Have you ever wondered where God was when things seem to be going wrong in your life? Maybe you have even asked why. In A Father's Love, author James Sienkiewicz takes you on a journey seeking the answers to those questions as the storms of life hit.

The excitement of the spiritual life is as fulfilling as friendship, as mysterious as the soul, and as infinite as the universe. This book is a jumpstart in the faith for those who have tried religion and not found the spirit, or have tried pleasure and not found joy, or have chased after life and not found deep meaning, or thought God to be imagined and not been awakened.

The book includes chapters on the infinite interior life, expectant faith, mystery traveler, sex in God's creation, beautiful simplicity, storytelling, difficulties connecting with God, religion unfettered, the New Evangelization, with humor throughout. The final chapter, titled "Evolutionary Christogenesis," includes quotes from Teilhard de Chardin.

The author, a Catholic priest, writes unabashedly of straitjacket rituals, institutional stonewalling, and the cynicism of people. Positively, he conveys an enthusiasm in the surge of goodness that is present in this generation. He conveys how you can become a fully rigged ship with sails unfurled in the sea of God's spirit. The divine force has never been absent from nature's scene or from human relational ways. We are called to be faith rebels.

In Ordinary Jerusalem, Angelos Dalachanis, Vincent Lemire and thirty-five scholars depict the ordinary history of an extraordinary global city in the late Ottoman and Mandate periods. Utilizing largely unknown archives, they revisit the holy city of three religions, which has often been defined solely as an eternal battlefield and studied exclusively through the prism of geopolitics and religion. At the core of their analysis are topics and issues developed by the European Research Council-funded project "Opening Jerusalem Archives: For a Connected History of Citadinite in the Holy City, 1840-1940." Drawn from the French vocabulary of geography and urban sociology, the concept of citadinite describes the dynamic identity relationship a city's inhabitants develop with each other and with their urban environment.

The Festschrift Darkhei Noam: The Jews of Arab Lands presented to Norman (Noam) Stillman offers a coherent and thought-provoking discussion by eminent scholars in the field of both the history and culture of the Jews in the Islamic World from pre-modern to modern times. Based on primary sources the book speaks to the resilience, flexibility, and creativity of Jewish culture in Arab lands. The volume clearly addresses the areas of research Norman Stillman himself has considerably contributed to. Research foci of the book are on the flexibility of Jewish law in real life, Jewish cultural life particularly on material and musical culture, the role of women in these different societies, antisemitism and Jewish responses to hatred against the Jews, and antisemitism from ancient martyrdom to modern political Zionism.

In The Magnificent Defeat, Frederick Buechner examines what it means to follow Christ, the lessons of Christmas and Easter, the miracles of grace, and "the magnificent defeat" of the human soul of God.