Product Description

The bestselling author of Stones from the River delivers her most ambitious and dramatic novel yet -- the unforgettable story of an endearing, but also flawed, Italian American family.

In December 1953 Anthony Amedeo's world is nested in his Bronx neighborhood, his parents' Studebaker, the Paradise Theater, Yankee Stadium -- and in his imagination, where he longs for a stencil kit to decorate the windows like all the other kids on his street.Instead he gets a very different present: his uncle Malcolm's family.

Malcolm is in jail for stealing -- once again -- from his latest new job, and Anthony's aunt and twin cousins settle into the Amedeos' fifth-floor walk-up. Sharing a room with girls is excruciating for Anthony, despite his affinity for the twins. But the real change in Anthony's life comes one evening when he causes the unthinkable to happen, changing each family member's life forever.

Evoking all the plenty and optimism of postwar America, Sacred Time spans three generations, taking us from the Bronx of the 1950s to contemporary Brooklyn. Keenly observing the dark side of family -- and its gracefulness -- Hegi has outdone herself with this captivating novel about childhood's tenderness and the landscape of loneliness.Ultimately she reveals how the transforming power of a singular event can reverberate through a family for generations. With gravity and poise, Hegi turns her astute yet forgiving eye on the essential frailty and dignity of the human condition in this elegant and fast-paced novel. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (14)

Scared Time:A Novel
Came quickly in good condition.I was notified by ther seller when it was shipped.

One of my favorite books!
I love all of Ms. Hegi's books and this one was no exception! We start out with a young boy and his point of view. He has an Italian family and they are very amusing. He is an only child, but he has two cousins whom are twins. They are girls though. The girls and his Aunt Floria have no where to go. So they end up living with Anthony and his family. What happens will mark everyone for the rest of their lives, each in their own way.

I love different writing styles and didn't find it all upsetting for this one to jump ahead. Ms Hegi writes so well you didn't even notice. I got enough of a glimpse of everyone I just wish it didn't have to end. I wish I would have gotten this book sooner is my ONLY regret!

Tragedy Affects Family
Anthony, seven years old, is fairly content.His father has a good catering business and his mother and grandparents dote on him.He even likes his cousins, eight-year-old Belinda and Bianca, in small doses.Now Christmas is coming, though, and his uncle is in jail again, so his aunt and cousins have moved in with his family.Anthony is crowded out of his space.He has to share his room with his cousins, and his aunt's sewing materials are taking up much of the apartment's living room.Anthony also picks up on his mother's irritation at having to take in their relatives, which adds to his overall stress.One day while Anthony and Bianca are alone in a room, she falls out of the sixth-floor window to her death.

This tragedy affects the entire family.Anthony is guilty about his part in Bianca's death, and weighted down by his family's unspoken belief that he pushed her.Belinda is guilty of picking a fight with her twin just before her death, and she stands as a permanent reminder of what the family has lost.The twins' father is guilty of having been in prison when his daughter died, unable to even attend the funeral.Anthony's parents and aunt all feel as though they should have been able to do something to avert this tragedy.

The writing in this story was beautiful, and it was interesting to read events from different points of view.However, it was sad to read about a family that was broken and even over the course of decades, was unable to fix itself.It seems that if Anthony had been encouraged to tell his story, perhaps he, at least, could have been able to heal.Instead, his cousin's death haunted him and ended up affecting the family he started as well as the family in which he grew up.

A story of powerful emotions and family dynamics
Sacred Time" follows two lines of one Italian-American family during the last half of the 20th century as its members try to integrate and move on from a shared and tragic event.

I found this story less inspiring than Hegi's "Stones from a River", too preoccupied with loss, guilt, longing and death. But Hegi goes as deeply into the particulars of her settings and locales as she does when she's exploring the minds and hearts of her characters, or what it's like to feel tired and sweaty, or how we sometimes see in strangers reflections of something in ourselves. This impeccable depth of detail makes this book really good.

Told from the perspectives of several family members, the storyopens onto urban childhoods amid popular commercial artefacts of the 1950's- Studebakers, Woolworth's jewelry packaging, Howdy Doody, Dragnet, and Davy Crockett. There's even one of those dime store pictures of Jesus that gave him too good (surely she means too orange?) a tan.

This charming coming-of-age tale suddenly shifts, catapulting the reader, along with the family, into a tragedy that affects each member forever. Hegi is able to maintin a consistently calm and lyrical tone however harrowing are the emotions she's so tenderly handling. It is this ability that inspired me rather than the story's content.

