The Panama Canal is a world-famous site central to the global economy, but the social, cultural, and political history of the country along this waterway is little known outside its borders. In Musica Tipica, author Sean Bellaviti sheds light on a key element of Panamanian culture, namely the story of cumbia or, as Panamanians frequently call it, "musica tipica," a form of music that enjoys unparalleled popularity throughout Panama. Through extensive archival and ethnographic research, Bellaviti reconstructs a twentieth-century social history that illuminates the crucial role music has played in the formation of national identities in Latin America. Focusing, in particular, on the relationship between cumbia and the rise of populist Panamanian nationalism in the context of U.S. imperialism, Bellaviti argues that this hybrid musical form, which forges links between the urban and rural as well as the modern and traditional, has been essential to the development of a sense of nationhood among Panamanians. With their approaches to musical fusion and their carefully curated performance identities, cumbia musicians have straddled some of the most pronounced schisms in Panamanian society.

Throughout church history, the book of Psalms has enjoyed wider use and acclaim than almost any other book of the Bible. Early Christians extolled it for its fullness of Christian doctrine, monks memorized and recited it daily, lay people have prayed its words as their own, and churches have sung from it as their premier hymn book. While the past half century has seen an extraordinary resurgence of interest in the thought of American theologian Jonathan Edwards, including his writings on the Bible, no scholar has yet explored his meditations on the Psalms. David P. Barshinger addresses this gap by providing a close study of his engagement with one of the Bibles most revered books. From his youth to the final days of his presidency at the College of New Jersey, Edwards was a devout student of Scriptureas more than 1,200 extant sermons, theological treatises, and thousands of personal manuscript pages devoted to biblical reflection bear witness. Using some of his writings that have previously received little to no attention, Jonathan Edwards and the Psalms offers insights on his theological engagement with the Psalms in the context of interpretation, worship, and preaching. Barshinger shows that he appropriated the history of redemption as an organizing theological framework within which to engage the Psalms specifically, and the Bible as a whole. This original study greatly advances Edwards scholarship, shedding new and welcome light on the theologians relationship to Scripture.

This volume demonstrates the recent direction of cultural history, as it is now being practiced in both history and musicology, to grasp the realms of human experience, understanding and meaning-how they are constructed, negotiated and communicated on both an individual and a social level. Just as historians in their quest to understand the construction and transmission of meaning, musicologists are turning to new inquiries into cultural representations and their social dynamics, while remaining aware of music's distinctive "register" of representation as an abstract language and a performing art. As the case studies analyzed by musicologists and historians in this volume attest, both fields are not only posing similar questions but attempting to study music itself together with the relevant framing factors and contexts that imbued it with meaning. They are seeking to do so within a factually accurate yet theoretically sophisticated interpretation that combines the insights into language and semiotics characteristic of "the new cultural history" and "new musicology" of the 1980s and '90s with more recent sociological theories and their perspective on how symbols function within the larger field of social power. The volume illuminates how musicologists and historians are practicing the new cultural history of music, employing similar rubrics and specifically those emerging from the recent synthesis of theoretical perspectives on language, symbols, meanings, and their social as well as political dynamics. These include questions of cultural identity and its expression, or its constructions, representations and exchanges, into which music provides a significant mode of access. The scholars who work in these areas are concerned with those cultural sites of the construction or attempted control of identity, as well as its interrogation through active agency on a social and on an individual level, which embraces subjectivity in its relation to the larger cultural unit. Here we may see attempts on the part of both historians and musicologists to engage with the new ways of perceiving the articulation of music, ideology, and politics opened up by figures such as Foucault, Bourdieu, Elias, Habermas and others. Their study of meanings and symbols is thus both relational and contextual as they strive to unlock the idioms not only of social and political power, but of the strategies of contestation or of refusal. Other scholars represented in this volume are particularly interested in cultural practice, collective memory, transmission and evaluation as it is forged and then negotiated, here influenced by figures such as de Certeau, Corbin, Chartier and Nora. Hence a part of this collection is devoted to cultural experience, practice and appropriations, grouping together those cultural arenas in which music both illuminates and is further illuminated by a study of uses, collective practices, modes of inscription, and of evaluation or reception. The contributors here, both historians and musicologists, are apprised of all the dimensions that may affect the construction of signification, including specific material inscriptions as well as the symbolic potential of the artistic language. Hence here we see a concern, characteristic of "the new cultural history," with how the forms assumed by texts may become an essential element in the creation of their meaning since different groups encounter, "possess," and experience a work in various ways, and within the context of substantially different aural and visual cultures.

