Iris Murdoch's philosophy has long attracted readers searching for a morally serious yet humane perspective on human life. Her eloquent call for "a theology which can continue without God" has been especially attractive to those who find that they can live neither with religion nor without it. By developing a form of thinking that is neither exclusively secular nor traditionally religious, Murdoch sought to recapture the existential or spiritual import of philosophy. Long before the current wave of interest in spiritual exercises, she approached philosophy not only as an academic discourse, but as a practice whose aim is the transformation of perception and consciousness. As she put it, a moral philosophy should be capable of being "inhabited"; that is, it should be "a philosophy one could live by."
In A Philosophy to Live By, Maria Antonaccio argues that Murdoch's thought embodies an ascetic model of philosophy for contemporary life. Extending and complementing the argument of her earlier monograph, Picturing the Human: The Moral Thought of Iris Murdoch, this new work establishes Murdoch's continuing relevance by engaging her thought with a variety of contemporary thinkers and debates in ethics from a perspective informed by Murdoch's philosophy as a whole. Among the prominent philosophers engaged here are Charles Taylor, Martha Nussbaum, Stephen Mulhall, John Rawls, Pierre Hadot, and Michel Foucault, and theologians such as Stanley Hauerwas, David Tracy, William Schweiker, and others. These engagements represent a sustained effort to think with Murdoch, yet also beyond her, by enlisting the resources of her thought to explore wider debates at the intersections of moral philosophy, religion, art, and politics, and in doing so, to illuminate the distinctive patterns and tropes of her philosophical style.

Ethicists and psychologists have become increasingly interested in the development of virtue in recent years, approaching the topic from the perspectives of virtue ethics and developmental psychology respectively. Such interest in virtue development has spread beyond academia, as teachers and parents have increasingly striven to cultivate virtue as part of education and child-rearing. Looking at these parallel trends in the study and practice of virtue development, the essays in this volume explore such questions as: How can philosophical work on virtue development inform psychological work on it, and vice versa? How should we understand virtue as a dimension of human personality? What is the developmental foundation of virtue? What are the evolutionary aspects of virtue and its development? How is virtue fostered? How is virtue exemplified in behavior and action? How is our conception of virtue influenced by context and by developmental and social experiences? What are the tensions, impediments and prospects for an integrative field of virtue study? Rather than centering on each discipline, the essays in this volume are orgnaized around themes and engage each other in a broader dialogue. The volume begins with an introductory essay from the editors that explains the full range of philosophical and empirical issues that have surrounded the notion of virtue in recent years.

The Oxford Handbook of John Donne presents scholars with the history of Donne studies and provides tools to orient scholarship in this field in the twenty-first century and beyond. Though profoundly historical in its orientation, the Handbook is not a summary of existing knowledge but a resource that reveals patterns of literary and historical attention and the new directions that these patterns enable or obstruct.
Part I -- Research resources in Donne Studies and why they they matter -- emphasizes the heuristic and practical orientation of the Handbook, examining prevailing assumptions and reviewing the specialized scholarly tools available. This section provides a brief evaluation and description of the scholarly strengths, shortcomings, and significance of each resource, focusing on a balanced evaluation of the opportunities and the hazards each offers.
Part II -- Donne's genres -- begins with an introduction that explores the significance and differentiation of the numerous genres in which Donne wrote, including discussion of the problems posed by his overlapping and bending of genres. Essays trace the conventions and histories of the genres concered and study the ways in which Donne's works confirm how and why his "fresh invention" illustrates his responses to the literary and non-literary contexts of their composition.
Part III -- Biographical and historical contexts -- creates perspective on what is known about Donne's life; shows how his life and writings epitomized and affected important controversial issues of his day; and brings to bear on Donne studies some of the most stimulating and creative ideas developed in recent decades by historians of early modern England.
Part IV -- Problems of literary interpretation that have been traditionally and generally important in Donne Studies -- introduces students and researchers to major critical debates affecting the reception of Donne from the 17th through to the 21st centuries.

