The Politics of Middle English Parables: Fiction, Theology, and Social Practice
Author: Mary Raschko File Type: pdf The politics of Middle English parables examines the dynamic intersection of fiction, theology and social practice in late-medieval England. Parables occupy a prominent place in Middle English literature, appearing in dream visions and story collections as well as in lives of Christ and devotional treatises. While most scholarship approaches the translated stories as stable vehicles of Christian teaching, this book highlights the many variations and points of conflict across Middle English renditions of the same story. In parables related to labour, social inequality, charity and penance, the book locates a creative theological discourse through which writers attempted to re-construct Christian belief and practice. Analysis of these diverse retellings reveals not what a given parable meant in a definitive sense but rather how Middle English parables inscribe the ideologies, power structures and cultural debates of late-medieval Christianity. **About the Author Mary Raschko is Assistant Professor of English at Whitman College
Author: Rebecca Fransway
File Type: epub
12-Step Horror Stories provides detailed, first-hand accounts of harrowing abuse suffered by desperate people who turned to what they thought was a source of help. This book includes numerous tales of 13th stepping, 12-step sexual predators taking advantage of vulnerable, newcomer women tales of AA gurus using their pigeons as slave labor tales of individuals driven to suicide by the cruel treatment of their fellow group members tales of broken confidences and broken relationships and tales of women raped by other 12-steppers, and then told by their sponsors or home group to keep [their] side of the street clean or even to make amends to their rapists. Knowledge of such things is common in AA-but never revealed to normies. 12-Step Horror Stories makes this knowledge available for the first time to the public-and in doing so, one hopes, will help prevent much unnecessary suffering.
Author: Nandita Biswas Mellamphy
File Type: pdf
Following Nietzsches call for a philosopher-physician and his own use of the bodily language of health and illness as tools to diagnose the ailments of the body politic, this book offers a reconstruction of the concept of political physiology in Nietzsches thought, bridging gaps between Anglo-American, German and French schools of interpretation. **
Author: Mark Doyle
File Type: pdf
Communal Violence in the British Empire focuses on how Britons interpreted, policed, and sometimes fostered violence between different ethnic and religious communities in the empire. It also asks what these outbreaks meant for the power and prestige of Britain among subject populations. Alternating between chapters of engaging narrative and chapters of careful, cross-colonial analysis, Mark Doyle uses outbreaks of communal violence in Ireland, the West Indies, and South Asia to uncover the inner workings of British imperialism its guiding assumptions, its mechanisms of control, its impact, and its limitations. He explains how Britons used communal violence to justify the imperial project even as that project was creating the conditions for more violence. Above all, this book demonstrates how communal violence exposed the limits of British power and, in time, helped lay the groundwork for the empires collapse. This book shows how violence, and the British states handling thereof, was a fundamental part of the imperial experience for colonizer and colonized alike. It offers a new perspective on the workings of empire that will be of interest to any student of imperial or world history. **Review Doyles book is useful and original in focusing on specific instances of communal conflict and state response. Vivid and closely-grained studies ... alternate with analytical chapters assessing the strategies and failures of British authorities. * Cercles * Thoroughly researched and engagingly written, this book draws together the local and imperial in impressive ways. Doyle masterfully explores the details of riots from the West Indies to Ireland to India, and demonstrates the ways in which these riots and the states response fused communalism and nationalism to ultimately corrode the authority of the British Empire. By identifying and analyzing broader themes present in a variety of communal riots, this book provides a valuable contribution to our understanding of the intersections between internal violence and the imperial experience. * Jill C. Bender, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, USA, author of The 1857 Indian Uprising and the British Empire * Treating communal disorder as a distinct analytical field, Mark Doyles comparative approach to the causes and effects of riots in the Victorian Empire is consistently insightful. Communal violence in the Indian sub-continent, British Guiana, and Ireland - the three cases that Doyle examines - profoundly reshaped ideas of authority and attachment, at same time highlighting the hypocrisies of imperialist claims of benevolent modernisation. * Martin Thomas, University of Exeter, UK * About the Author Mark Doyle is Associate Professor of History at Middle Tennessee State University, USA. He is the author of Fighting the Devil for the Sake of God Protestants, Catholics and the Origins of Violence in Victorian Belfast (2009).
