Elizabeth Cunningham – författare

The authors of Preschool Math--a scientist, a Montessori teacher, and an Emergent Curriculum advocate--come from different backgrounds and all offer unique expertise to the book. This combination gives the book a particularly interesting and stimulating approach, and makes the book usable for any teacher. Preschool Math encourages teachers to listen to and observe young children to better understand how they think about their world. The book uses these prompts to expand into useful and appropriate math experiences. Teachers will encourage children to use their senses and bodies to explore ideas, record and talk about the concepts, and to learn how math feels, tastes, and looks. Activities in Preschool Math use the scientific ideals of testing, evaluating, exploring, experimenting, problem solving, making guesses, and forming a hypothesis, while utilizing interesting materials and environments in mathematical ways.

Special features of this book

Preschool Math encourages children's thoughtful considerations, theory development, and logical exploration. It discourages interrogation or forcing a yes or no answer. Teachers are encouraged to observe children's play when introducing math concepts, or environment in ways that are appropriate at that time and for those children. This approach helps children learn math concepts as they are ready for them.

Preschool Math is written so that teachers can easily access and use the activities. The authors suggest materials and activities as well as describe ways to talk with the children or to encourage further exploration over future days or weeks. Teachers can find activities that best suit children's needs, or use the ideas to set up environments that will encourage children to explore math. Preschool Math will enrich the lives of children, introduce concepts that build foundations for a lifetime of learning, encourage wondering and exploration, and provide encouragement for adults to make early childhood a real math playground!

“Cunningham weaves Hebrew scripture, Celtic and Egyptian mythology, and early Christian legend into a nearly seamless whole, creating an unforgettable fifth gospel story in which the women most involved in Jesus’s ministry are given far more representation.”—Library Journal

“This year’s must-have summer reading.”—KINK Radio

“Lavish and lusty . . . Cunningham’s Celtic Magdalen is as hot in the mouth as Irish whiskey.”—Beliefnet (chosen as one of this year’s “heretical beach-books”)

“Explodes off the page with its tales of love, hope, power, and redemption—book clubs looking for a great discussion, take note.”—TheBookBrothel.com

"Smart and earthy . . . richly imaginative . . . the epitome of the storyteller''s art."—St. Louis Post-Dispatch, named one of "The Year''s Best Books"

"This amazing book could well become a classic of women''s literature."—Booklist, named one of the "Year''s Ten Best Fantasy Books"

Young Magdalen and Jesus, brimming with youthful charm and arrogance, find each other and fall in love, forging a bond that is stronger than death. Their pleasure is overshadowed by a brilliant but unbalanced druid who knows a perilous secret about Maeve''s past. The prequel to The Passion of Mary Magdalen. Now in paperback!

“The best one yet!”—Catherine MacCoun, author of On Becoming an Alchemist

"As usual, Cunningham provides plenty of juicy controversy embodied by vivid characters and expressed in vigorous action, all in crisply drawn biblical settings."—Booklist

"Gleefully iconoclastic. For that dwindling demographic with a sense of humor about religion, Maeve’s profane skewering of the all-too-human foibles of the Church fathers is a hoot." Kirkus Reiews

""Elizabeth Cunningham has again delved into her fabulous treasure trove of impeccable research, and come up with gold. In Bright Dark Madonna, her interweaving of Biblical-Celtic themes brings the first century to life with unexpected freshness and many surprises." —Katherine Neville, author of The Eight and The Fire

After playing an intimate role in the mystery of the Resurrection, what is left for Maeve, the Celtic Mary Magdalen? Never a follower, will she emerge as a leader of the early church? Will she retire quietly to mother a sacred bloodline? Will she set sail for France to proselytize and go spelunking? The answer: all and none of the above. No sooner does Maeve open her mouth to preach the gospel her way than a fierce debate begins about what to do with the child she is carrying. Maeve has her own ideas about where best to raise the savior’s scion. When she returns to Temple Magdalen, the holy whorehouse she founded, a custody battle of biblical proportions ensues. Maeve, her infant daughter Sara, and Jesus’ mother flee to the remote Taurus Mountains where they live in hiding among the Galatians until a mysterious man is dumped on their doorstep more dead than alive. When Maeve discovers the identity of the man she has healed, she is appalled and determined to keep her family’s secret. But Maeve has reckoned without the will of her brilliant, angry adolescent daughter who resolves to find out the truth about her father—for herself.

Required reading for fans and accesible to those new to The Maeve Chronicles, Bright Dark Madonna takes the reader on a breathtaking journey from the temple porticoes of Jerusalem, to the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus, to the south of France, and, as always, to the treacherous, beautiful terrain of the human heart.

