Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
|
Your cart is empty |
|||
Showing 1 - 15 of 15 matches in All Departments
St. Augustine's Confessions is heralded as a classic of Western culture. Yet when James Boyd White first tried to read it in translation, it seemed utterly dull. Its ideas struck him as platitudinous and its prose felt drab. It was only when he started to read the text in Latin that he began to see the originality and depth of Augustine's work. In Let in the Light, White invites readers to join him in a close and engaged encounter with the Confessions in which they will come to share his experience of the book's power and profundity by reading at least some of it in Augustine's own language. He offers an accessible guide to reading the text in Latin, line by line-even for those who have never studied the language. Equally attuned to the resonances of individual words and the deeper currents of Augustine's culture, Let in the Light considers how the form and nuances of the Latin text allow greater insight into the work and its author. White shows how to read Augustine's prose with care and imagination, rewarding sustained attention and broader reflection. Let in the Light brings new life to a classic work, guiding readers to experience the immediacy, urgency, and vitality of Augustine's Confessions.
Certain questions are basic to the human condition: how we imagine the world, and ourselves and others within it; how we confront the constraints of language and the limits of our own minds; and how we use imagination to give meaning to past experiences and to shape future ones. These are the questions James Boyd White addresses in "The Edge of Meaning", exploring each through its application to great works of Western culture - "Huckleberry Finn", the "Odyssey", and the paintings of Vermeer among them. In doing so, White creates a deeply moving and insightful book and presents an inspiring conception of mind, language and the essence of living.
St. Augustine's Confessions is heralded as a classic of Western culture. Yet when James Boyd White first tried to read it in translation, it seemed utterly dull. Its ideas struck him as platitudinous and its prose felt drab. It was only when he started to read the text in Latin that he began to see the originality and depth of Augustine's work. In Let in the Light, White invites readers to join him in a close and engaged encounter with the Confessions in which they will come to share his experience of the book's power and profundity by reading at least some of it in Augustine's own language. He offers an accessible guide to reading the text in Latin, line by line-even for those who have never studied the language. Equally attuned to the resonances of individual words and the deeper currents of Augustine's culture, Let in the Light considers how the form and nuances of the Latin text allow greater insight into the work and its author. White shows how to read Augustine's prose with care and imagination, rewarding sustained attention and broader reflection. Let in the Light brings new life to a classic work, guiding readers to experience the immediacy, urgency, and vitality of Augustine's Confessions.
To which institutions or social practices should we grant
authority? When should we instead assert our own sense of what is
right or good or necessary?
White extends his theory of law as constitutive rhetoric, asking
how one may criticize the legal culture and the texts within it.
Language is our key to imagining the world, others, and ourselves. Yet sometimes our ways of talking dehumanize others and trivialize human experience. In war other people are imagined as enemies to be killed. The language of race objectifies those it touches, and propaganda disables democracy. Advertising reduces us to consumers, and cliches destroy the life of the imagination. How are we to assert our humanity and that of others against the forces in the culture and in our own minds that would deny it? What kind of speech should the First Amendment protect? How should judges and justices themselves speak? These questions animate James Boyd White's "Living Speech," a profound examination of the ethics of human expression--in the law and in the rest of life. Drawing on examples from an unusual range of sources--judicial opinions, children's essays, literature, politics, and the speech-out-of-silence of Quaker worship--White offers a fascinating analysis of the force of our languages. Reminding us that every moment of speech is an occasion for gaining control of what we say and who we are, he shows us that we must practice the art of resisting the forces of inhumanity built into our habits of speech and thought if we are to become more capable of love and justice--in both law and life."
White extends his conception of United States law as a constitutive rhetoric shaping American legal culture that he proposed in When Words Lose Their Meaning, and asks how Americans can and should criticize this culture and the texts it creates. In determining if a judicial opinion is good or bad, he explores the possibility of cultural criticism, the nature of conceptual language, the character of economic and legal discourse, and the appropriate expectations for critical and analytic writing. White employs his unique approach by analyzing individual cases involving the Fourth Amendment of the United States constitution and demonstrates how a judge translates the facts and the legal tradition, creating a text that constructs a political and ethical community with its readers.
Description: How are we to read the Gospels and bring them into our lives? The idea of this book is that the Gospels are not merely rules for life, or stories illustrating moral lessons, or statements of theological doctrine, but invitations to thought and conversation. The Gospels are full of problems, uncertainties, and tensions; these difficulties call upon us to engage with the Gospels in a new way: to read them, to ask questions about them, to live with them, alone and together. The way we do that is by a kind of conversation, with each other, or within ourselves. The Gospel as Conversation is meant to engage the reader in the conversation by which the Gospels maintain their life today among us. It contains Gospel passages, sermons given on those passages, and questions for reflection. It is intended both for individual readers and for groups in adult education classes.
