Author: Rita M. Gross File Type: pdf Rita Gross and Rosemary Radford Ruether have long been known for their feminist contributions to Buddhism and Christianity, respectively. In this book, they talk candidly about what these traditions mean to them in both their liberating as well as problematic aspects. Throughout the book, their life stories provide the rich soil, perhaps even the rationale, for their theological and spiritual development. Despite the marked differences in their life histories and their respective religious faiths, Gross and Radford Ruether achieve surprising unanimity on the paramount issue what engaged Buddhism and enlightened Christianity can offer in the struggle to create a new future for the planet. **

Author: Steven Pressfield File Type: epub In the Depression year of 1931, on the golf links at Krewe Island off Savannahs windswept shore, two legends of the game, Bobby Jones and Walter Hagen, meet for a mesmerizing thirty-six-hole showdown. Another golfer will also compete--a troubled local war hero, once a champion, who comes with his mentor and caddie, the mysterious Bagger Vance. Sage and charismatic, it is Vance who will ultimately guide the match, for he holds the secret of the Authentic Swing. And he alone can show his protege the way back to glory. **

Author: David Rohl File Type: epub The Lords of Avaris is one mans journey in search of the legendary origins of the Western World. Our story begins in a small rock-cut tomb below the desolate ruin-mound of Jericho in the Jordan Valley. This is the start of an epic journey of discovery, in the Homeric mould, which ranges across the ancient lands and archaeological sites of the Mediterranean. From Joshuas Jericho to Romulus Rome, the true chronicle of our pre-Christian past is uncovered revealing an extraordinary historical picture, previously unimagined by scholars. The epic legends of the West, which permeate the writings of Greece and Rome, appear to have been based on the exploits of genuine historical figures and actual events. There really was an Heroic Age of brazen-clad warriors, the last of which fought before the walls of Troy, just as described in Homers Iliad. At the beginning of the Middle Bronze Age - two thousand years before the assassination of Julius Caesar in the Roman Senate - a new people appeared on the stage of history to join the great civilisations of Mesopotamia and Egypt. These Indo-European-speaking tribes were chariot-riding warriors from the northern mountains and plains. They became the Hittites, the Aryan kings of Mitanni, the Vedic heroes of the Indus, and the founders of the later empires of Greece, Persia and Rome. They had many legendary names - the Divine Pelasgians of Greece, the Luwians of Troy and western Anatolia, the Rephaim and Anakim of the Bible, and the Hyksos rulers of Avaris who suppressed Egypt for generations. Their heroes and heroines are legionary Inachus, mythical king of Argos in the Peloponnese his daughter the beautiful Princess Io who married an Egyptian pharaoh Danaus, the Hyksos ruler who, fleeing from Egypt to Greece, founded the Mycenaean dynasty which culminated in Agamemnons ill-fated Trojan War Cadmus, the bringer of writing to the West Minos, the Cretan high-king of Knossos who built the infamous Labyrinth Mopsus, warrior and sage who led a vast Greek, Philistine and Anatolian army into the Levant in a daring attempt to seize Egypt in the time of Ramesses III. All these, and more, are the stuff of legend - but The Lords of Avaris reveals these Classical heroes as flesh-and-blood characters from our ancestral past.

Author: Perry Anderson File Type: pdf The rise of the modern absolutist monarchies in Europe constitutes in many ways the birth of the modern historical epoch.Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, the companion volume to Perry AndersonsLineages of the Absolutist State, is a sustained exercise in historical sociology to root the development of absolutism in the diverse routes taken from the slave-based societies of Ancient Greece and Rome to fully-fledged feudalism. In the course of this study Anderson vindicates and the refines the explanatory power of a Marxist conception of history, whilst casting a fascinating light on Greece, Rome, the Germanic invasions, nomadic society, and the different patterns of the evolution of feudalism in Northern, Mediterranean, Eastern and Western Europe.ReviewA complex, beautifully interwoven and controlled account of Europe from the ancient Greeks to modern absolutist monarchies ... exhilarating. - Moses Finley, Guardian Quite splendid... A powerful and lucid intelligence. - Eric Hobsbawm, New Statesman The breath-taking range of conception and architectural skill with which it has been executed make this work a formidable intellectual experience. - Keith Thomas, New York Review of Books A most stimulating introduction to the understanding of modern capitalist society ... It is the breadth and the sweep of Andersons interpretation which impresses, It is a synthesis which gives a convincing explanation of the development of European feudalism, whether that of East or West, Baltic or Mediterranean. - Rodney Hilton About the AuthorPerry Anderson teaches history at UCLA and is an editor of New Left Review. His other books include Lineages of the Absolutist State (1974), Considerations on Western Marxism (1976), Arguments Within English Marxism (1980), In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (1983), and English Questions (1992).