Author: Walter Brueggemann File Type: epub In the pages of the Hebrew Bible, ancient Israel gave witness to its encounter with a profound and uncontrollable reality experienced through relationship. This book, drawn from the heart of foremost Old Testament theologian Walter Brueggemanns Theology of the Old Testament, distills a careers worth of insights into the core message of the Hebrew Bible. God is described there, Brueggemann observes, as engaging four partners - Israel, the nations, creation, and the human being - in the divine purpose. This volume presents Brueggemann at his most engaging, offering profound insights tailored especially for the beginning student of the Hebrew Bible.**
Author: George Steiner
File Type: pdf
George Steiner is one of the preeminent intellectuals of our time. The Washington Post has declared that no one else writing on literature can match him as polymath and polyglot, and few can equal the verve and eloquence of his writing, while the New York Times says of his works that the erudition is almost as extraordinary as the prose dense, knowing, allusive. Reading in many languages, celebrating the survival of high culture in the face of modern barbarisms, Steiner probes the ethics of language and literature with unparalleled grace and authority. A Long Saturday offers intimate insight into the questions that have absorbed him throughout his career. In a stimulating series of conversations, Steiner and journalist Laure Adler discuss a range of topics, including Steiners boyhood in Vienna and Paris, his education at the University of Chicago and Harvard, and his early years in academia. Books are a touchstone throughout, but Steiner and Adlers conversations also range over music, chess, psychoanalysis, the place of Israel in Jewish life, and beyond. Blending thoughts on subjects of broad interest in the humanitiesthe issue of honoring Richard Wagner and Martin Heidegger in spite of their politics, or Virginia Woolfs awareness of the novel as a multivocal form, for examplewith personal reflections on life and family, Steiner demonstrates why he is considered one of todays greatest minds. Revealing and exhilarating, A Long Saturday invites readers to pull up a chair and listen in on a conversation with a master.
Author: Alexandre Kojeve
File Type: epub
Alexandre Kojeve has been an often subterranean influence on twentiethcentury thought. With his profound interpretation of Hegel he became a key reference for such varied thinkers as Jean-Paul Sartre, Andre Breton, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Leo Strauss. He returned to prominence after the collapse of the Soviet Union, as the surprise inspiration for Francis Fukuyamas notorious thesis in The End of History.In The Notion of Authority, written in the 1940s in Nazi-occupied France, he uncovers the conceptual premises of four primary models of authority and examines the practical application of their derivative variations from the Enlightenment to Vichy France. This foundational text, here translated into English for the first time, is the missing piece in any discussion of sovereignty and political authority, ready to take its place alongside the work of Weber, Arendt, Schmitt, Agamben or Dumezil. The Notion of Authority is a short and sophisticated introduction to Kojeves philosophy of right, while in the context of his biography its significance resides in the fact it captures his puzzling intellectual interests at a time when he retired from the profession of philosophy and was about to become one of the pioneers of the Common Market and the idea of the European Union. In The Notion of Authority, written in the1940s in Nazi-occupied France, Alexandre Kojeve uncovers the conceptual premisesof four primary models of authority,examining the practical application of theirderivative variations from the Enlightenment to Vichy France.This foundational text, translated here intoEnglish for the first time, is the missing piece in any discussion of sovereignty and politicalauthority, worthy of a place alongside the work of Weber, Arendt, Schmitt, Agambenor Dumezil. The Notion of Authority is a short andsophisticated introduction to Kojevesphilosophy of right. It captures its authorsintellectual interests at a time when he wasretiring from the career of a professionalphilosopher and was about to become oneof the pioneers of the Common Market and the idea of the European Union.From the Hardcover edition.
