New Book Celebrates Beautiful Moments in Everyday Life

If there ever was a time that stopping to smell the roses was exceedingly difficult, this is it. Our fast-paced, technology driven world with cell phones to answer, emails to respond to, and deadlines to meet can make appreciating the finer things in life harder than ever to do.

In the enclosed advance copy of his new book The Hidden Beauty of Everyday Life (New World Library, June 2006) bestselling author Kent Nerburn inspires us to recognize and acknowledge the beauty in the ordinary occurrences of our everyday lives. He writes, “Our lives are filled with ordinary moments when the hidden beauty of life breaks into our everyday awareness like an unbidden shaft of light. It is a brush with the sacred, a near occasion of grace. Too often we are blind to these moments. We are busy with our daily obligations and too occupied with our comings and goings to surround our hearts with the quiet that is necessary to hear life’s softer songs.”

The Hidden Beauty of Everyday Life examines the kind of moments we all share — like a chance encounter with a young child or birds singing in the trees — and calls us to go deeper, beyond the surface meanings and appearances. Nerburn encourages us to hear what he calls “God’s whispers” in moments we far too often take for granted.

With incredible clarity and poetic simplicity, Nerburn crafts stories from everyday experiences that offer lessons to the spirit and windows to the heart. He writes, “This is a book for those who believe that God speaks as surely in the murmurs of the trees and the laughter of the children as from the pulpits of the churches and the synagogues, who know that a mother tucking a child in bed is offering a prayer of joyful praise as surely as the cantor or the minister or the monk at evening vespers.”

Whether he is standing before a sculpture in a cathedral in Florence or attending a funeral on an Indian reservation on a cold, blustery day, Nerburn’s words paint pictures that are truly unforgettable. His book is like a magnifying glass designed to help us see beyond the surface meanings of life to the place where the ordinary touches us with its spiritual meaning and depth.

About the Author
Kent Nerburn holds a PhD in religion and art and is internationally recognized not only as an author but as a sculptor, with works in such settings as the Peace Museum in Hiroshima, Japan, and Westminster Benedictine Abbey in Mission, British Columbia. He is the author of many books, including Simple Truths, Small Graces, Letters to My Son, Make Me An Instrument of Your Peace, and Neither Wolf nor Dog, which won of The Minnesota Book Award. He lives with his wife and son in northern Minnesota.

The Hidden Beauty of Everyday Life
By Kent Nerburn
June 2006 • Gift/Inspiration
Trade Cloth • Price: $16.00
ISBN1-57731-530-8 • 112 pages • 5" x 7 1/4"