The perennial classic: this intimate journal chronicling the Narnia author's experience of grief after his wife's death has consoled readers for half a century; this edition features responses from authors like Hilary Mantel, Francis Spufford, Rowan Williams, Jenna Bailey ... 'An intimate, anguished account of a man grappling with the mysteries of faith and love ... Elegant and raw ... A powerful record of thought and emotion experienced in real time.' Guardian 'Raw and modern ... This unsentimental, even bracing, account of one man's dialogue with despair becomes both compelling and consoling ... A contemporary classic.' Observer 'A source of great consolation ... Lewis deploys his genius for vivid imagery ... It is a relief for the reader to find that he or she is not alone in the intense loneliness or feelings of anguish that bereavement brings.' Henry Marsh, The Times 'Testimony from a sensitive and eloquent witness [on] 'The Human Condition'. It offers an interrogation of experience and a glimmer of hardwon hope. It allows one bewildered mind to reach out to another. Death is no barrier to that.' Hilary Mantel 'Here, sorrow and despair, the tiredness and numbness and petulance and nightmarishness of grief, all have their full, uncontrolled, experienced force ... [Such] radical openness ... Brilliant.' Francis Spufford *** No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. Narnia author C.S. Lewis had been married to his wife for four blissful years. When she died of cancer, he found himself alone, inconsolable in his grief. In this intimate journal, he chronicles the aftermath of the bereavement and mourning with blazing honesty. He grapples with a crisis of religious faith, navigating hope, rage, despair, and love - but eventually regains his bearings, finding his way back to life. A luminous modern classic, A Grief Observed has offered solace to countless readers for decades. This companion edition combines the original text with personal responses from Hilary Mantel, Rowan Williams, Francis Spufford, Maureen Freely, Kate Saunders, Jessica Martin and Jenna Bailey. *** What readers are saying: 'A truly great book - inspirational and untold help.' 'Every human being, living or dead, understands what Lewis means ... One of the most valuable books ever written.' 'Lewis, as always, sits down next to you and validates your grief like a true friend. He lets you rage, and cry, and even be furious with God, just as he did.' 'If you are grieving an enormous loss, you may find comfort here ... A great mind and wonderful writer who understands your grief well enough to put words to it.' 'His journal was also my journal as I worked through my own grief. Reading this book was actually comforting in that I knew that someone else understood my situation and offered insight and hope ... I highly recommend this book for anyone who has gone through the death of a loved one or who wants to comfort." 'This little book has had me in floods of tears [and] shows a real understanding of grief ... To read the words of this great man who shared and understood my pain and is a life affirming and faith affirming experience.'

Scholars increasingly recognise that understanding the history of religion means understanding worship and devotion as well as doctrines and polemics. Early modern Christianity consisted of its lived experience. This collection and its companion volume (Worship and the Parish Church in Early Modern Britain, ed. Natalie Mears and Alec Ryrie) bring together an interdisciplinary range of scholars to discuss what that lived experience comprised, and what it meant. Private and domestic devotion - how early modern men and women practised their religion when they were not in church - is a vital and largely hidden subject. Here, historical, literary and theological scholars examine piety of conformist, non-conformist and Catholic early modern Christians, in a range of private and domestic settings, in both England and Scotland. The subjects under analysis include Bible-reading, the composition of prayers, the use of the psalms, the use of physical props for prayers, the pious interpretation of dreams, and the troubling question of what counted as religious solitude. The collection as a whole broadens and deepens our understanding of the patterns of early modern devotion, and of their meanings for early modern culture as a whole.

This collection features five peer-reviewed literature reviews on ensuring animal welfare during transport and slaughter. The first chapter examines the impact of transport on beef and dairy cattle, as well as the effects of transport on carcass quality issues, such as bruising and dark cutting beef. It details how conditions can be optimised to ensure the welfare needs of the animal are met during all stages of transport. The second chapter reviews the legislation and codes of practice surrounding the transport and slaughter of cows to be culled as a result of disease or the development of health conditions such as lameness. The third chapter considers the effects of transport, handling and slaughter practices on pigs as well as physiological effects on carcass and meat quality. The fourth chapter explores current approaches used to stun poultry before slaughter, including electrical stunning and controlled atmosphere stunning. The chapter reviews the associated risks and benefits of each approach to overall bird health and welfare. The final chapter reviews the main welfare issues associated with management of sheep once they leave the farm, including transport by road and sea, use of holding facilities as well as handling and stunning of sheep at abattoirs.

