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Matched and Married (An Amish Mail-Order Bride Novel #2)
by Kathleen FullerNeither Margaret nor Owen has any interest in getting married. But in the small Amish town of Birch Creek, where marriage is on everyone&’s mind, their plans don&’t stand a chance.Margaret Yoder can&’t seem to catch a break. Even though she&’s dedicated to her Amish faith, her wild rumspringa won&’t stay in the past, and her mother keeps pressuring her to get married. To placate her mother and get away from former &“friends&”, she decides to return to Birch Creek to visit family—and pretend to find a husband.Like Margaret, Owen Bontrager isn&’t looking for a spouse, something that&’s hard to avoid in Birch Creek, where an ad for brides in the local paper has brought a swarm of single women to the thriving town. When he meets Margaret in an unexpected way, they discover they have more in common than they ever expected. In some ways, they are a perfect match.Margaret struggles to keep her goal of avoiding romance in order to focus on being a faithful member of the Amish church, and it doesn&’t help that she finds Owen intriguing. Knowing they don&’t have a future together; she returns home and gives in to her mother&’s insistence that she get married.Can Margaret betray her feelings for Owen and become a dutiful daughter and wife to the man of her mother&’s choosing? Or will Owen find a way to free Margaret of her past by giving her the future they both are surprised to find they desire?&“Fuller brings us compelling characters who stay in our hearts long after we&’ve read the book. It&’s always a treat to dive into one of her novels.&” —Beth Wiseman, bestselling authorSweet Amish romanceSecond in the Amish Mail-Order Bride series, but can be read out of orderBook one: A Double Dose of LoveBook three: Love in Plain Sight (available Spring 2022)Book length: 77,000 wordsIncludes discussion questions for book clubs
Matched Pearls (Living Books Romance #30)
by Grace Livingston HillFabulously wealthy, exquisitely beautiful, young Constance Courtland lived a life of pampered, self-centered ease. Though she had many admirers, the only thing Constance seemed to care about was herself. Then one warm spring day she met Seagrave and her world turned upside down. Constance learned the true meaning of love through the miracle of that poor boy’s faith. Grace Livingston Hill is The beloved author of over 100 books read and cherished by millions, She creates thrilling stories of inspiring, wholesome people whose ardent faith and overflowing hearts cope triumphantly with the problems of the first half of the twentieth century. Look for her books in the Bookshare collection with more to come: #2 Bright Arrows, #15 Marigold, #18 Brentwood, #24 By Way of the Silverthorns, #30 Matched Pearls, #38 Spice Box, #41 Blue Ruin, #50 The Finding of Jasper Holt, #55 Ladybird, #61 Mystery Flowers, #66 The Girl from Montana, #70 In The Way, #71 Exit Betty, #73 Not Under the Law, #74 Lo, Michael #76 The City of Fire #84 Cloudy Jewel, #95 Mary Arden and #96 Because of Stephen.
Matching Pastoral Candidates and Churches: A Guide for Search Committees and Candidates
by Joseph L. UmidiA guide to both sides of the candidate processWith humor and insight born of experience, Joseph Umidi helps candidates approach a selection process by clarifying their personal vision for ministry, connecting heart to heart with decision makers, and asking the right people the right questions. Search committee members will find guidance in analyzing a church's readiness for change, determining what is most needed, and evaluating a candidate's strength in meeting those needs. Eleven appendixes provide key model documents that will help the decision-making process.
The Matchmaker: An Amish Retelling of Jane Austen's Emma (The Amish Classics #2)
by Sarah PriceWhen Emma&’s interference in her friends&’lives backfires, will the consequencesbe more than she bargained for?Emma Weaver is twenty-one years old and has found a passion for playingmatchmaker with her friends. Her neighbor, Gideon King, warns her aboutinterfering in people&’s lives, but she disregards his advice and plans to set upPaul, the son of the bishop, with her friend Hannah. But when Paul misinterprets Emma&’s attention, believing she has feelingsfor him, he begins asking her to ride in his buggy after Sunday singings andshows up at her house for Friday evening visits. As she tries to repair thedamage that&’s been done and mend the hearts that have been broken, shefinds herself in trouble with the community. Will she learn her lesson andstop meddling in the affairs of others? Will she find a love of her own?
