Beyond The Fragments

Millions passionately desire a viable alternative to austerity and neoliberalism, but they are sceptical of traditional leftist top-down state solutions. In this urgent polemic, Hilary Wainwright argues that this requires a new politics for the left that comes from the bottom up, based on participatory democracy and the everyday knowledge and creativity of each individual. Political leadership should be about facilitation and partnership, not expert domination or paternalistic rule. Wainwright uses lessons from recent movements and experiments to build a radical future vision that will be an inspiration for activists and radicals everywhere.

Adults now constitute the majority of students in higher education; what they bring to it, want and need are important questions in the development of a more responsive higher education. The author discusses The Relationship Between Motives, Education, And Life History To Explore how culture and history shape people and their motives for learning, taking into account variations in gender, social background and ethnicity, challenging the orthodox view that non-traditional students enter higher educational for vocational/material reasons.

A five-point plan to usher you through heartache and toward a stronger, healthier place. “I know how to kill someone and get away with it.” The words spoken by her father when Melissa was a teen haunt her to this day. Two years later, after confessing that he was the serial killer nationally known as the Happy Face Killer, Keith Jesperson was arrested for the murder of eight women. The pain, guilt, and shame that followed her father’s conviction stigmatized Melissa for years until she figured out a way to use her emotions as fuel to free herself from self-imposed limits and set out on a journey to rebuild her fragmented life. Through her work as an Emmy-nominated investigative journalist, television host, educator, and advocate, Melissa created WHOLE, a five-step program to better develop her own approach to healing: Watch the Storm, Heal Your Heart, Open Your Mind, Leverage Your Power, and Elevate Your Spirit. Among other things, she found that the commitment to your core values makes all the difference in getting unstuck; that forgiveness gives the greatest chance of making a future not defined by the past; that there is great value in vulnerability; that creativity is essential to living a full life; and that hope is the basis for everything we feel, believe, and do. In each phase of the program, Melissa inspires you to embrace your past to find wholeness within the parts of your life that you believe to be “broken.” If you are stuck in the rut of a painful experience—whether depression, trauma, pain, fear, addiction, or guilt—you will find comfort in this book’s advice, self-evaluation, and action plans. WHOLE is a powerful journey of recovery and awakening that reframes the pain experience so it can be used as a way to invite understanding, growth, and transformation into your life.

An impossible decision in the chaos of D-Day. Ripples that cascade seventy-five years into the present. And two lives transformed by the tenuous resolve to reach out of the darkness toward fragments of light. Cancer stole everything from Ceelie—her peace of mind, her selfimage, perhaps even her twenty-three-year marriage to her college sweetheart, Nate. Without the support of Darlene, her quirky elderly friend, she may not have been able to endure so much loss. So when Darlene’s own prognosis turns dire, Ceelie can’t refuse her seemingly impossible request—to find a WWII paratrooper named Cal, the father who disappeared when Darlene was an infant, leaving a lifetime of desolation in his wake. The search that begins in the farmlands of Missouri eventually leads Ceelie to a small town in Normandy, where she uncovers the harrowing tale of the hero who dropped off-target into occupied France. Alternating between Cal’s D-Day rescue by two French sisters and Ceelie’s present-day journey through trial and heartbreak, Fragments of Light explores a timeless question: When life becomes unbearable, will you surrender to the darkness or dare to press toward a lingering light? Praise for Fragments of Light “Michèle Phoenix skillfully explores the strength and resiliency of the human spirit but also its heartbreaking limits. Brimming with expertly researched wartime details, Fragments of Light abounds with poignancy and insight.” —Susan Meissner, bestselling author of The Last Year of the War “As a D-Day Airborne participant, I recommend this novel with enthusiasm. Everyone should read it.” —Staff Sergeant Thomas Rice, WWII Veteran, 101st Airborne “Michele Phoenix’s Fragments of Light is a luminous portrait of men and women grappling with the past in a brave attempt to forge a different kind of future . . . A story as beautiful as it is heartbreaking. In short, I loved this book!” —Lauren Denton, USA TODAY bestselling author of The Hideaway “Deeply personal and beautifully humane, Phoenix once again asserts her power as one of the most moving and lyrical voices in inspirational fiction.” —Rachel McMillan, author of The London Restoration “Written with depth and understanding, this story offers readers a wonderful journey spanning from war-torn World War II France to a battle for love in our time.” —Katherine Reay, bestselling author of Dear Mr. Knightley “As the title suggests, there are no easy illuminations on the path of healing. Cancer attacks more than the body. War destroys more than flesh and bone. Not all heroes welcome the attention, and not all husbands are up to the challenge. Women find the most unlikely sources of strength, and the best families defy definition.” —Allison Pittman, bestselling author of The Seamstress “It’s not often a story moves me as Fragments of Light has. With a rare and honest voice, Michèle Phoenix weaves a story of heroes from yesteryear and also those from your neighborhood—each with hearts of valor—as they endure the fight of their lives.” —Elizabeth Byler Younts, Carol Award–winning author The Solace of Water

