Situated in the rugged hills west of downtown Portland, Forest Park is the nation’s premier urban natural sanctuary. It supports essential habitat for hundreds of native plants and animals, including species at risk, and is one of the largest city parks in the world. While extending critical ecosystem services to the region, it offers miles of outstanding hiking trails, all within minutes of the downtown core.

Forest Park: Exploring Portland’s Natural Sanctuary showcases this treasure in a new light, offering a compendium of the most up-to-date and comprehensive information available. Twenty-one hikes covering seventy-five miles bring a full awareness of the park’s outstanding attributes. Hikes are grouped by theme to encourage people to explore Forest Park’s watersheds, geology, lichens and mosses, vegetation, amphibians and reptiles, pollinators, native wildlife, and wildlife corridors. Beautiful photographs and full-color maps accompany each trail description.

Forest Park is a shining example of the Pacific Northwest western hemlock community—an ecosystem unique among all temperate forests of the world. It is also an exciting model for a future Urban Biodiversity Reserve, a concept that would recognize the park’s scientific, natural, and cultural qualities. Forest Park will help all visitors discover the beauty and wonders of this extraordinary natural resource.

The workings of Western intelligence in our day--whether in politics or the arts, in the humanities or the church--are as troubling as they are mysterious, leading to the questions: Where are we going? What in the world were we thinking? By exploring the history of four "cultures" so deeply embedded in Western history that we rarely see their instrumental role in politics, religion, education, and the arts, this timely book provides a broad framework for addressing these questions in a fresh way.

The cultures considered here originated in the ancient world, took on Christian forms, and manifest themselves today in more secular ways. These are, as John W. O'Malley identifies them: the prophetic culture that proclaims the need for radical change in the structures of society (represented by, for example, Jeremiah, Martin Luther, and Martin Luther King, Jr.); the academic culture that seeks instead to understand those structures (Aristotle, Aquinas, the modern university); the humanistic culture that addresses fundamental human issues and works for the common good of society (Cicero, Erasmus, and Eleanor Roosevelt); and the culture of art and performance that celebrates the mystery of the human condition (Phidias, Michelangelo, Balanchine).

By showing how these cultures, as modes of activity and discourse in which Western intelligence has manifested itself through the centuries and continues to do so, O'Malley produces an essay that especially through the history of Christianity brilliantly illuminates the larger history of the West.

Frederic Remington and the West sheds new light on the remarkably complicated and much misunderstood career of Frederic Remington. This study of the complex relationship between Remington and the American West focuses on the artist’s imagination and how it expressed itself. Ben Merchant Vorpahl takes into account all the dimensions of Remington’s extensive work—from journalism to fiction, sculpture, and painting. He traces the events of Remington’s life and makes extensive use of literary and art criticism and nineteenth-century American social cultural and military history in interpreting his work.

Vorpahl reveals Remington as a talented, sensitive, and sometimes neurotic American whose work reflects with peculiar force the excitement and distress of the period between the Civil War and the Spanish-American War. Remington was not a “western” artist in the conventional sense; neither was he a historian: he lacked the historian’s breadth of vision and discipline, expressing himself not through analysis but through synthesis. Vorpahl shows that, even while Remington catered to the sometimes maudlin, sometimes jingoistic tastes of his public and his editors, his resourceful imagination was at work devising a far more demanding and worthwhile design—a composite work, executed in prose, pictures, and bronze. This body of work, as the author demonstrates, demands to be regarded as an interrelated whole. Here guilt, shame, and personal failure are honestly articulated, and death itself is confronted as the artist’s chief subject.

Because Remington was so prolific a painter, sculptor, illustrator, and writer, and because his subjects, techniques, and media were so apparently diverse, the deeper continuity of his work had not previously been recognized. This study is a major contribution to our understanding of an important American artist. In addition, Vorpahl illuminates the interplay between history, artistic consciousness, and the development of America’s sense of itself during Remington’s lifetime.