Volume XXII of the distinguished annual Studies in Contemporary Jewry explores the major and rapid changes experienced by a population known variously as "Sephardim," "Oriental" Jews and "Mizrahim" over the last fifty years. Although Sephardim are popularly believed to have originated in Spain or Portugal, the majority of Mizrahi Jews today are actually the descendants of Jews from Muslim and Arab countries in the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia. They constitute a growing proportion of Israeli Jewry and continue to revitalize Jewish culture in places as varied as France, Latin America, and the United States.
Sephardic Jewry and Mizrahi Jews offers a collection of new scholarship on the issues of self-definition and identity facing Sephardic Jewry. The essays draw on a variety of disciplines--demography, history, political science, sociology, religious and gender studies, anthropology, and literature. Contributors explore the issues surrounding the emergence and increasingly wide usage of "Mizrahi" in place of "Sephardic," as well as the invigoration of Sephardic Judaism. They look at the evolution of Sephardic politics in Israel through the dramatic rise and continuing influence of the Shas political party and its spiritual leader, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef. Other contributors examine the variegated nature of Mizrahi immigration to Israel, fictional portraits of female Mizrahi immigrants to Israel in the 1940s and 1950s, contemporary Mizrahi Israel feminism, modern Arab historiography's portrayal of Jews of Muslim lands, and the changing Sephardic halakhic tradition.

We live under minority rule. But who is the ruling minority?

Most of us are getting screwed over. Our world is defined by inequality, insecurity, lack of community and information overload. As the world burns, mega-corporations are reporting record profits. How are they getting away with it?

'Minority rule' is the term Ash Sarkar uses to describe the irrational fear that minorities are trying to overturn and oppress majority populations. In her eye-opening debut, she reveals how minority elites rule majorities by creating the culture wars that have taken over our politics, stoking fear and panic in our media landscape. Because despite what they'll have you believe, antiracist campaigners aren't actually silencing the 'forgotten' working class, immigrants aren't eating your pets, trans-activists aren't corrupting your children, and cancel culture isn't crushing free speech.

In Minority Rule, Sarkar exposes how a strategic misdirection of blame over who is really screwing everything up is keeping the majority divided, while the real ruling minority of hedge fund managers, press barons, landlords and corporations remain on top. And it's facilitating one of the biggest power grabs in history. Most crucially, she shows us how what we really have in common is being concealed by a deafening culture of distraction - and that the first step towards a better future is understanding what is happening now, and how we got here.

Karl Marx is the most historically foundational and systematic critic of capitalism to date, and the years since the 2008 financial crisis have witnessed a rebirth of his popular appeal. In a world of rising income inequality, right-wing nationalisms, and global climate change, people are again looking to the father of modern socialism for answers. As this book argues, every era since Marx's death has reinvented him to fit its needs. There is not one Marx forever and for all time. There are a thousand Marxes. As Thomas Nail contends, one of the most significant contributions of Marx's work is that it treats theory itself as a historical practice. Reading Marx is not just an interpretative activity but a creative one. As our historical conditions change, so do the kinds of questions we pose and the kinds of answers we find in Marx's writing. This book is a return to the writings of Karl Marx, including his under-appreciated dissertation, through the lens of the pressing philosophical and political problems of our time: ecological crisis, gender inequality, colonialism, and global mobility. However, the aim of this book is not to make Marxism relevant by "applying" it to contemporary issues. Instead, Marx in Motion, the first new materialist interpretation of Marx's work, treats Capital as if it were already a response to the present. Thomas Nail argues that Marx was a new materialist avant la lettre. He argues that Marx did not believe history was determined, or that matter was passive, or that humans were separate or superior to nature. Marx did not even have a labor theory of value. Marxists argue that new materialists lack a sufficient political and economic theory, and new materialists argue that Marx's materialism is human-centric and mechanistic. This book aims to solve both problems by proposing a new materialist Marxism.

