Four strong women are drawn to an old plantation by a spell cast over a hundred and fifty years ago. Each one holds a key for the others as their lives intermingle with the past, and they discover gifts that give them the collective strength to solve a mystery and face their own challenges.

Marie de l'Incarnation (1599 - 1672), renowned French mystic and founder of the Ursulines in Canada, abandoned her son, Claude Martin, when he was a mere eleven years old to dedicate herself completely to a consecrated religious life.
In 1639, Marie migrated to the struggling French colony at Quebec to found the first Ursuline convent in the New World. Over the course of the next thirty-one years, the relationship between Marie and Claude would take shape by means of a trans-Atlantic correspondence in which mother and son shared advice and counsel, concerns and anxieties, and joys and frustrations.
From Mother to Son presents annotated translations of forty-one of the eighty-one extant full-length letters exchanged by Marie and her son between 1640 and 1671. These letters reveal much about the early history of New France and the spiritual itinerary of one of the most celebrated mystics of the seventeenth century. Uniting the letters into a coherent whole is the distinctive relationship between an absent mother and her abandoned son, a relationship reconfigured from flesh and blood to the written word exchanged between professed religious united in Jesus Christ as members of the same spiritual family.
In providing a contemporary translation of Marie's letters to Claude, Mary Dunn renders accessible to an English-speaking readership a rich source for the history of colonial North America, providing a counterpoint to a narrative weighted in favor of Plymouth Rock and the Puritans and a history of New France dominated by the perspectives of men both religious and secular.
Dunn expertly contextualizes the correspondence within the broader cultural, historical, intellectual, and theological currents of the seventeenth century as well as within modern scholarship on Marie de l'Incarnation.
From Mother to Son offers a fascinating portrait of the nature and evolution of Marie's relationship with her son. By highlighting the great range of their conversation, Dunn provides a window onto one of the more intriguing and complicated stories of maternal and filial affection in the modern Christian West.

Diane Miller enjoys her peaceful life in the country with her husband of twenty-three years, their beautiful daughter, and their two black Labs. She had it all: the picture perfect life, with a doting husband and caring father-or so she thought.

After she receives a shocking phone call from her twin sister, who informs her Don has been having a yearlong affair, Diane's world is turned upside down. Suddenly, her husband is a stranger with another woman-a soul mate-he wants to marry. Caught up in a divorce she never saw coming, Diane must reinvent everything about her life, relationships, job, and home. But she is about to get more than she bargained for when she buys an elegant old house in the historic district and meets a kaleidoscope of new friends-along with a mysterious and sexy houseguest.

In this contemporary romance, a scorned woman quickly forgets her past troubles as she inadvertently becomes immersed in the drama of 235 Bradford Place and rediscovers herself in the process.

In 1631, Marie Guyart stepped over the threshold of the Ursuline convent in Tours, leaving behind her eleven-year-old son, Claude, against the wishes of her family and her own misgivings. Marie concluded, "God was dearer to me than all that. Leaving him therefore in His hands, I bid adieu to him joyfully." Claude organized a band of schoolboys to storm the convent, begging for his mother's return. Eight years later, Marie made her way to Quebec, where over the course of the next thirty-three years she opened the first school for Native American girls, translated catechisms into indigenous languages, and served some eighteen years as superior of the first Ursuline convent in the New World. She would also maintain, over this same period, an extensive and intimate correspondence with the son she had abandoned to serve God. The Cruelest of All Mothers is, fundamentally, an explanation of Marie de l'Incarnation's decision to abandon Claude for religious life. Complicating Marie's own explication of the abandonment as a sacrifice carried out in imitation of Christ and in submission to God's will, the book situates the event against the background of early modern French family life, the marginalization of motherhood in the Christian tradition, and seventeenth-century French Catholic spirituality. Deeply grounded in a set of rich primary sources, The Cruelest of All Mothers offers a rich and complex analysis of the abandonment.

Scholars of religion have come a long way since William James famously made of religion a matter between man and his maker. For decades now, they have been attentive to the ways in which religion takes shape as the product of broad social forces, focusing on the dynamics of power and culture as heuristics for understanding religious phenomena and experience.   What, however, might they be missing by moving too quickly from one interpretative extreme to the other—and what might we learn about religion by staying in the interstitial space between the individual in her solitude and society as a whole?    Religious Intimacies, edited by Mary Dunn and Brenna Moore, brings together nine scholars of modern Christianity to probe this in-between space. In essays that range from treatments of Jesuit-indigenous relations in early modern Canada to the erotics of contemporary black theology, each contributor makes the case for the study of the presence and power of affective ties and relational dynamics between friends, lovers, and intimate others (even things) as vital to the understanding of religion.