Matchmaker, Matchmaker...
by Anna SchmidtSINGLE CHRISTIAN FEMALE SEEKS SINGLE CHRISTIAN MALESome girls hope for just one date on Valentine's Day, but matchmaker Grace Harrison was dealing with more than a dozen, and not a one for her! The last thing she needs is a reporter prying into her Washington, D. C. , church's speed-dating program, or her sorry single status. . . . ;(JUST NOT THIS ONE)Covering Grace's pet project is all well and good, but his journalistic instincts tell Jud Marlowe the real story might lie with another Harrison-her senator father. If only Grace weren't so cautious, so private. . . so appealing. With the article in question, it's up to Jud to decide what's more important: a scoop or a sweetheart.
The Matchmaker's Gift: A Novel
by Lynda Cohen LoigmanNamed a Best Book of Fall 2022 by Parade • BuzzFeed • New York Post • GMA.com • People"Loigman's latest is a gem. A scrappy Jewish teenager newly arrived in 1920s New York struggles to follow her calling as a matchmaker––seventy years later, her cynical divorce-attorney granddaughter realizes she has very inconveniently inherited the family gift for matching soulmates. Both funny and moving, The Matchmaker's Gift made me smile from start to finish."––Kate Quinn, New York Times bestselling author of The Rose CodeIs finding true love a calling or a curse?Even as a child in 1910, Sara Glikman knows her gift: she is a maker of matches and a seeker of soulmates. But among the pushcart-crowded streets of New York’s Lower East Side, Sara’s vocation is dominated by devout older men—men who see a talented female matchmaker as a dangerous threat to their traditions and livelihood. After making matches in secret for more than a decade, Sara must fight to take her rightful place among her peers, and to demand the recognition she deserves.Two generations later, Sara’s granddaughter, Abby, is a successful Manhattan divorce attorney, representing the city’s wealthiest clients. When her beloved Grandma Sara dies, Abby inherits her collection of handwritten journals recording the details of Sara’s matches. But among the faded volumes, Abby finds more questions than answers. Why did Abby’s grandmother leave this library to her and what did she hope Abby would discover within its pages? Why does the work Abby once found so compelling suddenly feel inconsequential and flawed? Is Abby willing to sacrifice the career she’s worked so hard for in order to keep her grandmother’s mysterious promise to a stranger? And is there really such a thing as love at first sight?
The Matchmaker's Match
by Jessica NelsonThe Marriage Ultimatum He has three months to find a wife-or lose his estate. Spencer, Lord Ashwhite, doubts he'll find a suitable bride among the ton, until the unconventional Lady Amelia Baxley agrees to provide a list of candidates. It should be an ideal arrangement, were Spencer not growing attached to the one woman Amelia refuses to consider as a prospect: herself. Independence means everything to Amelia, who has been burned in love before. The charming marquis is quickly putting her entire life in turmoil, and controlling her stubborn heart has never been such a challenge. But does the ever-practical Amelia dare to go from bride-finder to wife?
