Dr. Joice Christine Bailey Lewis wrote My Ancestral Voices at the age of seventy-four. She tells stories about people and events that occurred in the Alabama community where her ancestors lived for five generations. Dr. Lewis uses autobiographies and biographies to describe events by details and dialogue that are either true, assumed, or plausible. Dr. Lewis, a member of the fifth generation, tells how she drew strength from the historical accounts of survival of people through slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, racial segregation, educational inequality, sharecropping, the civil rights movement, the Second World War, Northern and Western Diaspora, and her ancestors beating great odds to succeed in landowning and community development and in fields of medicine, law, education, and business. The Holly Springs Missionary Baptist Church was erected by the first generation of ancestors who were all freed slaves. It is still in service to the community of Romulus (Ralph) Alabama. The church stands as a monument to its members, who rose up from slavery to create a lasting legacy of hope, love, and family.

Voices from the Ancestors brings together the reflective writings and spiritual practices of Xicanx, Latinx, and Afro-Latinx womxn and male allies in the United States who seek to heal from the historical traumas of colonization by returning to ancestral traditions and knowledge. This wisdom is based on the authors’ oral traditions, research, intuitions, and lived experiences—wisdom inspired by, and created from, personal trajectories on the path to spiritual conocimiento, or inner spiritual inquiry. This conocimiento has reemerged over the last fifty years as efforts to decolonize lives, minds, spirits, and bodies have advanced. Yet this knowledge goes back many generations to the time when the ancestors understood their interconnectedness with each other, with nature, and with the sacred cosmic forces—a time when the human body was a microcosm of the universe. Reclaiming and reconstructing spirituality based on non-Western epistemologies is central to the process of decolonization, particularly in these fraught times. The wisdom offered here appears in a variety of forms—in reflective essays, poetry, prayers, specific guidelines for healing practices, communal rituals, and visual art, all meant to address life transitions and how to live holistically and with a spiritual consciousness for the challenges of the twenty-first century.

In the wild night hours, or during the heat of the day - whenever man's thoughts whirl feverishly - then truth and fantasy, the past and the future, life and death are indiscriminately mingled on Toorberg, home of the Moolman family. So the magistrate is to learn as he investigates the strange circumstances of the death of little Noah, child of grief, who was not entirely of this world. Every day the case becomes more complex, until it challenges the very foundations of the law. It seems as if the magistrate will have to judge an entire dynasty, both the living and the dead. Everyone's guilt has to be affirmed, or denied, and this means he will have to rip open the lives of all. The Moolmans are a tribe who have long since learned how to deal with their own. Parents cut children out of their lives, shunt them aside to live as stepchildren, scrag-ends of the clan, or as city-dwellers whose names are never uttered. The Moolmans cannot forgive; not when their tribal blood is betrayed.

A classic in its genre, it has been hailed as a seminal piece of work surpassing the only other work in this field, John Mbiti's 'African Religions & Philosophy' (1969), as its coverage is not just of traditional continental Africa but also includes ancient Africa and its legacy in the Diaspora.Described by the esteemed historian Robin Walker as a book that 'deserves a place in every home', it is a complimentary counterpart to the film and is the published findings of over 7 years of literature research as well as content from video interviews carried out in action research during filming.Topics covered include African conception of the Creator/'God', Nature and the Natural Forces, nature of humanity, Ancestral veneration and communication and various forms of African rituals and prayers. In addition, it is an invaluable companion for those seeking to live an African Spiritual-Centred life as it contains a whole chapter dedicated to Ritual with practices for daily living, suited for the initiated and non-initiated alike.It is currently available in English and Spanish, with other language translations due including French and Portuguese.

In this first volume of James Lees-Milne's addictive diaries, the author, discharged from the Army for health reasons, has returned to work for the National Trust - then with a memership of only 6,000 and owning only about half a dozen houses open to the public. Staff and offices have been removed to West Wycombe Park, in Buckinghamshire. He describes his employment as a 'combination of hard labour and sheer fun'. It certainly involves some quirky encounters. -- Book cover.

An effective understanding of the history of Mangaia, the most southerly of the Cook Islands, requires a firm foundation in the language of the people. Based upon this insight, Ancestral Voices transcribes and interprets a series of indigenous historical texts, including proverbs, songs and narratives, as told by generations of Mangaian scholars, notably the tribal historian, Mamae, and by outsider scholars, particularly, the missionary William Wyatt Gill and the anthropologist Te Rangi Hiroa (Peter Buck).

Ancestral Voices, Healing Narratives: Female Ghosts in Contemporary US and Caribbean Fiction examines four novels by Erna Brodber, Zoé Valdés, Sandra Cisneros, and Maryse Condé. In this unique comparative analysis, Kristina S. Gibby explores the significance of female ghosts—specifically maternal figures, who haunt female narrators, inspiring them to transcribe the dead’s obfuscated (hi)stories and recover their family memory. The author argues that these female ghosts subvert historiographic power structures through a matrilineal succession of knowledge via oral traditions of storytelling, inevitably broadening historical consciousness and asserting the value of fiction in the face of historical rupture. Gibby contends that in form and content, these novels disrupt patriarchal and Western expectations of time and epistemology. They favor cyclical temporality (highlighted by the spirits’ uncanny return), which underscores relational understanding and challenges the exclusive and limiting constraints of linear time. This book makes important contributions to inter-American literary criticism with its narrow focus on female authors who confront the horrors of history through maternal spirits.