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Baptists have a well-earned reputation as a contentious people. Lacking a centralized authority to settle disputes, and defending the conscience of each believer, they have excelled at conflict and division. But perhaps the resolution of this scandal is not for Baptists to stop fighting, but to learn to fight better. Christopher L. Schelin reconsiders Baptist ecclesiology from the perspective that conflict is not merely inevitable but is essentially constructive for the church's discernment of the mind of Christ. Enlisting the support of radical democratic political theory, as exemplified in the work of Romand Coles, the author argues that it is precisely through hospitable encounters with difference and disagreement that new possibilities emerge. Schelin invites Baptists not to shy away from conflict, employing convergences with radical democracy to reimagine key doctrinal themes such as soul competency, the priesthood of believers, and pastoral authority.

"How does psychoanalysis animate racial passing and how does racial passing inspire psychoanalysis? Despite long-held beliefs that the two have nothing in common, Donavan L. Ramon poses that psychoanalysis is relevant for understanding the reasons behind jumping the color line. Beginning with the premise that Sigmund Freud created psychoanalysis to contend with his own anxieties about race, Ramon explores canonical and non-canonical passing narratives using psychoanalytic perspectives. He closely reads narratives by Charles Chesnutt, James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Jessie Fauset, Anita Reynolds, Danzy Senna, Vera Caspary, Anatole Broyard, and Philip Roth to advance several provocative claims about the intersections of passing and psychoanalysis. Chief among them are the youthful trauma and psychological consequences of racial passing. For instance, while the death drive motivates fictional racial passers to hasten their own deaths, those who pass in real life often seek their own immortality through print despite hiding their Blackness. Throughout this analysis, Ramon underscores the nuances of racial passing in school as the place of trauma for Black subjects. Ramon's work is deeply interdisciplinary, threading psychoanalysis and other theoretical perspectives throughout persuasive close readings of twentieth and twenty-first century racial passing narratives. The monograph concludes with a meditation on today's ineffective language of race, which hinders racial progress. Scholars of race, African American Literature, American Literature, and psychoanalysis will find Ramon's book compelling." --

Catherine Staples grew up in Massachusetts and it's there, in New England woods, meadows, and Cape Cod coasts, that the loss of her brother plays out as a quest across space and time: from a weathervane in Madison Square Park to a rusty pump in the mountains, from words etched on nineteenth-century glass to the track of skates on the Charles River. Place is at the heart of the transformation of loss. So, too, are myth and the lives of New England's early naturalists and Transcendentalists. Henry David Thoreau's narrative echoes and enlarges hers. He, too, lost a brother and found his way by tuning ear, eye, and stride to "the living earth," a new way of seeing things. Vert is an old word in danger of being lost. "In English forest law," it's "everything that grows and forms a green leaf, serving as cover for deer." It's suggestive of habitat, our imperiled earth, the small spinney of a brother's memory.

A work of art as well as a work of literature, A YEAR OF BIRDS will be welcomed by nature lovers, art lovers, and birders. With 150 color illustrations by renowned bird artist Barry Van Dusen and a foreword by celebrated naturalist Peter Alden, the author of numerous Audubon Field Guides, Henry David Thoreau's writings on birds are arranged by the day of the year, emphasizing the relationship of birds with their environment and the spiritual significance of the seasons. On any given day, curious readers might step into their yards and compare the birds they observe with those that Thoreau saw and heard. With a focus on the town of Concord, Massachusetts, where Thoreau spent most of his life, A YEAR OF BIRDS includes the best of Thoreau's unparalleled descriptions of birds, from the red-tailed hawk to the Blackburnian warbler. Special sections are devoted to the now-vanished passenger pigeon and to Thoreau's mysterious "night warbler."

Richard Rankin lives in North Carolina on family property settled in the mid 1760s and farmed until the 1970s. The desire to belong to a place grows out of a deep yearning to feel at home in the world and to find a particular location where that feeling is best satisfied. Individual essays treat diverse local topics including the disappearance of family farms, complicated racial history, soil conservation, physical labor as recreation, the influence of a great tree, chicken fighting, folk history, folk healing, the disappearance of bobwhite quail, black bear restoration, and exemplary outdoorsmen. As a whole, the pieces reveal how a settled inhabitant's personal identity grows from a local landscape and its history and culture. How the Creator invites the settler to join an ongoing partnership to re-create and steward a beloved place and its creatures. And how this creative process leads to a greater appreciation of local things, family, neighbors and wildlife, and service to creation.