How can we connect the Gospels--the fundamental texts of Christian faith--to our own experience of inner and outer life? This is the question that animates Connecting to the Gospel. In it James Boyd White presents a series of Gospel passages, together with the sermons he gave on these passages as a lay preacher in the Episcopal Church, with brief commentaries and questions on each as well. The whole is designed as an aid to thought and reflection about the issues raised by the Gospel passages, as they relate both to our own larger culture and to our internal religious experiences. The texts are old texts, from the past. What relation do they have, can they have, with life in the twenty-first century?One aim of the book is to establish a set of questions, both about the Gospels and about our own lives, which the reader is invited to pursue on his or her own. It can be used both by individuals and groups engaged in study and exploration.
Through fresh readings of texts ranging from Homer's "Iliad,"
Swift's "Tale of a Tub," and Austen's "Emma" through the United
States Constitution and "McCulloch v. Maryland," James Boyd White
examines the relationship between an individual mind and its
language and culture as well as the "textual community" established
between writer and audience. These striking textual analyses
develop a rhetoric--a "way of reading" that can be brought to any
text but that, in broader terms, becomes a way of learning that can
shape the reader's life.
In this collection of essays, James Boyd White continues his work
in the rhetorical and literary analysis of law, seeing it as a
system for the creation of social meaning. White's focus is on the
intellectual and ethical possibilities of law, based on the view
that law is not merely a logical enterprise, nor a mere matter of
politics and power, but rather an activity of the whole mind,
including its imaginative and affective capacities.
The authors of this book share a concern for the state of law and
democracy in our country, which to many seems to have deteriorated
badly. Deep changes are visible in a wide array of phenomena:
judicial opinions, the teaching of law, legal practice,
international relations, legal scholarship, congressional
deliberations, and the culture of contemporary politics. In each of
these intersections between law, culture, and politics, traditional
expectations have been transformed in ways that pose a threat to
the continued vitality and authority of law and democracy. The
authors analyze specific instances in which such a decline has
occurred or is threatened, tracing them to "the empire of force," a
phrase borrowed from Simone Weil. This French intellectual applied
the term not only to the brute force used by police and soldiers
but, more broadly, to the underlying ways of thinking, talking, and
imagining that make that sort of force possible, including
propaganda, unexamined ideology, sentimental cliches, and politics
by buzzwords, all familiar cultural forms. Based on the underlying
crisis and its causes, the editors and authors of these essays
agree that neither law nor democracy can survive where the empire
of force dominates. Yet each manages to find a ground for hope in
our legal and democratic culture. H. Jefferson Powell is Frederic
Cleaveland Professor of Law and Divinity at Duke University and has
served in both the federal and state governments, as a deputy
assistant attorney general and as principal deputy solicitor
general in the U.S. Department of Justice and as special counsel to
the attorney general of North Carolina. His latest book is
"Constitutional Conscience: The Moral Dimension of Judicial
Decision. "An extraordinary collection of provocative, insightful, and
inspiring essays on the future of law and democracy in the
twenty-first century." "These thoughtful essays diagnose democracy's perilous present,
and---more importantly---they explore avenues to democracy's rescue
through humanization of law." Contributors
In this wide-ranging and timely volume, fourteen scholars address the important question, How should we talk about religion, whether our own or the religion of others? They confront such fundamental topics as the sufficiency of "reason" for a full life; the adequacy of our methods of describing and analyzing religion; the degree to which any serious confrontation with the religious experiences of others will challenge our own; and whether there can be a pluralism that does not dissolve into universal relativism. Writing from a diversity of perspectives and academic disciplines-philosophy, classics, medieval studies, history, anthropology, economics, political science, and art history, among others-the contributors illuminate issues at the heart of the most significant cultural, social, and political debates of our day. What emerges is not a univocal answer to the question posed in the title. Instead, by demonstrating how religion is talked about in the languages of very different academic disciplines, the essayists creatively address issues that no one should ignore: fundamentalism; the role of religion in American democracy; the tension between secular liberalism and religious rhetoric; monotheism versus pluralism; and the relationship between poverty and liberation theology. Collectively, their various approaches to talking about religion-differences due to background, age, nationality, religious outlook, and intellectual commitment, yet all valid-provide a general response to the question in the book's title: in intellectual and personal community. Contributorss: Luis E. Bacigalupo, Clifford Ando, Sabine MacCormack, R. Scott Appleby, Bilinda Straight, Patrick J. Deneen, Wayne C. Booth (1921-2005), Eugene Garver, Javier Iguiniz Echeverria, Ruth Abbey, Sol Serrano, Carol Bier, Jeffrey Kripal, Ebrahim Moosa.
|
You may like...
Jurassic Park Trilogy Collection
Sam Neill, Laura Dern, …
Blu-ray disc
(1)
|