Since the appearance of Homo sapiens on the planet hundreds of thousands of years ago, human beings have sought to exploit their environments, extracting as many resources as their technological ingenuity has allowed. As technologies have advanced in recent centuries, that impulse has remained largely unchecked, exponentially accelerating the human impact on the environment. Humans versus Nature tells a history of the global environment from the Stone Age to the present, emphasizing the adversarial relationship between the human and natural worlds. Nature is cast as an active protagonist, rather than a mere backdrop or victim of human malfeasance. Daniel R. Headrick shows how environmental changes-epidemics, climate shocks, and volcanic eruptions-have molded human societies and cultures, sometimes overwhelming them. At the same time, he traces the history of anthropogenic changes in the environment-species extinctions, global warming, deforestation, and resource depletion-back to the age of hunters and gatherers and the first farmers and herders. He shows how human interventions such as irrigation systems, over-fishing, and the Industrial Revolution have in turn harmed the very societies that initiated them. Throughout, Headrick examines how human-driven environmental changes are interwoven with larger global systems, dramatically reshaping the complex relationship between people and the natural world. In doing so, he roots the current environmental crisis in the deep past.

Surviving Your Child's Adolescence helps parents meet the 10 deepest needs of their teenager. These needs include:

This collection of eleven new essays contains the latest developments in analytic feminist philosophy on the topic of pornography. While honoring early feminist work on the subject, it aims to go beyond speech act analyses of pornography and to reshape the philosophical discourse that surrounds pornography. A rich feminist literature on pornography has emerged since the 1980s, with Rae Langton's speech act theoretic analysis dominating specifically Anglo-American feminist philosophy on pornography. Despite the predominance of this literature, there remain considerable disagreements and precious little agreement on many key issues: What is pornography? Does pornography (as Langton argues) constitute women's subordination and silencing? Does it objectify women in harmful ways? Is pornography authoritative enough to enact women's subordination? Is speech act theory the best way to approach pornography? Given the deep divergences over these questions, the first goal of this collection is to take stock of extant debates in order to clarify key feminist conceptual and political commitments regarding pornography. This volume further aims to go beyond the prevalent speech-acts approach to pornography, and to highlight novel issues in feminist pornography-debates, including the aesthetics of pornography, trans* identities and racialization in pornography, and putatively feminist pornography.

The number of non-religious men and women has increased dramatically over the past several decades. Yet scholarship on the non-religious is severely lacking. In response to this critical gap in knowledge, The Nonreligious provides a comprehensive summation and analytical discussion of existing social scientific research on the non-religious. The authors present a thorough overview of existing research, while also drawing on ongoing research and positing ways to improve upon our current understanding of this growing population. The findings in this book stand out against the corpus of secular writing, which is comprised primarily of polemical rants critiquing religion, personal life-stories/memoirs of former believers, or abstract philosophical explorations of theology and anti-theology. By offering the first research- and data-based conclusions about the non-religious, this book will be an invaluable source of information and a foundation for further scholarship. Written in clear, jargon-free language that will appeal to the increasingly interested general readers, this book provides an unbiased, thorough account of all relevant existing scholarship within the social sciences that bears on the lived experience of the non-religious.

We are women, we are men. We are refugees, single mothers, people with disabilities, and queers. We belong to social categories and they frame our actions, self-understanding, and opportunities. But what are social categories? How are they created and sustained? How does one come to belong to them? Asta approaches these questions through analytic feminist metaphysics. Her theory of social categories centers on an answer to the question: what is it for a feature of an individual to be socially meaningful? In a careful, probing investigation, she reveals how social categories are created and sustained and demonstrates their tendency to oppress through examples from current events. To this end, she offers an account of just what social construction is and how it works in a range of examples that problematize the categories of sex, gender, and race in particular. The main idea is that social categories are conferred upon people. Asta introduces a 'conferralist' framework in order to articulate a theory of social meaning, social construction, and most importantly, of the construction of sex, gender, race, disability, and other social categories.