Although we no longer live in the relative simplicity of the Jurassic age, and even though we are not aware of them, primitive mammalian brain that developed in that era still live on inside our skulls and remain crucial to our daily functions. The challenges we face today in the information age--how to process the vastly greater, more varied and quickly changing inputs we receive--are very different from those that our ancestors faced during the Jurassic age. As we struggle to process overwhelming amounts of information, we may sometimes ask whether our brains can change to help us adapt. In fact, our brains have always changed gradually, so the questions we should ask are really how our brains will change, and whether we will be able to take full advantage of the changes, perhaps even enhance them, to help us keep up with the accelerating evolution of machines. To understand how our brains will change, we need to understand how they evolved in the first place, as well as how the interactions of the resulting brain structures, including the relics of primitive mammalian and even reptilian processes, influence how we think and act.
In Mind from Body, Don Tucker, one of the most original thinkers about organic information processing, provides a fascinating analysis of how our brains have become what they are today and speculates intriguingly about what they could be tomorrow. He presents important research that explains how personal experience creates the emotional and motivational bases of each of our thoughts, even though we are usually not aware that it is happening. Tucker shows that in exploring how these bodily thought processes still determine how we react to the world andmake decisions, we can become more rational in our actions, free ourselves from fruitless or even self-destructive patterns of behavior, become more efficient, and perhaps even wiser. By combining the most up-to-date scientific thought and hands-on experimental results, expressed clearly and compellingly, along with a story of hypothetical decision-making, Tucker explicates what is happening behind our thought processes as our minds struggle to maintain the pace of the information age.

Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion is an annual volume offering a regular snapshot of state-of-the-art work in this longstanding area of philosophy that has seen an explosive growth of interest over the past half century. Under the guidance of a distinguished editorial board, it publishes exemplary papers in any area of philosophy of religion.

Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray famously insisted on their philosophical differences, and this mutual insistence has largely guided the reception of their thought. What does it mean to return to Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray in light of questions and problems of contemporary feminism, including intersectional and queer criticisms of their projects? How should we now take up, amplify, and surpass the horizons opened by their projects? Seeking answers to these questions, the essays in this volume return to Beauvoir and Irigaray to find what the two philosophers share. And as the authors make clear, the richness of Beauvoir and Irigaray's thought far exceeds the reductive parameters of the Eurocentric, bourgeois second-wave debates that have constrained interpretation of their work. The first section of this volume places Beauvoir and Irigaray in critical dialogue, exploring the place of the material and the corporeal in Beauvoir's thought and, in doing so, reading Beauvoir in a framework that goes beyond a theory of gender and the humanism of phenomenology. The essays in the second section of the volume take up the challenge of articulating points of dialogue between the two focal philosophers in logic, ethics, and politics. Combined, these essays resituate Beauvoir and Irigaray's work both historically and in light of contemporary demands, breaking new ground in feminist philosophy.

Though much has been written about particular forms of violence related to religion, such as sacrificial rites and militant martyrdom, there have been few efforts to survey the phenomena in all of the world's major religious traditions, historically and in the present, viewing the subject in personal as well as social dimensions, and covering both literary themes and political conflicts. This compact collection of essays provides such an overview. Each of the essays explores the ways in which violence is justified within the literary and theological foundation of the tradition, how it is used symbolically and in ritual practice, and how social acts of vengeance and warfare have been justified by religious ideas. The nature of the connection between violence and faith has always been a topic of heated debate, especially as acts of violence performed in the name of religion have erupted onto the global stage. Some scholars argue that these acts of violence are not really religious at all, but symptomatic of other elements of society or human nature. Others however point to the fact that often the perpetrators of these acts cite the faith's own foundational texts as their inspiration-and that the occurrence of violence in the name of religion exists across all faith traditions. Is violence, then, the rare exception in religious traditions or is it one of the rules? The contributors to this volume explore many possible approaches to this question and myriad others. How is religion defined? Must a religion be centered on supernatural beings? Does the term refer to social behavior or private? Is dogma or practice the key to its essence? Is it a philosophical system or a poetic structure? And how should violence be defined? From whose perspective and at what point is an act to be deemed violent? What act cannot be construed as violent in some way? For instance, are we talking only about war and genocide, or psychological coercion, social restrictions and binding categorizations? Collectively, the essays in this volume reflect the complex and contested meanings of both religion and violence, providing overviews of engagements with violence in Hindu, Buddhist, Chinese, Sikh, Jewish, Christian, Islamic, African, and Pacific Island religious traditions. By shedding light on the intersection of violence with faith, this volume does much to expand the understanding of the nature of religion itself, and the diverse forms it may take.

