In this powerful new collection, one of our most dazzlingly inventive and prolific poets tackles a universal theme: the agonizing search for God that is part and parcel of the livse of all of us. As always, Anne Sexton's latest work derives from intense personal experience. She explores the dilemmas and triumphs, and the agony and the peace of her highly unorthodox faith, sharing all her findings with her readers as the quest progresses. Anne Sexton's poetry speaks to our most passionate yearnings for love and our deepest fears of evil and death. The uncompromising honesty and vividness of "The Awful Rowing Toward God" confirms her stature as one of the most compelling voices of our time. -- From publisher's description.

A moving meditation on memory, oblivion, and eternity by one of our most celebrated poets What is it we want when we can’t stop wanting? And how do we make that hunger productive and vital rather than corrosive and destructive? These are the questions that animate Christian Wiman as he explores the relationships between art and faith, death and fame, heaven and oblivion. Above all, He Held Radical Light is a love letter to poetry, filled with moving, surprising, and sometimes funny encounters with the poets Wiman has known. Seamus Heaney opens a suddenly intimate conversation about faith; Mary Oliver puts half of a dead pigeon in her pocket; A. R. Ammons stands up in front of an audience and refuses to read. He Held Radical Light is as urgent and intense as it is lively and entertaining—a sharp sequel to Wiman’s earlier memoir, My Bright Abyss.

"Kristine Rankka has produced a masterpiece--an insightful analysis of modern feminist interpretations of 'radical' or 'tragic' suffering. Here is a mature work, comprehensive in its breadth, compelling in its argument, moving in its palpable sensitivity, poetic and graceful in its articulation. By invoking the category of the 'tragic, ' Rankka proposes a mystical-political spirituality to move reflection on suffering from the private, to the communal, interdependent realm. Rankka's _Women and the Value of Suffering_ is a creative retrieval of a conversation among women, long in progress, about the meaning of life's suffering. It is eminently readable and thoroughly enriching " George E. Griener, S.J. Academic dean Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley

Alice Walker’s first published book collects poems written as a student and on her first visit to Africa For readers seeking the origins of Alice Walker’s potent, distinctive voice, this collection will provide ample insight. Composed while she was still a student at Sarah Lawrence College in the late 1960s, these poems are already engaged with some of the moral dilemmas that have defined Walker’s entire career. Luminous vignettes from her first trip to Africa give way to reflections on the flourishing civil rights movement, while an eye for the transformative power of love and beauty run through all twenty-seven entries. Walker’s talents are prodigious, yet it’s her pure moral and aesthetic clarity that impress most in this debut work. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Alice Walker including rare photos from the author’s personal collection.

Resources for weekly RCIA meetings using the lectionary readings from Cycle B.