David Tracy is widely considered one of the most important religious thinkers in North America, known for his pluralistic vision and disciplinary breadth. His first book in more than twenty years reflects Tracy’s range and erudition, collecting essays from the 1980s to 2018 into a two-volume work that will be greeted with joy by his admirers and praise from new readers. In the first volume, Fragments, Tracy gathers his most important essays on broad theological questions, beginning with the problem of suffering across Greek tragedy, Christianity, and Buddhism. The volume goes on to address the Infinite, and the many attempts to categorize and name it by Plato, Aristotle, Rilke, Heidegger, and others. In the remaining essays, he reflects on questions of the invisible, contemplation, hermeneutics, and public theology. Throughout, Tracy evokes the potential of fragments (understood both as concepts and events) to shatter closed systems and open us to difference and Infinity. Covering science, literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and non-Western religious traditions, Tracy provides in Fragments a guide for any open reader to rethink our fragmenting contemporary culture.

A personal history of life, love and women’s liberation In this powerful memoir Sheila Rowbotham looks back at her life as a participant in the women’s liberation movement, left politics and the creative radical culture of a decade in which freedom and equality seemed possible. She reveals the tremendous efforts that were made to transform attitudes and feelings, as well as daily life. After addressing the first British Women’s Liberation Conference at Ruskin College, Oxford in 1970, she went on to encourage night cleaners to unionise, to campaign for nurseries and abortion rights. She played an influential role in discussions of socialist feminist ideas and her books and journalism attracted an international readership. Written with generosity and humour Daring to Hope recreates grassroots networks, communal houses and squats, bringing alive a shared impetus to organise collectively and to love without jealousy or domination. It conveys the shifts occurring in politics and society through kernels of personal experience. The result is a book about liberation in the widest sense.

The political make-up of the contemporary world changes with such rapidity that few attempts have been made to consider with adequate care, the nature and value of the concept of sovereignty. What exactly is meant when one speaks about the acquisition, preservation, infringement or loss of sovereignty? This book revisits the assumptions underlying the applications of this fundamental category, as well as studying the political discourses in which it has been embedded. Bringing together historians, constitutional lawyers, political philosophers and experts in international relations, Sovereignty in Fragments seeks to dispel the illusion that there is a unitary concept of sovereignty of which one could offer a clear definition. This book will appeal to scholars and advanced students of international relations, international law and the history of political thought.

"Barthes's most popular and unusual performance as a writer is "A Lover's Discourse," a writing out of the discourse of love. This language primarily the complaints and reflections of the lover when alone, not exchanges of a lover with his or her partner is unfashionable. Thought it is spoken by millions of people, diffused in our popular romances and television programs as well as in serious literature, there is no institution that explores, maintains, modifies, judges, repeats, and otherwise assumes responsibility for this discourse . . . Writing out the figures of a neglected discourse, Barthes surprises us in "A Lover's Discourse" by making love, in its most absurd and sentimental forms, an object of interest." Jonathan Culler