The Enlightenment saw a critical engagement with the ancient idea that music carries certain powers - it heals and pacifies, civilizes and educates. Yet this interest in musical utility seems to conflict with larger notions of aesthetic autonomy that emerged at the same time. In Enlightenment Orpheus, Vanessa Agnew examines this apparent conflict, and provocatively questions the notion of an aesthetic-philosophical break between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Agnew persuasively connects the English traveler and music scholar Charles Burney with the ancient myth of Orpheus. She uses Burney as a guide through wide-ranging discussions of eighteenth-century musical travel, views on music's curative powers, interest in non-European music, and concerns about cultural identity. Arguing that what people said about music was central to some of the great Enlightenment debates surrounding such issues as human agency, cultural difference, and national identity, Agnew adds a new dimension to postcolonial studies, which has typically emphasized the literary and visual at the expense of the aural. She also demonstrates that these discussions must be viewed in context at the era's broad and well-entrenched transnational network, and emphasizes the importance of travel literature in generating knowledge at the time. A new and radically interdisciplinary approach to the question of the power of music - its aesthetic and historical interpretations and political uses - Enlightenment Orpheus will appeal to students and scholars in historical musicology, ethnomusicology, German studies, eighteenth-century history, and comparative studies.

Featuring extensive revisions to the text as well as a new introduction and epilogue--bringing the book completely up to date on the tumultuous politics of the previous decade and the long-term implications of the Soviet collapse--this compact, original, and engaging book offers the definitive account of one of the great historical events of the last fifty years.
Combining historical and geopolitical analysis with an absorbing narrative, Kotkin draws upon extensive research, including memoirs by dozens of insiders and senior figures, to illuminate the factors that led to the demise of Communism and the USSR. The new edition puts the collapse in the context of the global economic and political changes from the 1970s to the present day. Kotkin creates a compelling profile of post Soviet Russia and he reminds us, with chilling immediacy, of what could not have been predicted--that the world's largest police state, with several million troops, a doomsday arsenal, and an appalling record of violence, would liquidate itself with barely a whimper. Throughout the book, Kotkin also paints vivid portraits of key personalities. Using recently released archive materials, for example, he offers a fascinating picture of Gorbachev, describing this virtuoso tactician and resolutely committed reformer as "flabbergasted by the fact that his socialist renewal was leading to the system's liquidation"--and more or less going along with it.
At once authoritative and provocative, Armageddon Averted illuminates the collapse of the Soviet Union, revealing how "principled restraint and scheming self-interest brought a deadly system to meek dissolution."
Acclaim for the First Edition:
"The clearest picture we have to date of the post-Soviet landscape."
--The New Yorker
"A triumph of the art of contemporary history. In fewer than 200 pagesKotkin elucidates the implosion of the Soviet empire--the most important and startling series of international events of the past fifty years--and clearly spells out why, thanks almost entirely to the 'principal restraint' of the Soviet leadership, that collapse didn't result in a cataclysmic war, as all experts had long forecasted."
-The Atlantic Monthly
"Concise and persuasive The mystery, for Kotkin, is not so much why the Soviet Union collapsed as why it did so with so little collateral damage."
--The New York Review of Books

Dr. Ronald D. Ramsey draws on his experiences as an organization development consultant, his knowledge of the behavioral sciences and theological studies, and his own unforgiveness challenges to lead readers on a forgiveness journey in this book. The book is composed of short readings that draw upon Dr. Ramsey's work as a counselor and chaplain; worksheets that engage the reader's experiences, thoughts and emotions; chapter summaries; and devotionals based on Scripture. Dr. Ramsey explores how to recover from experiencing interpersonal offenses and transgressions to reach emotional peace. Taking an interactive and practical approach, he reveals how to: - appreciate the importance of forgiveness; - acknowledge the hurt in your life from unforgiveness; - make a commitment to try to forgive; - transition to a Godly perspective; - take steps to sustain emotional freedom. The most difficult time to love others is when they have transgressed against us in some way. By learning a Christ-centered approach to forgiving others, we can move forward toward emotional peace. Take a journey from unforgiveness to emotional peace with the insights and biblical wisdom in Forty Days to Forgiveness.

