Stations Along The Way

Written in the spirit of The Diary of Anne Frank and beginning where the bestseller Hitler's Willing Executioners leaves off, Stations along the Way is a true story chronicling the spiritual transformation of former Hitler Youth leader Ursula Martens. Consumed with guilt and shame over having been used by Adolf Hitler and Nazis during WWII, Ursula travels to America, where she experiences prejudice similar to that forced upon the Jews in Nazi Germany. Confused about what lies ahead, she suddenly discovers self-forgiveness in the most unlikely of places--through the love of three Holocaust survivors. One has romantic intentions; the other two accept her despite her past. As God becomes the essence of her life, Ursula turns full circle from worshipping the swastika to now worshipping the cross.

Fourteen original woodcut designs depicting the Stations of the Cross, with accompanying monologue, that inspire meaningful meditation about faith for Lent and throughout the year. Each year on Good Friday, Christian congregations all over the world walk the Stations of the Cross, a commemoration of Jesus' walk to Calvary. In Walking the Way of Sorrows, artist Noyes Capehart and writer/journalist Katerina Whitley provide a fresh resource for congregations and individuals who want to explore the meaning of these Stations more deeply. Capehart's stark and powerful block cuts of the fourteen Stations are accompanied by monologues from the point of view of someone at each station. These monologues, along with biblical references and a brief liturgy, are excellent for individual devotion, but can also be used by groups who walk the Stations together.

A father’s heartbreaking and hopeful story about his beloved son, in which a young man teaches his family “a new way to die” with wit, candor, and grace. "A book after my own heart, profound, gorgeous, deeply spiritual and human, beautifully written, heartbreaking, but also, because of the writer's wisdom and spirit, triumphant." —Anne Lamott As the book opens, Richard Lischer’s son, Adam, calls to tell his father, a professor of divinity at Duke University, that his cancer has returned. Adam is a charismatic young man with a promising law career, and that his wife is pregnant with their first child makes the disease’s return all the more devastating. Despite the cruel course of the illness, Adam’s growing weakness evokes in him a remarkable spiritual strength. This is the story of one last summer, lived as honestly and faithfully as possible. Deeply moving and utterly lacking in sentimentality or self-pity, Stations of the Heart is an unforgettable book about life and death and the terrible blessing of saying good-bye.

Step back to the day when a visit to the gas station meant service with a smile, a wash of the windshield, and the cheerful question, "Fill 'er up?" Since their unremarkable beginnings as cheap shacks and curbside pumps at the dawn of the automobile age, gas stations have taken many forms and worn many guises: castles, cottages and teepees, Art Deco and Streamline Moderne, clad with wood, stucco, or gleaming porcelain in seemingly infinite variety. The companion volume to the Wisconsin Public Television documentary of the same name, Fill 'er Up: The Glory Days of Wisconsin Gas Stations visits 60 Wisconsin gas stations that are still standing today and chronicles the history of these humble yet ubiquitous buildings. The book tells the larger story of the gas station's place in automobile culture and its evolution in tandem with American history, as well as the stories of the individuals influenced by the gas stations in their lives. Fill 'er Up provides a glimpse into the glory days of gas stations, when full service and free oil changes were the rule and the local station was a gathering place for neighbors. More importantly, Fill 'er Up links the past and the present, showing why gas stations should be preserved and envisioning what place these historic structures can have in the 21st century and beyond.

National Book Award Finalist: This autobiographical road-trip novel exploring life and politics in the 1950s became “an underground bestseller” (The Village Voice). The year is 1956, and a blacklisted Hollywood agent sets off on a cross-country adventure from Los Angeles to New York City. Along the way—stopping at bars, all-night restaurants, and gas stations—the twenty-nine-year-old narrator, at once egotistical and compassionate, barrels across the “blue highways” to meet, fight with, love, and hate old comrades and girlfriends, collecting their stories and reflecting on his own life experiences. Driven by probing stream-of-consciousness prose and brutally honest self-analysis, Going Away is a sprawling autobiographical journey into a kaleidoscope of American mindsets; most significantly, that of its radical narrator. Crammed with acute social and political observations, this urgent novel captures the spirit of its times, so remarkably like that of today. An odyssey in the spirit of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Going Away is “a novel of major importance. There hasn’t been anything like it since TheGrapes of Wrath” (San Francisco Chronicle).

This is the first book to introduce the fourteen joyful and highly symbolic events that make up the Via Lucis, the Christian Way of Light, an ancient spiritual tradition celebrating the post-Resurrection life of Christ on Earth. The Stations of the Light, with its “good news” of healing and salvation, is becoming an increasingly popular devotion throughout the United States and the world, and was recognized by the Vatican in its Jubilee 2000 campaign. While Christians of all denominations are familiar with the Stations of the Cross, few know how to celebrate the Stations of the Light, a practice that came into being through inspiration from ancient Roman sources. Stations of the Light is a clear and inspiring guide to making this ancient ritual part of contemporary Christian life. The stations mark the fourteen sacred events in the post-Easter story, from “Jesus Rises from the Dead” to “Pentecost: The Risen Lord Sends the Holy Spirit.” For each one, Mary Ford-Grabowsky presents a variety of spiritual practices that invite readers to form their own realistic and sacred image of the event. Beginning with relaxation and releasing the imagination, these exercises are designed to help convey the story and foster inspiration, and include ancient and contemporary meditations, reflections, and prayers; as well as journal writing, artwork, music, and mantras.

Most compellingly, Stations is about the journey we each take along the tracks of memory where time and place intersect - the lost world of home.

National Book Award Finalist: Never before has the mentality of the average German under the Nazi regime been made as intelligible to the outsider.” —The New York TImes They Thought They Were Free is an eloquent and provocative examination of the development of fascism in Germany. Milton Mayer’s book is a study of ten Germans and their lives from 1933-45, based on interviews he conducted after the war when he lived in Germany. Mayer had a position as a research professor at the University of Frankfurt and lived in a nearby small Hessian town which he disguised with the name “Kronenberg.” These ten men were not men of distinction, according to Mayer, but they had been members of the Nazi Party; Mayer wanted to discover what had made them Nazis. His discussions with them of Nazism, the rise of the Reich, and mass complicity with evil became the backbone of this book, an indictment of the ordinary German that is all the more powerful for its refusal to let the rest of us pretend that our moment, our society, our country are fundamentally immune. A new foreword to this edition by eminent historian of the Reich Richard J. Evans puts the book in historical and contemporary context. We live in an age of fervid politics and hyperbolic rhetoric. They Thought They Were Free cuts through that, revealing instead the slow, quiet accretions of change, complicity, and abdication of moral authority that quietly mark the rise of evil.

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