Author: Mark Plaiss A monastery is not just for monks. Laypeople enjoy visiting monasteries and learning from the women and men who live there. The silence of the monastery is a retreat from the clatter and bluster of city and suburb. In No End to the Search Mark Plaiss, married with a wife, children, and grandchildren, writes of his visits to various monasteries while striving to delve into the experience and meaning of monasticism. What is behind that wall? What is the appeal of monastic life? To what degree can such a life be lived by persons who are married, and why would they wish to do so? This book explores the relationship between the vowed life of monks and the life of laypersons who are unable to live such vows but desire to share just a sliver of it.
Author: John Ragosta
For over one hundred years, Thomas Jefferson and his Statute for Establishing Religious Freedom have stood at the center of our understanding of religious liberty and the First Amendment. Jeffersons expansive visionincluding his insistence that political freedom and free thought would be at risk if we did not keep government out of the church and church out of governmentenjoyed a near consensus of support at the Supreme Court and among historians, until Justice William Rehnquist called reliance on Jefferson demonstrably incorrect. Since then, Rehnquists call has been taken up by a bevy of jurists and academics anxious to encourage renewed government involvement with religion. In Religious Freedom: Jeffersons Legacy, Americas Creed, the historian and lawyer John Ragosta offers a vigorous defense of Jeffersons advocacy for a strict separation of church and state. Beginning with a close look at Jeffersons own religious evolution, Ragosta shows that deep religious beliefs were at the heart of Jeffersons views on religious freedom. Basing his analysis on that Jeffersonian vision, Ragosta redefines our understanding of how and why the First Amendment was adopted. He shows how the amendments focus on maintaining the authority of states to regulate religious freedom demonstrates that a very strict restriction on federal action was intended. Ultimately revealing that the great sage demanded a firm separation of church and state but never sought a wholly secular public square, Ragosta provides a new perspective on Jefferson, the First Amendment, and religious liberty within the United States.
Author: Edward D. Mansfield, Richard Sisson
Over the course of the last century, political scientists have been moved by two principal purposes. First, they have sought to understand and explain political phenomena in a way that is both theoretically and empirically grounded. Second, they have analyzed matters of enduring public interest, whether in terms of public policy and political action, fidelity between principle and practice in the organization and conduct of government, or the conditions of freedom, whether of citizens or of states. Many of the central advances made in the field have been prompted by a desire to improve both the quality and our understanding of political life. Nowhere is this tendency more apparent than in research on American politics, a field in which concerns for the public interest have stimulated various important insights. This volume systematically analyzes the major developments within the broad field of American politics over the past three decades. Each chapter is composed of a core paper that addresses the major puzzles, conversations, and debates that have attended major areas of concern and inquiry within the discipline. These papers examine and evaluate the intellectual evolution and natural history of major areas of political inquiry and chart particularly promising trajectories, puzzles, and concerns for future work. Each core paper is accompanied by a set of shorter commentaries that engage the issues it takes up, thus contributing to an ongoing and lively dialogue among key figures in the field. Acompanion volumeexamines the major developments within the fields of comparative politics and international relations.
Author: By Deborah A. Green
In The Aroma of Righteousness, Deborah Green explores images of perfume and incense in late Roman and early Byzantine Jewish literature. Using literary methods to illuminate the rabbinic literature, Green demonstrates the ways in which the rabbis reading of biblical texts and their intimate experience with aromatics build and deepen their interpretations. The study uncovers the cultural associations that are evoked by perfume and incense in both the Hebrew Bible and midrashic texts and seeks to understand the cultural, theological, and experiential motivations and impulses that lie behind these interpretations. Green accomplishes this by examining the relationship between the textual traditions of the Hebrew Bible and Midrash, the surviving evidence from the material culture of Palestine in the late Roman and early Byzantine periods, and cultural evidence as described by the rabbis and other Roman authors.
Author: Benjamin C. Pykles , Foreword by Robert L. Schuyler
This detailed study of the excavation and restoration of the city of Nauvoo, Illinois, reveals the roots of historical archaeology. In the late 1960s, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints sponsored an archaeology program to authentically restore the city of Nauvoo, which was founded along the Mississippi River in the 1840s by the Mormons as they moved west. Non-Mormon scholars were also interested in Nauvoo because it was representative of several western frontier towns in this era. As the archaeology and restoration of Nauvoo progressed, however, conflicts arose, particularly regarding control of the site and its interpretation for the public. The field of historical archaeology was just coming into its own during this period, with myriad perspectives and doctrines being developed and tested. The Nauvoo site was one of the places where the discipline was forged. This well-researched account weaves together multiple viewpoints in examining the many contentious issues surrounding the archaeology and restoration of the city of Nauvoo, Illinois, providing an illuminating picture of the early days of professional historical archaeology.
Author: Stanley Walens
Professor Walens shows that the Kwakiutl visualize the world as a place of mouths and stomachs, of eaters and eaten. His analyses of the social rituals of meals, native ideas of the ethology of predation, a key Kwakiutl myth, and the Hamatsa dance, the most dramatic of their ceremonials, demonstrate the ways in which oral, assimilative metaphors encapsulate Kwakiutl ideas of man's role in the cosmos.Originally published in 1982.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Author: Nancy Haught
The Bible is laced with stories in which strangers behave better than believers. What do these encounters with otherspeople from different cultures, religions, genders, economic and social classesteach us about our own spiritual values, about the faith and God behind them? In Sacred Strangers, Nancy Haught leads readers through these stories, line by line, offering insight to open hearts to sacred strangers at a time when personal encounters can make us or break usas people, Americans, and citizens of the world.
Author: Rudolf Peierls
Here is the intensely personal and often humorous autobiography of one of the most distinguished theoretical physicists of his generation, Sir Rudolf Peierls. Born in Germany in 1907, Peierls was indeed a bird of passage, whose career of fifty-five years took him to leading centers of physics--including Munich, Leipzig, Zurich, Copenhagen, Cambridge, Manchester, Oxford, and J. Robert Oppenheimer's Los Alamos. Peierls was a major participant in the revolutionary development of quantum mechanics in the 1920s and 1930s, working with some of the pioneers and, as he puts it, some of the great characters in this field.Originally published in 1988.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Author: Andrew J. Kirkendall
Andrew J. Kirkendall provides a transnational, archives-based study of Brazilian Paulo Freire (1921-1997), a major Third World (as it was called in that era--now known as the developing world or even the global South) intellectual and shaper of international literacy education during the Cold War. The study serves as both the first-ever political biography of the man and an examination of the politics of literacy in Latin America and beyond in the Cold War period. Throughout the twentieth-century, when governments of many political stripes embraced literacy education as a crucial element of efforts to fuel economic growth, political inclusion, and international development, Freire pioneered a highly influential, internationally adopted consciousness raising approach featuring mass literacy education campaigns that sought to engage, in a political fashion, the illiterate. Freires often controversial campaigns--which aroused the suspicion of the U.S. government and lead to his exile from Brazil for sixteen years--played transformative roles in many places, helping to build, overthrow, and reform governments from Brazil and Chile to Nicaragua and newly independent Portuguese African countries. His pedogogical ideas were influential in the United States, as well.