Sistine Heresy

Eros, art, and gorgeous blasphemyÉ Adrianna Borgia, survivor of the Borgia court, presents Michelangelo with the greatest temptations of his life while struggling herself with soul-threatening desires and heresies. Her growing passion for the painter Raphaela Bramante mirrors the sculptorÕs damnable interest in a castrato in the Sistine choir and in the ideas of secular humanism. Claimed as the epitome of Christian inspiration, MichelangeloÕs ceiling is revealed as a coup of Eros upon religion, a gorgeous blasphemy and a paean to forbidden love in the very heart of the Church.

Scientists have sounded alarms about the demise of Earth’s oceans for decades, and now the extinction event is here. As the world braces for disaster, paleobotanist Dr. Elle Graham finds a possible cure. Unfortunately, it’s been extinct for over one hundred thousand years. Captain Jackson Drake lives in the past because she can’t stand to face the present after the woman she loved sacrificed herself to save others, a casualty of a world ravaged by superbugs. The last person Jackson wants to travel back in time with is another woman trying to save the world at the cost of her own life. When things go sideways on primeval Earth, Jackson and Elle must put aside conflicts and work together to save the mission. Faith in each other just might give them the strength to save the world and rescue a broken heart in the process. But can Elle convince Jackson that the future is worth saving?

As the German Blitzkrieg brings the Soviet Union to its knees in 1942, a regiment of women aviators flies out at night in flimsy aircraft without parachutes or radios to harass the Wehrmacht troops. The Germans call them “Night Witches” and the best of them is Lilya Drachenko. From the other end of the world, photojournalist Alex Preston arrives to “get the story” for the American press and witnesses sacrifice, hardship, and desperate courage among the Soviet women that is foreign to her. So also are their politics. While the conservative journalist and the communist Lilya clash politically, Stalingrad, the most savage battle of the 20th century, brings them together, until enemy capture and the lethal Russian winter tears them apart again.

Ancient curses, modern day villains, and a most intriguing woman who keeps appearing when least expected and thenÉdisappearing. Archeologist Valerie Foret has spent a year searching for a tomb in the Egyptian desertÑa labor broken only by high risk trysts with a powerful manÕs wife. When she finally makes the discovery of a lifetime, she is set upon by jealous rivals and religious fanatics. Worse, she is drawn into the depths of the desert by forces that offer knowledge of vast mysteries and at the same time threaten to destroy everything she knows. For what sheÕs found is a glimpse into the hereafter, and itÕs nothing like itÕs supposed to be. Brilliant scientist that she is, she has loved most unwisely and learned what she does not want to know. Follow her adventures through modern and ancient Egypt, through this world and the next, with Book One of the Ibis Prophecy.

What if Sodom and Gomorrah, those synonyms for debauchery, were in fact perfect societies? What if the avenging angels were genocidal terrorists, and the Òone righteous manÓ who escaped the annihilation was a murderous fanatic and the rapist of his own daughters? Justice is a long time coming, but finally the serene waters of the Red Sea give up the secret of a millennia-old lie. While surrendering to biblical wantonness with a film actress, sculptor Joanna Boleyn, discovers that righteousness can conceal its own depravity, that art tells more truth than scripture, and that challenging authority can be mortally dangerous.

The New York Times bestselling author of How the Irish Saved Civilization reveals how the innovations of the Renaissance and the Reformation changed the Western world. • “Cahill is our king of popular historians.” —The Dallas Morning News This was an age in which whole continents and peoples were discovered. It was an era of sublime artistic and scientific adventure, but also of newly powerful princes and armies—and of unprecedented courage, as thousands refused to bow their heads to the religious pieties of the past. In these exquisitely written and lavishly illustrated pages, Cahill illuminates, as no one else can, the great gift-givers who shaped our history—those who left us a world more varied and complex, more awesome and delightful, more beautiful and strong than the one they had found.

Organized by heretical movements and texts from the Gnostic Gospels to The Book of Mormon, this book uses the work of James Joyce – particularly Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake – as a prism to explore how the history of Christian heresy remains part of how we read, write, and think about books today. Erickson argues that the study of classical, medieval, and modern debates over heresy and orthodoxy provide new ways of understanding modernist literature and literary theory. Using Joyce's works as a springboard to explore different perspectives and intersections of 20th century literature and the modern literary and religious imagination, this book gives us new insights into how our modern and “secular” reading practices unintentionally reflect how we understand our religious histories.

Dana Norland shoots two men in cold blood and flees the US for the mountains of Rwanda. Posing as a biologist, she finds herself caring for gorillas with Kristen, Dian Fossey’s successor at the Karisoke research center. She has plenty of time to think about what she’s done, but can she find peace? Apparently not, for the mountain is haunted both by the ghost of Dian Fossey, and by the men who murdered her. Personal vendetta joins with genocide, and to flee the marauding butchers, the women hide in the rainforest. Among the mountain gorillas they once protected, they learn what justice is. And what it is not.

What happens when a mask becomes the deepest truth, when a lie reveals the greatest love that was ever given? Renaissance historian Joanna Valois and transgendered beauty Sara Falier take us spiraling into the past, from New York City during the Stonewall riots, to Venice under the Inquisition, and finally to NeroÕs Rome. In Venice, they find a sixteenth century heretical book and learn about the woman condemned to death for printing it. The book, a translation of an ancient codex describing the Crucifixion, shattered the lives of nearly everyone who touched it, and 400 years later, could still bring half the world to its knees.

When the hallowed halls of academia become the stage for murder, newly appointed Dean Beth Ellis's search for the truth leads her to unexpected discoveries about her own heart. For Beth Ellis, Grafton College and its faculty and students are her home and family. But the president of the college rubs everyone the wrong way, the new English professor on campus isn't much more popular, and Beth has her hands full trying to keep the peace as various campus factions quarrel. Still, she didn't expect a tenure battle to end in murder. Sally Sullivan left the Chicago police homicide division and returned to her hometown where, as chief of police, she expected her greatest challenges to be dealing with car accidents and drunk drivers. But faced with a murder investigation with more motives than evidence and an inexperienced staff, Sally finds small-town policing isn't as simple as she thought. Neither are her growing feelings for Beth Ellis. As Sally and Beth's different worlds collide, their desire to solve the murder is complicated by their unexpected attraction. A second murder on campus places the survival of the college itself, their tenuous relationship, and even their lives in jeopardy.