Download or read book Once There Was A Nun written by Ruth Montgomery and published by Pickle Partners Publishing. This book was released on 2019-01-13 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE INSPIRING, REVEALING STORY OF ONE WOMAN’S YEARS BEHIND CONVENT WALLS AND HER RETURN TO THE WORLD OUTSIDE In 1925 Mary McCarran joined her sister Margaret in the Convent of the Holy Names. Here is the story of the black-garbed postulant, hopeful and homesick. Here is the nun, tried and proven, exchanging vows for a gold wedding ring. Sister Mary Mercy made her greatest sacrifice in a small convent room where, after thirty-two years, she exchanged her beloved habit for a new pink dress—and returned to the secular world. This is Mary McCarran’s unforgettable and inspiring story of those three decades as a member of a religious community. “An apparently faithful view of some inner workings of the Catholic Church seldom revealed dispassionately to the public at large...an altogether extraordinary story told in an extraordinary manner.”—NEW YORK JOURNAL AMERICAN

Download or read book I Once was a Buddhist Nun written by Esther Baker and published by Inter-Varsity Press. This book was released on 2012-12-17 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Suddenly I found myself, with my shaven head and dark-brown robe, running down to the traditional Anglican church in the nearby village ... I thought, 'I've got to talk to somebody, I've got to understand what's happening to me.' Esther Baker had been a Buddhist for over thirteen years. Her search for truth drove her up through the ranks of a Buddhist nun and deeper into a life of meditation and detachment from the world. But then, one day, alone in her room, the perfect shadow of a cross fell on her wall, and, unbidden, Christ began to enter her life. Would anything ever be the same again?

Download or read book How I Became a Nun written by César Aira and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2007-02-28 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A good story and first-rate social science."—New York Times Book Review. A sinisterly funny modern-day Through the Looking Glass that begins with cyanide poisoning and ends in strawberry ice cream. The idea of the Native American living in perfect harmony with nature is one of the most cherished contemporary myths. But how truthful is this larger-than-life image? According to anthropologist Shepard Krech, the first humans in North America demonstrated all of the intelligence, self-interest, flexibility, and ability to make mistakes of human beings anywhere. As Nicholas Lemann put it in The New Yorker, "Krech is more than just a conventional-wisdom overturner; he has a serious larger point to make. . . . Concepts like ecology, waste, preservation, and even the natural (as distinct from human) world are entirely anachronistic when applied to Indians in the days before the European settlement of North America." "Offers a more complex portrait of Native American peoples, one that rejects mythologies, even those that both European and Native Americans might wish to embrace."—Washington Post "My story, the story of 'how I became a nun,' began very early in my life; I had just turned six. The beginning is marked by a vivid memory, which I can reconstruct down to the last detail. Before, there is nothing, and after, everything is an extension of the same vivid memory, continuous and unbroken, including the intervals of sleep, up to the point where I took the veil ." So starts Cesar Aira's astounding "autobiographical" novel. Intense and perfect, this invented narrative of childhood experience bristles with dramatic humor at each stage of growing up: a first ice cream, school, reading, games, friendship. The novel begins in Aira's hometown, Coronel Pringles. As self-awareness grows, the story rushes forward in a torrent of anecdotes which transform a world of uneventful happiness into something else: the anecdote becomes adventure, and adventure, fable, and then legend. Between memory and oblivion, reality and fiction, Cesar Aira's How I Became a Nun retains childhood's main treasures: the reality of fable and the delirium of invention. A few days after his fiftieth birthday, Aira noticed the thin rim of the moon, visible despite the rising sun. When his wife explained the phenomenon to him he was shocked that for fifty years he had known nothing about "something so obvious, so visible." This epiphany led him to write How I Became a Nun. With a subtle and melancholic sense of humor he reflects on his failures, on the meaning of life and the importance of literature.