The Matchmaker's Mistletoe Mission: A delightful Christmas treat! (Boots and Bouquets)
by Jaci BurtonNew York Times bestselling author Jaci Burton begins a brand-new series of irresistible cowboys and unforgettable weddings with this charming Boots and Bouquets Christimas novella.If you love Holly Martin, Sarah Morgan and Jill Shalvis, you'll love Jaci Burton!How better to get in the Christmas mood that by celebrating a with a snowy wedding at a family vineyard? Stranded at the Red Moss Vineyard a week before her best friend's wedding, LA native and professional matchmaker Alice Weatherford is not pleased with her first trip to Oklahoma, or the epic snowstorm forcing her to stay. So much for Christmas cheer. What she needs is a project, something to distract her...and, oh, has she found one in neighboring rancher Clay Henry. Gorgeous, charming, and unlike any other man she's ever met, finding the right woman for Clay should be easy... Having grown up with the Bellini sisters, it's no hardship for Clay to ride out the storm at their cozy family vineyard, especially since that means spending time with their savvy and smart houseguest. But despite Alice's best efforts, he's not the least bit interested in her matchmaking... Alice is the only woman Clay wants. Now he just has to convince the matchmaker herself to give love a chance.Want more sexy romance? Look out for more cowboys and weddings in the Boots and Bouquets series and check out Jaci's gorgeously romantic Hope series beginning with Hope Flames. Or to turn up the heat, look out for Jaci's sizzling Brotherhood by Fire and Play-By-Play series which began with The Perfect Play.
The Matchmakers of Butternut Creek: A Novel (Butternut Creek #2)
by Jane Myers PerrineOnce again, the Widows of Butternut Creek are determined to find a bride for Pastor Adam. This time, their candidate is as gun shy as the pastor! A traumatic experience as a college freshman has left Gussie Milton 'once bitten, twice shy.' Although she'd like a relationship, she's frightened, so she's thrown herself into caring for her aging parents, her photography business, and her church. In the eyes of Miss Birdie and her friend Mercedes, aka 'the Widows,' Gussie would make their young pastor the perfect wife. And though the attraction proves mutual, first Gussie's past and then the pastor's hopes for the future threaten to keep them apart. Can the Widows' meddling be the catalyst that changes the couple's lives forever?
The Matchmaking Pact (After the Storm #5)
by Carolyne AarsenLily Marstow and Alyssa Cane think they have the perfect plan. After all, helping their single parents fall in love shouldn't be that hard. But Silas Marstow wants nothing to do with the woman who lost track of his child for precious minutes in the aftermath of the High Plains tornado. And Josie Cane is busy caring for her ailing grandmother and rebuilding her life. The girls' matchmaking pact is in jeopardy unless they can make their parents see the love that's right in in front of them.
Material Acts in Everyday Hindu Worlds (SUNY series in Hindu Studies)
by Joyce Burkhalter FlueckigerIn Material Acts in Everyday Hindu Worlds, Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger analyzes the agency of materiality—the ability of materials to have an effect on both humans and deities—beyond human intentions. Using materials from three regions where Flueckiger conducted extensive fieldwork, she begins with Indian understandings of the agency of ornaments that have the desired effects of protecting women and making them more auspicious. Subsequent chapters bring in examples of materiality that are agentive beyond human intentions, from a south Indian goddess tradition where female guising transforms the aggressive masculinity of men who wear saris, braids, and breasts to the presence of cement images of Ravana in Chhattisgarh, which perform alternative theologies and ideologies to those of dominant textual traditions of the Ramayana epic. Deeply ethnographic and accessibly written, Material Acts in Everyday Hindu Worlds expands our understanding of material agency as well as the parameters of religion more broadly.
Material Christianity: Western Religion and the Agency of Things (Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures #32)
by Susanna Elm Christopher OckerThis collection of essays offers a series of rigorously focused art-historical, historical, and philosophical studies that examine ways in which materiality has posed and still poses a religious and cultural problem. The volume examines the material agency of objects, artifacts, and environments: art, ritual, pilgrimage, food, and philosophy. It studies the variable "senses” of materiality, the place of materiality in the formation of modern Western religion, and its role in Christianity’s dialogue with non-Western religions. The essays present new interpretations of religious rites and outlooks through the focus on their material components. They also suggest how material engagement theory - a new movement in cultural anthropology and archeology - may shed light on the cultural history of Christianity in medieval and early modern Europe and the Americas. It thus fills an important lacuna in the study of western religion by highlighting the longue durée, from the Middles Ages to the Modern Period, of a current dilemma, namely the divide between materialistic and what might broadly be called hermeneutical or cultural-critical approaches to religion and human subjectivity.
Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America
by Colleen McDannellWhat can the religious objects used by nineteenth- and twentieth-century Americans tell us about American Christianity? What is the relationship between the beliefs of the faithful and the landscapes they build? This lavishly illustrated book investigates the history and meaning of Christian material culture in America over the last 150 years. <p><p> Drawing on a rich array of historical sources and on in-depth interviews with Protestants, Catholics, and Mormons, Colleen McDannell examines the relationship between religion and mass consumption. She describes examples of nineteenth-century religious practice: Victorians burying their dead in cultivated cemetery parks; Protestants producing and displaying elaborate family Bibles; Catholics writing for special water from Lourdes reputed to have miraculous powers. And she looks at today's Christians: Mormons wearing sacred underclothing as a reminder of their religious promises, Catholics debating the design of tasteful churches, and Protestants manufacturing, marketing, and using a vast array of prints, clothing, figurines, jewelry, and toys that some label "Jesus junk" but that others see as a witness to their faith. McDannell claims that previous studies of American Christianity have overemphasized the written, cognitive, and ethical dimensions of religion, presenting faith as a disembodied system of beliefs. She shifts attention from the church and the theological seminary to the workplace, home, cemetery, and Sunday school, highlighting a different Christianity—one in which average Christians experience the divine, the nature of death, the power of healing, and the meaning of community through interacting with a created world of devotional images, environments, and objects.
Material Culture and Asian Religions: Text, Image, Object (Routledge Research in Religion, Media and Culture)
by Benjamin J. Fleming Richard D. MannTraditionally, research on the history of Asian religions has been marked by a bias for literary evidence, privileging canonical texts penned in ‘classical’ languages. Not only has a focus on literary evidence shaped the dominant narratives about the religious histories of Asia, in both scholarship and popular culture, but it has contributed to the tendency to study different religious traditions in relative isolation from one another. Today, moreover, historical work is often based on modern textual editions and, increasingly, on electronic databases. What may be lost, in the process, is the visceral sense of the text as artifact – as a material object that formed part of a broader material culture, in which the boundaries between religious traditions were sometimes more fluid than canonical literature might suggest. This volume brings together specialists in a variety of Asian cultures to discuss the methodological challenges involved in integrating material evidence for the reconstruction of the religious histories of South, Southeast, Central, and East Asia. By means of specific ‘test cases,’ the volume explores the importance of considering material and literary evidence in concert. What untold stories do these sources help us to recover? How might they push us to reevaluate historical narratives traditionally told from literary sources? By addressing these questions from the perspectives of different subfields and religious traditions, contributors map out the challenges involved in interpreting different types of data, assessing the problems of interpretation distinct to specific types of material evidence (e.g., coins, temple art, manuscripts, donative inscriptions) and considering the issues raised by the different patterns in the preservation of such evidence in different locales. Special attention is paid to newly-discovered and neglected sources; to our evidence for trade, migration, and inter-regional cultural exchange; and to geographical locales that served as "contact zones" connecting cultures. In addition, the chapters in this volume represent the rich range of religious traditions across Asia – including Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Shinto, and Chinese religions, as well as Islam and eastern Christianities.
The Material Culture of the Jacobites
by Neil GuthrieThe Jacobites, adherents of the exiled King James II of England and VII of Scotland and his descendants, continue to command attention long after the end of realistic Jacobite hopes down to the present. Extraordinarily, the promotion of the Jacobite cause and adherence to it were recorded in a rich and highly miscellaneous store of objects, including medals, portraits, pin-cushions, glassware and dice-boxes. Interdisciplinary and highly illustrated, this book combines legal and art history to survey the extensive material culture associated with Jacobites and Jacobitism. Neil Guthrie considers the attractions and the risks of making, distributing and possessing things of danger; their imagery and inscriptions; and their place in a variety of contexts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Finally, he explores the many complex reasons underlying the long-lasting fascination with the Jacobites.
