Infertility affects nearly 6.1 million women and 2.1 million married couples in the United States. Additionally, 25 percent of women of childbearing age will experience a miscarriage and one in 80 pregnancies will end in a stillbirth. In Hope Deferred, we hear the voices of five female scholars from a variety of Christian denominations--Church of the Brethren, Disciples of Christ, Lutheran, Presbyterian, and Roman Catholic--as they share their very private stories of painful loss in the hope of bringing comfort and a theological understanding to those who have experienced reproductive loss.

Doubts, depression and discouragement are characteristic responses of someone who has endured an experience of 'bad things happening to good people.' When a promise from God does not come to pass, the aftermath is often confusion about validity of a personal relationship with the Lord. In Praying Through Sorrows, co-authors Dutch Sheets and Chris Jackson confront the emotional anguish awaiting the arrival of a long delayed breakthrough. Forsaking any clichi about the patience of Job, Praying Through Sorrows shows how one overcomes the debilitating state of 'hope deferred making the heart sick, ' while seeking a restoration of faith in God's goodness.

Hope Deferred, initially published in 1965 traces the history of girls’ education from Anglo-Saxon England to modern times, telling the story largely through the leading personalities whose opinions and prejudices shaped this history. It outlines the progress of popular education and the work of the pioneers who fought to bring girls’ education at every level into line with boys’; and it carries the story into the second half of the twentieth-century to discuss the problem of whether girls are really receiving the right kind of education.

Protestant liberals are not rare in Northern Ireland, but their conspicuous absence from active politics has been one of the most dispiriting, and damaging, aspects of the ongoing situation. There are, however, some honorable exceptions and Basil McIvor is one of them. Lawyer, minister of education, and member of the Stormont parliament as a Unionist MP in 1969, McIvor speaks from experience. The candor of his memoirs, written at a time of unprecedented movement on the broader political stage, makes this quiet, thoughtful book an invaluable addition to the literature of the Troubles.