The Art of Family: Rituals, Imagination, and Everyday Spirituality

by Gina Bria

Book Overview

In this authoritative and compassionate book, Gina Bria shows parents how to create a family that draws strength from key activities in everyday life. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0440507723
• ISBN13: 9780440507727
• Release Date: May 1998
• Publisher: DTP
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 7.5"

Customer Reviews

A wonderful, heartwarming book for families and singles!!!

I have the pleasure of working with Gina in a children's program. I enjoy my time with her and was happy she put her wisdom into a book for me to have at all times. I have given this book to my sister and my friend who is pregnant for the first time. I recommend not only to people with families but to people like me whose friends are family. The book added a quality and richness to my everyday life. How I interact with people is forever changed...

i loved this book :)

I had never been a true believer in marriage or family until i happened to pick this book up during a 30 minute break that i had at work. I savored every sentence and saw my emotions rise up. This book brought me to the realization that love/marriage/family are all part of us and they need to be nurtured/adored/respected as such. Not only did my views of marriage change from this book, but i am now engaged to be married! Gina's style of writing is excellent and i hope she is writing more books!

Thought-provoking and insightful.

The Art of Family is one of the most thought-provoking and insightful books I've ever read. Through delightful, sometimes funny, and often poignant stories the author demonstrates how incorporating rituals, imagination and spirituality into everyday living can make for a fuller and richer family experience. This is a book I savored. Each paragraph gave me moment to pause and reflect. I have recommended this book to my friends, family members, and to those with whom I work. Everyone can get something out of this book.

The Art of Family is a gift of love!

While reading this book, you'll wish, like I do, that you were luckly enough to have the author in your own family, so inspirational are her stories! But she doesn't write a "formula" to happier family lives--instead, she describes with wit and much love the kinds of rituals, events, and attitudes that help families and their members create meaning for themselves, for entire lives. Using her unique perspective and her anthropologist's training in observing people, she blends the wisdom of her own experience (and those of her family and friends) with her knowledge of other cultures and traditions, from which we can learn a great deal. This book's hilarious and touching examples have given me the courage to actively contemplate and begin planning how my family's life together can be richer and more rewarding.

This book is heaven sent!

The Art of Family is inspirational in the original meaning of the word--it makes you want to be the right kind of parent, and person. By "right" I only mean happy, available, and enjoying the rewards of kids--remembering why you wanted a family in the first place. With her humor and her empathy, Bria speaks directly to every kind of mom--the one who appears together on the outside, but who feels something is missing on the inside, to the one who feels she just hasn't "gotten it" yet. I love this book and I'm giving copies to all my friends--the together ones and the not so.