Material Mystery: The Flesh of the World in Three Mythic Bodies
by Karmen MacKendrickMaterial Mystery considers three apparently anthropocentric myths that are central to Abrahamic religions—those of the primal human, the incarnated and possibly divine redeemer, and the resurrected body. At first glance, these stories reinforce a human-centered theology and point to a very anthropomorphic God. Taking them seriously seems to ignore the material turn in the humanities entirely, with the same sort of willful ignorance that some of our politicians show in declaring that their myths count as facts, or that the point of the rest of the world is to further human consumption. But it is possible, Karmen MacKendrick shows, to read these figures through a particular tradition that emerges from the Hebrew Bible, the tradition of Wisdom as a creative force. Wisdom texts are common across the ancient Near East. As the idea of creative Wisdom develops from antiquity into the middle ages, it gathers philosophical influences from a range of philosophical traditions. This exuberantly promiscuous impurity—intellectual, artistic, and theological—generates new interpretive possibilities. In these interpretations, each human-like figure opens up onto the world''s matter, as an interdependent part of it, and matter is thoroughly mixed with divinity. Such mythic readings complement our factual, scientific understanding of the material world, to engage wider kinds of knowing and affective attention—particularly Wisdom''s combination of care and delight.
Material Religion and Popular Culture (Routledge Studies in Religion)
by E. Frances KingIn this study, E. Frances King explores how people first learn to relate to the images and artefacts of religious belief within their domestic environments. As a sense of religious belonging is instilled on a daily basis in the home, it also becomes emotionally linked to family, community, and homeland, resulting in two different genealogies – one to do with faith and one to do with motherland – that become entangled.
Material Religion in Modern Britain
by Timothy Willem Jones Lucinda Matthews-JonesA growing awareness of religious plurality and religious conflict in contemporary society has led to a search for new ways to understand religious change beyond traditional subjects of British ecclesiology. Narratives of the gradual decline of Christianity dominate this field; yet many scholars now concede that Britain's religious landscape was more varied and rich than these narratives would suggest. Material Religion in Modern Britain responds to this challenge by bringing emerging scholarship on material culture to bear on studies of religion and spirituality. The collection is the first to apply this suite of analytical methods to the traditional subjects of British religious studies and the full spectrum of religious denominations, sects, and movements that constituted Britain's multi-faith landscape in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The book reveals how, across this religious spectrum, objects were, and continue to be, used in the performance and production of religious faith and subjectivity. In doing so it expands our understanding of the persistence of religious belief and culture in a secularising, secularized, and post-secular society.
Material Spirit: Religion and Literature Intranscendent (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy)
by Manuel Asensi Carl GoodThe essays in this collection examine philosophical, religious, and literary or artistic texts using methodologies and insights that have grown out of reflection on literature and art. In them, them phrase “material spirit” becomes a point of departure for considering the continuing spectral effects of religious texts and concerns in ways that do not simply call for, or assume, new orrenewed forms of religiosity.The writers in this collection seek to examine religion beyond traditional notions of transcendence: Their topics range from early Christian religious practices to global climate change. Some of the essays explore religious themes or tones in literary texts, for example, works by Wordsworth, Hopkins, Proust, Woolf, and Teresa of Avila. Others approach—in a literarycriticalmood—philosophical or para-philosophical writers such as Bataille, Husserl, Derrida, and Benjamin. Still others treat writers of a more explicitly religious orientation, such as Augustine, Rosenzweig, or Bernard of Clairvaux.
Material Witness (A Shipshewana Amish Mystery #3)
by Vannetta ChapmanTragedy strikes on the opening night of the Fall Crafters Fair when a woman is killed in the parking lot of Daisy's Quilt Shop, and the only material witness is one of Melinda Byer's boys. The investigation takes a more bizarre turn when detective Shane Black becomes convinced the killer was actually after Callie. This time it's a madman loose in the largest crowd of the year, and he's looking for something or someone. If they can't figure out what, one of Deborah and Callie's close circle of friends may be next. Masked identities, antique quilts with hidden messages, an Amish boy whose handicap makes him stronger, one brave dog, and a possible hidden treasure ... this time it's nonstop action, danger, and a dash of romance.
