Timothy Jones – författare

Many of us worry about our kids getting pulled under by our culture''s negative currents. We try to shout over the roar of media blitzes, misguided values in the schools, and peer pressure. And we wonder how to raise faithful children.

For parents who sometimes feel they haven''t done enough, Jones provides ideas for taking small steps toward communication and intimacy, showing you how to take advantage of teachable moments by fully "focusing on the present."

While leading my squad on patrol, I instinctively turned around to signal to my men that the enemy is in the area and to pass it up to our platoon leader. As I turned around, I hear a faint metallic click at my foot...then the explosion. Instantly, I am traveling through the air, my steel pot (head gear) is traveling in one direction, my rucksack previously strapped to my body is traveling in another direction, I can see the visions of my life moving slowly before my eyes in what seemed like an eternity. I feel suspended in time. There is no sound around me. My body is stunned, and I am going in and out of consciousness. While in this suspended state of life and death, I remember praying, "God, please don''t let me die...if you let me live, I will devote my life to saving humanity. "

God saved my life in Vietnam. Before Vietnam, I lived a purposeless life caring only about fun, booze, and women....But why did he save me? What cause God to turn me around at the moment of the explosion? What was he saving me for? Looking back, I now accept my land-mine explosion encounter in Vietnam as one of many times of major transitions in my life when God interceded to guide me...a spiritual marker that would lay the groundwork for all that would follow.

The Gothic and the Carnivalesque in American Culture offers a new account of the American Gothic. Gothic studies, the field that explores horrid and frightful narratives, usually describes the genre as exploring genuine historical fears, crises and traumas, yet this does not account for the ways in which the genre is often a source of wicked delight as much as it is of horror – its audiences laugh as often as they shriek. This book traces the carnivalesque tradition in the American Gothic from the nineteenth into the late twentieth century. It discusses the festivals offered by Poe, Hawthorne and Irving; the celebrations of wickedness offered by the Weird Tales writers, including H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith; the curious aura attached to Ray Bradbury’s stories; the way in which hosted horrors in comics and on television in the 1950s and 1960s taught their mass audiences how to read the genre; Stephen King’s nurturing of a new audience for Gothic carnivals in the 1970s and 1980s; and the confluence of Gothic story and Goth subculture in the 1990s.