All human cultures across time have created rituals, bringing family members together to celebrate, welcome, honor, or mourn. While contemporary rituals still exist to serve these important functions, we often perform them automatically, without considering their vital roles in our lives. Many individuals feel alienated from the rituals of their childhoods, while others are struggling to create satisfying new traditions that reflect their own present needs and circumstances. Authors Evan Imber-Black and Janine Roberts show how we can learn to tap the power of rituals to mark transitions, express important values, heal the past, and deepen relationships. Each chapter looks at the special issues and possibilities for nuclear, extended, single-parent, and remarried families, as well as for single adults and couples. The authors also pay particular attention to how changing gender roles are reflected in our rituals, and how revitalized traditions can actually alter the course of intimate relationships. Filled with first-person stories and practical examples, this book will help all readers enhance the meaning of traditions old and new, reinforcing and celebrating life's many milestones and ties.

Follow a young woman off the plane, down winding dusty paths, and through the doors of an orphanage where children are waiting to teach you the most important lessons in life. Travel past the orphanage to the surrounding villages, and stoop inside darkened huts to greet men, women, and children whose stories of amazing faith give you strength and courage to go forth and fight the everyday battles. See the AIDS epidemic spread from household to household, yet watch as each one rises from the ashes and keeps going. Return in the evening to the quiet cement house enveloped in darkness, the only light a small glow from your candle. Look around the room at your new friends, a people willing to trust God and find joy in the midst of these devastating circumstances. You will come to realize that no matter what a person faces, the pain of grief and hardship is greatly diminished in the presence of lavish love. Come experience true love! Janine Roberts grew up in Vienna, West Virginia. She graduated from West Virginia Wesleyan College in 1999 and Asbury Theological Seminary in 2004. Janine traveled to Zimbabwe in 1998 and 2002 before moving to Fairfield Children's Homes from 2004 to 2007. During her time there, she worked with Zimbabwean volunteers to expand a program called HOPE. This program provides nutrition, education, and medical support to orphans so that they can continue living with relatives in their communities. She plans to return to live in Zimbabwe in 2009. For her current updates from Zimbabwe, please visit www.hopeofzim.blogspot.com.

The Vaccine Papers documents the remarkable and worrying findings of an independent investigation by the prize-winning journalist Janine Roberts into the development and manufacture of today's vaccines.

You may have read about American Indians who resisted the loss of their lands. This book tells how the Aborigines in Australia fought similarly in defense of their lands along a most savage frontier. Jack of Cape Grim is a unique and rare account, based on original unpublished handwritten diaries and correspondence, and on Aboriginal memories, of an intrepid band of Aboriginal women and men who fought to protect their lands, resisting three military expeditions sent after them. Melbourne in 1839 consisted of tumbledown wooden houses and roads so muddy that horses and carts sunk out of sight, yet it was a magnet for the younger sons of aristocrats who arrived accompanied by tens of thousands of sea-sick sheep. Nearby the Aborigines had stone walled homes with roofs so strong that settlers reported they stood the weight of a horse, and extensive fish farms - all of which was soon to be destroyed. This is the story of an incredible cultural clash in one of the remotest parts of the British Empire. Many Aboriginal Elders thought the end of days had come. They said the dead had returned, for everyone knew that ghosts were white They said these must not be resisted. Other Aborigines took every opportunity to study the technology bought by these strangers - and others, more astutely perhaps, said these new arrivals were savages from overseas and must be immediately resisted. Among the later were a group of three Tasmanian women, including Truganini, a woman famous for her beauty among the settler leaders and wrongly reputed to be the last of her people, and two Tasmanian men including Jack of Cape Grim. They had no hope of returning to their tribal lands, so eventually decided they must make a last stand. This is their story of how they outwitted the British army sent against them and drove settlers back into town, but only to be finally betrayed. However these women then won their way back to Tasmania and continued to struggle for their land. Today, near Cape Grim in Tasmania, where Jack's folk were thrown over a cliff, some of their people's descendants still hunt the mutton bird. Australian government funding has been granted for a film script based on this book and negotiations are proceeding. The author Jan Roberts worked for some 17 years with Aboriginal people and their organizations on civil rights issues. Her articles have appeared in the Melbourne Age and Sydney Morning Herald as well as in the Independent and Financial Times in the UK. Her films have been shown on television in the USA, UK and Australia.

This book takes its readers on a journey into the very heart of the hunt for viruses - to the key experiments originally performed to prove that these invisibly small particles are the cause of diseases previously blamed on toxins or bacteria and into the latest research. It sheds light on the extraordinary assumptions that underlay much of this research - and on the vaccines that developed from this. The author, an investigative journalist who has researched and produced investigative films for the BBC, American and Australian television, was asked by parents with children severely ill after vaccination, to discover if the medical authorities were hiding anything from them. She agreed, but had no idea how long this search would take. She expected at best to uncover a small degree of contamination. On the ensuing decade-long journey of discovery, she learnt it is not just the added mercury that we have to worry about. She discovered that the top government scientists admit to colleagues that vaccines are contaminated with viruses from chickens, humans and monkeys, with RNA and DNA fragments, with 'cellular degradation products', and possibly 'oncogenes and prions.' They report alarmingly that it is impossible to commercially purify vaccines. They express great concerns, but the public is not told despite the possible consequences for long-term public health. A recent US court decision has linked autism with vaccine contamination. The author cites her sources by name - and gives references and Internet links where they are available. I She reveals evidence that the World Health Organisation has discovered the MMR vaccine is contaminated with chicken leukosis virus, but has decided not totell the public of this, and to continue to make the vaccine with eggs from contaminated chickens. She reports US biowarfare researchers tried to create new agents to destroy our immune systems - and worked on a bacterium to make it a hospital superbug. Did they manage to create HIV? A senior professor told her that the vaccine program was so contaminated that HIV might well have spread though it without any need for military intervention. She set out to find the evidence to resolve this, and to learn how HIV apparently spread so far and fast. She needed to know more about this virus so went to the foundation research widely held today to have found HIV and proved it caused AIDS. She was then rocked to discover that this same research was investigated for scientific fraud for a five year period by powerful US scientific institutions and by Congress, . Why is this not widely known? She found their reports and discovered they found major errors in this research, some so serious that these made it impossible to repeat these experiments and thus to verify them She reveals the evidence unearthed - reproducing key documents so the reader can assess them for themselves. This is explosive material. In the final part of this book the author reports recent research that is revolutionising biology and offering much hope for the future. These new developments shed new light on the relationships between our cells and viruses. They are not necessarily enemies. Readers may find these new developments radically change the ideas they have held about viruses since childhood. This book has over 500 references and includes several documents unearthed under Freedom of Information legislation. It has ascientific glossary and is fully indexed..

This book uses rich case material to show how normative family rituals can be identified and used as the basis for therapeutic rituals. Throughout the perspective is both consistent and positive. The editors and contributors assume that families are resourceful and can become partners in coevolving metaphorical rituals that suit their unique histories and needs.

Daily rituals, holiday traditions, and rites of passage mark our time, create unforgettable memories, and define us as individuals, family members, and community participants. Rituals in Families and Family Therapy, Revised Edition, builds on the rich case material of the first edition and develops the editors' powerful therapeutic approach that identifies normative family rituals as the basis for effective therapeutic rituals. With new chapters on such topics as rituals and bicultural couples, illness and ritual, and rituals in the wake of September 11, 2001, the Revised Edition both revisits and rejuvenates the landmark work of Imber-Black, Roberts, and Whiting.