In Bewitching Russian Opera: The Tsarina from State to Stage, Inna Naroditskaya investigates the musical lives of four female monarchs who ruled Russia for most of the eighteenth century - Catherine I, Anna, Elizabeth, and Catherine the Great. Engaging with ethnomusicological, historical, and philological approaches, her study traces the tsarinas' deeply invested interest in musical drama, as each built theaters, established drama schools, commissioned operas and ballets, and themselves wrote and produced musical plays. Naroditskaya examines the creative output of the tsarinas across the contexts in which they worked and lived, revealing significant connections between their personal creative aspirations and contemporary musical-theatrical practices, and the political and state affairs conducted during their reigns. Bewitching Russian Opera ultimately demonstrates that the theater served as an experimental space for these imperial women, in which they rehearsed, probed, and formulated gender and class roles, and enacted on the musical stage political ambitions and international conquests which they would later carry out on the world stage itself.
Beginning with the eighteenth-century imperial court, Naroditskaya illustrates the increased theatricality of the court and the popularity of musical theater among nobles, which occurred alongside an appropriation of folk and court ceremonies into the theater. Through contemporary performance theory, she demonstrates how the opportunity for role-playing and costume-changing in performative spaces allowed individuals to cross otherwise rigid boundaries of class and gender. A close look at a series of operas and musical theater productions - from Catherine the Great's fairy tale operas to Tchaikovsky's Pique Dame - illuminates the transition of these royal women from powerful political and cultural figures during their own reigns, to a marginalized and unreal Other under the patriarchal dominance of the subsequent period. These tsarinas successfully fostered the concept of a modern nation and collective national identity, only to then have their power and influence undone in Russian cultural consciousness through the fairy-tales operas of the 19th century that positioned tsarinas as "magical" and dangerous figures rightfully displaced and conquered--by triumphant heroes on the stage, and by the new patriarchal rulers in the state.

Ndangwa Noyoo was Head of the Department of Social Development at UCT from 2018-2020.

This book exposes corruption and malpractices at UCT, which the author witnessed during his tenure as HoD there, before he was ousted by a group of lecturers in his department. The former had been aided and abetted by senior administrators at the faculty level.

It is a personal account that is evidence-based, as the claims the author makes in the book are documented in various reports, communications and eye-witness accounts that span a period of five and a half years.

This is the first of Newman's Anglican works to be presented in a fully annotated edition. Newman published the first two editions in 1836 and 1837 at the height of his career within the Oxford Movement. The third edition was published in 1877, when Newman had been a Roman Catholic for thiry-two years. It represents a dialogue between the Evangelical Anglican, Anglo-Catholic, and Roman Catholic Newman. As such it is a critical work in understanding Newman's development, as well as the impact of his thought on the larger Christian Church in his century and even in this one as it comes to a close. The text of this edition is based on the edition of 1889 (with obvious errors and misprints silently corrected), the edition to be seen through the press by Newman before his death in 1890; its pagination is preserved in the margin alongside the present text to facilitate reference to the uniform edition of the collected works. The text is supplemented by an introduction and textual appendix which lists all the variant readings between the editions of 1836, 1837, 1877 and the final edition.

By 1700 London was the largest city in the world, with over 500,000 inhabitants. Very weakly policed, its streets saw regular outbreaks of rioting by a mob easily stirred by economic grievances, politics or religion. If the mob vented its anger more often on property than people, eighteenth-century Londoners frequently came to blows over personal disputes in a society where men and women were quick to defend their honour. Slanging matches easily turned to fisticuffs and slights on honour were avenged in duels. In this world, where the detection and prosecution of crime was the part of the business of the citizen, punishment, whether by the pillory, whipping at a cart's tail or hanging at Tyburn, was public and endorsed by crowds. The Mob draws a fascinating portrait of the public life of the modern world's first great city.

Discover a wide range of fascinating and bizarre tales from Wilmington and the surrounding region of North Carolina.

Explore the history of brewing and beer culture in Louisville, Kentucky.

This is a sequel to Richard Viladesau's well-received study, The Beauty of the Cross: The Passion of Christ in Theology and the Arts from the Catacombs to the Eve of the Renaissance. It continues his project of presenting theological history by using art as both an independent religious or theological "text" and as a means of understanding the cultural context for academic theology. Viladesau argues that art and symbolism function as alternative strands of theological expression sometimes parallel to, sometimes interwoven with, and sometimes in tension with formal theological reflection on the meaning of crucifixion and its role in salvation history.
This book examines the two great revolutionary movements that gave birth to the modern West: the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation. This period was eventful for both theology and art, and thus particularly fruitful for Viladesau's project.
Using individual works of art, over sixty of which are reproduced in this book, to epitomize particular artistic and theological models, he explores the contours of each paradigm through the works of representative theologians as well as liturgical, poetic, artistic, and musical sources. To name a few examples, the theologies of Savonarola, Luther, Calvin, and the Council of Trent, are examined in correlation to the new situation of art in the era of Fra Angelico, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Durer, Cranach, and the Mannerists.
In this book, Viladesau continues to deepen our understanding of the foremost symbol of Christianity.