What makes for a philosophical classic? Why do some philosophical works persist over time, while others do not? The philosophical canon and diversity are topics of major debate today. This stimulating volume contains ten new essays by accomplished philosophers writing passionately about works in the history of philosophy that they feel were unjustly neglected or ignored-and why they deserve greater attention. The essays cover lesser known works by famous thinkers as well as works that were once famous but now only faintly remembered. Works examined include Gorgias' Encomium of Helen, Jane Adams' Women and Public Housekeeping, W.E.B. DuBois' Whither Now and Why, Edith Stein's On the Problem of Empathy, Jonathan Bennett's Rationality, and more. While each chapter is an expression of engagement with an individual work, the volume as a whole, and Eric Schliesser's introduction specifically, address timely questions about the nature of philosophy, disciplinary contours, and the vagaries of canon formation.

Outside In presents the newest scholarship that narrates and explains the history of the United States as part of a networked transnational past. This work tells the stories of Americans who inhabited the border-crossing circuitry of people, ideas, and institutions that have made the modern world a worldly place. Forsaking manifestos of transnational history and surveys of existing scholarship for fresh research, careful attention to concrete situations and transactions, and original interpretation, the vigorous, accomplished historians whose work is collected here show how the transnational history of the United States is actually being written. Ranging from high statecraft to political ferment from below, from the history of religion to the discourse of women's rights, from the political left to the political right, from conservative businessmen to African diaspora radicals, this set of original essays narrates U.S. history in new ways, emphasizing the period from 1870 to the present. The essays in Outside In demonstrate the inadequacy of any unidirectional concept of "the U.S. and the world," although they stress the worldly forces that have shaped Americans. At the same time, these essays disrupt and complicate the very idea of simple inward and outward flows of influence, showing how Americans lived within transnational circuits featuring impacts and influences running in multiple directions. Outside In also transcends the divide between work focusing on the international system of nation-states and transnational history that treats non-state actors exclusively. The essays assembled here show how to write transnational history that takes the nation-state seriously, explaining that governments and non-state actors were never sealed off from one another in the modern world. These essays point the way toward a more concrete and fully internationalized vision of modern American history.

This study contextualizes the achievement of a strategically crucial figure in Byzantium's turbulent seventh century, the monk and theologian Maximus the Confessor (580-662). Building on newer biographical research and a growing international body of scholarship, as well as on fresh examination of his diverse literary corpus, Paul Blowers develops a profile integrating the two principal initiatives of Maximus's career: first, his reinterpretation of the christocentric economy of creation and salvation as a framework for expounding the spiritual and ascetical life of monastic and non-monastic Christians; and second, his intensifying public involvement in the last phase of the ancient christological debates, the monothelete controversy, wherein Maximus helped lead an East-West coalition against Byzantine imperial attempts doctrinally to limit Jesus Christ to a single (divine) activity and will devoid of properly human volition. Blowers identifies what he terms Maximus's "cosmo-politeian" worldview, a contemplative and ascetical vision of the participation of all created beings in the novel politeia, or reordered existence, inaugurated by Christ's "new theandric energy". Maximus ultimately insinuated his teaching on the christoformity and cruciformity of the human vocation with his rigorous explication of the precise constitution of Christ's own composite person. In outlining this cosmo-politeian theory, Blowers additionally sets forth a "theo-dramatic" reading of Maximus, inspired by Hans Urs von Balthasar, which depicts the motion of creation and history according to the christocentric "plot" or interplay of divine and creaturely freedoms. Blowers also amplifies how Maximus's cumulative achievement challenged imperial ideology in the seventh century-the repercussions of which cost him his life-and how it generated multiple recontextualizations in the later history of theology.

In Union Made, Heath W. Carter advances a bold new interpretation of the origins of American Social Christianity. While historians have often attributed the rise of the Social Gospel to middle-class ministers, seminary professors, and social reformers, this book places working people at the very center of the story. The major characters-blacksmiths, glove makers, teamsters, printers, and the like-have been mostly forgotten, but as Carter convincingly argues, their collective contribution to American Social Christianity was no less significant than that of Walter Rauschenbusch or Jane Addams. Leading readers into the thick of late-19th-century Chicago's tumultuous history, Carter shows that countless working-class believers participated in the heated debates over the implications of Christianity for industrializing society, often with as much fervor as they did in other contests over wages and the length of the workday. Throughout the Gilded Age the city's trade unionists, socialists, and anarchists advanced theological critiques of laissez faire capitalism and protested "scab ministers" who cozied up to the business elite. Their criticisms compounded church leaders' anxieties about losing the poor, such that by the turn-of-the-century many leading Christians were arguing that the only way to salvage hopes of a Christian America was for the churches to soften their position on "the labor question." As denomination after denomination did just that, it became apparent that the Social Gospel was, indeed, ascendant-from below.

