Revisioning the Past Prospects in Historical Theology

Religion & Spirituality

Engel, Mary Potter

Christian Books & Bibles

Augsburg Fortress Pub

After receiving word that her mother is dying and asking for her, Ruth VanderZicht struggles with mixed emotions and conflicting desires as she tries to decide whether or not to respond and finds herself torn between her secular beliefs and desperate longing for a spiritual relationship with God. 15,000 first printing.

A Woman of Salt: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

Contemporary

Counterpoint

In an uncommon mosaic of fiction and commentary, a new writer brilliantly explores the conflict between a woman's mundane secular life and her passionate longing for spirituality. . A Woman of Salt opens with Ruth VanderZicht receiving the news that her mother is dying and is asking for her. Ruth is thrown into a fierce turmoil of memory in which she veers between love and anger, sense and insanity, as she decides whether to heed her mother's call. This struggle in contradiction takes the form of a dialogue, and each story Ruth tells herself is commented upon by a midrash, a narrative exploration of a biblical text. The book becomes the spiritual biography of a tormented woman searching for rest, the story of the forty-year struggle of a would-be skeptic and religious runaway whose fate is haunted by a longing for God that she resists at every turn. As Ruth gradually settles her heart and mind the distance between her stories and her midrashim dissolves. A Woman of Salt is a daring and complex novel that confronts the dangers of introspection and the healing power of imagination. It is a resonant meditation and a beautiful story of one woman's longing and spiritual regeneration.

A Woman of Salt

For readers of Allan Gurganus and John Kennedy Toole, stories set in a small Southern town where a young Jewish doctor tries to bring compassion and science to a cast of misfits, loners, and eccentrics. A one-hundred-and-fourteen-year-old woman living alone, a deaf recluse, a Jewish alligator hunter and his New York wife, a gay African-American drummer, a woman accused of poisoning her husband, a homeless, transgendered person, a woman scarred by a dog attack, a Jewish shopkeeper with unfulfilled aspirations, a wife with an AIDS-afflicted husband--these are a few of the characters in these twenty-one linked stories from the diverse and vital rural culture of the Lowcountry of South Carolina. Struggling to wrest meaning from the tragic events of their lives, these characters create unorthodox views of God, the world, and justice, simply as a way to survive. Their stories revolve around an outsider, Dr. Jake Reuben, who during his stay in Coosawaw County is educated by the Lowcountry people into a new way of healing, and who learns that the benefits of a small measure of respect far exceed the contents of his medical bag. Full of surprises, humor, compassion, and wisdom, Strangers an

Strangers and Sojourners: Stories from the Lowcountry

United States

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Books by Engel, Mary Potter