Bicycle spokes still flay afternoon avenues, tumbleweeds still roll a stumbling plain. We stray into an uprooted acre, and Inna binds the blind seat of the heart. Inna Jane Ray's poems in California Hours move between childhood memories and imagined futures across a dramatic human and natural landscape. Written in the late 1970s, Ray’s eight-poem cycle painted the effects of drought, flood, fire and urbanization in her native California. Bonnie Barrett's new design of the original hand bound book makes Inna’s work accessible now and includes samples of her art gleaned from her sketchbooks, paintings and photography.
The edition includes a foreword by Janet Nippell.
Poetry about contemporary spiritual life, written in non-churchy and non-ironic language. Serious, humorous, often startling meditations engage the spiritual searching of both believers and non-believers. These poems are full of ideas but not academic, full of feeling but not sentimental. They can be unsettling for know-it-alls, challenging for skeptics, helpful for catechists, inspirational for preachers, and provide thoughtful support for prayer. The author is a Catholic of the Vatican II persuasion, a Boomer from the California coast, and has come to believe what she was once told by a Franciscan teacher: that there are no Christians in Heaven, because in heaven our human desperation for rigid identity systems dissolves in Love. Dedicated to all people who have come to feel that something is missing.
This second edition has a foreword and author biography by Janet Nippell.
The Knot Garden
Lyrical, eerie, haunted, sing-song, blunt, intellectually demanding and often funny, some of these poems rhyme, some don't. Covering California territory from the Los Angeles basin to the Point Reyes peninsula, and using characters adapted from Malaysian creation stories, themes of Buddhist meditation practice, and quirky contemplations of Catholic Sister Fishwick, the pilgrim voice heard in The Knot Garden ponders the question: What is the shape of the world? Not simply the planet itself, but the spiritual story we tell to understand our place in it. Without a story, a spiritual world-view, it is difficult to know how to choose rightly our actions in life. When it seems the coherence of our world view may be overwhelmed by spiritual chaos and ecological destruction brought about in part by the fragmentation of modernity, these poems affirm that recombinant, re-weaviing, re-gathering powers of creative nature can lead us through its disintegration on a path open to faith. This second edition contains an afterword by Janet Nippell.
In this book is a history and exposition of one of their ongoing controversies: The Atonement of Christ. Helpful for any non-Christian person who would like to read a short, if condensed and demanding, overview of cultural mechanisms undergirding the proclamation of "Jesus Saves." Useful for catechists in any Christian faith tradition, especially for Christians reared in one tradition who are converting to another. An excellent text for religious studies courses as an introduction to the development of soteriological assertion in the Christian faith tradition from Patristic times into the era of Post-modernity. Of particular interest to contemporary women who have experienced abuse, bullying and battering at the hands of individuals and institutions who claim to be doing so in the name of Jesus, and would like support to become liberated from it.