Art Study

Harry Potter has captivated the imagination of millions of children. And Harry Potter has caused controversy in churches and schools. What's a parent to do with the magical, mystical world of Harry and his friends? Gina Burkart chose to read the books with her own children. As they read together, she discovered many parallels between Christian faith and the themes of these books. Indeed, the escapades of Harry Potter sparked significant conversation between Burkart and her kids.

At the end of summer 2017, Anna Funder found herself at a moment of peak overload. Family obligations and household responsibilities were crushing her soul and taking her away from her writing deadlines. She needed help, and George Orwell came to her rescue. "I’ve always loved Orwell," Funder writes, "his self-deprecating humor, his laser vision about how power works, and who it works on." So after rereading and savoring books Orwell had written, she devoured six major biographies tracing his life and work. But then she read about his forgotten wife, and it was a revelation.

For every person who draws strength and direction from the Bible, there are many more who struggle with it. Some call it a long book with fine print and obscure meaning. Some call it a mystery, a chore to read, or an undecipherable puzzle. The good news is you can easily solve this problem. With over 300,000 sold, this revised and expanded edition of Living by the Book will remove the barriers that keep scripture from transforming your life.

In Recollections of My Nonexistence, Rebecca Solnit describes her formation as a writer and as a feminist in 1980s San Francisco, in an atmosphere of gender violence on the street and throughout society and the exclusion of women from cultural arenas. She tells of being poor, hopeful, and adrift in the city that became her great teacher, and of the small apartment that, when she was 19, became the home in which she transformed herself. She explores the forces that liberated her as a person and as a writer.

A definitive collection of wisdom on every style of writing and a celebration of the transformative power of the written word from one of the most influential writers and thinkers of the modern age, C. S. Lewis, the beloved author of the Chronicles of Narnia series, Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, and other revered classics.

The Indignities of Being a Woman candidly traces the history of womanhood and investigates how much things have really changed for womankind. By carefully x-raying areas such as body image, marriage, mental illness, fashion, and politics, this audiobook examines what it was like to be a woman in the past versus what it’s like now, when women are constantly told equality between the sexes exists but reality proves otherwise.

Julian Barnes' new book is, among many things, a family memoir, an exchange with his brother (a philosopher), a meditation on morality and the fear of death, a celebration of art, an argument with and about God, and homage to the French writer Jules Renard. Though he warns us that 'this is not my autobiography', the result is a tour of the mind of one of our most brilliant writers.

The GED Test Prep & Study Guide is an exhaustive and expertly curated resource aimed at empowering individuals seeking to obtain their General Educational Development (GED) certificate. This all-encompassing guide covers the full spectrum of subjects tested on the GED, structured in an accessible and systematic format.

Erin Gibson has a singular goal - to create a utopian future where women are recognized as humans. In Feminasty - titled after her nickname on the hit podcast Throwing Shade - she has written a collection of make-you-laugh-until-you-cry essays that expose the hidden rules that make life as a woman unnecessarily hard and deconstructs them in a way that's bold, provocative, and hilarious.

Written between A.D. 413 and 426, The City of God is one of the great cornerstones in the history of Christian thought, a book which is vital to the understanding of modern Western society. Augustine originally intended it to be an apology for Christianity against the accusation that the Church was responsible for the decline of the Roman Empire, which had occurred just three years earlier. Indeed, Augustine produced a great amount of evidence to prove that paganism was responsible for this event. However, by the time the work was finished, the book had taken on a larger theme.

StoryCorps OutLoud sets out across the country to record and preserve the stories of LGBT individuals along with their families and friends. OutLoud is a project undertaken in the memory of Isay's father, psychiatrist Dr. Richard Isay. Professionally credited for helping to persuade the mental-health community that homosexuality is not a mental disorder, Dr. Isay was himself a closeted gay man for many years.

Richard Wright's powerful and eloquent memoir of his journey from innocence to experience in the Jim Crow South. At once an unashamed confession and a profound indictment, Black Boy is a poignant record of struggle and endurance - a seminal literary work that illuminates our own time. The once controversial, now classic American autobiography measures the brutality and rawness of the Jim Crow South against the sheer desperate will it took to survive as a Black boy. Seventy-five years later, his words continue to reverberate.

In Burn It Down, veteran reporter Maureen Ryan does just that. She draws on decades of experience to connect the dots and illuminate the deeper forces sustaining Hollywood’s corrosive culture. Fresh reporting sheds light on problematic situations at companies like Lucasfilm and shows like Lost, Saturday Night Live, The Goldbergs, Sleepy Hollow, Curb Your Enthusiasm and more.

With fascinating insight into the traditions of China's martial arts, it documents the abusive upbringing that turned a four-old child into a hardened, professional killer. From China to Europe and across the Mediterranean, we follow Tony as he becomes an elite bodyguard, protecting some of the world's most powerful people. Following personal tragedy, Tony's extreme discipline and the philosophy of his art is quickly turned. He begins to use his skills for illegal means and highly destructive, bloodthirsty pleasure.

In June 2015 Alberto Manguel prepared to leave his centuries-old village home in France's Loire Valley and reestablish himself in a one-bedroom apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Packing up his enormous, 35,000 volume personal library, choosing which books to keep, store, or cast out, Manguel found himself in deep reverie on the nature of relationships between books and readers, books and collectors, order and disorder, memory and reading.

In literary circles of the mid-twentieth century, father and son, Ikbal and Idries Shah, spread seductive accounts of a mystical Middle East. Pitching themselves as the authentic voice of the Muslim world, they penned travelogues and exotic potboilers alongside weighty tomes on Islam and politics.

An initiation signals a beginning: a door opens and you step through. Traditional Wiccan initiates are usually brought into the craft through a ceremony with a High Priestess. But even though Amanda Yates Garcia's mother, a practicing witch herself, initiated her into the earth-centered practice of witchcraft when she was 13 years old, Amanda's real life as a witch only began when she underwent a series of spontaneous initiations of her own.

In this timely and important audiobook, one of the most trusted and admired writers on the world of faith examines the meaning of Scripture. The sacred texts have been co-opted by fundamentalists, who insist that they must be taken literally, and by others who interpret Scripture to bolster their own prejudices. These texts are seen to prescribe ethical norms and codes of behavior that are divinely ordained: They are believed to contain eternal truths. But as Karen Armstrong shows, such a narrow, peculiar reading of Scripture is a relatively recent, modern phenomenon.

George Marsden describes how Lewis gradually went from being an atheist to a committed Anglican - famously converting to Christianity in 1931 after conversing into the night with his friends, J. R. R. Tolkien and Hugh Dyson - and how Lewis delivered his wartime talks to a traumatized British nation in the midst of an all-out war for survival.

Dan Brown's immensely popular New York Times best-selling The Da Vinci Code is one of the most successful books of recent history. It has captivated millions the world over with its enthralling suspense and its provocative questions about the true nature of Jesus' life.