Download or read book Nun written by Mary Gilligan Wong and published by HarperCollins Publishers. This book was released on 1984 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Agatha of Little Neon written by Claire Luchette and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2021-08-03 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" Honoree “An enchanting, sparkling book about the many meanings of sisterhood.” —Kristin Iversen, Refinery29 Claire Luchette's debut, Agatha of Little Neon, is a novel about yearning and sisterhood, figuring out how you fit in (or don’t), and the unexpected friends who help you find your truest self Agatha has lived every day of the last nine years with her sisters: they work together, laugh together, pray together. Their world is contained within the little house they share. The four of them are devoted to Mother Roberta and to their quiet, purposeful life. But when the parish goes broke, the sisters are forced to move. They land in Woonsocket, a former mill town now dotted with wind turbines. They take over the care of a halfway house, where they live alongside their charges, such as the jawless Tim Gary and the headstrong Lawnmower Jill. Agatha is forced to venture out into the world alone to teach math at a local all-girls high school, where for the first time in years she has to reckon all on her own with what she sees and feels. Who will she be if she isn’t with her sisters? These women, the church, have been her home. Or has she just been hiding? Disarming, delightfully deadpan, and full of searching, Claire Luchette’s Agatha of Little Neon offers a view into the lives of women and the choices they make.

Download or read book The Red Skirt written by Patricia O'Donnell-Gibson and published by Self Publisher. This book was released on 2011-07-29 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Impressionistic and dreamy, a nine-year-old girl immediately feels that she might be called by God when a Catholic missionary speaks to her third grade class at a Catholic school. The idea of this calling embeds itself into her, haunting her through elementary and high school, after which she chooses to enter the convent. Her story follows the five years she spent as an Adrian Dominican nun struggling to balance her desire for a secular life with her great fear of turning her back on God's call. Her stories are sad as well as joyous, inspiring as well as unsettling.

Download or read book A Friend Is a Gift You Give Yourself written by William Boyle and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2019-03-05 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Goodfellas meets Thelma and Louise when an unlikely trio of women in New York find themselves banding together to escape the clutches of violent figures from their pasts. After Brooklyn mob widow Rena Ruggiero hits her eighty-year-old neighbor Enzio in the head with an ashtray when he makes an unwanted move on her, she embarks on a bizarre adventure. Taking off in Enzio’s ’62 Impala, she retreats to the Bronx home of her estranged daughter, Adrienne, and her granddaughter, Lucia, only to be turned away by Adrienne at the door. Their neighbor, Lacey “Wolfie” Wolfstein, a one-time Golden Age porn star and retired Florida Suncoast grifter, takes Rena in and befriends her. When Lucia discovers that Adrienne is planning to hit the road with her ex-boyfriend Richie, she figures Rena’s her only way out of a life on the run with a mother she can’t stand. But Richie has massacred a few members of the Brancaccio crime family for a big payday, and he drags even more trouble into the mix in the form of an unhinged enforcer named Crea. The stage is set for an explosion that will propel Rena, Wolfie, and Lucia down a strange path, each woman running from something and unsure what comes next. A Friend is a Gift You Give Yourself is a screwball noir about finding friendship and family where you least expect it, in which William Boyle again draws readers into the familiar—and sometimes frightening—world in the shadows at the edges of New York’s neighborhoods.

Download or read book In the Skin of a Lion written by Michael Ondaatje and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-04-06 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bristling with intelligence and shimmering with romance, this novel tests the boundary between history and myth. Patrick Lewis arrives in Toronto in the 1920s and earns his living searching for a vanished millionaire and tunneling beneath Lake Ontario. In the course of his adventures, Patrick's life intersects with those of characters who reappear in Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning The English Patient. 256 pp.

Download or read book The Rebel Nun written by Marj Charlier and published by Blackstone Publishing. This book was released on 2021-03-02 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marj Charlier’s The Rebel Nun is based on the true story of Clotild, the daughter of a sixth-century king and his concubine, who leads a rebellion of nuns against the rising misogyny and patriarchy of the medieval church. At that time, women are afforded few choices in life: prostitution, motherhood, or the cloister. Only the latter offers them any kind of independence. By the end of the sixth century, even this is eroding as the church begins to eject women from the clergy and declares them too unclean to touch sacramental objects or even their priest-husbands. Craving the legitimacy thwarted by her bastard status, Clotild seeks to become the next abbess of the female Monastery of the Holy Cross, the most famous of the women’s cloisters of the early Middle Ages. When the bishop of Poitiers blocks her appointment and seeks to control the nunnery himself, Clotild masterminds an escape, leading a group of nuns on a dangerous pilgrimage to beg her royal relatives to intercede on their behalf. But the bishop refuses to back down, and a bloody battle ensues. Will Clotild and her sisters succeed with their quest, or will they face excommunication, possibly even death? In the only historical novel written about the incident, The Rebel Nun is a richly imagined story about a truly remarkable heroine.