The Vietnam War remains a topic of extraordinary interest, especially in light of the invasion of Iraq. In The Vietnam War, Mark Lawrence offers readers a superb short account of this key moment in U.S. as well as world history, based on the latest European and American research and on newly opened archives in China, Russia, and Vietnam. While focusing on the American involvement from 1965 to 1975, Lawrence offers an unprecedentedly complete picture of all sides of the war, drawing on now available communist records to capture the complicated brew of motivations that drove the other side. Moreover, the book reaches back well before American forces set foot in Vietnam, describing for instance how French colonialism sparked the 1945 Vietnamese revolution, and revealing how the Cold War concerns of the 1950s warped Washington's perception of Vietnam, leading the United States to back the French and eventually become involved on the ground itself. Of course, the heart of the book is the "American war," ranging from the overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem to the impact of the Tet Offensive on the political situation in the US, Johnson's withdrawal from the 1968 presidential race, Nixon's expansion of the war into Cambodia and Laos, and the final peace agreement of 1973, which ended American military involvement. Finally, the book examines the aftermath of the war, from the momentous liberalization-"Doi Moi"-in Vietnam that began in 1986, to the enduring legacy of the war in American books, films, and political debate. A quick and reliable primer on an intensely relevant topic, this well researched and engaging volume offers an invaluable overview of the Vietnam War.

In Leaves from the Garden of Eden, Howard Schwartz, a three-time winner of the National Jewish Book Award, has gathered together one hundred of the most astonishing and luminous stories from Jewish folk tradition.
Just as Schwartz's award-winning book Tree of Souls: The Mythology of Judaism collected the essential myths of Jewish tradition, Leaves from the Garden of Eden collects one hundred essential Jewish tales. As imaginative as the Arabian Nights, these stories invoke enchanted worlds, demonic realms, and mystical experiences. The four most popular types of Jewish tales are gathered here--fairy tales, folktales, supernatural tales, and mystical tales--taking readers on heavenly journeys, lifelong quests, and descents to the underworld. King David is still alive in the City of Luz, which the Angel of Death cannot enter, and somewhere deep in the forest a mysterious cottage contains the candle of your soul. In these stories, a bride who is not careful may end up marrying a demon, while the charm sewn into a dress may drive a pious woman to lascivious behavior. There is a dybbuk lurking in a well, a book that comes to life, and a world where Lilith, the Queen of Demons, seduces the unsuspecting. Here too are Jewish versions of many of the best-known tales, including "Cinderella," "Snow White," and "Rapunzel." Schwartz's retelling of one of these stories, "The Finger," inspired Tim Burton's film Corpse Bride.
With its broad selection from written and oral sources, Leaves from the Garden of Eden is a landmark collection, representing the full range of Jewish folklore, from the Talmud to the present. It is a must-read for everyone who loves fiction and an ideal holiday gift.

The role of chance changed in the nineteenth century, and American literature changed with it. Long dismissed as a nominal concept, chance was increasingly treated as a natural force to be managed but never mastered. New theories of chance sparked religious and philosophical controversies while revolutionizing the sciences as probabilistic methods spread from mathematics, economics, and sociology to physics and evolutionary biology. Chance also became more visible in everyday life as Americans struggled to control its power through weather forecasting, insurance, game theory, statistics, military science, and financial strategy. Uncertain Chances shows how the rise of chance shaped the way nineteenth-century American writers faced questions of doubt and belief. Poe in his detective fiction critiques probabilistic methods. Melville in Moby-Dick and beyond struggles to vindicate moral action under conditions of chance. Douglass and other African American authors fight against statistical racism. Thoreau learns to appreciate the play between nature's randomness and order. Dickinson works faithfully to render poetically the affective experience of chance-surprise. These and other nineteenth-century writers dramatize the inescapable dangers and wonderful possibilities of chance. Their writings even help to navigate extremes that remain with us today-fundamentalism and relativism, determinism and chaos, terrorism and risk-management, the rational confidence of the Enlightenment and the debilitating doubts of modernity.