While I enjoyed its vivid characterisations, the book was overall so dark and sad that I'm now yearning for something lighthearted, such as a drive along Liguria's coast (Liguria provided one setting for Floria, a character I really felt for), or some pretty martini, or a night out swing-dancing to really happy music.

Disappointing
I found this book on an awards list and listened to it on CD.It was difficult to finish because I just didn't care about any of the characters.The only redeeming part of the book is the charming narrative with which it opens, told from the viewpoint of a little boy growing up in a close-knit Italian-American family.But the narratives of the adults, which follow, are predictable and fall hopelessly flat.There are the obligatory infidelities and a lesbian dalliance, and there is even some completely gratuitous George Bush bashing!There is much better contemporary fiction out there. ... Read more

Product Description
Sacred Time Management cuts through old programming, fear, and survival strategies and invites you to start making choices from your essence rather than your head. It invites you to use the workplace (and the rest of your life!) to explore and unweave tangled energetics in your being. It asks you to take responsibility for your creation. It asks you to be more intimate with yourself, to live from your depth instead of your crust. ... Read more

Product Description
In Sacred Time and the Search for Meaning, Gary Eberle contemplates how humans' view of time has evolved throughout history, how we came to measure time, and why we feel especially starved for it now. Eberle seeks to rediscover a renewed sense of meaning in life through looking for ways to enter the realm of sacred time or "sabbath time" where we can reconnect with the slower, deeper rhythms of life that have traditionally been experienced through religious worship, prayer and observance of holy days.

Thomas Moore, author of Care of the Soul, said "To recover sacred time is to recover our souls, and this book is full of good lessons for doing just that." Rev. Forrest Church wrote, ". . . do your soul a favor--read and savor this truly wonderful book." ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Time: The Infinite, yet Scarce Commodity
"Time, time, time, see what's become of me!"

The image of time as a sports car racing swiftly away from the curb of our existence is a picture which those of us, in that joyous span of life known as "middle-age," can see with utter clarity.In today's society, we have an abundance of riches: possessions, unparalleled affluence, access to information and images, instantaneous communication and freedom of expression.And yet, for all of our multi-tasked nirvana, we are simple beggars as time slips through our fingertips.

Gary Eberle conducts us on a delightful exploration of the concept of time - its evolution, its importance, its scarcity, and our obsession with filling every nook and cranny of the thing.Drawing on both personal reflection and academic considerations, the author examines our fixation with robotic productivity and offers thoughtful ways to effectively slow the pace of daily living to a level that is consistent with the internal rhythms of our being.

One of my favorite sections is Chapter 4: Books of Hours, which examines the concept of prayer as an integral part of daily existence and in finding our internal tranquility.Rather than viewing Liturgical Prayer as a numbing restrictive regimen, Gary Eberle offers its liberating patterns as a tonic for temporal gastric distress.

The book is well written and holds the reader's interest throughout the 200+ pages.It is well worth the time!
... Read more

Product Description
What could possibly account for the scope and longevity of the Star Trek phenomenon? With legions of impassioned fans and a life span of 30 years and counting, the Star Trek television and film corpus has made Gene Roddenberry's creation nothing less than an American mythology. Deep Space and Sacred Time examines for the first time in book-length form the many ways Star Trek has served as a mythic reference point for American society--and suggests that an understanding of this might help us to see ourselves more clearly as a culture. Moreover, this thoughtful and thought-provoking work posits that Star Trek offers its audience a sense of hope and, in the setting of an orderly cosmos, the possibility for empowerment. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Now I finally understand what "post-modernism" means!
I decided to read this book mostly because of the title -- as aTrekker who is also Jewish, I was interested to see what theseauthors had to say about "sacred time," because, as Abraham Joshua Heschel said, weJews live more in sacred time than in sacred places.So, any book with"sacred time" in the title is bound to catch my eye.

As itturned out, their definition of "sacred time" wasn't quite thesame as the Jewish one, but I still enjoyed the book.It's an excellentanalysis of Star Trek from an anthropology POV.Especially useful to mewas the clear, concise explanation of what "traditional,""modernist," and "post-modernist" worldviews mean interms of how various cultures view time andthe future.I had heard TOScalled "modernist" and DS9 called "post-modernist"before, but could never really get a grasp on what that meant, exactly. (What can I say?I'm in the over-50 generation and haven't always kept upon the latest buzzwords.)This book clearly explained all three POVs --traditional, modern, and post-modern -- then put them into the context ofvarious Trek episodes.Great job!

