Synopsis: Many remember The Scarlet Letter as required reading for reluctant sixteen year olds. The unnamed, elusive narrator of Hawthorne's "tale of human frailty and sorrow" is-some readers might say maddeningly-indirect, ambiguous, and inconsistent. Readers who hope to arrive at satisfying judgments about the book's four iconic characters-Hester, Arthur, Roger, and Pearl-are often left to arrive at their conclusions by guess and inference. The narrator provides what seems to be willfully incomplete information. His point of view shifts from one moral or historical perspective to another...

Patient Poets: Illness from Inside Out invites readers to consider what caregivers and medical professionals may learn from poetry by patients. It offers reflections on poetry as a particularly apt vehicle for articulating the often isolating experiences of pain, fatigue, changed life rhythms, altered self-understanding, embarrassment, resistance, and acceptance.

Well-known biblical phrases -- "in the fullness of time," "fearfully and wonderfully made," "in the beauty of holiness," and others -- suggest and evoke and invite. In this book Marilyn Chandler McEntyre offers brief reflections on more than fifty such scriptural phrases that prompt readers to pay attention, to pause where we sense a beckoning.
Some of these select phrases are devotional, some speculative, some whimsical, some edgy. McEntyre encourages us to see such "words within the Word" as invitations and, in doing so, to discover that they are places of divine encounter, epiphany, or...

When the time comes for us to die, how do we say good-bye to our friends, our families, and the lives we have lived? How do we remain faithful -- to God, to ourselves, and to loved ones -- as we face our final journey?

As Marilyn McEntyre acknowledges, these questions are especially challenging because we now live longer than previous generations did, and many of us die more slowly. Those who are dying have a lot of things to deal with -- fear, discouragement, boredom, pain, regret. The list is long.

In this book McEntyre offers fifty-two short meditations on the very...

Sharing the Practice
-A beautiful book of meditations.-

Christian Century
-McEntyre's language is reflective and sensitive but not sentimental. . . . A thoughtful and realistic window into the often hidden, though well-traveled, end-of-life journey.-

Michael Card
-- musician and writer
-Marilyn McEntyre embodies simple, patient kindness in the pages of this book.-

Samuel Wells
-- vicar of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, London
-When we face our own death, or the death of someone dearer to...