Author: Katharine Sarah Moody
File Type: pdf
The theological turn in continental philosophy and the turn to Paul in political philosophy have occasioned a return to radical theology, a tradition whose philosophical heritage can be traced to the death of God announced in the work of Nietzsche and Hegel. John D. Caputos deconstructive theology and Slavoj Zizeks materialist theology are two radical theologies that explore what it might mean to pass through the death of God and to abandon this experience as specifically Christian. Radical Theology and Emerging Christianity demonstrates how these theologies are transforming everyday religious practices through an examination of the work of Peter Rollins and Kester Brewin, two figures at the radical margins of a contemporary expression of western religiosity called emerging Christianity. The author uses her analysis of all four figures to argue that deconstructive practices can enable religious communities to become part of a wider materialist collective in which the death of God continues to resonate. Pushing the methodological boundaries of philosophy of religion by examining religious practices as the site of philosophical signification, the book challenges scholars and practitioners alike to a new and more demanding dialogue between theory and performance.**
Author: Rosemary Dinnage
File Type: pdf
In the course of over thirty years of writing about psychology, child development, biography, and fiction, Rosemary Dinnage has encountered a variety of outstanding women, all of whom, in one way or another, felt powerfully alone. Here she brings together her reflections on some of the most memorable of them, including solitairies like the painter Gwen John and the philosopher Simone Weil muses to partners of genius like Clementine Churchill and Giuseppina Verdi unstoppable characters like the birth-control advocate Marie Stopes and the childrens novelist Enid Blyton literary survivors like Isak Dinesen and Rebecca West and, along the way, an assortment of aristocrats, lawbreakers, manic-depressives, transvestites, and storytellers. Some of these women knew isolation through their dedication to duty, and others through their immersion in writing, painting, or politics. Some juggled with fantasy worlds in which they could end up stranded. Others learned the fine art of survival, fighting illness, hard childhoods, or a hostile public. All of them, whether trying to construct a life or a work of artor bothsuggest ways in which women can choose, learn, laugh, invent, dare, and of course wholeheartedly love or hate. These women make up a remarkable gallery of the famous, the infamous, the once famous, and the never famous. In telling their stories, Rosemary Dinnage considers what aloneness may really be, how it begins, how it feels, and, above all, how this crucial experience can teach and illuminate as well as hurt. **
Author: Gloria Fisk
File Type: pdf
When Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006, he was honored as a builder of bridges across a dangerous chasm. By rendering his Turkish characters and settings familiar where they would otherwise seem troublingly foreign, and by speaking freely against his authoritarian state, he demonstrated a variety of literary greatness that testified also to the good literature can do in the world. Gloria Fisk challenges this standard for canonization as world literature by showing how poorly it applies to Pamuk. Reading the Turkish novelist as a case study in the ways Western readers expand their reach, Fisk traces the terms of his engagement with a literary market dominated by the tastes of its Anglophone publics, who received him as a balm for their anxieties about Islamic terrorism and the stratifications of global capitalism. Fisk reads Pamuks post-911 novels as they circulated through this audience, as rich in cultural capital as it is far-flung, in the American English that is global capitals lingua franca. She launches a polemic against Anglophone readers instrumental use of literature as a source of crosscultural understanding, contending that this pervasive way of reading across all manner of borders limits the globality it announces, because it serves the interests of the Western cultural and educational institutions that produce it. Orhan Pamuk and the Good of World Literature proposes a new way to think about the uneven processes of translation, circulation, and judgment that carry contemporary literature to its readers, wherever they live. **Review Gloria Fisk has written an important and challenging book. Using the work and career of Orhan Pamuk, she has set out to understand the complex and not always benign forces that go into the making of a worldwide literary superstar. Not for or against Pamuk, this book is with him in his attempt to enter the gates of the Western canon without at the same time losing his soul. (Keith Gessen, cofounding editor of n + 1) Taking Orhan Pamuk as her central case study, Gloria Fisk probes the uses and abuses of world authors in American literary studies, as foreign writers become enlisted for domestic agendas. Her nuanced account will provoke self-reflection and debate among postcolonialists, comparatists, and world literary scholars alike. (David Damrosch, Harvard University) Orhan Pamuk and the Good of World Literature unrelentingly probes what it means to think of the literary as a vehicle of political good, to assume that reading a novel about far-off places promotes empathy, and to valorize select writers as translators of alien worlds, even as their works circulate only in English in the West. Showing what it means to read a writer like Orhan Pamuk as a bridge between East and West, Fisk highlights the risks of transporting a U.S. multicultural logic to the globe, insisting that the Anglo-American academy is complicit in the very hegemony it seeks to critique. (Yogita Goyal, University of California, Los Angeles) In this forcefully argued book, Gloria Fisk defends Orhan Pamukand other writers of world literaturefrom nationalists who brand them as traitors and academics who cling to reading in the original. It is a book that tackles the question of literature in our time. (Martin Puchner, Harvard University) About the Author Gloria Fisk is an associate professor at Queens College, CUNY. Her work has been published in New Literary History, n+1, and The American Reader, among other places.
