Roger Owen has fully revised and updated his authoritative text to take into account the very latest developments in the Middle East. This new edition continues to explore the emergence of individual Middle Eastern states since the fall of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War and the key themes that have characterized the region since then. The book continues to serve as an excellent introduction for newcomers to the modern history and politics of this fascinating region.

Egypt is one of the major powers in the Middle East. The vigour of its cultural life and the extent of its influence make it a force which cannot be ignored in the Arab world. Yet, despite the comparative confidence with which its rulers handle power, the country has a politically contradictory past with which to come to terms, as well as its role in a region of shifting political identity and allegiance. This book examines the causes and consequences of the many crises within the Egyptian political, sociological, economic and moral legacy and the strategies which Mubarak's government has devised to cope with that legacy. The book's concern is for the capacity of the present administration to avoid expediency and the generation of further crisis and rather to employ Egypt's considerable resources in the shaping of a distinct and effective role for the country.

Contents:
1. Government and the State in Egypt Today Nazih N. Ayubi 2. The Role of the Official Opposition Mona Makram Ebeid 3. Political Crisis/Conflict in post-1967 Egypt Hani Shukrullah 4. Migration, Inflation and Social Mobility Galal A. Amin 5. Debt and Egypt's Financial Policies David Butter 6. Egypt: Some Issues in Agricultural Sector Policy Simon Commander 7. Egypt and the Region in the 1980s Charles Tripp

This is a one-stop introduction to the multifaceted phenomenon of the 'Arab Spring', from the writers of Jadaliyya. Covering the full range of issues involved in these historic events, from political economy and the role of social media, to international politics, gender, labour and the impact on culture, these firsthand accounts explore the inspirational uprisings in a way unavailable through mainstream Western and Arab media. Covering all the major centres of disruption, including Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Libya and Bahrain, the writers also look further afield, to Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Palestine, and Iraq. The Dawn of the Arab Uprisings is the best place to start for anyone wanting to understand and interpret these dramatic events.

Roger Owen has fully revised and updated his authoritative text to take into account the latest developments in the Middle East. This book continues to serve as an excellent introduction for newcomers to the modern history and politics of this fascinating region.

This third edition continues to explore the emergence of individual Middle Eastern states since the fall of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War and the key themes that have characterized the region since then.

The book contains 11 chapters written by relevant scientists in the field of particle-based methods and their applications in engineering and applied sciences. The chapters cover most particle-based techniques used in practice including the discrete element method, the smooth particle hydrodynamic method and the particle finite element method. The book will be of interest to researchers and engineers interested in the fundamentals of particle-based methods and their applications.

The book contains 11 chapters written by relevant scientists in the field of particle-based methods and their applications in engineering and applied sciences. The chapters cover most particle-based techniques used in practice including the discrete element method, the smooth particle hydrodynamic method and the particle finite element method. The book will be of interest to researchers and engineers interested in the fundamentals of particle-based methods and their applications.

This book contains 14 invited contributions written by distinguished authors who participated in the VIII International Conference on Computational Plasticity held at CIMNE/UPC (www.cimne.com) from 5-8 September 2005, in Barcelona, Spain. The chapters present recent progress and future research directions in the field of computational plasticity.

Despite the apparent activity in the field, the ever increasing rate of development of new engineering materials required to meet advanced technological needs poses fresh challenges in the field of constitutive modelling. The complex behaviour of such materials demands a closer interaction between numerical analysts and material scientists in order to produce thermodynamically consistent models which provide a response in keeping with fundamental micromechanical principles and experimental observations. This necessity for collaboration is further highlighted by the continuing remarkable developments in computer hardware which makes the numerical simulation of complex deformation responses increasingly possible.

This book contains 14 invited contributions written by distinguished authors who participated in the VIII International Conference on Computational Plasticity held at CIMNE/UPC (www.cimne.com) from 5-8 September 2005, Barcelona, Spain. The meeting was one of the Thematic Conferences of the European Community on Computational Methods in Applied Sciences (ECCOMAS, www.eccomas.org).

