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In 1971, Sister Martha Louise acts as headmistress at Our Lady of the Perpetual Covenant Academy, a down-on-its luck boarding school for girls, one of them seventeen-year-old Petranella Funk. In alternating accounts, the fiery nun and timid teenage girl recall that pivotal year, when Lila Rupert arrives at the school. Where Lila goes, chaos follows, and soon the orderly boredom of Covenant Academy is forever disrupted. Love simultaneously beckons and threatens, friendships offer redemption and ruin, and long buried secrets emerge which hold the power to heal or to destroy. Caught up in the whirlwind of social changes sweeping through American society during a turbulent decade, and wrestling with the mercurial personality who is Lila, Sister Martha Louise and Petranella must, in separate but intersecting scenarios, reevaluate long accepted traditions and beliefs as each struggles to come to terms with what she holds sacred. Not just the young doubt and are capable of change, and even the most daunting and sober individual may hide a delightfully rebellious streak and painful regrets, as this poignant and often humorous tale of days gone by reveals.
In the 1970s recent college grad Char flees to the idyllic Pennsylvania-Dutch countryside to consider her future. Staying with a Mennonite great-aunt, she meets Amish bad boy Uri Stoltzfus, who agrees to serve as her guide to the Plain culture. Both Char and Uri have hard choices to make about the values they will embrace in this coming-of-age novel set against the backdrop of a turbulent decade. Feminism, racism, the Vietnam War, more permissive attitudes toward sex and drugs, and new types of music collide with a way of life unchanged for centuries. Char also meets another great-aunt whose very existence proves an affair between Char's great-grandmother and an unidentified lover. Who was he and why did he not assume responsibility for his daughter? Char hopes that finding an answer to this family mystery will help her solve her own dark secret.
In the late 1970s, idealistic college grad Charlotte met Amish bad boy Uri Stoltzfus while visiting relatives in small-town Pennsylvania. Her encounters with Uri changed her life. Seven years have now passed. Char, who joined the Navy, is a bored press officer serving on a remote island base. She hears rumors that a Special Operations sniper nicknamed the Amish Assassin is coming there to hide from his pursuers. Could this be Uri? Char’s career has stalled, she is having an affair, and her life seems to have reached a dead end. So, who better to keep company with than another lost soul? Forced to face her regrets and disappointments, Char wonders if life ever offers second chances, even to a misfit like her. Surprises await...
In 1966, Alice Mucklehausen moved with her family to a small town where she found herself the new girl in her seventh grade class and, as an American, experienced the coupled hospitality and hostility greeting those from south of the border the Canadian border, that is. Half a century later, prodded by an insistent Memory, Alice reviews those poignant and often comedic days of adolescent despair and immigrant angst and reconsiders her role in the relationships and events that transpired.
Anticipating a peaceful life after death, an intrepid nun is chagrined when St. Peter refuses her entry at heaven’s gates. Instead, he charges her with returning to earth on a special mission. But before St. Peter can supply explicit instructions, Sr. Martha Louise is unexpectedly transported thirty years into the future, to a post-apocalyptic totalitarian state. She finds religion outlawed and humanity tottering on the brink of extinction, thanks to a mysterious despotic ruler, the Illustrious Innovator, venerated as a demigod. Not only must Sr. Martha Louise convince the Illustrious Innovator of the error of his ways, she also must deal with revolt, famine, plague, and myriad other catastrophes in a world rapidly descending into frenzied chaos. In a first-person account that mixes biting political satire, lighthearted supernatural realism, and grim noire fiction, Sr. Martha Louise relates her management of her unintentionally vague divine mission.
Once upon a time, Uri and Char Stoltzfus led seemingly charmed lives. Uri was a legendary Army sharpshooter, Char, his wife, a decorated Navy Public Affairs Officer. They had a happy marriage and two healthy daughters. Then came the day when a mysterious sniper gunned down Uri on the grounds of a Buddhist temple in Japan. Uri was killed, or so the word went out. Fast forward a quarter of a century. Uri still lives, although he, Char, and their daughters must deal with the terrible effects of that single misfired bullet. In addition, Uri and Char have recently retired. They are adjusting to the finicky rules and regulations of the senior community into which they have just moved, when characters from the past reenter their lives and force a reckoning long in the making in the lives of all four family members.
Chapters 11 and 12 in the Book of Judges recount how a rash vow forced the military victor Jephthah to sacrifice his beloved only daughter. While scholars agree that she was sacrificed, for centuries they have debated the exact nature of that sacrifice. Some argue that Jephthah's daughter was ritually killed on an altar, her throat slit like an animal's. Others maintain that she forsook marriage and motherhood to devote the rest of her life to serving her god. Whatever occurred remains a mystery. But might the unnamed young woman's too eager compliance have disguised more than submission to her father and her faith? Did she stray beyond the accepted norms for her day? What forbidden passions did she pursue? In her own quiet way was she as reckless as her famous father?
Curandero: Ethno-Psychotherapy & Curanderismo Hispanic Mental Health in the 21st Century, is the product of more than 50 years of the study of curanderismo and Hispanic mental health. In this book, Dr. Zavaleta examines curanderismo and the folk beliefs carried by immigrants across the U.S.-Mexico border. In the United States, the Hispanic population is notoriously underserved in both physical and mental health care. In Curandero, Dr. Zavaleta reviews the history of curanderismo, beginning with pre-Columbian populations, and traces the development of curanderismo over the past 500 years. He also examines the history and practice of psychiatry and the emergence of ethno-psychotherapy as well as psychiatry’s historic failure to incorporate culture in the treatment of the mental health of Hispanic populations. Dr. Zavaleta seeks to introduce curanderismo to psychiatry with the intention of incorporating its important aspects in the treatment of Hispanic mental health.
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