Rene Steinke – författare

Smoke has as many different scents as skin. Part of the pleasure is not knowing what it will be -- sulfurous or closer to incense or airier and sweeter as I imagine the smell of clouds.Ella is a connoisseur of fire, a woman enthralled by it as other women are by love. She savors the seductive promise of a spark, the caress of a curling wisp of smoke, the all-consuming hunger of a spreading blaze. Ella''s heart seethes with a rage that can be spoken only with tongues of flame.In her remarkable first novel, Rene Steinke has created a narrator so lyrical and lucid in her madness as to raise the book to the level of romance. Trapped in a sleepy Indiana town, torn by inner demons that drive her to pyromania and promiscuity, Ella is at once entirely original and unforgettably real.As she struggles to come to terms with her family''s tormented past and her own uncertain future, she draws the mesmerized reader ever deeper into her scorched soul, revealing a sensuality that will spiral into final, fiery destruction -- unless it can be quenched by love.

“Steinke''s sense of this small Texas town, with its explosive and interconnected lives and deaths, is absolutely masterful.”—Elizabeth GilbertA big, moving novel of one tight-knit Texas community and the events that alter its residents’ lives forever.Friendswood, Texas, is a small Gulf Coast town of church suppers, oil rigs on the horizon, hurricane weather, and high school football games. When tragedy rears its head with an industrial leak that kills and sickens residents, it pulls on the common thread that runs through the community, intensifying everything. From a confused fifteen-year-old girl beset by visions, to a high school football star tormented by his actions, to a mother galvanized by the death of her teen daughter, to a morally bankrupt father trying to survive his mistakes, René Steinke explores what happens when families are trapped in the ambiguity of history’s missteps—when the actions of a few change the lives and well-being of many. Driving the narrative powerfully forward is the suspenseful question of the fates of four Friendswood families, and Steinke’s striking insight and empathy. Inspired in part by the town where she herself grew up, this layered, propulsive, psychologically complex story is poignant proof that extreme public events, as catastrophic as they might seem, must almost always pale in comparison to the intimate personal experiences and motivations of grief, love, lust, ambition, anxiety, and regret.

The first edition of How Your Church Family Works was written nearly thirty years ago, and the reach and velocity of change in the last three decades poses a new challenge for churches. Thirty years ago, churches functioned in a fairly stable environment and focused on growth an expansion. The tide has turned now, though, and supplanted increase with decline. Bowen family systems theory—on which How Your Church Family Works is based—has not changed, but its application has to be revised for the twenty-first century. How Your 21st-Century Church Family Works, the second edition of Peter Steinke’s landmark book, addresses the radically altered landscape of church sustainability with new introductory and concluding chapters bookending updates throughout the now-classic text. Core chapters of the book feature fresh examples of emotional process that are more exemplary of the current scene. One key addition is a new trigger of anxiety for churches—the change process. Change threatens the familiar and stable and suffers from negative connotations of endangering tradition. Where gradual change has been the norm for so long, churches now see a blistering pace of disruptions, some of which have forced change too early or too late, or sometimes in unproductive directions. How Your 21st-Century Church family works embraces the anxiety caused by change, transforming it from a source of anguish to a font of opportunity.