"In the title poem of Gordon Johnston's second collection, a canoer with his keel in a quick current is too caught up in the flow of water, sunlight, and sycamore leaves to say precisely where he is on the river. He is constantly both arriving and departing, negotiating his passage through a riverscape that is as ancient as it is newborn, that is mapped and familiar but always in flux. These poems engage the losses and renewals of this flux--encounters with the "trash fish," turtles, otters, and other lives in Southern rivers and woods as well as in the wilds of West Virginia, Wyoming, and Oklahoma. In these poems, mountains, plains, and creeks--even clay, birch bark, and shelf lichens--speak. "Where Here Is Hard to Say" also applies in this collection to crossing into new, difficult human territories, "Lonely Middles" of confronting the mortality of friends and parents, letting sons and daughters grow up and away from the home, wrestling with depression, and trying to find stable footing in mid-life as the ecstatic alternates with the awful. The poems invent prayers and weapons against the doubts. Telling stories, writing letters, cutting back brush, carving canoes, listening to Wilco, the poems find fellowship in each of these acts. By turns wryly funny, rueful, awed, and nostalgic, the voice in these poems may have trouble saying exactly where it is, but it makes the reader glad to be there, too, listening. There is a hard-won wisdom in these poems, but they are never didactic or preachy. They express their insights through humble, often funny, speakers and through precise images that honor the mysteries of faith and experience. This is a book with stories to tell, visions to impart, and music to convey them memorably."--Publisher's website.

"Jackie K. Cooper has spent the last three decades of his life gathering his memories of growing up in the South. He has studied the various seasons of his life and having reached the winter season, he offers reflections on lessons learned, the people who have influenced him, the role of God's hand in his journey, and the good fortune with which he has been blessed. These stories are presented in a narrative format and are as easy to absorb as a conversation between two friends spending an afternoon on the porch on a breezy summery day. The tea is sweet, and the stories are a mixture of the funny and the sad, but still heartwarming. Cooper's collection of his "wisdom of winter" is here to be shared, so open this book and let your mind be free to rest and relax, to listen and learn, to anticipate and appreciate." --Back cover.

"When the Lane cake, named after Emma Rylander Lane (1856-1904), appeared in Harper Lee's TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD (1960), the boozy Southern dessert was at peak popularity. Yet the culinary artist behind the cake had fallen into obscurity. FROM BISCUITS TO LANE CAKE recovers Lane's biography and reveals the Georgia backstory of Alabama's official state dessert, as well as the recipes she published in SOME GOOD THINGS TO EAT (1898). Born in Americus, Georgia, and left fatherless in the American Civil War, Lane spent most of her life living, studying, and managing a household in Southwest Georgia. While in Clayton, Alabama, and Columbus, Georgia, she drew on the diverse culinary heritage of the South as she won cooking demonstration competitions, published a cookbook, and taught cooking classes. Lane's recipes, from biscuits, wafers, and loaf cakes to salads, cordials, and holiday favorites, show that her expertise went far beyond the bourbon-infused dessert that bears her married name"--Amazon.com.

"Stella Bankwell has suddenly found herself in a 'heap of trouble' in the words of her mountain people. Ten years ago, the pretty, charming redhead was a sports marketing executive when she married unforeseen trouble-dashing Asher Bankwell who is descended from 150 years of old Atlanta money and prestige. Now, she is banished from Atlanta society, after her high falutin' lifestyle humiliatingly crashed publicly in front of Atlanta's snootiest at a blacktie gala. After a brief runaway to her childhood mountain home to her Mama's consoling, she escapes for her beloved St. Simons Island where the sea and her best friend, Marlo, offer peace and calm. But there on the enchanting island, she also finds herself embroiled in a mystery that includes murder and money laundering. With the help of her best friend, Chatty (Chatham Balsam Colquitt IV, the only good that came from her marriage to Asher), who follows her to his second home on adjoining Sea Island; former Governor McCager Burnett (Chatty's Sea Island neighbor); and handsome U.S. Marshal Jackson (Pepper) Culpepper, they set out to solve a mystery that, most surely, will send a deep rattling through the columned, brick mansions of Atlanta's exclusive Buckhead. She was simply trying to escape her scandalous embarrassment and an unhappy marriage. Now, she's facing real trouble: Possible federal indictments that lead to a murder that leads to serious danger for Stella. It turns out to be the beginning of Stella Bankwell, former Atlanta socialite, becoming Stellla Bankwell, amateur sleuth"--

The Greatest Generation was filled with war heroes and love stories; this nonfiction historical romance explores how, one couple's love was sustained and grew across an ocean of separation.

