Art Study

“Buy the ticket, take the ride,” was a favorite slogan of Hunter S. Thompson, and it pretty much defined both his work and his life. Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone showcases the roller-coaster of a career at the magazine that was his literary home.

Harry Potter has captivated the imagination of millions of children. And Harry Potter has caused controversy in churches and schools. What's a parent to do with the magical, mystical world of Harry and his friends? Gina Burkart chose to read the books with her own children. As they read together, she discovered many parallels between Christian faith and the themes of these books. Indeed, the escapades of Harry Potter sparked significant conversation between Burkart and her kids.

Everyone would benefit from seeing further into the future, whether buying stocks, crafting policy, launching a new product, or simply planning the week's meals. Unfortunately, people tend to be terrible forecasters. As Wharton professor Philip Tetlock showed in a landmark 2005 study, even experts' predictions are only slightly better than chance. However, an important and underreported conclusion of that study was that some experts do have real foresight.

Music opinions bring out passionate debate in people, and Steven Hyden knows that firsthand. Each chapter in Your Favorite Band Is Killing Me focuses on a pop music rivalry, from the classic to the very recent, and draws connections to the larger forces surrounding the pairing.

The Book of the Dead is an ancient Egyptian funerary text written on papyrus and used from the beginning of the New Kingdom. The book was placed in the coffin or burial chamber of the deceased, and was part of a tradition of funerary texts which includes the earlier Pyramid Texts and Coffin Texts, which were painted onto objects, not written on papyrus. A number of the spells which make up the Book continued to be separately inscribed on tomb walls and sarcophagi, as the spells from which they originated always had been.

The Book of Enoch contains one of the oldest stories ever told by the human species on Planet Earth. It is an epic tale of lustful angels, man-eating giants, and portentous visions of the end times. It introduces us to the heavenly Watchers and their earthborn hybrid sons, the mighty Nephilim, unlocking the meaning behind some of the most perplexing passages in the Old and New Testaments of the Bible.

Selected from sermons delivered by C. S. Lewis during World War II, these nine addresses show the beloved author and theologian bringing hope and courage in a time of great doubt. "The Weight of Glory", considered by many to be Lewis’s finest sermon of all, is an incomparable explication of virtue, goodness, desire, and glory.

The Art and Practice of Geomancy teaches readers how to divine the answers to life's everyday questions about health, luck, new jobs, and love, as well as finding buried treasure, predicting the weather, and identifying secret enemies. Greer delivers to readers an ancient system of divination in an easy-to-use form requiring little more than a pen and a piece of paper.

The Art of Worldly Wisdom was written in 1647. It is a collection of 300 maxims on various topics, each elaborated with a commentary. The sayings offer advice and guidance on how to live well, advance socially, and be a better person.

Most Christians know the name Martin Luther. Less familiar, however, are his words. This audio compilation of many of Luther's most important writings serves as an excellent introduction for those new to Luther. It also provides a fresh medium for people familiar with his writing.

C. S. Lewis offers a magisterial take on the literature and poetry of one of the most consequential periods in world history, providing deep insight into some of the greatest writers of the age, including Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, William Tyndale, John Knox, Dr. Johnson, Richard Hooker, Hugh Latimer, Christopher Marlowe, John Donne, and Thomas Cranmer.

Written after his wife's tragic death as a way of surviving the "mad midnight moments", A Grief Observed is C.S. Lewis's honest reflection on the fundamental issues of life, death, and faith in the midst of loss. This work contains his concise, genuine reflections on that period.

It has been three decades since Nirvana upended the pop cultural landscape with Nevermind, the landmark album that became the soundtrack of Generation X, capturing its confusion, frustration, and passion. In 1993, Michael Azerrad published what stands as the definitive biography of this revolutionary band and its star-crossed leader Kurt Cobain. Written with the band’s complete cooperation—the only book to feature interviews with Cobain, bassist Krist Novoselic, and drummer Dave Grohl—it became a massive bestseller and, in the words of Cobain, "the best rock book I’ve ever read.”

In Trickster Makes This World, Lewis Hyde brings to life the playful and disruptive side of human imagination as it is embodied in trickster mythology. He first visits the old stories—Hermes in Greece, Eshu in West Africa, Krishna in India, Coyote in North America, among others—and then holds them up against the lives and work of more recent creators: Picasso, Duchamp, Ginsberg, John Cage, and Frederick Douglass. Twelve years after its first publication, Trickster Makes This World has taken its place among the great works of modern cultural criticism.

At important meetings in 2021 and 2022, powerful leaders from government, finance, media, and business who support the World Economic Forum’s plan for a Great Reset of capitalism launched a new “call to action” titled the “Great Narrative.” The Great Narrative campaign seeks to use the decay of traditional values throughout the West and new and future advancements in technology—including in the areas of artificial intelligence, automation, the metaverse, robotics, and more—to seize control of economies and societies in North America and Europe.

We remember Audre Lorde as an iconic writer, a quotable teacher whose words and face grace T-shirts, nonprofit annual reports, and campus diversity-center walls. But even those who are inspired by Lorde’s teachings on “the creative power of difference” may be missing something fundamental about her life and work, and what they can mean for us today. Lorde’s understanding of survival was not simply about getting through to the other side of oppression or being resilient in the face of cancer. It was about the total stakes of what it means to be in relationship with a planet in transformation.

On May 8, 1373, 30-year-old Julian of Norwich, sick and near death, had a series of visions of Christ. In these 16 visions she learnt about God's loving nature. God in Julian's visions was not angry and wrathful. Instead, the three properties of God were presented as life, love and light, and all of His creation was good, including his servant, man. In Julian's version, Man is not to blame for his sin; instead it is something that he must experience and overcome in his spiritual journey with God.

Story captures our hearts and feeds our imaginations. It reminds us who we are and where we came from. Story gives meaning and direction to our lives as we learn to see it as an affirmation of God’s love. Drawing upon her own experiences, well-known tales in literature, and selected narratives from Scripture, Madeleine L’Engle gently leads the way into the glorious world of story in The Rock That Is Higher. Here she acknowledges universal human longings and considers how literature, Scripture, personal stories, and life experiences all point us toward our true home.

Instead of focusing on one service, like HBO, Pandora’s Box asks, “What did HBO do, besides give us The Sopranos?” The answer: It gave us a revolution. Biskind bites off a big chunk of entertainment history, following HBO from its birth into maturity, moving on to the basic cablers like FX and AMC, and ending up with the streamers and their wars, pitting Netflix against Amazon Prime Video, Max, and the killer pluses—Disney, Apple TV, and Paramount.

Written between A.D. 413 and 426, The City of God is one of the great cornerstones in the history of Christian thought, a book which is vital to the understanding of modern Western society. Augustine originally intended it to be an apology for Christianity against the accusation that the Church was responsible for the decline of the Roman Empire, which had occurred just three years earlier. Indeed, Augustine produced a great amount of evidence to prove that paganism was responsible for this event. However, by the time the work was finished, the book had taken on a larger theme.