Chapter 16
A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby

The Art of Recovery

A new book by the Creative Arts Project spotlights the healing power of art

May 20, 2011 Challenged Lives: Artistic Vision, a colorful new art book by the Creative Arts Project, is bringing attention to a number of Middle Tennessee creators, showcasing their work as well as their personalities and their thoughts on the creative process. Years in the making, it’s the latest effort by this Nashville-based organization to raise awareness about mental illness and addiction, and to draw attention to the life-changing benefits of art therapy. Jane Baxter, director of the Creative Arts Project, recently answered questions via email about the book, the artists it showcases, and the value of creative therapy.

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Moral, Not Faithful

In Reasonable Atheism, a pair of Vanderbilt professors argue that atheism is as morally defensible as any religious tradition

May 19, 2011 Because atheists deny the notion of a supreme spiritual authority, they are often derided as amoral, libertine, or, in perhaps the biggest slight of all, moral relativists. In Reasonable Atheism, Vanderbilt philosophy professors Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse argue just the opposite. Though they clearly believe religion is wrong-headed, even dangerous, the authors’ goal is not to decry religious faith but to show that godlessness deserves the same respect afforded mainstream belief systems.

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Killer Reading

Jane Bradley’s new book is a horrifying crime novel that somehow manages to inspire hope

May 18, 2011 It’s the rare novel that can detail horrific evil and still illuminate the best of the human spirit, turning a reader thoughtful, inward, almost spiritual. That’s what Chattanooga native Jane Bradley has managed to do with her new book You Believers, a heartbreaking narrative with a capacity for finding deliverance in the wake of a life devastated by evil. Bradley will sign copies of the book at 7 p.m. on May 19 at Barnes & Noble Booksellers in Brentwood.

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Fragile

A baby’s life-threatening illness brought Hamilton Cain a new understanding of his own childhood

May 17, 2011 Hamilton Cain is a natural storyteller. During his adolescence in Chattanooga, his way with words convinced his conservative family that he was anointed to preach. But it also gained him entry into a wider and more challenging world than the one offered by his strict Southern Baptist childhood: after college at the University of Virginia, Cain became a journalist in New York City. But the discovery that his first infant son had been born with a debilitating and degenerative genetic disease sent Hamilton Cain on a search to discover what liberation and affirmation can be found in a childhood he thought he had left behind forever. This Boy’s Faith is the story of a father who learns what it means to be faithful through raising his medically fragile son.

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All Quiet Now

The Village Idiot was a maddening presence and a comical Facebook character—until he was suddenly gone

May 16, 2011 Save for the pouring rain and a yapping miniature pinscher next door, it is eerily silent as I write this. Under normal circumstances, all manner of small engines would be revving—yes, even in a downpour—as I write, but not today. My next-door-neighbor, the one I called the Village Idiot, the one I turned into a Facebook phenomenon with posts about the constant noise of chainsaws and log splitters emanating from next door, is gone.

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No Bull

Roy Blount Jr. schools The Wall Street Journal on the fun of playing with words

May 16, 2011 Nobody fiddles with words better than Roy Blount Jr. A regular on National Public Radio’s quiz show Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me, the Vanderbilt graduate also serves as a usage adviser to The American Heritage Dictionary and has written two books—2009’s Alphabet Juice and this summer’s Alphabetter Juice—that are sort of like dictionaries in their own right, only dictionaries glossed by a master comic.

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