Who would I be if my father had been someone else? This startling and beautiful book is a valiant attempt to answer this universal and searching question.The subjects of this book set out on that search under the guidance of Jess Maghan, a world renown expert on the subject of authority. Using forced field writing, they were able to distill their findings into essays of 350 words. Illustrated with contemporary photos of subjects and archival photos of their fathers

When Tessa Lloyd’s sons-in-law became fathers, she searched for resources that would help inspire them—especially parenting stories from other fathers. However, that book didn’t seem to exist. As a counsellor for children and families, Lloyd understood the ways a father-child relationship can have a lasting effect through the generations. Seeing a need, Lloyd decided to gather these stories herself. This resulting volume collects the stories and portraits of forty Canadian fathers who open up about both their own fathers and their deeply personal parenting experiences. This diverse group includes Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, writer Lawrence Hill, academic Niigaan Sinclair, athlete Trevor Linden, restaurateur Vikram Vij, anthropologist Wade Davis, musician Alan Doyle, artist Robert Bateman and philanthropist Rick Hansen. The contributors reflect on their varied parenting experiences and challenges, including parenting while incarcerated, parenting across cultural barriers, parenting through divorce, parenting while transgender, parenting as a celebrity and parenting with a disability. Many common themes emerge throughout the stories, including the process of overcoming cultural messages that encourage men to be strong, authoritarian and emotionally unavailable. The stories are extraordinarily candid and vulnerable, as the fathers describe their own failings, regrets and childhood traumas, as well as the humbling process of trying to do better. In one anecdote, Dr. Greg Wells describes the experience of meeting another father walking the empty streets at three a.m. with an infant, and how that moment of shared recognition gave him strength at a difficult time. The stories in this book offer a similar glimpse into the shared experiences and trials of fatherhood, but also offer fascinating reflections on the more universal experiences of finding one’s place within a family and striving to be a better person for the sake of others.

A timely book on the increasing trend of men fathering children later in life.

This book is the first publication of a very early set of Christian monastic rules from Roman Egypt, accompanied by four preliminary chapters discussing their historical and social context and their character as rules. These rules were found quoted in the writings of the great Egyptian monastic leader Shenoute. Designed for a federation of monks and nuns who banded together about 360 CE—forming the so-called "White Monastery Federation"—the rules date back to the fourth and fifth centuries. New historical evidence is presented for the founding of the Federation. Providing almost the earliest evidence for Christian communal (cenobitic) monasticism, the rules depict many intimate aspects of ascetic practice. Details of monastic daily life are mentioned in passing in the rules, and the author uses these details to describe their picture of monastic life under five general topics: the monastery as a physical plant, the human makeup of the community, ascetic observances, the hierarchy of authority, and the daily liturgy. The book includes a clear English translation of the rules accompanied by the original Coptic text, amounting to five hundred and ninety-five entries.

Dads is a journey into gay fatherhood in the United States. More than 40 families are portrayed by the Belgian photographer Bart Heynen. A very diverse group of dads who have one thing in common; they are gay and they have children. Ever since 2015, when same-sex marriage became legal in all states, we witness a baby boom in the gay community. From New York City to Utah all these fathers are at the very beginning of a new era for gay men. Dads sheds a light on the daily lives of these families.

There have always been good fathers and bad fathers. But never before in history has the role of fathers been as undefined as it is today. hardly anyone who becomes a father is entering the race with a religious, cultural or educational assignment. This involves many drawbacks. But instead of just deploring this fact, I want committed fathers to recognize and exploit the new opportunities involved in this. Especially the freedom from old role models opens up completely new possibilities for fathers to take on an hugely positive task for the development of their children and to cultivate a stable relationship with the mother, which lives from the difference of the sexes.

Fathers, Daughters, and Slaves explores the unique contribution by French women writers to Haitian politics and culture during the early nineteenth century, when Haiti was on the verge of reestablishing slavery and when class, race, and gender identities were being renegotiated. It offers in-depth readings of works by Germaine de Staël, Claire de Duras, and Marceline Desbordes- Valmore, as well as two lesserknown but important writers, Charlotte Dard and Sophie Doin, all of whom were writers living in France commenting on Haiti from afar, and all of whom were staunch opponents of slavery. Exploring the similarities between the works of these French women and twentiethand twenty-first-century francophone texts, it offers a much-needed new voice to the exploration of colonial fiction, Caribbean writing, romanticism, and feminism, undercutting the neat distinctions between the cultures of France and its colonies, as well as nineteenth- and twentieth-century writing.