Orange County is one of the best-known, yet least understood, counties in California. The popular image of beautiful people in beach cities is certainly accurate. But the Orange County that is often overlooked includes workaday lives in Anaheim, the barrios of Santa Ana, townhouse living in Brea and the diverse communities of Little Saigon, Little Texas, Los Rios, La Habra and Silverado Canyon. Modern Orange County offers very little sense of history, and it sometimes seems as if the urbanization of the 1960s is all that defines the place. Orange County historian Phil Brigandi fills in the gaps with this collection of essays that explores the very creation of the county, as well as pressing issues of race, citrus, attractions and annexation.

For more than 800 years scholars have pointed to the dark augury having to do with "the last Pope." The prophecy, taken from St. Malachy's "Prophecy of the Popes," is among a list of verses predicting each of the Roman Catholic popes from Pope Celestine II to the final pope, "Peter the Roman," whose reign would end in the destruction of Rome. First published in 1595, the prophecies were attributed to St. Malachy by a Benedictine historian named Arnold de Wyon, who recorded them in his book, Lignum Vitae. Tradition holds that Malachy had been called to Rome by Pope Innocent II, and while there, he experienced the vision of the future popes, including the last one, which he wrote down in a series of cryptic phrases. According to the prophecy, the next pope (following Benedict XVI) is to be the final pontiff, Petrus Romanus or Peter the Roman. The idea by some Catholics that the next pope on St. Malachy's list heralds the beginning of "great apostasy" followed by "great tribulation" sets the stage for the imminent unfolding of apocalyptic events, something many non-Catholics would agree with. This would give rise to a false prophet, who according to the book of Revelation leads the world's religious communities into embracing a political leader known as Antichrist. In recent history, several Catholic priests--some deceased now--have been surprisingly outspoken on what they have seen as this inevitable danger rising from within the ranks of Catholicism as a result of secret satanic "Illuminati-Masonic" influences. These priests claim secret knowledge of an multinational power elite and occult hierarchy operating behind supranatural and global political machinations. Among this secret society are sinister false Catholic infiltrators who understand that, as the Roman Catholic Church represents one-sixth of the world's population and over half of all Christians, it is indispensable for controlling future global elements in matters of church and state and the fulfillment of a diabolical plan they call "Alta Vendetta," which is set to assume control of the papacy and to help the False Prophet deceive the world's faithful (including Catholics) into worshipping Antichrist. As stated by Dr. Michael Lake on the front cover, Catholic and evangelical scholars have dreaded this moment for centuries. Unfortunately, as readers will learn, time for avoiding Peter the Roman just ran out.

Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (1148 - 1210) wrote prolifically in the disciplines of theology, Quranic exegesis, and philosophy. He composed treatises on jurisprudence, medicine, physiognomy, astronomy, and astrology. His body of work marks a momentous turning point in the Islamic tradition and his influence within the post-classical Islamic tradition is striking. After his death in 1210 his works became standard textbooks in Islamic institutions of higher learning. Razi investigates his transformative contributions to the Islamic intellectual tradition. One of the leading representatives of Sunni orthodoxy in medieval Islam, Razi was the first intellectual to exploit the rich heritage of ancient and Islamic philosophy to interpret the Quran. Jaffer uncovers Razi's boldly unconventional intellectual aspirations. The book elucidates the development of Razi's unique appropriation of methods and ideas from ancient and Islamic philosophy into a unified Quranic commentary-and consequently into the Sunni worldview. Jaffer shows that the genre of Quranic commentary in the post-classical period contains a wealth of philosophical material that is of major interest for the history of philosophical ideas in Islam and for the interaction of the aqli ("rational") and naqli ("traditional") sciences in Islamic civilization. Jaffer demonstrates the ways Razi reconciled the opposing intellectual trends of his milieu on major methodological conflicts. A highly original work, this book brilliantly repositions the central aims of Razi's intellectual program.