Scholars increasingly recognise that understanding the history of religion means understanding worship and devotion as well as doctrines and polemics. Early modern Christianity consisted of its lived experience. This collection and its companion volume (Worship and the Parish Church in Early Modern Britain, ed. Natalie Mears and Alec Ryrie) bring together an interdisciplinary range of scholars to discuss what that lived experience comprised, and what it meant. Private and domestic devotion - how early modern men and women practised their religion when they were not in church - is a vital and largely hidden subject. Here, historical, literary and theological scholars examine piety of conformist, non-conformist and Catholic early modern Christians, in a range of private and domestic settings, in both England and Scotland. The subjects under analysis include Bible-reading, the composition of prayers, the use of the psalms, the use of physical props for prayers, the pious interpretation of dreams, and the troubling question of what counted as religious solitude. The collection as a whole broadens and deepens our understanding of the patterns of early modern devotion, and of their meanings for early modern culture as a whole.

Walton's Lives, which include those of John Donne and George Herbert, helped establish modern biography. A major influence on Boswell and Johnson, Walton's achievement has usually been assessed - and criticized - in relation only to the developed ethic he helped to establish. This book is the first extended study of the process by which Walton transformed the type-dominated conventions he inherited into the particularized individual portrait we take to be central not only to biography but to the novel.

The Eucharist is common Sunday fare in most Anglican churches, and the point in ritual where God and humanity most closely meet. It nourishes the soul, deepens and extends community, reaches deeper than any other Christian practice. But collective worship has been in steep decline and Eucharistic practice has been further disrupted by the pandemic. In The Eucharist in Four Dimensions, Jessica Martin considers the place of the Eucharist today using four approaches: · The Point of the Eucharist – its essence, story and what it is for in contemporary culture; the divine value it gives to the weak and the broken; · Flat Eucharist – the meaning of the Eucharist in a world of written liturgy and screened worship; · The Eucharist as event - the role of physical gathering and communal eating in the Eucharistic drama of communal feast; how this works when we are physically absent; · The Eucharist in time – how memory brings together Jesus’s past physical present with the meetings and partings of our own lives. This is an essential guide to the Eucharist for all ministering in a world of streamed services and remote worship.

The Doctor has returned Mags, formerly of the Psychic Circus, to her native world: Vulpana. Not the savage Vulpana that Mags was taken from, but Vulpana in an earlier era. The Golden Millennium - when the Four Great Wolf Packs, each devoted to one of the planet's four moons, oversaw the height of Vulpanan civilisation. A time when the noblest families of the Vulpanan aristocracy found themselves in need of new blood...A golden age, that's about to come to a violent end! CAST: Sylvester McCoy (The Doctor), Jessica Martin (Mags), Nimmy Marsh (Ulla), Peter Bankole (Issak), Irfan Shamji (Jaks), Sean Knopp (Tob), Beth Goddard (Barton).

The traditional landscape of Anglican parish ministry is irrevocably changing. Priests have traditionally understood themselves as maintaining centres of prayer and spiritual care for people in a particular place, but urgent pressures on parish ministry are changing this. For God's Sake seeks to discern what priests are called to do in the new shape the church is taking. It looks for signs of God's kingdom in today's signs of the times, and ways of being both faithful and creative in the face of an uncertain future. A range of contributors explore first-hand the contradictions and paradoxes of a priest's daily life, reflecting on how the wisdom of the past and the new initiatives of evangelization are shaping their vocation to prayer, study and speaking the good news of Jesus Christ.

We live in a world that prizes gratification of desire. But what if this pressure to satisfy our wants instead makes us settle for lesser imitations? What if the problem with desire is not that we want what we can't have, but that we don't want it enough? What if desire itself - the gap between wanting and having - is the key to living well? Holiness and Desire explores these questions and the challenges they pose to modern living. Drawing on sources from the Bible to literature and social media, Jessica Martin considers what a distinctive holiness might look like within the distorting pressures of our highly sexualized modern culture.