Combining vivid ethnographic storytelling and incisive theoretical analysis, New Monasticism and the Transformation of American Evangelicalism introduces readers to the fascinating and unexplored terrain of neo-monastic evangelicalism. Often located in disadvantaged urban neighborhoods, new monastic communities pursue religiously inspired visions of racial, social, and economic justice-alongside personal spiritual transformation-through diverse and creative expressions of radical community For most of the last century, popular and scholarly common-sense has equated American evangelicalism with across-the-board social, economic, and political conservatism. However, if a growing chorus of evangelical leaders, media pundits, and religious scholars is to be believed, the era of uncontested evangelical conservatism is on the brink of collapse-if it hasn't collapsed already. Wes Markofski has immersed himself in the paradoxical world of evangelical neo-monasticism, focusing on the Urban Monastery-an influential neo-monastic community located in a gritty, racially diverse neighborhood in a major Midwestern American city. The resulting account of the way in which the movement is transforming American evangelicalism challenges entrenched stereotypes and calls attention to the dynamic diversity of religious and political points of view which vie for supremacy in the American evangelical subculture. New Monasticism and the Transformation of American Evangelicalism is the first sociological analysis of new monastic evangelicalism and the first major work to theorize the growing theological and political diversity within twenty-first-century American evangelicalism.

Evangelicals are increasingly turning their attention toward issues such as the environment, international human rights, economic development, racial reconciliation, and urban renewal. This marks an expansion of the social agenda advanced by the Religious Right over the past few decades. For outsiders to evangelical culture, this trend complicates simplistic stereotypes. For insiders, it brings contention over what "true" evangelicalism means today. The New Evangelical Social Engagement brings together an impressive interdisciplinary team of scholars to map this new religious terrain and spell out its significance. The volume's introduction describes the broad outlines of this "new evangelicalism." The editors identify its key elements, trace its historical lineage, account for the recent changes taking place within evangelicalism, and highlight the implications of these changes for politics, civic engagement, and American religion. Part One of the book discusses important groups and trends: emerging evangelicals, the New Monastics, an emphasis on social justice, Catholic influences, gender dynamics and the desire to rehabilitate the evangelical identity, and evangelical attitudes toward the new social agenda. Part Two focuses on specific issues: the environment, racial reconciliation, abortion, international human rights, and global poverty. Part Three contains reflections on the new evangelical social engagement by three leading scholars in the fields of American religious history, sociology of religion, and Christian ethics.

The Greek Wars treats of the whole course of Persian relations with the Greeks from the coming of Cyrus in the 540s down to Alexander the Great's defeat of Darius III in 331 BC. Cawkwell discusses from a Persian perspective major questions such as why Xerxes' invasion of Greece failed, and how important a part the Great King played in Greek affairs in the fourth century. Cawkwell's views are at many points original: in particular, his explanation of how and why the Persian invasion of Greece failed challenges the prevailing orthodoxy, as does his view of the importance of Persia in Greek affairs for the two decades after the King's Peace. Persia, he concludes, was destroyed by Macedonian military might but moral decline had no part in it; the Macedonians who had subjected Greece were too good an army, but their victory was not easy.

Although puritans in 17th-century New England lived alongside both Native Americans and Africans, the white New Englanders imagined their neighbors as something culturally and intellectually distinct from themselves. Legally and practically, they saw people of color as simultaneously human and less than human, things to be owned. Yet all of these people remained New Englanders, regardless of the color of their skin, and this posed a problem for puritans. In order to fulfill John Winthrop's dream of a "city on a hill," New England's churches needed to contain all New Englanders. To deal with this problem, white New Englanders generally turned to familiar theological constructs to redeem not only themselves and their actions (including their participation in race-based slavery) but also to redeem the colonies' Africans and Native Americans. Richard A. Bailey draws on diaries, letters, sermons, court documents, newspapers, church records, and theological writings to tell the story of the religious and racial tensions in puritan New England.

The "Posterior Analytics" contains some of Aristotle's most influential thoughts in logic, epistemology, metaphysics and the philosophy of science. The first book expounds and develops the notions of a demonstrative argument, and of a formal, axiomatized science. The second discusses a cluster of problems raised by the axioms of principles of such a science, and investigates in particular the theory of definition.;This volume, like the others in the "Clarendon Aristotle" series, is intended to serve the needs of readers of Aristotle without a knowledge of Greek. For this second edition the translation has been completely rewritten, with the aims of greater elegance and greater fidelity to the Greek. The commentary elucidates and assesses Aristotle's arguments from a philosophical point of view. It has been extensively revised to take account of the scholarship of the last 20 years.