This collection of essays aims to explore fundamental questions about God, human nature, and political life through careful readings of the Greek poets, the Hebrew Bible, and Shakespeare. The volume investigates the abiding tension between the Hebraic and the Hellenic dimensions of the Western soul through an examination of profound literary, philosophic, and theological reflections on topics as various as friendship, marriage, tyranny, sovereignty, sin, forgiveness, comedy, tragedy, and contemplation. Offered in honor of Mera J. Flaumenhaft, the essays reflect the intellectual rigor, moral seriousness, and disciplined imagination of her scholarship and teaching.

Leon R. Kass has been helping Americans better understand the human condition for over four decades as a teacher, writer, scholar, public champion of the humanities, and defender of human dignity. From bioethics to civic education, from interpreting the Bible to weighing the moral implications of modern science, Kass has offered wisdom, guidance, and instruction. In this volume, fifteen of Kass's admirers, including students, colleagues, and friends, honor his work by reflecting on the broad range of subjects to which he has devoted his life's work. Some of the essays offer interpretations of great works of literature and philosophy from Homer, Sophocles, and Plato to Rousseau, Franklin, Jane Austen, Hawthorne, and Henry James. Others examine the significance of Leon Kass's work as a bioethicist and Chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics and as an interpreter of the Book of Genesis. The essays collected in Apples of Gold in Pictures of Silver offer a sense of the breadth of Kass's interests and insights and of the influence he has had on generations of scholars. The reader is further acquainted with the career of Leon R. Kass by a biographical introduction and a comprehensive listing of his published writings and the courses he has taught."

Leon R. Kass has been helping Americans better understand the human condition for over four decades as a teacher, writer, scholar, public champion of the humanities, and defender of human dignity. From bioethics to civic education, from interpreting the Bible to weighing the moral implications of modern science, Kass has offered wisdom, guidance, and instruction. In this volume, fifteen of Kass's admirers, including students, colleagues, and friends, honor his work by reflecting on the broad range of subjects to which he has devoted his life's work. Some of the essays offer interpretations of great works of literature and philosophy from Homer, Sophocles, and Plato to Rousseau, Franklin, Jane Austen, Hawthorne, and Henry James. Others examine the significance of Leon Kass's work as a bioethicist and Chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics and as an interpreter of the Book of Genesis. The essays collected in Apples of Gold in Pictures of Silver offer a sense of the breadth of Kass's interests and insights and of the influence he has had on generations of scholars. The reader is further acquainted with the career of Leon R. Kass by a biographical introduction and a comprehensive listing of his published writings and the courses he has taught."

The past becomes a source of wisdom when the scientific quest for uncovering the roots of things is combined with the humanistic endeavor to make the dead letter come alive in a thoughtful mind. Vague attempts at being "interdisciplinary," by contrast, merely provide excuses to avoid examining the words set down by the scientific thinkers themselves. If we love wisdom in its wholeness, we must explore the sources of the things that we now take for granted: we must think through the records of the thinking that has demarcated the various fields of study and envisioned what's to be investigated within them and how it's to be done. But where shall we start looking for points of view to help us consider what learning is, and what learning has to do with how we live within our world? We couldn't do better than to climb the two peaks that constitute the subject of this book. these are the classical geometry in which Apollonius presented the conic sections, and that modern transformation over which Descartes presided at its inception. In this effort, a useful link between our two primary texts is provided by examining some work done by Diophantus, by Pappus, and by Viete. While the study of these writings is a formidable enterprise indeed, the two volumes of Insights and Manipulations, offering clear guidance and abundant help, greatly alleviate the requisite labor.