Gordon Johnston

This folio of more than two hundred-fifty photographs with a foreword by President William D. Underwood and accompanying text by Gordon Johnston celebrates Georgia's oldest private university. Since its founding in 1833 in Penfield as Mercer Institute, Mercer University has educated tens of thousands of undergraduate, graduate, and professional students, counting among its alumni twelve governors, twenty-five congressional representatives, a U. S. Attorney General, two Rhodes Scholars, two Pulitzer Prize winners, and many physicians, artists, poets, engineers, scientists, ministers, musicians, educators, judges, attorneys, business leaders, nurses, and pharmacists. Mercer University enrolls more than 9,000 students each academic year in twelve colleges and schools on campuses in Macon, Atlanta, Savannah, and Columbus, and at centers in Henry and Douglas Counties. Mercer Illustrated highlights the places, people, spirit, and experiences that collectively contribute to Mercer's impact on the world. With sections depicting the university's campuses in Macon, Atlanta, Columbus, and Savannah and the academic, athletic, arts, service, and social events that nourish mind and soul and build community in each location, this collection offers a slice of Mercer life from all the areas of the world and the state that the University has come to call home over the last 191 years.

These seven river stories, written after the author canoed the Ocmulgee and its tributaries, draw on European American, Native, and African American traditions and relationships with the upper river between the confluence of the Yellow, Alcovy, and South Rivers under Jackson Lake and Macon, Georgia. Set from the 1810s to the present, the stories follow characters as their inherited or adopted perspectives on the river--and their ignorance of it--are altered by their personal experience of the watershed's danger, power, and life. Each story engages a specific place, among them Pittman's Ferry, the Seven Islands, Smith Shoals, the levee in Macon, and the Ocmulgee Mounds of the Mississippian people. A middle-aged woman who has lost her father and the pawn shop she inherited from him kayaks a wild Seven Islands rapid, looking for solace or self-destruction; an orphaned boy finds purpose and a path toward self-definition through borrowed Native culture and gar-fishing; the river baptism of a scarred, violent man tamed by a stroke revives a congregation even as it reopens old wounds; a long-exiled, past-her-prime call girl returns to Macon to uncover a surprising sense of belonging; Towaliga River memories carry a Navy sniper through his grim wartime duty. Canoe-camping on the Ocmulgee, subject to its weather and flow, and seeing how its force shaped the landscape, Gordon Johnston recovered a sense of time grounded in geology. ""Humanity is small and new in the long life of the watershed,"" he says. ""I wrote these stories with that humility in mind.

This book is the first full-length history of the BBC World Service: from its interwar launch as short-wave radio broadcasts for the British Empire, to its twenty-first-century incarnation as the multi-media global platform of the British Broadcasting Corporation. The book provides insights into the BBC’s working relationship with the Foreign Office, the early years of the Empire Service, and the role of the BBC during the Second World War. In following the voice of the BBC through the Cold War and the contraction of the British empire, the book argues that debates about the work and purposes of the World Service have always involved deliberations about the future of the UK and its place in the world. In current times, these debates have been shaped by the British government’s commitment to leave the European Union and the centrifugal currents in British politics which in the longer term threaten the integrity of the United Kingdom. Through a detailed exploration of its past, the bookposes questions about the World Service’s possible future and argues that, for the BBC, the question is not only what it means to be a global broadcaster as we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century, but what it means to be a national broadcaster in a divided kingdom.

Durable Goods, poem by poem, finds lasting value in ordinary daily acts and objects -- shaving with an inherited safety razor, packing a backpack for a wilderness trek, listening to Neal Young on a cassette worn to the brink of uselessness, answering a toddler daughter's questions about air. There are letter poems to writer friends composed along trails in the Rockies, appreciations of the crooked, eternally unraveling beauties of river rapids and of the canoes that cooperate with them. By turns boyish and battle-scarred -- "For forty years," one poems says, "I have been fifteen" -- the voice is this collection is that of a man listening to his life, leaning toward whatever durable good he can come across next.

This book is the first full-length history of the BBC World Service: from its interwar launch as short-wave radio broadcasts for the British Empire, to its twenty-first-century incarnation as the multi-media global platform of the British Broadcasting Corporation. The book provides insights into the BBC’s working relationship with the Foreign Office, the early years of the Empire Service, and the role of the BBC during the Second World War. In following the voice of the BBC through the Cold War and the contraction of the British empire, the book argues that debates about the work and purposes of the World Service have always involved deliberations about the future of the UK and its place in the world. In current times, these debates have been shaped by the British government’s commitment to leave the European Union and the centrifugal currents in British politics which in the longer term threaten the integrity of the United Kingdom. Through a detailed exploration of its past, the bookposes questions about the World Service’s possible future and argues that, for the BBC, the question is not only what it means to be a global broadcaster as we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century, but what it means to be a national broadcaster in a divided kingdom.

In this brief illustrated guide to the national monument located in Macon, Georgia, that conserves ancient Mississippian mounds and 12,000 years of human presence along the Ocmulgee River, Matthew Jennings and Gordon Johnston, like G. D. Pope and Lonnie Davis in earlier guides, introduce readers to the park's history, archaeology, Native cultures, and landscape. Jennings both updates the history and adds an account of the intercultural exchange that the park has brought about between the post-removal Muscogee Creek people native to the area and Georgians of the last several generations. This new guide braids into Jennings's concise historical overview Gordon Johnston's field notes and poems, written while Johnston was writer-in-residence at Ocmulgee National Monument, about the park's woods, streams, artifacts, and wildlife. The book includes transcriptions of oral stories by William Harjo (Muscogee) and an array of photographs and images, many of them new, that span the park's history, including Ocmulgee, an installation by artist Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds (Cheyenne/Arapaho) in Atlanta in 2005.

From "Anna's Lovers" Our houses glow both from within and on the outside: their night lights and an almost perfect and wintry moon. The phrase "but for now" means among other things "making do," as if we had to settle for the bare minimum. In But for Now, Gordon Johnston presents poems where the mortal world is more than enough because there is more to it than the merely mortal and where it is possible to hear beyond the outmoded clanking of inherited religious vocabularies. These poems find moments of grace in chance occurrences and through a wide range of styles and methods, they choreograph the random casual events of our existence. Northrop Frye famously asked, "Where is here?" These poems instead ask, "When is now?" Engaged with worlds of waiting and of doing, with enduring and healing, But for Now celebrates music and noise, speech and silence, and asserts that for all the darkness at the edges, there is something shining at the centre of the painting.

Few books have sought to exhaustively trace the theme of Messiah through all of Scripture, but this book does so with the expert analysis of three leading evangelical scholars. For the Bible student and pastor, Jesus the Messiahpresents a comprehensive picture of both scriptural and cultural expectations surrounding the Messiah, from an examination of the Old Testament promises to their unique and perfect fulfillment in Jesus' life. Students of the life of Christ will benefit from the authors' rich understanding of ancient biblical culture and pastors will find an indispensable help for understanding the unity and importance of the ancient promise of Messiah. This handsome volume will be a ready reference on Messiah for years to come.