Michael Slote argues that emotion is involved in all human thought and action on conceptual grounds, rather than merely being causally connected with other aspects of the mind. This kind of general sentimentalism about the mind goes beyond that advocated by Hume, and the book's main arguments are only partially anticipated in German Romanticism and in the Chinese philosophical tendency to avoid rigid distinctions between thought and emotion. The new sentimentalist philosophy of mind Slote proposes can solve important problems about the nature of belief and action that other approaches - including Pragmatism - fail to address. In arguing for the centrality of emotion within philosophy of the mind, A Sentimentalist Theory of the Mind continues the critique of rationalist philosophical views that began with Slote's Moral Sentimentalism (OUP, 2010) and continued in his From Enlightenment to Receptivity (OUP, 2013). This new book also delves into what is distinctive about human minds, arguing that there is a greater variety to ordinary human motives than has been recognized and that emotions play a central role in this complex psychology.

In the last few decades, all major presidential candidates have openly discussed the role of faith in their lives, sharing their religious beliefs and church commitments with the media and their constituencies. And yet, to the surprise of many Americans, God played almost no role in the 2012 presidential campaign. During the campaign, incumbent Barack Obama minimized the role of religion in his administration and in his life. This was in stark contrast to his emphasis, in 2008, on how his Chicago church had nurtured him as a person, community organizer, and politician, which ultimately backfired when incendiary messages preached by his liberationist pastor Jeremiah Wright went viral. The Republican Party faced a different kind of problem in 2012, with the increasing irrelevance or absence of founders of the Religious Right such as Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell. Furthermore, with Mormon Mitt Romney running as the GOP candidate, party operatives avoided shining a spotlight on religion, recognizing that vast numbers of Americans remain suspicious of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The absence of God during the 2012 election reveals that the United States is at a crossroads with regards to faith, even while religion continues to play a central role in almost every facet of American culture and political life. The separation of church and state and the disestablishment of religion have fostered a rich religious marketplace characterized by innovation and entrepreneurship. As the generation that launched the culture wars fades into history and a new, substantially more diverse population matures, the question of how faith is functioning in the new millennium has become more important than ever. In Faith in the New Millennium historians, sociologists, and religious studies scholars tackle contemporary issues, controversies, and policies ranging from drone wars to presidential campaigns to the exposing of religious secrets in order to make sense of American life in the new millennium. This melding of past and present offers readers a rare opportunity to assess Americans' current wrestling with matters of faith, and provides valuable insight into the many ways that faith has shaped and transformed the age of Obama and how the age of Obama has shaped American religious faith.

We must all make choices about how we want to live. We evaluate our possibilities by relying on historical, moral, personal, political, religious, and scientific modes of evaluations, but the values and reasons that follow from them conflict. Philosophical problems are forced on us when we try to cope with such conflicts. There are reasons for and against all proposed ways of coping with the conflicts, but none of them has been generally accepted by reasonable thinkers. The constructive aim of The Nature of Philosophical Problems is to propose a way of understanding the nature of such philosophical problems, explain why they occur, why they are perennial, and propose a pluralist approach as the most reasonable way of coping with them. This approach is practical, context-dependent, and particular. It follows from it that the recurrence of philosophical problems is not a defect, but a welcome consequence of the richness of our modes of understanding that enlarges the range of possibilities by which we might choose to live. The critical aim of the book is to give reasons against both the absolutist attempt to find an overriding value or principle for resolving philosophical problems and of the relativist claim that reasons unavoidably come to an end and how we want to live is ultimately a matter of personal preference, not of reasons.