I also enjoyed the brilliant insightthat Trek has, in effect,moved primal mythology from sharing a commonstory about the past, to sharing a common story about the future.Incenturiesgone by, each culture assumed its origins story to be the"real" story, and that was a uniting factor for each group.Buttoday, with so many cultures colliding in an ever-shrinking world, wecannot assume that we all we share the same past heroes anymore.Instead,we look to the same future heroes on Star Trek for role models andinspiration.Whether or not Trek is the "real" future is besidethe point here.It has become a mythology that people use on a globallevel (to greater or lesser degrees), regardless of the different creationstories that make up their individual cultures' past mythologies.

Iliked the fact that this book intelligently questioned some of thepolitically-correct criticisms of Trek that have come out in recent years. While not accepting everything on Trek at face value, this book does pointout that some PC critics have bordered on the ridiculous.The authors herestrike a very good balance between entering into the spirit of the Trekuniverse, and critically examining some of the basic assumptions that Trekmakes about what the future "should be.">I highly recommend"Deep Space and Sacred Time" to anyone seriously interested inthe impact of Star Trek on our modern (or is that post-modern? ) culture.

An excellent analysis
Wagner and Lundeen have added an important book to the growing repository of "serious" literature concerning Star Trek. In a sense they take over where Harrison Taylor et al left off with "EnterpriseZones", and they are not slow to suggest within their own bookcriticisms of that earlier work. The chapter on religion was particularlyenlightening, since for me it seemed to highlight the inconsistenciesinherent in Star Trek's treatment of the subject. Less caustic thanTaylor's volume, its apparent gentleness does not betoken an acceptance ofall things Trek.

The book was very interesting.
This book was a great book because of how he include family life and the things about star trek. I would recomend this book to the star trek fans. ... Read more

Product Description
Systems of belief are the tracks that knowledge leaves behind. Questioning and open inquiry offer far more - Tarthang Tulku ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Joyful Geometry
I particularly enjoy this approach to the TSK vision. Sacred Dimensions is a warm, ebullient text; it's less a gauntlet thrown down in challenge than the first three TSK books (which are, in my opinion, works of genius). Perhaps it's best to let this text speak for itself:

"The promise of the Time, Space, Knowledge vision--TSK--is this: If we understand our own space more fully, we can open all of space. If we konw our own time more intimately, we can transform our living experience. If we investigate the operations of our own mind more deeply, we can see the roots of knowledge everywhere. Seeing the natural harmony within appearance, we wil lbe able to take advantage of the extraordinary opportunity time is steadily presenting" (p. xli).

The rest of the text elaborates these themes.Highly recommended. ... Read more

Product Description
Complete rituals for the celebration of birth, marriage and death, as well as a comprehensive structure for a new age religion in which the natural rhythms of the earth signal the major spiritual festivals. ... Read more

Product Description
Tracing the proliferation of forms of mourning and memorial across a century increasingly concerned with their historical and temporal significance, Arranging Grief offers a much-needed new view of the aesthetic, social, and political implications of emotion.

Considering a diversity of texts, including mourning manuals, sermons, memorial tracts, poetry, and fiction by writers such as James Fenimore Cooper, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Susan Warner, Harriet E. Wilson, Herman Melville, Frances E. W. Harper, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Elizabeth Keckley and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Dana Luciano illustrates the ways that grief coupled the feeling body to time.

Nineteenth-century appeals to grief, as Luciano demonstrates, proliferated modes of "sacred time" across both religious and ostensibly secular frameworks, at once authorizing and unsettling established forms of connection to the past and the future. Drawing on formalist, Foucauldian and psychoanalytic criticism, Arranging Grief shows that literary engagements with grief offered ways of challenging deep-seated cultural assumptions about history, progress, bodies, and behaviors. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A brilliant work of cultural history and critical theory
This is a beautifully written, masterfully argued, deeply sophisticated book. It tracks how nineteenth century culture marshaled rituals of and ideas about grief both to serve and to contest an increasingly linear, racialized, heterosexualized, and Christianized national-political time. Luciano argues that even as the culture of mourning aimed to channel the newly permitted emotional "excess" of lament for lost loved ones into a liberal ideology of a shared humanity moving forward in time, the wayward grief and bereavement rituals of women, Native Americans, and people of African ancestry signaled other ways of conceiving of and living in both time and history. It's a story about the Anglo-American nineteenth century, about modernity writ large, and about possibilities for thinking politically in our own time.

