0553897934
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Book Description
An Arab and a Jew open a restaurant together across the street from the United Nations.... It sounds like the beginning of an ethnic joke, but it's the axis around which spins this gutsy, fun-loving, and alarmingly provocative novel, in which a bean can philosophizes, a dessert spoon mystifies, a young waitress takes on the New York art world, and a rowdy redneck welder discovers the lost god of Palestine--while the illusions that obscure humanity's view of the true universe fall away, one by one, like Salome's veils. Skinny Legs and All deals with today's most sensitive issues: race, politics, marriage, art, religion, money, and lust. It weaves lyrically through what some call the "end days" of our planet. Refusing to avert its gaze from the horrors of the apocalypse, it also refuses to let the alleged end of the world spoil its mood. And its mood is defiantly upbeat. In the gloriously inventive Tom Robbins style, here are characters, phrases, stories, and ideas that dance together on the page, wild and sexy, like Salome herself. Or was it Jezebel?

Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space

Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space PDF Author: Janna Levin
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307958205
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
The authoritative story of the headline-making discovery of gravitational waves—by an eminent theoretical astrophysicist and award-winning writer. From the author of How the Universe Got Its Spots and A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, the epic story of the scientific campaign to record the soundtrack of our universe. Black holes are dark. That is their essence. When black holes collide, they will do so unilluminated. Yet the black hole collision is an event more powerful than any since the origin of the universe. The profusion of energy will emanate as waves in the shape of spacetime: gravitational waves. No telescope will ever record the event; instead, the only evidence would be the sound of spacetime ringing. In 1916, Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves, his top priority after he proposed his theory of curved spacetime. One century later, we are recording the first sounds from space, the soundtrack to accompany astronomy’s silent movie. In Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space, Janna Levin recounts the fascinating story of the obsessions, the aspirations, and the trials of the scientists who embarked on an arduous, fifty-year endeavor to capture these elusive waves. An experimental ambition that began as an amusing thought experiment, a mad idea, became the object of fixation for the original architects—Rai Weiss, Kip Thorne, and Ron Drever. Striving to make the ambition a reality, the original three gradually accumulated an international team of hundreds. As this book was written, two massive instruments of remarkably delicate sensitivity were brought to advanced capability. As the book draws to a close, five decades after the experimental ambition began, the team races to intercept a wisp of a sound with two colossal machines, hoping to succeed in time for the centenary of Einstein’s most radical idea. Janna Levin’s absorbing account of the surprises, disappointments, achievements, and risks in this unfolding story offers a portrait of modern science that is unlike anything we’ve seen before.

Jazz Moon

Jazz Moon PDF Author: Joe Okonkwo
Publisher: Kensington Books
ISBN: 1496701178
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
“A passionate, alive, and original novel about love, race, and jazz in 1920s Harlem and Paris—a moving story of traveling far to find oneself” (David Ebershoff, author of The Danish Girl and The 19th Wife). On a sweltering summer night in 1925, beauties in beaded dresses mingle with hepcats in dapper suits on the streets of Harlem. The air is thick with reefer smoke, and jazz pours out of speakeasy doorways. Ben Charles and his devoted wife are among the locals crammed into a basement club to hear music and drink bootleg liquor. For aspiring poet Ben, the heady rhythms are a revelation. So is Baby Back Johnston, an ambitious trumpet player who flashes a devilish grin and blasts dynamite from his horn. Ben finds himself drawn to the trumpeter—and to Paris, where Baby Back says everything is happening. In Paris, black people are welcomed as exotic celebrities, especially those from Harlem. It’s an easy life, but it quickly leaves Ben adrift and alone, craving solace through anonymous dalliances in the city’s decadent underground scene. From chic Parisian cafés to seedy opium dens, his odyssey will bring new love, trials, and heartache, even as echoes from the past urge him to decide where true fulfillment and inspiration lie. Jazz Moon is an evocative story of emotional and artistic awakening set against the backdrop of the Harlem Renaissance and Jazz Age–Paris—a winner of the Edmund White Award and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. “Jazz Moon mashes up essences of Hurston and Hughes and Fitzgerald into a heady mixtape of a romance: driving and rhythmic as an Armstrong Hot Five record, sensuous as the small of a Cotton Club chorus girl’s back. I enjoyed it immensely.” —Larry Duplechan, author of Blackbird and Got ’til It’s Gone

Cuba and Its Music

Cuba and Its Music PDF Author: Ned Sublette
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
ISBN: 1569764204
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 690

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Book Description
This entertaining history of Cuba and its music begins with the collision of Spain and Africa and continues through the era of Miguelito Valdes, Arsenio Rodriguez, Benny More, and Perez Prado. It offers a behind-the-scenes examination of music from a Cuban point of view, unearthing surprising, provocative connections and making the case that Cuba was fundamental to the evolution of music in the New World. The ways in which the music of black slaves transformed 16th-century Europe, how the "claves" appeared, and how Cuban music influenced ragtime, jazz, and rhythm and blues are revealed. Music lovers will follow this journey from Andalucia, the Congo, the Calabar, Dahomey, and Yorubaland via Cuba to Mexico, Puerto Rico, Saint-Domingue, New Orleans, New York, and Miami. The music is placed in a historical context that considers the complexities of the slave trade; Cuba's relationship to the United States; its revolutionary political traditions; the music of Santeria, Palo, Abakua, and Vodu; and much more.

The Poisonwood Bible

The Poisonwood Bible PDF Author: Barbara Kingsolver
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061804819
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 578

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Book Description
New York Times Bestseller • Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize • An Oprah's Book Club Selection “Powerful . . . [Kingsolver] has with infinitely steady hands worked the prickly threads of religion, politics, race, sin and redemption into a thing of terrible beauty.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review The Poisonwood Bible, now celebrating its 25th anniversary, established Barbara Kingsolver as one of the most thoughtful and daring of modern writers. Taking its place alongside the classic works of postcolonial literature, it is a suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in Africa. The story is told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it—from garden seeds to Scripture—is calamitously transformed on African soil. The novel is set against one of the most dramatic political chronicles of the twentieth century: the Congo's fight for independence from Belgium, the murder of its first elected prime minister, the CIA coup to install his replacement, and the insidious progress of a world economic order that robs the fledgling African nation of its autonomy. Against this backdrop, Orleanna Price reconstructs the story of her evangelist husband's part in the Western assault on Africa, a tale indelibly darkened by her own losses and unanswerable questions about her own culpability. Also narrating the story, by turns, are her four daughters—the teenaged Rachel; adolescent twins Leah and Adah; and Ruth May, a prescient five-year-old. These sharply observant girls, who arrive in the Congo with racial preconceptions forged in 1950s Georgia, will be marked in surprisingly different ways by their father's intractable mission, and by Africa itself. Ultimately each must strike her own separate path to salvation. Their passionately intertwined stories become a compelling exploration of moral risk and personal responsibility.

It's Complicated

It's Complicated PDF Author: Danah Boyd
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300166311
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Surveys the online social habits of American teens and analyzes the role technology and social media plays in their lives, examining common misconceptions about such topics as identity, privacy, danger, and bullying.