In these warm, life-affirming essays, a former Reader's Digest editor celebrates the beauty hidden in everyday events, experience, and encounters.

In these warm, life-affirming essays, a former Reader's Digest editor celebrates the beauty hidden in everyday events, experience, and encounters.

In these warm, life-affirming essays, a former Reader's Digest editor celebrates the beauty hidden in everyday events, experience, and encounters.

The central message of this book is that the well-being of body, mind, spirit, and planet requires that we nurture our connections. From our skin to the cosmic, to sights and sounds to the Transcendent, this book takes us by the hand to marvel at how life itself is a constellation of interrelationships of touch. We cannot not touch and be touched. Humans live in a biosphere of touch, the touch thriving and bustling within our bodies, the touch of our relationships with family and friends, the touch between neighbors, the touch with Mother Nature, and the touch with the Transcendent. Selfishness, and self-centeredness are the powers withering us and the planet. In our confrontation with our anxiety at death, guilt, and meaningless, we sever the very interrelations that nourish and enrich life. It is imperative, as perhaps never before, that we restore our touch with our deepest selves, others, Mother Nature, and the Transcendent.

Wisdom's Wonder offers a fresh reading of the Hebrew Bible's wisdom literature with a unique emphasis on "wonder" as the framework for understanding biblical wisdom. William Brown argues that wonder effectively integrates biblical wisdom's emphasis on character formation and its outlook on creation, breaking an impasse that has plagued recent wisdom studies. Drawing on various disciplines, from philosophy to neuroscience, Brown discovers new distinctions and connections in Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes. Each book is studied in terms of its view of moral character and creation, as well as in terms of the social or intellectual crisis each book identifies. Most general treatments of the wisdom literature spend too much time on issues of genre, poetry, and social context at the neglect of discussing the intellectual and emotional power of the wisdom corpus. Brown argues that the real power of the wisdom corpus lies in its capacity to evoke the reader's sense of wonder. An extensive revision and expansion of Brown's Character in Crisis (Eerdmans, 1996), this book demonstrates that the wisdom books are much more than simply advice literature: with wonder as the foundation for understanding, Brown maintains that wisdom is a process with transformation of the self as the goal.

Since his professional debut in 1962, Stevie Wonder has recorded sixty-four singles that have made the Billboard top 100, including ten that reached number one. Wonder was one of the first Motown artists to have complete control over the writing, arranging, and recording of his songs, and achieved that stature before he was 20 years old. He has won 17 Grammy awards, was elected to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989, and earned the Grammy's Lifetime Achievement Award in 1996. Equally important, his work as a producer, arranger, and instrumentalist on other artists' recordings has put him in the highest rank of musical collaborators. This is the first work of criticism on this important documentarian of American life, as well as the introductory volume in The Praeger Singer-Songwriter Collection. Through a combination of biography and critical analysis, James Perone's groundbreaking new book reveals the many ways in which Stevie Wonder's body of work emerged, developed, reflected its time, and influenced myriad other artists. After revealing the social, cultural, and political context of Wonder's work, the book provides detailed analysis of his compositions and recordings, with a focus on both his well-known songs and those known only to his hardcore fans. The volume also contains discussions of cover versions of Wonder's compositions, a discography of his recordings, a song title index, an annotated bibliography, and a general index.