Examines the extraordinary flowering of English spirituality in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.

In his debut novel, rock legend Pete Townshend explores the anxiety of modern life and madness in a story that stretches across two generations of a London family, their lovers, collaborators, and friends. A former rock star disappears on the Cumberland moors. When his wife finds him, she discovers he has become a hermit and a painter of apocalyptic visions. An art dealer has drug-induced visions of demonic faces swirling in a bedstead and soon his wife disappears, nowhere to be found. A beautiful Irish girl who has stabbed her father to death is determined to seduce her best friend's husband. A young composer begins to experience aural hallucinations, expressions of the fear and anxiety of the people of London. He constructs a maze in his back garden. Driven by passion and musical ambition, events spiral out of control -- good drugs and bad drugs, loves lost and found, families broken apart and reunited. Conceived jointly as an opera, The Age of Anxiety deals with mythic and operatic themes. Hallucinations and soundscapes haunt this novel in an extended meditation on manic genius and the dark art of creativity.

A noted scholar examines the work of the English mystic Julian of Norwich Julian of Norwich is the late fourteenth-century and early fifteenth-century English woman theologian. With her mystical writings, she has become one of the most popular and influential spiritual figures of our times. In Julian of Norwich: In God's Sight, the eminent scholar Philip Sheldrake offers a study of the theology that Julian expresses in her writings. The author examines what is known about Julian’s mystical experience or mystical consciousness, discusses what can be surmised about Julian’s likely identity and places her writings in historical, cultural and spiritual contexts. Julian of Norwich: In God's Sight is based on a faithful reading of Julian’s texts, especially the Long Text, as well as on her own declared theological-spiritual purpose. This compelling book: Presents a contextually-grounded and text-related study of the key elements of Julian’s theology Offers a scholarly work by a well-known expert in the field Unlocks an ever-richer understanding of Julian’s writings Includes an examination of the key texts attributed to Julian Written for students of theology and those interested in learning more about this popular mystic, Julian of Norwich: In God's Sight offers ascholarly review of Julian’s most important writings.

Inspired by Alain de Botton's bestselling Consolations of Philosophy, this volume shows how theology can be of practical value to every believer. The great theologians in the history of the church have always found that theology affords genuine comfort in the face of life's difficulties. InThe Consolations of Theology Brian Rosner and other practical theologians present a compelling blend of biography and theology that profoundly addresses the perennial human problems of anger, obsession, despair, anxiety, disappointment, and pain. Contributors: Gwenfair Walters Adams Robert Banks Peter Bolt Andrew Cameron Richard Gibson Brian Rosner Mark Thompson

Julian of Norwich's Revelations of Divine Love grapples with the same fundamental question that has vexed philosophers and theologians since the advent of monotheistic religion, and continues as a barrier to belief for many today. Namely, if God is so good, how can natural disaster, genocide, trauma - and my present suffering - occur? Historically, there have been two apparently very different approaches to the problem: the pastoral, or practical, on the one hand and the systematic on the other. However, Richard Norton suggests that these two lines of thought may not be as separate as they seem, and may indeed be dependent on one another for their cohesion. Drawing on Julian's medieval experience of personal and population-wide suffering, alongside that of more recent theologians such as Dorothy Solle and Jurgen Moltmann, Norton constructs a compassionate model of theodicy that can be of use to both pastoral and systematic theologians. Throughout, he remains sensitive to the raw atrocity of evil, while preserving a vision of God as the one who ensures that all shall be well.

The post-9/11 age of supermodernity is characterized by an intensification of collective anxiety about the present and future state of the nation and the world. Our psychological and spiritual capacities are pushed to their limits. Through a cognitive-theological approach to the treatment of this intensified anxiety, Kirk Bingaman demonstrates that it is possible and indeed necessary to help those in our care to live meaningfully even in a time of great change and uncertainty.