The Goddess is returning!

She takes shape in the hands of an Episcopal priest’s shy, retiring wife. She invades the dreams of a grande dame who thinks women priests are a scandal. She lures a poker-playing ex-convict onto unfamiliar terrain, literally. Then there is the mysterious old man in the wood, who’s been watching, waiting for a sign of her return. 

Who is the Goddess? Where has she been for so long? What does she want from the four human beings whose lives she is turning upside down and inside out?

As they confront these questions, Esther, Spencer, Marvin and Fergus find themselves drawn together, forging friendships across boundaries of age, class and race, discovering—and recovering—powerful, erotic passions. All their encounters, with themselves and each other, lead them deeper into Blackwood, an old estate that shelters an imperiled grove of trees sacred to the Goddess, a grove it becomes their mission to save. 

The Return of the Goddess, A Divine Comedy marks Cunningham’s first explicit exploration of Christianity and the power of a divine feminine, long forgotten, obscured, and suppressed by the Church. She went on to write The Maeve Chronicles, featuring her iconic, outspoken Celtic Magdalen. The Return of the Goddess takes the reader inside the world of Cunningham’s origins where a gap in a wall leads from the church to the sacred grove. 

Twenty-six years after its first publication The Return of the Goddess, A Divine Comedy remains a classic in what has become a movement, both within established religions and beyond, to reclaim the goddess and to embody her return.

Enter the world of The Wild Mother—modern fairytale, bold biblical midrash, filled with the psychological depth and imaginative originality for which the author of The Maeve Chronicles is known. Elizabeth Cunningham''s classic feminist novel is as fresh and timeless today as when it was first released in 1993 to critical acclaim.

Adam Underwood and Eva Brooke appear to be made for each other. Both are single parents. Both are academics, he a dazzling, enigmatic professor of Alchemy, she a humble but dedicated professor of Fairytales. Adam''s children, Ionia and Fred, share a latchkey after school with Eva''s precocious son, Jason. So why don''t Adam and Eva marry and live happily ever after?

Eva can''t help wondering. Pathologically polite, she cannot bring herself to ask personal questions. She struggles not to find it strange that Adam has never so much as mentioned his children''s absent mother. Nor has Adam''s own mother-cum-housekeeper, the feisty, outspoken Ursula, ever uttered her name. Yet Eva glimpses the missing woman in ten-year-old Ionia''s haunted and haunting purple eyes and in Ionia''s drawings of a woman dancing on the crest of a hill, wild black hair spread out against the sky....

Then one night, she returns: Lilith, the wild mother. The precarious status quo that Eva, Adam, and their families have achieved is shattered and their world is turned inside out or, more precisely, outside in.

As wild breaks into their lives, Adam, obsessed with control, attempts to seal them all in a deadly trap. Now a crucial challenge confronts each one of them. Will these very human beings embrace their own wildness, risking all they value and understand? Or will they deny the freedom essential to Lilith''s nature--and their own.

“One of the most engaging memoirs I’ve read in ages. The wise and feisty voice I''ve come to know and love in Elizabeth Cunningham’s Maeve Chronicles fills these pages and carried me away. Anyone who has forged an independent path through the luminous moments and deepest shadows of a soul-filled life will recognize their own spiritual adventures reflected here.”—Mirabai Starr, God of Love

In this intriguing spiritual memoir, The Maeve Chronicles author Elizabeth Cunningham traces her dynamic faith journey and its relationship to her writing.

As the daughter of an Episcopal priest, author Elizabeth Cunningham was born into community, sacred story, and the mysteries of prayer. For her, “If a writer is one who writes, then a ‘prayer’ is one who prays.” As such, her praying is dynamic, a dance between many opposites—active vs. contemplative, community vs. individual, human vs. wild—and Cunningham sees the divine as both incarnate and transcendent, an intimate beloved and a vast mystery. When she prays, Cunningham is both audacious and reverent, asking tough questions of God—raging, listening intently, and dancing and singing ecstatically. Her storyteller’s imagination opens a path from the known to the unknowable, from despair to wonder. 

In this nonfiction debut, Cunningham recounts both her lifelong spiritual quest and her ongoing spiritual questions. Her journey takes her from her childhood church, with its ornate liturgy, to the silence of Quaker meeting; from her ordination as an interfaith minister to an eclectic, earth-centered community where she served as priestess before becoming a hermit, of sorts, making a church of her own backyard.

Candid and passionate, Cunningham’s memoir invites readers of all faiths—and doubts!—to explore what it means to live life as a prayer in the beautiful, imperiled world we share.