Overview: Here is a brief, balanced, and up-to-date history of Georgia from the early Native Americans into the twenty-first century. Based on the most recent research, this second edition surveys the people and events that shaped our state's history in a style that reads easily and flows effortlessly. Beginning with the earliest Native American settlements, the story tells of first contacts between area natives and Spanish from Florida, British from Carolina, and James Oglethorpe leading the effort to found a colony called Georgia. That colony passed out of the British Empire during the American Revolution, a conflict that was as much a civil war as a war for independence. In the following decades, the Creek and Cherokee were driven out as Georgia was transformed into a cotton kingdom dominated by a minority of slaveholders, who finally sought to make slavery perpetual in a war that often pitted Georgians against each other. In the aftermath of the Civil War, the state struggled with the consequences of the conflict, political, social, and economic. The postwar years were highlighted by economic stagnation, questions over the meaning of freedom, and one-party politics. Race relations pervaded the state's history after the Civil War and those struggles are traced from Reconstruction to Jim Crow to the Civil Rights Era and twenty-first century voter suppression. In the latter half of the twentieth century, and carrying into the twenty-first, Georgia drifted away from the provincialism that characterized its history and moved toward modernity.

This collection of essays is written in memory of Roger H. Prentice (1943-2022). Prentice was born in New Brunswick and brought up in Halifax, Nova Scotia. A Dalhousie University graduate, he also graduated from Acadia University and then served as a pastor at Amherst, Nova Scotia and St. Stephen, New Brunswick. In 1979, Prentice began his studies in Baptist History at Oxford University under the direction of the late Dr. B.R. White at Regent's Park College. Upon his return in 1983, he became a minister at Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia. In 1985, Prentice became dean of the Manning Memorial Chapel and served as University Chaplain at Acadia University until he retired in 2007. Throughout his ministry, Prentice had a unique way of combining preaching, leading worship, and pastoral counseling together with involvement in his local community. Included are essays on Baptist theology and identity, spirituality, chaplaincy and ministry, worship and the arts, and engagement with the wider world.

"A middle-aged woman who has lost her father and the pawn shop she inherited from him kayaks a wild Seven Islands rapid, looking for solace or self-destruction - an orphaned boy finds purpose and a path toward self-definition through borrowed Native culture and gar-fishing -- the river baptism of a scarred, violent man tamed by a stroke revives a congregation even as it reopens old wounds - a long-exiled, past-her-prime call girl returns to Macon, Georgia to uncover, thanks to an old house on the levee and a sandbar and a college art class, a surprising sense of belonging - Towaliga River memories carry a Navy sniper through his grim wartime duty... These seven stories, written after their author canoed the Ocmulgee and its tributaries, draw on European-American, Native, and African-American traditions and relationships with the upper river between the confluence of the Yellow, Alcovy, and South rivers under Jackson Lake and Macon. Set from the 1810s to the present, the stories follow characters as their inherited or adopted perspectives on the river - and their ignorances of it - are altered by their personal experience of the watershed's danger, power, and life. Each story engages a specific place, among them Pittman's Ferry, the Seven Islands, Smith Shoals, the levee in Macon, and the Ocmulgee Mounds of the Mississippian people"--

Through nearly 1,000 photographs, this picture essay illustrates the day-to-day activities on the set of the greatest American cinematic saga of all, Gone With the Wind. Many heretofore unpublished photographs-those made by studio photographers, for example, as well as rare snapshots taken by crew members-are included. Many books, essays, and articles have been written on the subject, but this candid chronicle presents a unique view of the daily activities and the many people involved in bringing Margaret Mitchell's unforgettable story to the screen. Herb Bridges is a lifelong fan and collector of Gone With the Wind memorabilia. His previous books include Scarlett Fever and Favorite Scenes from Gone With the Wind.