The discipline of religious studies has, historically, tended to focus on discrete ritual mistakes that occur in the context of individual performances outlined in ethnographic or sociological studies, and scholars have largely dismissed the fact that there are extensive discussions of ritual mistakes in many indigenous traditions' religious literature. And yet ritual mistakes (ranging from the simple to the complex) happen all the time, and they continue to carry ritual "weight," even when no one seriously doubts their impact on the efficacy of a ritual. In Ritual Gone Wrong, Kathryn McClymond approaches ritual mistakes as an integral part of ritual life and argues that religious traditions can accommodate mistakes and are often prepared for them. McClymond shows that many traditions even incorporate the regular occurrence of errors into their ritual systems, developing a substantial literature on how rituals can be disrupted, how these disruptions can be addressed, and when disruptions have gone too far. Using a series of case studies ranging from ancient India to modern day Iraq, and from medieval allegations of child sacrifice to contemporary Olympic ceremonies, McClymond explores the numerous ways in which ritual can go wrong, and demonstrates that the ritual is by nature fluid, supple, and dynamic-simultaneously adapting to socio-cultural conditions and, in some cases, shaping them.

In this book, Yaroslav Komarovski argues that the Tibetan Buddhist interpretations of the realization of ultimate reality both contribute to and challenge contemporary interpretations of unmediated mystical experience. The model used by the majority of Tibetan Buddhist thinkers states that the realization of ultimate reality, while unmediated during its actual occurrence, is necessarily filtered and mediated by the conditioning contemplative processes leading to it, and Komarovski argues that therefore, in order to understand this mystical experience, one must focus on these processes, rather than on the experience itself. Komarovski also provides an in-depth comparison of seminal Tibetan Geluk thinker Tsongkhapa and his major Sakya critic Gorampa's accounts of the realization of ultimate reality, demonstrating that the differences between these two interpretations lie primarily in their conflicting descriptions of the compatible conditioning processes that lead to this realization. Komarovski maintains that Tsongkhapa and Gorampa's views are virtually irreconcilable, but demonstrates that the differing processes outlined by these two thinkers are equally effective in terms of actually attaining the realization of ultimate reality. Tibetan Buddhism and Mystical Experience speaks to the plurality of mystical experience, perhaps even suggesting that the diversity of mystical experience is one of its primary features.

1994 symbolised the triumphal defeat of almost three and a half centuries of racial separation since the Dutch East India Company planted a bitter almond hedge to keep indigenous people out of `their' Cape outpost in 1659. But for the majority of people in the world's most unequal society, the taste of bitter almonds linger as their exclusion from a dignified life remain the rule.

In the year of South Africa's troubled coming-of-age, veteran investigative journalist Michael Schmidt brings to bear 21 years of his scribbled field notes to weave a tapestry of the view from below: here in the demi-monde of our transition from autocracy to democracy, in the half-light glow of the rusted rainbow, you will meet neo-Nazis and the newly dispossessed, Boers and Bushmen, black illegal coal miners and a bank robber, witches and wastrels, love children and land claimants.

With their feet in the mud, the Born Free youth have their eyes on the stars.

Have you ever felt like something was missing either within yourself or in your life-as if there's a void that you can't define and yet can't escape? You've been trying to find your purpose, and sometimes you even question whether you have one. Author Jill Allen has faced those questions and has discovered the way to show up as the woman she wants to be-the woman God designed and created her to be.
Set Free reveals Allen's heartbreaking and awe-inspiring life story. She recalls the fog surrounding the tragedy of her mother's unexpected death when she was a young girl, her own near-fatal accident, and her relationship with God throughout every moment. Using candid and relatable storytelling, she shares some of her darkest moments and traces her path to where she is today-a fierce woman of strong faith, a happily married wife of twenty years, and a proud mother of five. She details every step she took along the journey that led her to God's unconditional love so you can take these exact steps to freedom and enjoy His peace too.
In this inspirational personal narrative, one woman tells her life story to help women realize they can overcome anything with God.