Download or read book Requiem for a Nun written by William Faulkner and published by DigiCat. This book was released on 2022-08-01 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "Requiem for a Nun" by William Faulkner. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

Download or read book And Then There was Nun written by Bruce W. Gilray and published by Samuel French, Inc.. This book was released on 2010 with total page 125 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes property, set and costume plots, sheet music, and set map.

Download or read book Dedicated to God written by Abbie Reese and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2014 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the second decade of the twenty-first century, Catholicism appears under siege. Reporters fixate on drama-accusations, investigations, the selection of a new pope. They ignore the inner story, the very reason why the church has survived from the Roman Empire's persecution through Renaissance splendor to the present day. This is the story of a search for truth, peace, and salvation, a story of selfless dedication that continues behind monastic walls even in our time. In Dedicated to God, Abbie Reese opens a window onto the Corpus Christi Monastery of the Poor Clare Colettine Order, a community of cloistered monastic nuns living within a 25,000-square foot enclosure near Rockford, Illinois. It is a world apart from our noisy, digital, hyper-connected world, a world of poverty, simplicity, and prayer. These women have surrendered everything-their names, shoes, even their families. They disappear from the larger world; when one dies, the order marks her grave with a simple stone indicating religious name and death date, nothing more. While they live, they pray five times a day at the Liturgy of the Hours for the victims of catastrophes and personal tragedies around the globe. The author spent six years learning their individual stories and the ancient rules they have chosen to live by. Reese makes that choice understandable, showing how each nun's values led her there, even if families were sometimes befuddled (one great-niece calls the monastery "the Jesus cage"). With an eye for complexity, Reese ranges from the challenges individuals face (she calls one "the claustrophobic nun") to the uncomprehending society that threatens this place with extinction.

Download or read book The First Free Women written by Matty Weingast and published by Shambhala Publications. This book was released on 2020-02-11 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Ancient Collection Reimagined Composed around the Buddha’s lifetime, the Therigatha (“Verses of the Elder Nuns”) contains the poems of the first Buddhist women: princesses and courtesans, tired wives of arranged marriages and the desperately in love, those born into limitless wealth and those born with nothing at all. The original authors of the Therigatha were women from every kind of background, but they all shared a deep-seated desire for awakening and liberation. In The First Free Women, Matty Weingast has reimagined this ancient collection and created a contemporary and radical adaptation that takes the essence of each poem and highlights the struggles and doubts, as well as the strength, perseverance, and profound compassion, embodied by these courageous women.

Download or read book City of Margins written by William Boyle and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2020-03-03 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A vivid new cast of characters collide in gritty 1990s Brooklyn, in this latest from acclaimed neo-noir author William Boyle. In City of Margins, the lives of several lost souls intersect in Southern Brooklyn in the early 1990s. There’s Donnie Parascandolo, a disgraced ex-cop with blood on his hands; Ava Bifulco, a widow whose daily work grind is her whole life; Nick, Ava’s son, a grubby high school teacher who dreams of a shortcut to success; Mikey Baldini, a college dropout who’s returned to the old neighborhood, purposeless and drifting; Donna Rotante, Donnie’s ex-wife, still reeling from the suicide of their teenage son; Mikey’s mother, Rosemarie, also a widow, who hopes Mikey won’t fall into the trap of strong arm work; and Antonina Divino, a high school girl with designs on breaking free from Brooklyn. Uniting them are the dead: Mikey’s old man, killed over a gambling debt, and Donnie and Donna’s poor son, Gabe. These characters cross paths in unexpected ways, guided by coincidence and the pull of blood. There are new things to be found in the rubble of their lives, too. The promise of something different beyond the barriers that have been set out for them. This is a story of revenge and retribution, of facing down the ghosts of the past, of untold desires, of yearning and forgiveness and synchronicity, of the great distance of lives lived in dangerous proximity to each other. City of Margins is a Technicolor noir melodrama pieced together in broken glass.

