poetry | fiction | non-fiction | children's
With gentle imagery and language, Sandy Roberts explores her own spiritual roots and survival of growing up in the deep South of 1940’s Texas, and the pain and hardship of the changing physical and political landscape.
Emily Dickinson kept at her side the two same books that were prominent in Sandy’s own childhood home – the dictionary and the bible. Perhaps those books were enough to plant the seed to love words, language, and the images and the connections.
Holy Ghost of Whiskey is a beautiful commitment to the god-force of memory. Marty Silverthorne reminds us over and over again how poetry strengthens our root. These deep evocations of language and ghosts create pathways that charm us into honky tonk heavens. From beginning to end these poems offer a haunted awareness of the joys, sacrifices, and sorrows that are singing in the hinges of three room shot gun shacks. These poems lift up the roots and reveal well-crafted tenderness and emphatic imagination that bears witness to the longings and challenges we all have confronting our angels, our ghosts, loves, and losses.
Decline and Dysfunction in the American Church proposes an interdisciplinary explanation, one that converges at the intersection of Christianity and psychology. Based on his research of over 25 years of parish and diocesan ministry, Culpepper contends that the American church has, for many, become irrelevant to their lives due to the toxic influences of co-dependent patterns of behavior. The same co-dependent behaviors that devastate the efforts of human families to love and support one another effect church congregational and denominational “families” in similar ways.
This is a deeply felt book about a family in crisis that lives inside you and lends itself to multiple readings. Sad, but not without its small, yet sustaining, redemptions: “In the evening, overflowing with secret love,/ I dangle my feet above the receding/ spillway and listen: ripples. The moon’s/ reflection rides them like a blessing.