An exploration of early modern accounts of sickness and disability-and what they tell us about our own approach to bodily difference In our age of biomedicine, society often treats sickness and disability as problems in need of solution. Phenomena of embodied difference, however, have not always been seen in terms of lack and loss. Where Paralytics Walk and the Blind See explores the case of early modern Catholic Canada under French rule and shows it to be a period rich with alternative understandings of infirmity, disease, and death. Counternarratives to our contemporary assumptions, these early modern stories invite us to creatively imagine ways of living meaningfully with embodied difference today. At the heart of Dunn's account are a range of historical sources: Jesuit stories of illness in New France, an account of Canada's first hospital, the hagiographic vita of Catherine de Saint-Augustin, and tales of miraculous healings wrought by a dead Franciscan friar. In an early modern world that subscribed to a Christian view of salvation, both sickness and disability held significance for more than the body, opening opportunities for virtue, charity, and even redemption. Dunn demonstrates that when these reflections collide with modern thinking, the effect is a certain kind of freedom to reimagine what sickness and disability might mean to us. Reminding us that the meanings we make of embodied difference are historically conditioned, Where Paralytics Walk and the Blind See makes a forceful case for the role of history in broadening our imagination.

In 1631, Marie Guyart stepped over the threshold of the Ursuline convent in Tours, leaving behind her eleven-year-old son, Claude, against the wishes of her family and her own misgivings. Marie concluded, "God was dearer to me than all that. Leaving him therefore in His hands, I bid adieu to him joyfully." Claude organized a band of schoolboys to storm the convent, begging for his mother's return. Eight years later, Marie made her way to Quebec, where over the course of the next thirty-three years she opened the first school for Native American girls, translated catechisms into indigenous languages, and served some eighteen years as superior of the first Ursuline convent in the New World. She would also maintain, over this same period, an extensive and intimate correspondence with the son she had abandoned to serve God. The Cruelest of All Mothers is, fundamentally, an explanation of Marie de l'Incarnation's decision to abandon Claude for religious life. Complicating Marie's own explication of the abandonment as a sacrifice carried out in imitation of Christ and in submission to God's will, the book situates the event against the background of early modern French family life, the marginalization of motherhood in the Christian tradition, and seventeenth-century French Catholic spirituality. Deeply grounded in a set of rich primary sources, The Cruelest of All Mothers offers a rich and complex analysis of the abandonment.

The United States is a nation of counties--3,071 of them, to be exact. This reference book offers a brief profile and history of each and every one of them. The authors provide the following information for each county: name, county seat, population, land area, location and prominent geographical features, name derivation, date of establishment, and products and industries. Selected entries include history, a sampling of famous residents, interesting facts or oddities, population and area rankings and name comparatives. Connecticut and Rhode Island's counties were officially abolished a few years ago, but information about the former counties is included. Louisiana's parishes are also included. Alaska does not have counties, but its organized boroughs are listed in an appendix.

Scholars of religion have come a long way since William James famously made of religion a matter between man and his maker. For decades now, they have been attentive to the ways in which religion takes shape as the product of broad social forces, focusing on the dynamics of power and culture as heuristics for understanding religious phenomena and experience.   What, however, might they be missing by moving too quickly from one interpretative extreme to the other—and what might we learn about religion by staying in the interstitial space between the individual in her solitude and society as a whole?    Religious Intimacies, edited by Mary Dunn and Brenna Moore, brings together nine scholars of modern Christianity to probe this in-between space. In essays that range from treatments of Jesuit-indigenous relations in early modern Canada to the erotics of contemporary black theology, each contributor makes the case for the study of the presence and power of affective ties and relational dynamics between friends, lovers, and intimate others (even things) as vital to the understanding of religion.

The sequel to A THOUSAND AWKWARD MOMENTS. A feel good novel about a newly divorced woman who conquers life's challenging moments with the help of girlfriends, wine and humor. The mysteries of the old house on Bradford Place unfold as Diane and her girlfriends investigate the background of the ghost that tries to rule her life. Diane is caught in a complicated love triangle with a sexy ghost, a gorgeous bad boy, and a long distance relationship. Men, work, gossip and ghosts continue to provide comedy and insight for Diane and her girlfriends as they each navigate their single status to find their happily ever after.

Diane Miller enjoys her peaceful life in the country with her husband of twenty-three years, their beautiful daughter, and their two black Labs. She had it all: the picture perfect life, with a doting husband and caring father-or so she thought.

After she receives a shocking phone call from her twin sister, who informs her Don has been having a yearlong affair, Diane's world is turned upside down. Suddenly, her husband is a stranger with another woman-a soul mate-he wants to marry. Caught up in a divorce she never saw coming, Diane must reinvent everything about her life, relationships, job, and home. But she is about to get more than she bargained for when she buys an elegant old house in the historic district and meets a kaleidoscope of new friends-along with a mysterious and sexy houseguest.

In this contemporary romance, a scorned woman quickly forgets her past troubles as she inadvertently becomes immersed in the drama of 235 Bradford Place and rediscovers herself in the process.