Michael MacKenzie

There's a ticking time bomb in your ministry. Is it you? The pressures of pastoring are endless, leading many to burnout and depression, sexual misconduct, or substance abuse. But moral failures can be averted and shipwrecked ministries can be repaired. Counselor Michael MacKenzie, a longtime expert in helping pastors at risk, deals with the issues beneath the issues, such as shame, fear, and pain. If we don't address our own weakness and brokenness, we will hurt ourselves and those around us. With vivid pictures of both self-destructive patterns and reconstructive grace, MacKenzie shows how to lay the groundwork for restored identity and service. God can use those exact areas of vulnerability as a catalyst to you becoming the pastor and person he intends you to be. Defuse the bomb before it goes off. Find hope for healing and recovery.

Otto Dix fought in the First World War for the better part of four years before becoming one of the most important artists of the Weimar era. Marked by the experience, he made monumental, difficult and powerful works about it. Whereas Dix has often been presented as a lone voice of reason and opposition in Germany between the wars, this book locates his work squarely in the mainstream of Weimar society. Informed by recent studies of collective remembrance, of camaraderie, and of the popular, working-class socialist groups that commemorated the war, this book takes Dix’s very public, monumental works out of the isolation of the artist’s studio and returns them to a context of public memorials, mass media depictions, and the communal search for meaning in the war. The author argues that Dix sought to establish a community of veterans through depictions of the war experience that used the soldier’s humorous, grotesque language of the trenches and that deliberately excluded women and other non-combatants. His depictions were preoccupied with heteronormativity in the context of intimate touch and tenderness between soldiers at the front and with sexual potency in the face of debilitating wounds suffered by others in the war.

Inspired by Rousseau, and in need of a maid, the Baroness sets herself the task of transforming a "pure, unsullied creature" into a presentable maid. But learning how to set a table is one thing; Emily's unforeseen traumas are quite another. What moral imperatives differentiate instinctive behaviour from rational behaviour? What chance have the Baroness' enlightened plans for Emily in the messy human world that is their reality? Published in cooperation with the Shaw Festival, this edition of The Baroness and the Pig includes a foreword by Artistic Director Tim Carroll and an essay by Resident Scholar Leonard Conolly. It also includes information on the Festival's 2018 production of The Baroness and the Pig, directed by Selma Dimitrijevic and designed by Camellia Koo. Based on characters created by Catherine Fitch and Marion Day