Everywhere she looked, the world was in poor shape. And because she’d quit drinking, she no longer had the comfort blanket of alcohol to tamp down her anxiety. How did sober people stay sane?

In recent times, the self-help industry has exploded into a multi- billion dollar global industry – and along with it has come every imaginable type of therapy, healing or general woo-woo. In the past, Rebecca scoffed at this industry, mocking its reliance on half-baked science and the way it appears to prey on the mentally fragile.

But as she searched for a meaning of life that did not involve booze, she found it increasingly hard to rationalize her default scepticism. This shit really seems to work for some people, she reasoned. And it’s not like I have any particularly solid alternatives.

Rebecca lives in Cape Town, the undisputed epicentre of ‘alternative’ paths to peace and enlightenment in South Africa. She decided that over the course of a year, she would embark on a quest for personal wellness, spiritual enlightenment and good old-fashioned happiness. She was willing, within reason, to try anything. She would open herself to even the most outlandish contemporary fads in self- improvement.

What followed was a twelve-month immersion in the world of auras, chakras, hallucinogenic drugs, sweat lodges, sangomas, past lives and more.

And by the end of it? Maybe she would find some new ways of thinking and living. Or maybe she would emerge with her prejudices untouched.

Either way, it would be a good story.

Annual volume on medieval textual cultures, engaging with intellectual and cultural pluralism in the Middle Ages, showcasing the best new work in this field. New Medieval Literatures is an annual of work on medieval textual cultures, aiming to engage with intellectual and cultural pluralism in the Middle Ages and now. Its scope is inclusive of work across the theoretical, archival, philological, and historicist methodologies associated with medieval literary studies, and embraces the range of European cultures, capaciously defined. Essays in this volume engage with widely varied themes: law and literature; manuscript production, patronage, and aesthetics; real and imagined geographies; gender and its connections to narrative theory and to psychoanalysis. Investigations range from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries, from England to the eastern Mediterranean. New arguments are put forward about the dating, context, and occasion of Geoffrey Chaucer's Boece, while the narrative dynamics of Chaucer's "Franklin's Tale" and "Tale of Melibee" are examined from new perspectives. The topography of the Holy Lands appears both as a set of emotional sites, depicted in the Prick of Conscience in its account of the end of the world, and as co-ordinates in the cultural imaginary of medieval the wine-trade. Grendel's mother emerges as the invisible and unavowable centre of male heroic culture in Beowulf, and the fourteenth-century St Erkenwald is brought into contact with the community-building project of the medieval death investigation. Finally, the late medieval Speculum Christiani is revealed to be a work with deep aesthetic investments when read through the framework of how its medieval scribes encountered and shaped that work.

How, and what, children and young adults read are questions bound up with both aspirations and concerns. This book brings together experts from a range of academic disciplines to examine how this reading has been mediated in Anglo-American contexts. Reading Mediation explores mediation across case studies of different reading experiences, practices and modes: It considers social and solitary reading; it analyzes ideas of text-reader interaction through book design and textual strategies; and it examines methods readers use for orienting themselves in relation to the text. Throughout it interrogates how values and assumptions about the effects of reading are implicated in its mediation, underpinning book collections, programmatic and parental intervention and facilitation of reading as well as the study of children's reading and literature. Employing a variety of methodologies, the essays elaborate how using "mediation" as a connecting node of analysis promotes interdisciplinary dialogue, and they demonstrate its value as a critical term for the study of children's reading, literacy and print culture.

Examining writing for and about education in the period from 1740 to 1820, Rebecca Davies's book plots the formation of a written paradigm of maternal education that associates maternity with educational authority. Examining novels, fiction for children, conduct literature and educative and political tracts by Samuel Richardson, Sarah Fielding, Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria Edgeworth, Ann Martin Taylor and Jane Austen, Davies identifies an authoritative feminine educational voice. She shows how the function of the discourse of maternal authority is modified in different genres, arguing that both the female writers and the fictional mothers adopt maternal authority and produce their own formulations of ideal educational methods. The location of idealised maternity for women, Davies proposes, is in the act of writing educational discourse rather than in the physical performance of the maternal role. Her book contextualizes the development of a written discourse of maternal education that emerged in the enlightenment period and explores the empowerment achieved by women writing within this discourse, albeit through a notion of authority that is circumscribed by the 'rules' of a discipline.