This is a compelling and revealing look at the history of the U.S.-Mexico border as a place, a symbol of cross-cultural melding, and a source of growing anxiety over immigration and national security. The U.S.-Mexico border is far more than a line that separates two countries. A winding path of nearly 2,000 miles from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico, it is history, commerce, and culture. In recent years, however, attitudes about border crossings and border issues have hardened as has immigration policy. A source of growing anxiety over illegal immigration, national security, and safety, the border has become a symbol of political cataclysm over immigration law and enforcement, the future of DACA, the increasingly harsh treatment of refugees and others who attempt to cross without authorization, and the future of U.S. policy. This book traces the history of the border and its people, from the creation of the border line to explosive issues surrounding immigration and the future of the United States as a nation of diverse cultures and races. Explores the creation and development of the border in the late 19th century and the growing industrialization of the region in the early 20th century Examines the cross-border violence during the US Civil War and the Mexican Revolution, the increasing racial hostility and deportation policies in the 1930s and 1950s, and cartel violence Provides an unbiased assessment of the advent of the Chicano movement and politics on the border, NAFTA and border economics, and the increasingly hostile political debate over immigration and demands for a wall Provides critical background and contextual information to the events that have led to a turning point in America: How do we as a nation treat those seeking a new life at the border? Shows how the border has brought out feelings of community and acceptance along the border and at the same time birthed nativist and racial stereotypes Supplements political material with relatable information about the lives of cross-border workers and the blending of cultures along the border as they include food, language, and art

Through its extensive use of primary source materials and invaluable contextual notes, this book offers a documented history of one of the most famous adventures in early American history: the Lewis and Clark expedition. This book is the first to situate the Lewis and Clark expedition within the political and scientific ambitions of Thomas Jefferson. It spans a forty-year period in American history, from 1783–1832, covering Jefferson's early interest in trying to organize an expedition to explore the American West through the difficult negotiations of the Louisiana Purchase, the formation of the "Corps of Discovery," the expedition's incredible journey into the unknown, and its aftermath. The story of the expedition is told not just through the journals and letters of Lewis and Clark, but also through the firsthand accounts of the expedition's other members, which included Sacagawea, a Native American woman, and York, an African American slave. The book features more than 100 primary source documents, including letters to and from Jefferson, Benjamin Rush, and others as the expedition was being organized; diary excerpts during the expedition; and, uniquely, letters documenting the lives of Lewis, Clark, Sacagawea, and York after the expedition.

Why should inquiry be possible, only if some knowledge is required to guide it, as conventionally understood? Contrary to the conventional wisdom held by many thinkers in all human history hitherto existing, there are some fundamental dialectic principles hidden behind any categories of understanding in knowing. And these principles impose some constraints, at both methodological and ontological levels, together with other levels in culture, society, nature, and the mind - on how reality is to be understood. Furthermore, the specific categories of understanding (as conventionally understood), even if valid at all (which are often not the case), are often not that important, when compared with these more fundamental dialectic principles hidden behind them. The focus on understanding the nature of knowledge has been much misplaced, in this sense, in the intellectual history hitherto existing, and much time and talent have been wasted for something less important. If true, this thesis will alter the way of how knowledge is to be understood across the board.
Is written by a highly knowledgeable and well-respected scholarA new theory called The Holistic Theory of KnowledgeA comprehensive analysis of knowledge in relation to methodology and ontology, from the perspectives of nature, the mind, society, and culture

Berdine se lewe in Johannesburg is vir goed verby, en die verbintenis met haar familie en vriende wat sy jare lank verwaarloos het, is aan die herstel.

Haar ouma Bertha se nalatenskap van diensbaarheid en naasteliefde staan voorop vir Berdine en haar droom om ’n kliniek op te rig om die armes gratis te bedien gaan nie om eie eer nie. Dit gebeur nie oornag nie en ten spyte van haar nuutgevonde geloof pak die twyfel en mismoedigheid haar beet. Berdine loop ook ’n pad met Tiekie en haar babadogtertjie en sy kuier weer by Bekkie. Sy leer die vernames van die dorp ken wat hul naaste met onselfsugtige liefde dien.

Dieter Daneel is steeds aan die voorpunt van omtrent elke bedrywigheid en met die naamgee-seremonie, toe die skuiling aan Bertha Human opgedra word ter waardering van haar jare lange diens aan die dorp en sy mense, word die wêreld onderstebo gekeer en Berdine weereens voor ’n keuse gestel.