Author: Martha D. Escobar
File Type: pdf
Today the United States leads the world in incarceration rates. The country increasingly relies on the prison system as a fix for the regulation of societal issues. Captivity Beyond Prisons is the first full-length book to explicitly link prisons and incarceration to the criminalization of Latina (im)migrants. Starting in the 1990s, the United States saw tremendous expansion in the number of imprisoned (im)migrants, specifically Latinasos. Consequently, there was also an increase in the number of deportations. In addition to regulating society, prisons also serve as a reproductive control strategy, both in preventing female inmates from having children and by separating them from their families. With an eye to racialized and gendered technologies of power, Escobar argues that incarcerated Latinas are especially depicted as socially irrecuperable because they are not considered useful within the neoliberal labor market. This perception impacts how they are criminalized, which is not limited to incarceration but also extends to and affects Latina (im)migrants everyday lives. Escobar also explores the relationship between the immigrant rights movement and the prison abolition movement, scrutinizing a variety of social institutions working on solutions to social problems that lead to imprisonment. Accessible to both academics and those in the justice and social service sectors, Escobars book pushes readers to consider how, even in radical spaces, unequal power relations can be reproduced by the very entities that attempt to undo them. **
Author: Robert Oerter
File Type: pdf
There are two scientific theories that, taken together, explain the entire universe. The first, which describes the force of gravity, is widely known Einsteins General Theory of Relativity. But the theory that explains everything elsethe Standard Model of Elementary Particlesis virtually unknown among the general public.In The Theory of Almost Everything, Robert Oerter shows how what were once thought to be separate forces of nature were combined into a single theory by some of the most brilliant minds of the twentieth century. Rich with accessible analogies and lucid prose, The Theory of Almost Everything celebrates a heretofore unsung achievement in human knowledgeand reveals the sublime structure that underlies the world as we know it.From Publishers WeeklyThe Standard Model of Elementary Particles (the Standard Model to those in the know) can explain nearly everything from the workings of the sun to the structure of, say, a garbage can, but it cant explain gravity, which is why physicists still have jobs. Oerter, in this highly accessible volume, explains the Standard Model to the everyman, using literary references and easy-to-follow analogies to make clear mind-bending physics principles. Subatomic particles got you down? Think about a BB gun and a Nerf ball. String theory? Why, its similar to a guitar, of course. Oerter concedes the Theory of Almost Everything has major deficiencies, especially in light of the recently discovered dark matter and dark energy, and physicists are closer than ever to discovering the Theory of Everything that will supplant the Standard Model, but this relentlessly informative and digestible primer on just about everything should appease armchair scientists in the meantime. Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. ReviewThis highly accessible volume explains the Standard Model to the everyman, using literary references and easy-to-follow analogies to make clear mind-bending physics principles. Publishers WeeklyAccessible and engagingThis book is for anyone interested in modern physics and ultimate answers about the universe. Science News