Ani

Eddie is a wounded war veteran, an old man who has lived, in his mind, an uninspired life. His job is fixing rides at a seaside amusement park. On his 83rd birthday, a tragic accident kills him as he tries to save a little girl from a falling cart. He awakes in the afterlife, where he learns that heaven is not a destination; it's a place where your life is explained to you by five people, some of whom you knew, others who may have been strangers. One by one, Eddie's five people revisit their connections to him on earth, illuminating the mysteries of his "meaningless" life.

Following the publication of her main book in 1875, Mary Baker Eddy was giving regular lectures in Massachusetts, at Hawthorne Hall, near the Boston Commons and named for Nathaniel Hawthorne. Between the late 1870s and the mid 1880s, with a seating capacity of 250, Eddy regularly filled the hall on Sunday afternoons, with parishioners eager to hear her lectures, which were pivotal in helping to quickly build the Christian Science movement. Christian Healing is a lecture she gave in April of 1880.

> No Man Is an Island is a collection of 16 essays in which Thomas Merton plumbs aspects of human spirituality. Merton treats the “basic verities on which the spiritual life depends”. Essay themes include hope, conscience, sacrifice, charity, sincerity, mercy, and silence. The work is threaded through with Merton’s deep awareness that we are all called to “live not for ourselves but for others”.