Modernism has long been understood as a radical repudiation of the past. Reading against the narrative of modernism-as-break, Pragmatic Modernism traces an alternative strain of modernist thought that grows out of pragmatist philosophy and is characterized by its commitment to gradualism, continuity, and recontextualization. It rediscovers a distinctive response to the social, intellectual, and artistic transformations of modernity in the work of Henry James, Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Dewey, and William James. These thinkers share an institutionally-grounded approach to change which emphasizes habits, continuities, and daily life over spectacular events, heroic opposition, and radical rupture. Pragmatic modernists developed an active, dialectical approach to habit, maintaining a critical stance toward mindless repetitions while refusing to romanticize moments of shock or conflict. Through its analysis of pragmatist keywords, including "habit," "institution," "prediction," and "bigness," Pragmatic Modernism offers new readings of works by James, Proust, Stein, and Andre Breton, among others. It shows, for instance, how Stein's characteristic literary innovation-her repetitions-aesthetically materialize the problem of habit; and how institutions-businesses, museums, newspapers, the law, and even the state itself-help to construct the subtlest of personal observations and private gestures in James's novels. This study reconstructs an overlooked strain of modernism. In so doing, it helps us to reimagine the stark choice between political quietism and total revolution that has been handed down to us as modernism's legacy.

This book explores an issue at the nerve of the long term health of all churches: how godly wonder can be reborn through renewed attention to the place of beauty in preaching and worship.
The book opens with an exploration of the theological and cultural difficulties of defining beauty. It traces the church's historical ambivalence about beauty and art and describes how, in our own day, the concept of beauty has been commercialized and degraded. Troeger develops a theologically informed aesthetic that provides a counter-cultural vision of beauty flowing from the love of God.
The book demonstrates how preachers can reclaim the place of beauty in preaching and worship. Chapter two employs the concept of midrash to mine the history of congregational song as a resource for sermons. Chapter three introduces methods from musicology for creating sermons on instrumental and choral works and for integrating word and music more effectively. Chapter four explores how the close relationship between poetry and prayer can stir the homiletical imagination. Each of these chapters includes a selection of the author's sermons illustrating how preachers can use these varied art forms to open a congregation to the beauty of God.
A final chapter recounts the responses of congregation members to whom the sermons were delivered. It uses the insights gained from those experiences to affirm how the human heart hungers for a vision of wonder and beauty that empowers people to live more faithfully in the world.

Tantric traditions in both Buddhism and Hinduism are thriving throughout Asia and in Asian diasporic communities around the world, yet they have been largely ignored by Western scholars until now. This collection of original essays fills this gap by examining the ways in which Tantric Buddhist traditions have changed over time and distance as they have spread across cultural boundaries in Asia. The book is divided into three sections dedicated to South Asia, Central Asia, and East and Southeast Asia. The essays cover such topics as the changing ideal of masculinity in Buddhist literature, the controversy triggered by the transmission of the Indian Buddhist deity Heruka to Tibet in the 10th century, and the evolution of a Chinese Buddhist Tantric tradition in the form of the True Buddha School. The book as a whole addresses complex and contested categories in the field of religious studies, including the concept of syncretism and the various ways that the change and transformation of religious traditions can be described and articulated. The authors, leading scholars in Tantric studies, draw on a wide array of methodologies from the fields of history, anthropology, art history, and sociology. Tantric Traditions in Transmission and Translation is groundbreaking in its attempt to look past religious, linguistic, and cultural boundaries.

The idea of the pre-existence of the soul has been extremely important, widespread, and persistent throughout Western history--from even before the philosophy of Plato to the poetry of Robert Frost. When Souls Had Wings offers the first systematic history of this little explored feature of Western culture.
Terryl Givens describes the tradition of pre-existence as "pre-heaven"--the place where unborn souls wait until they descend to earth to be born. And typically it is seen as a descent--a falling away from a happier and untroubled state into the turbulent and sinful world we know. The title of the book refers to the idea put forward in antiquity that our souls begin with wings, and that only after shedding those wings do we fall to earth. The book not only traces the history of the idea of pre-existence, but also captures its meaning for those who have embraced it. Givens describes how pre-existence has been invoked to explain "the better angels of our nature," including the human yearning for transcendence and the sublime. Pre-existence has been said to account for why we know what we should not know, whether in the form of a Greek slave's grasp of mathematics, the moral sense common to humanity, or the human ability to recognize universals. The belief has explained human bonds that seem to have their own mysterious prehistory, salved the wounded sensibility of a host of thinkers who could not otherwise account for the unevenly distributed pain and suffering that are humanity's common lot, and has been posited by philosophers and theologians alike to salvage the principle of human freedom and accountability.
When Souls had Wings underscores how durable (and controversial) this idea has been throughout the history of Western thought, the theological dangers it has represented, and how prominently it has featured in poetry, literature, and art.