front cover of Given Up for You
Given Up for You
A Memoir of Love, Belonging, and Belief
Erin O. White
University of Wisconsin Press, 2018
In this candid and revelatory memoir, Erin O. White shares her hunger for both romantic and divine love, and how these desires transformed her life. In the late 1990s, she spent Saturday nights with her girlfriend and Sunday mornings in Catholic confirmation classes. But when the Church closed its doors to her, she was faced with a question: What does a lesbian believer do with her longing for God? Given Up for You explores these yearnings with bittersweet conviction, plumbing the depths of heart and soul.
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front cover of Godly Love
Godly Love
A Rose Planted in the Desert of Our Hearts
Stephen G. Post
Templeton Press, 2008

In this uplifting new book, author Stephen G. Post explores the mysteries and the wonder of Godly love. This all-important love is personal, unconditional, unlimited, generative, and omnipresent. The title alludes to Isaiah 35, how Godly love is said to plant a rose in our hearts precisely when we feel like a desert with no more love to give.

Post draws on his life experiences and works at the Institute for Research on Unlimited Love as he intersperses personal anecdotes with spiritual truths and research on human happiness. In the process, he defines the concept of Godly love and illustrates how important it can be in our lives—not only emotionally and spiritually but physically as well. "Godly love," he writes, "is the only foundation in the universe that we can really lean on."

We all have deserts in life, so we all need Godly love. Without it, the downward slide to cynicism, hostility, and cool indifference can be too easy. These meditations on the subject will nurture our confidence in the power of a love greater than our own when we need it most.

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front cover of God's Love through the Spirit
God's Love through the Spirit
Kenneth M. Loyer
Catholic University of America Press, 2014
Although the doctrine of the Holy Spirit has often been a neglected subject in theology, it remains vital for understanding both the Christian confession of God as Trinity and the nature of the Christian life. In view of those two topics, God's Love through the Spirit examines the relationship between love and the person and work of the Holy Spirit in Thomas Aquinas and John Wesley - two very different figures whose teachings on the Spirit and the Christian life are found to be, on the whole, surprisingly compatible. An investigation into Aquinas's amor-based pneumatology, including a groundbreaking analysis of his recently discovered Pentecost sermon, and a fresh assessment of the doctrine of sanctification in Wesley show that in distinctive yet largely complementary ways, Aquinas and Wesley provide resources that can be used to reclaim a richer pneumatology, specifically in relation to the theological virtue of love.
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front cover of Green World
Green World
A Tragicomic Memoir of Love & Shakespeare
Michelle Ephraim
University of Massachusetts Press, 2024

At twenty-three, Michelle Ephraim was failing at everything. The only child of reclusive Holocaust-survivor parents who were dismayed by her literary studies, she found herself dumped by her boyfriend and bombing out of graduate school. Then, one night, she crashed a Shakespeare recitation party. Loopy from vodka and never having read a single line of Shakespeare, she was transfixed. Shakespeare, she decided, was the lifeline she needed.

Green World is the hilarious and heartbreaking story of Ephraim’s quest to become a Shakespeare scholar and to find community and home. As she studies Shakespeare, Ephraim’s world uncannily begins to mirror the story of the Jewish daughter in The Merchant of Venice, and she finds herself in a Green World, an idyllic place where Shakespeare’s heroines escape their family trauma. Green World reckons with global, historical, and personal tragedy and shows how literature—comic and tragic—can help us brave every kind of anguish.

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