It might be hard going for non-academics, as each sentence is a gold mine of ideas--I'm a college professor and have spent about two hours per chapter reading and taking notes-- but it is worth every minute spent on it. I won't belabor its sophisticated work with Marxist, deconstructionist, psychoanalytic, feminist, and queer theory, but it's all there and amazingly coordinated within a convincing, elegant, deeply original argument. Amazingly, it's a FIRST book, but it's as good as most people get over the course of a long career. If you are a nineteenth-century historian or literary critic, an anthropologist of death ritual, a psychoanalytic theorist, or an educated reader who loves a gorgeous challenge, buy this book. ... Read more

Product Description
Cori Spezzati deals with polychoral church music from its beginnings in the first few decades of the sixteenth century to its climax in the work of Giovanni Gabrieli and Heinrich Schutz. In polychoral music the singers, sometimes with instrumentalists also, were split into two (or more) groups that often engaged in lively dialogue and joined in majestic tutti climaxes. The book draws on contemporary descriptions of the idiom, especially from the writings of Vicentino and Zarlino, but concentrates in the main on musical analysis, showing how antiphonal chanting (such as that of the psalms), dialogue and canon influenced the phenomenon. Polychoral music has often been considered synonymous not only with Venetian music, but with impressive pomp. Anthony Carver's study shows that it was cultivated by many composers outside Venice - in Rome, all over northern Italy, in Catholic and Protestant areas of Germany, in Spain and the New World - and that it was as capable of quiet devotion or mannerist expressionism as of outgoing pomp. Perhaps most important, music by several major composers about which there is still surprisingly little in the literature is treated in depth: the Gabrielis, Lasso, Palestrina, Victoria, and several German masters. The book is illustrated with many musical examples. A companion volume offers an anthology of seventeen complete pieces, most of which are analysed in the text of Volume I. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Top notch resource and guide
Carver has created an excellent survey of the sacred polychoral repertoire, commenting the well-known composers and pieces and bringing out much less well known examples. Although, as any survey, he must cover a wide topical area he does achieve some real depth. Volume I is the textual survey, volume II is all musical examples-- complete works in most cases, or at least, complete sections. Inevitably, one wishes more examples were included but that is always the case in an anthology. The text can be a bit dense at times, as with any academic effort, but it is unlikely the casual music-lover will pick up this book. However, one does not need a PhD in musicology to appreciate Carver's points, and it is very useful for any experienced choral director who is fortunate enough to have the resources to perform some of this incredible music.
Volume II's examples are given in the original pitch level, in modern clefs (original clefs are indicated at the start of each example). The original part names (Cantus, sextus, bassus secundus, etc) are used with no editorialization on what the modern vocal counterpart is-- this requires anyone examining the music for performance purposes to thoroughly study the example in order to properly assign the sung line, but that is not a bad thing. No transpositions are given, even in cases of 'chiavette" but with the presence of the original clefs this call for transposition is easily determined.
One problem performing this repertoire (multiple choral music of the Renaissance and early Baroque) is that it often calls for several tenor parts, an issue with most modern church and community groups (due to the general shortage of avocational male singers). Even those choral ensembles blessed with singers who have the skill to negotiate this often tricky music may find the need for multiple tenor sections a problem in terms of balance. But for those with the resources to pull it off, the sound is glorious and the reward for performer and audience great indeed. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Unique Exploration of Baha'i Faith
John Walbridge's outstanding book gives a fascinating exploration of the Baha'i Faith, the most widespread of the world religions and the most recent of the world major religons. He gives it's complex history from its beginnings in 19th Century Iran, where it has been and continues to be persecuted. He explains its law, both comparing it to the laws of the other religions of the world, as well as explaining complicated aspects of it scripture. What is unique is that he details the small rites and sociological characteristics that effect individual believers with accuracy and respect. His scholarship is profound, explaining many deeper aspects to the Baha'i Faith in way that anyone could understand. He does this fully in the context of its scripture, its history and its contemporary issues. I strongly recommend this book for those individuals who want to understand the Baha'i Faith and its scripture with greater depth, more intense clarity, going beyond introductory books. This is a book for those who want to explore the Baha'i Faith from the perspective of a believer but also from the point of view of accurate detail and Baha'i scripture. This books covers Baha'i scripture in the orginal languages it was written, it's complex and turbulent history, it's theology and law, social structure, relationship with historical and contemporary Iran, local and international administration,etc. Few people can explain as much in so small a book. It is delightfully written and compherensive. I strongly recommend to any student of comparative religion or student of religious studies. ... Read more