The different chapters of this book present recent progress and future research directions in the field of computational plasticity. A common line of many contributions is that a stronger interaction between the phenomenological and micromechanical modelling of plasticity behaviour is apparent and the use of inverse identification techniques is also more prominent. The development of adaptive strategies for plasticity problems continues to be a challenging goal, while it is interesting to note the permanence of element modelling as a research issue. Industrial forming processes, geomechanics, steel and concrete structures form the core of the applications of the different numerical methods presented in the book.

The monarchical presidential regimes that prevailed in the Arab world for so long looked as though they would last indefinitely until events in Tunisia and Egypt made clear their time was up. "The Rise and Fall of Arab Presidents for Life" exposes for the first time the origins and dynamics of a governmental system that largely defined the Arab Middle East in the twentieth century.

Presidents who rule for life have been a feature of the Arab world since independence. In the 1980s their regimes increasingly resembled monarchies as presidents took up residence in palaces and made every effort to ensure their sons would succeed them. Roger Owen explores the main features of the prototypical Arab monarchical regime: its household; its inner circle of corrupt cronies; and its attempts to create a popular legitimacy based on economic success, a manipulated constitution, managed elections, and information suppression.

Why has the Arab world suffered such a concentration of permanent presidential government? Though post-Soviet Central Asia has also known monarchical presidencies, Owen argues that a significant reason is the Arab demonstration effect, whereby close ties across the Arab world have enabled ruling families to share management strategies and assistance. But this effect also explains why these presidencies all came under the same pressure to reform or go. Owen discusses the huge popular opposition the presidential systems engendered during the Arab Spring, and the political change that ensued, while also delineating the challenges the Arab revolutions face across the Middle East and North Africa."

* Thoughtful exploration of midlife spirituality through the prism of nature walks * Study questions for each section Roger Owens, facing a "dark night of the soul" as he turned forty and entered midlife, was en-couraged by his spiritual director to think of it instead as a "threshold of discovery." Rather than go on a grand adventure like walking the Appalachian Trail or the Camino de Santiago, he decid-ed to mark his fortieth year by taking forty walks in a nearby nature preserve. With patience and attention, he explored the concerns rising with him: the inevitability of death, his boredom with life, and the reality of his changing faith, changing images of God, and changing sense of self. The result is forty short chapters that weave together insightful stories of his walks with accessi-ble history and practices of Christian spirituality and the lives of saints. This field guide to the spirituality of midlife facilitates readers' personal journeys through ques-tions of faith, purpose, and relationships. It is not solely a memoir, but a work of wisdom litera-ture that uses engaging first-person narratives to explore universal themes and spiritual inquiry. Wise and imaginative, and with study questions for each section, Threshold of Discovery is the companion guide for a thoughtful Christian journey.

Land was the major economic resource in the pre-modern Middle East. Questions of ownership, of access, of management and of control occupied a central role in administration, in law, and in rural practice over many centuries. And changes in land regimes, such as those which took place in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were bound to have significant repercussions at all levels of society.

Nevertheless, the subject of land and property relations is still not well understood. It has also been hindered by a concentration on Islamic legal categories which often had little connection with property relations on the ground and by the assumption that the Middle East witnessed much the same passage from pre-modern to modern forms of property as is supposed to have taken place in Europe.

About the Contributor(s): Jason Byassee is senior pastor at Boone United Methodist Church in North Carolina and a Fellow in Theology and Leadership at Duke Divinity School. L. Roger Owens is associate professor of leadership and ministry at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary.

"I challenge you to get through a chapter of this book without a desire for God being struck in your soul." - read more ...

