Product Description: In modern day central Pennsylvania, Judith Wegler tries to heal the growing rift between her husband, Isaac, and his teenage brother Joseph — whom Judith and Isaac have raised as their own ever since both brothers lost their parents and siblings in a horrific fire...read more

Product Description: A collection of wisdom from one of the world’s greatest spiritual leaders.When Jorge Mario Bergoglio became the 266th pope, he took the name Francis in honor of Saint Francis of Assisi, a figure renowned for his humility, wisdom, and concern for the poor...read more

Product Description: Startled by God: Wisdom from Unexpected Places offers a different way of seeing God in all things. Reminiscent of the spirituality fostered by Richard Rohr and other contemporary mystics, Joe McHugh writes out a tradition infused with the basics of Jesuit and Trappist theology, yet fully planted in the day-to-day workings of the contemporary world...read more

This important study in ethnomusicology is an attempt by the author -- a musician who has become a social anthropologist -- to compare his experiences of music-making in different cultures. He is here presenting new information resulting from his research into African music, especially among the Venda. Venda music, he discovered is in its way no less complex in structure than European music. Literacy and the invention of nation may generate extended musical structures, but they express differences of degree, and not the difference in kind that is implied by the distinction between 'art' and 'folk' music. Many, if not all, of music's essential processes may be found in the constitution of the human body and in patterns of interaction of human bodies in society. Thus all music is structurally, as well as functionally, 'folk' music in the sense that music cannot be transmitted of have meaning without associations between people.If John Blacking's guess about the biological and social origins of music is correct, or even only partly correct, it would generate new ideas about the nature of musicality, the role of music in education and its general role in societies which (like the Venda in the context of their traditional economy) will have more leisure time as automation increases.