Product Description
This study contributes to the debate over the relationship between science and religion by examining Sir Isaac Newton s construal of space and time in his Principia Mathematica and other important works.This book should appeal to scholars interested in the philosophy of religion, theology, and the history of science. ... Read more

Product Description
Francisca Rumsey uses two case studies from early Christian Ireland, the Nauigatio sancti Brendani abbatis and the Rules of the Céli Dé to demonstrate two different ways of understanding sacred time. One sees time as part of a good and holy creation, and therefore intrinsically good in itself; the other sees time as part of a fallen world needing redemption, and therefore in need of sanctification. The Céli Dé are often presented as part of a reform movement in early Irish monasticism. This question of monastic 'reform' is explored in detail to show that the received position regarding the Céli Dé is inaccurate. In fact, in the specific issue of liturgical prayer, their approach was innovative to the point of idiosyncrasy. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A scholarly contribution for students of biblical criticism
In Sacred Text, Secular Times: The Hebrew Bible In The Modern World, editors Leonard J. Greenspoon and Bryan F. LeBeau have effectively collaborated to gathered together fourteen papers which combine to present the reader with a rich, scholarly, and varied exploration of the ways in which the Hebrew bible has influenced the modern world, and the ways in which the modern world has influenced how we read and interpret those sacred writings. From Andrew Skinner's "The Influence Of The Hebrew Bible on the Founders of the American Republic" to Archie C. C. Lee's "Weaving a Humanistic Vision: Reading the Hebrew bible in Asian Religio-Cultural Context", Sacred Text, Secular Times will prove a fascinating, informative, challenging, impressive, and scholarly contribution for students of biblical criticism, sacred text interpretation, Judaic studies, and contemporary culture. ... Read more

Product Description
Entering Lent can be imagined as entering the silence of a vast and empty desert that leads to an experience of alleluia. The Lenten meditations in this book lead us to our own interior desert. ... Read more

Product Description
This volume consists of a series of philosophical questions arranged around a number of areas including: temporal direction and irreversibility; timelike and spacelike; encoding and decoding; independence and interdependency; and finer and coarser discrimination. ... Read more

Product Description

Product Description
Pilgrimage is a mindful journey to encounter, explore, and become aware of the sacred. Rosanne Keller’s emphasis on sacred, altered time is a distinctive feature of Pilgrim in Time. In this book, she takes us to pilgrimage sites as well as sacred places close at hand, such as one’s own garden.

Pilgrimage is also a place to face and deal with our fears. It can lead to self-knowledge. As we continue on the path we move out of ourselves. Pilgrim in Time encourages us to rediscover the sacredness of this earth. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

inner and outer quest
Every page of Rosanne's book drew me in.Each journey she made gave me the desire to experience more sources of awe for myself.I could see that a pilgrimage helps you grow spiritually, intellectually and also culturally.I learned that before going on a pilgrimage you must let go of any expectations, so you are able to grow in these ways. Everyone should read this book! Everyone should experience a pilgrimage of some kind.It is an inner quest as well as an outer one.

Embracing the Pilgrim Spirit
Keller, a sculptor and retreat leader, introduces herself as a wayfarer, a seeker, and finally, a pilgrim, one who "lets things of the past go and journeys through time." In ten absorbing chapters, she shares the insights she gained while visiting locales described briefly under the headings pyramids, circles, domes, towers, rivers, mountains, islands, temples, cathedrals, mosques, and ruins. And we are with her on the final night of 1999 for a "small pilgrimage" in the frozen fields behind her home in Minnesota.

We learn that Keller walked 176 miles of the border between Wales and England to celebrate her 50th birthday. In one of the final chapters, "an instance of what pilgrim spirit is about," she offers a detailed description of her trek across the 500 miles of "The Way of St. James" in Spain at age 61.

In the final chapter, Keller reflects on the spirit of pilgrimage: "All of us are on journeys that require us to abandon security and take risks, sometimes to change course drastically, and always to keep going, even when we don't know exactly where the path is leading." ... Read more