Description: The Shape of Participation is a work of constructive theology addressed to theologians, seminarians, and thoughtful pastors. Owens engages and deepens recent popular discussions of church practices by approaching practices from the church Fathers' understanding of the church's participation in God. Through a wide-ranging engagement with theologians, both ancient and contemporary--including Cyril of Alexandria, Maximus the Confessor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Herbert McCabe--Owens argues that the embodied practices of the church are the church's participation in the life of God, making the church Jesus' own continued, peaceable embodiment in and for the world. This book is for theologians, pastors, and anyone who wants a deeper understanding of how the visible presence of God's church is extraordinarily good news in a violent world. Endorsements: ""I'm grateful for this account of the church's relationship to the life of God for refusing the hopelessness of so much contemporary ecclesiology. All of us who persist in preaching or hearing the Word and receiving God's good gifts at the table will be strengthened and encouraged by Owens's theocentric understanding of what the church is up to in the world."" --Beth Felker Jones Wheaton College ""A wonderful book--Owens takes the significant interest in 'practices' that has emerged over the last decade, engages it theologically in rich ways with attention to specific ecclesial examples, and deepens it through insightful analyses of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Herbert McCabe, and Maximus the Confessor. Pastors and scholars alike will benefit from careful study of Owens's significant argument."" --L. Gregory Jones Duke University ""By reframing the church's practices as a participation in Christ and, indeed, as Christ's own practicing in and for the world, Owens has brought to the study of Christian practice new theological depth, shape, and creativity. Moreover, by doing this in dialogue with ancient as well as contemporary theological and philosophical sources and in a way that takes seriously the concrete, embodied church rather than remaining on the level of idealized and abstract ecclesiology, he has provided us a helpful new model for thinking about what it means to be the church."" --Bryan Stone Boston University School of Theology About the Contributor(s): L. Roger Owens is co-pastor with his wife Ginger Thomas of Duke Memorial United Methodist Church, Durham, North Carolina. His next book is So I Send You: An Introduction to the Missional Church (forthcoming in the Cascade Companion series of Cascade Books).

Examines the growth and transformation of the Middle East economy during the 19th and early 20th centuries. The text looks at how the region's economic structures were fundamentally altered by the growing impact of European trade and finance, and by the internal reforms of the rulers of Egypt. It also examines in detail the impact of this process on the four central areas of the Middle East. The result, the author argues, was the creation of a fixed pattern of agricultural, industrial and financial activity. The states formed after the collapse of teh Ottoman Empire found that altering this pattern in their attempts to promote a less dependent form of development was frought with difficulty; and the problems they faced and their different approaches are still highly relevant to the Middle East's economic development today.

Gwenlyn Parry was one of the most important Welsh-language playwrights of the twentieth century and played a key role in the popularisation and flourishing of drama in the theatre and on television during the 1970s and 1980s. Parry's major stage plays - Saer Doliau, Ty ar y Tywod, Y Ffin and Y Twr - had a substantial impact, and were instrumental in solidifying a new relationship between drama and theatrical production in Welsh, bringing the theatricality of the Absurd to a popular audience for the first time. His plays have been the subject of much critical attention in Welsh, and have been reinterpreted in production on many occasions, both in their original form and in translation. This study is the first extended treatment of his life and work in English, and examines the complex and occasionally paradoxical relationship between the autobiographical aspects of his writing and his use of theatrical form.

Farmer, poet, essayist, and environmental writer Wendell Berry is acclaimed for his ideas regarding the values inherent in an agricultural society. Place, community, good work, and simple pleasures are but a few of the values that form the bedrock of Berry's thought. While the notion of reverence is central to Berry, he is not widely known as a religious writer. However, the moral underpinnings of his work are rooted in Christian tradition, articulating the tenet that faith and stewardship of the land are not mutually exclusive. In Wendell Berry and Religion, editors Joel J. Shuman and L. Roger Owens probe the moral and spiritual implications of Berry's work. Chief among them are the notions that the earth is God's provisional gift to mankind and that studying how we engage material creation reflects important truths. This collection reveals deep, thoughtful, and provocative conversations within Berry's writings, illuminating the theological inspirations inherent in his work.

The year 1958 was a dramatic turning point in the history of the Middle East and the Arab World: Lebanon was in turmoil; Iraq underwent revolution. The West-backed King Faisal of Iraq and Crown Prince Abdallah were deposed and killed by a military coup led by Abd al-Karim Qasim and the new republic was proclaimed on the 14th July. Led by Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Arab world seemed to be splitting from the West and, some claimed, realigning itself with the communist world. Here is a seminal work by world-class scholars - required reading for anyone with a serious interest in the recent history of the region.