Author: Ziauddin Sardar
File Type: epub
What is mathematics, and why is it such a mystery to so many people? Mathematics is the greatest creation of human intelligence. It affects us all. We depend on it in our daily lives, and yet many of the tools of mathematics, such as geometry, algebra and trigonometry, are descended from ancient or non-Western civilizations.Introducing Mathematics traces the story of mathematics from the ancient world to modern times, describing the great discoveries and providing an accessible introduction to such topics as number-systems, geometry and algebra, the calculus, the theory of the infinite, statistical reasoning and chaos theory. It shows how the history of mathematics has seen progress and paradox go hand in hand - and how this is still happening today.
Author: Daniel S. Cutrara
File Type: pdf
From struggles over identity politics in the 1990s to current concerns about a clash of civilizations between Islam and Christianity, culture wars play a prominent role in the twenty-first century. Movies help to define and drive these conflicts by both reflecting and shaping cultural norms, as well as showing what violates those norms. In this pathfinding book, Daniel S. Cutrara employs queer theory, cultural studies, theological studies, and film studies to investigate how cinema represents and often denigrates religion and religious believersan issue that has received little attention in film studies, despite the fact that faith in its varied manifestations is at the heart of so many cultural conflicts today.Wicked Cinema examines films from the United States, Europe, and the Middle East, including Crimes and Misdemeanors, The Circle, Breaking the Waves, Closed Doors, Agnes of God, Priest, The Last Temptation of Christ, and Dogma. Central to all of the films is their protagonists struggles with sexual transgression and traditional belief systems within Christianity, Judaism, or Islama struggle, Cutrara argues, that positions believers as the Other and magnifies the abuses of religion while ignoring its positive aspects. Uncovering a hazardous web of ideological assumptions informed by patriarchy, the spiritflesh dichotomy, and heteronormativity, Cutrara demonstrates that ultimately these films emphasize the Otherness of the faithful through a variety of strategies commonly used to denigrate the queer, from erasing their existence, to using feminization to make them appear weak, to presenting them as dangerous fanatics.**
Author: H S Shivaprakash
File Type: epub
One of the only collections of Vachana poetry in translationa must read for all poetry lovers. Here I come, a ferryman without a body To the great flowing river. If you pay the price Your mind That grasps and lets go, I shall take you across Vachana poetry in Kannada literature attained its zenith in the twelfth century. Passionate, intensely personal, and ahead of their times, these free-verse poems speak eloquently of the futility of formal learning, the vanity of wealth and the evils of social divisions. The vachanas stress on the worship of Shiva, through love, labour and devotion, as the only worthwhile life-goal for the vachanakarathe vachana poet. This collection offers a selection of vachanas composed by a wide range of vachanakaras from different walks of life writing during that period. While some of these poets are well known even today, most have been forgotten. Translated fluidly and with great skill by H.S. Shivaprakash, I Keep Vigil of Rudra is not only an important addition to Vachana literature, but also a must read for lovers of poetry everywhere.
Author: David Koenig
File Type: pdf
What you are about to read is an unfinished book on the NYC hardcore and punk music scene between the years 1986-1993. I worked on this project from 2006 until I shut it down at the beginning of 2009. After many factors in my life, I had to kill it. I wanted to have an actual book for people to purchase. The reason I am releasing it in this form is because many people have contacted me to keep the project going. I also wanted to validate the people responses that they worked hard on typing out and sending to me. An enormous amount of work went into what you see here. Please be advised, it is truly an unfinished work and should be treated as such. I planned on finishing off each chapter, but there is plenty here to get an idea of what direction the finished project was headed in. It is not edited, formatted, spell checked, etc... What you see is what you get. For you to make a determination on it. I feel by reading what is here, there will be much discussion afterward amoung the readers. If there is not a persons name in front of the paragraph, its me talking or writing.Thanks for the memories,-David Koenig (aka Dave K.) November 2009 C.E.