At a moment when the nuclear nonproliferation regime is under duress, Rebecca Davis Gibbons provides a trenchant analysis of the international system that has, for more than fifty years, controlled the spread of these catastrophic weapons. The Hegemon's Tool Kit details how that regime works and how, disastrously, it might falter.     In the early nuclear age, experts anticipated that all technologically-capable states would build these powerful devices. That did not happen. Widespread development of nuclear arms did not occur, in large part, because a global nuclear nonproliferation regime was created. By the late-1960s, the United States and the Soviet Union had drafted the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), and across decades the regime has expanded, with more agreements and more nations participating. As a result, in 2022, only nine states possess nuclear weapons.     Why do most states in the international system adhere to the nuclear nonproliferation regime? The answer lies, Gibbons asserts, in decades of painstaking efforts undertaken by the US government. As the most powerful state during the nuclear age, the United States had many tools with which to persuade other states to join or otherwise support nonproliferation agreements.    The waning of US global influence, Gibbons shows in The Hegemon's Tool Kit, is a key threat to the nonproliferation regime. So, too, is the deepening global divide over progress on nuclear disarmament. To date, the Chinese government is not taking significant steps to support the nuclear nonproliferation regime, and as a result, the regime may face a harmful leadership gap. 

The man said he was a doctor . . . but he did something to little baby Fanny's eyes that made her blind for the rest of her life. How could she find out about the world around her? How could she be happy? How could she learn? How could she love God? How could she forgive? Fanny Crosby was blind for more than ninety years . . . and she wrote over 8,000 hymns and gospel songs about her Savior. Potter's Wheel Books: showing children the Master Potter at work Christian biography for children ages 7-10

This is the long-awaited story of Alan Wilson, musical genius and co-founder of Canned Heat. Biographer Rebecca Davis journeys through his artistic innovations, tormented personal life, obsessive love of nature, and mysterious death. A key figure in the 1960s "blues revival," Wilson participated in the rediscovery of Son House, and wrote scholarly analyses of House and Robert Pete Williams. He went on to co-found pioneering blues-rock band Canned Heat, becoming an unlikely rock star. Known as "Blind Owl," he was responsible for the hit songs "Going Up the Country" and "On the Road Again."

The hill tribes of Southeast Asia told legends that one day the White Book that their ancestors had lost would be brought back to them. When the Karen tribe saw the Bible in 1813 through the mission of Adoniram Judson, they recognised the White Book of their stories. This is the amazing true story of how the faith spread through the land of Myanmar, formerly Burma.

Why would a crippled old man wait by the side of the road every day for twenty years? Why would a slave and a witch doctor walk for three days to find a man called Jesus? Why would a lame man purposely walk to a tribe where he knew he could be killed? Sixteen captivating episodes from one Christian mission in Ethiopia show the power of God in the midst of darkness. Find out about the invisible evangelist, the two girls who prayed and other astonishing stories. This is a book that will make you gasp at God's goodness The evangelists in this book include one man named Dick McLellan. Born in Australia Dick had the privilege of working with SIM during the 1950s. This book contains some of his experiences as well as the stories of Africans who eagerly took hold of God's message with two hands. With joy in their souls they declared, "With this hand I renounce the devil and all his works With this hand I surrender to Jesus Christ All I am and all I have " For more background information, as well as links for magazine articles, blogs, photos, and videos, see the Educator Resources Page at Rebecca Davis's website. Additionally, colouring pages are available to download further down this page in associated Media section.

In 1938, in the remote highlands of a mountainous island, explorers discovered thousands upon thousands of tribal people. Missionaries began to come, to bring the Good News of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Little did they know that many of the people of the tribes were waiting . . . waiting . . . for someone to come and help them out of the darkness of their old way of life. Witness Men consists of true missionary stories that took place throughout the highlands of Papua, Indonesia, from 1955 to 2010, when one of the tribes received their first New Testaments.

Colombia has been known as a land of violence - Colombian people have reacted to the Gospel of Jesus Christ by cursing the messengers, beating them, kidnapping them, killing them and burning down their houses. But from those burnings have shot out sparks and flames and laser beams of light, as the Gospel has continued to shine forth in the midst of darkness. God has delivered people from burning houses. God has healed the ones who cursed. God has even rescued kidnappers. Read fourteen true stories of the Light of the World shining in the land of Colombia, South America.