A Materialism for the Masses: Saint Paul and the Philosophy of Undying Life (Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture)
by Ward BlantonNietzsche and Freud saw Christianity as metaphysical escapism, with Nietzsche calling the religion a "Platonism for the masses" and faulting Paul the apostle for negating more immanent, material modes of thought and political solidarity. Integrating this debate with the philosophies of difference espoused by Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ward Blanton argues that genealogical interventions into the political economies of Western cultural memory do not go far enough in relation to the imagined founder of Christianity.Blanton challenges the idea of Paulinism as a pop Platonic worldview or form of social control. He unearths in Pauline legacies otherwise repressed resources for new materialist spiritualities and new forms of radical political solidarity, liberating "religion" from inherited interpretive assumptions so philosophical thought can manifest in risky, radical freedom.
Materialities of Ritual in the Black Atlantic
by Akinwumi Ogundiran Paula SaundersFocusing on everyday rituals, the essays in this volume look at spheres of social action and the places throughout the Atlantic world where African-descended communities have expressed their values, ideas, beliefs, and spirituality in material terms. The contributors trace the impact of encounters with the Atlantic world on African cultural formation, how entanglement with commerce, commodification, and enslavement and with colonialism, emancipation, and self-rule manifested itself in the shaping of ritual acts such as those associated with birth, death, healing, and protection. Taken as a whole, the book offers new perspectives on what the materials of rituals can tell us about the intimate processes of cultural transformation and the dynamics of the human condition.
Materiality and the Study of Religion: The Stuff of the Sacred (Theology and Religion in Interdisciplinary Perspective Series in Association with the BSA Sociology of Religion Study Group)
by Tim Hutchings Joanne McKenzieMaterial culture has emerged in recent decades as a significant theoretical concern for the study of religion. This book contributes to and evaluates this material turn, presenting thirteen chapters of new empirical research and theoretical reflection from some of the leading international scholars of material religion. Following a model for material analysis proposed in the first chapter by David Morgan, the contributors trace the life cycle of religious materiality through three phases: the production of religious objects, their classification as religious (or non-religious), and their circulation and use in material culture. The chapters in this volume consider how objects become and cease to be sacred, how materiality can be used to contest access to public space and resources, and how religion is embodied and performed by individuals in their everyday lives. Contributors discuss the significance of the materiality of religion across different religious traditions and diverse geographical regions, paying close attention to gender, age, ethnicity, memory and politics. The volume closes with an afterword by Manuel Vásquez.
Materializing Religion: Expression, Performance and Ritual (Theology and Religion in Interdisciplinary Perspective Series in Association with the BSA Sociology of Religion Study Group)
by William KeenanThe material symbol has become central to understanding religion in late modernity. Overtly theological approaches use words to express the values and faith of a religion, but leave out the 'incarnation' of religion in the behavioural, performative, or audio-visual form. This book explores the lived experience of religion through its material expressions, demonstrating how religion and spirituality are given form and are thus far from being detached or ethereal. Cutting across cultures, senses, disciplines and faiths, the contributors register the variety in which religions and religious groups express the sacred and numinous. Including chapters on music, architecture, festivals, ritual, artifacts, dance, dress and magic, this book offers an invaluable resource to students of sociology and anthropology of religion, art, culture, history, liturgy, theories of late modern culture, and religious studies.
Maternal Body: A Theology of Incarnation from the Christian East
by Carrie Frederick FrostPlaces Orthodox sources--icons, hymns, and prayers--on motherhood into conversation with each other. In so doing, this work brings an anchored vision of motherhood to the twenty-first century--especially the embodied experience of motherhood.