Download or read book The Song at the Scaffold written by Gertrud Von Le Fort and published by Tan Books. This book was released on 2014-08-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Song at the Scaffold is a novelette set in the time of the French Revolution, an epoch that vividly demonstrated man's capacity for both heroism and brutality. It is a very intense story dealing primarily with the Carmelite Convent at Compiegne but also encompassing the Paris mob, the Reign of Terror, Women Revolutionists, etc., climaxing in the martyrdom of sixteen Carmelite nuns. Excellent reading for both students and adults!

Download or read book I Came As a Shadow written by John Thompson and published by Henry Holt and Company. This book was released on 2020-12-15 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK The long-awaited autobiography from Georgetown University’s legendary coach, whose life on and off the basketball court threw America’s unresolved struggle with racial justice into sharp relief. John Thompson was never just a basketball coach and I Came As A Shadow is categorically not just a basketball autobiography. After five decades at the center of race and sports in America, Thompson—the iconic NCAA champion, Black activist, and educator—was ready to make the private public at last, and he completed this autobiography shortly before his death in the historically tumultuous summer of 2020. Chockful of stories and moving beyond mere stats (three Final Fours, four-time national coach of the year, seven Big East championships, 97 percent graduation rate), Thompson’s book drives us through his childhood under Jim Crow segregation to our current moment of racial reckoning. We experience riding shotgun with Celtics icon Red Auerbach and coaching NBA Hall of Famers like Patrick Ewing and Allen Iverson. What were the origins of the the phrase “Hoya Paranoia”? You’ll see. And parting his veil of secrecy, Thompson brings us into his negotiation with a D.C. drug kingpin in his players’ orbit in the 1980s, as well as behind the scenes of his years on the Nike board. Thompson’s mother was a teacher who had to clean houses because of racism in the nation's capital. His father could not read or write. Their son grew up to be a man with his own larger-than-life statue in a building that bears his family’s name on a campus once kept afloat by the selling of 272 enslaved Black people. This is a great American story, and John Thompson’s experience sheds light on many of the issues roiling our nation. In these pages, he proves himself to be the elder statesman whose final words college basketball and the country need to hear. I Came As A Shadow is not a swan song, but a bullhorn blast from one of America’s most prominent sons.

Download or read book Nuns Behaving Badly written by Craig A. Monson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-11-15 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Witchcraft. Arson. Going AWOL. Some nuns in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy strayed far from the paradigms of monastic life. Cloistered in convents, subjected to stifling hierarchy, repressed, and occasionally persecuted by their male superiors, these women circumvented authority in sometimes extraordinary ways. But tales of their transgressions have long been buried in the Vatican Secret Archive. That is, until now. In Nuns Behaving Badly, Craig A. Monson resurrects forgotten tales and restores to life the long-silent voices of these cloistered heroines. Here we meet nuns who dared speak out about physical assault and sexual impropriety (some real, some imagined). Others were only guilty of misjudgment or defacing valuable artwork that offended their sensibilities. But what unites the women and their stories is the challenges they faced: these were women trying to find their way within the Catholicism of their day and through the strict limits it imposed on them. Monson introduces us to women who were occasionally desperate to flee cloistered life, as when an entire community conspired to torch their convent and be set free. But more often, he shows us nuns just trying to live their lives. When they were crossed—by powerful priests who claimed to know what was best for them—bad behavior could escalate from mere troublemaking to open confrontation. In resurrecting these long-forgotten tales and trials, Monson also draws attention to the predicament of modern religious women, whose “misbehavior”—seeking ordination as priests or refusing to give up their endowments to pay for priestly wrongdoing in their own archdioceses—continues even today. The nuns of early modern Italy, Monson shows, set the standard for religious transgression in their own age—and beyond.