To entertain an idea is to take it in, pay attention to it, give it breathing room, dwell with it for a time. The practice of entertaining ideas suggests rumination and meditation, inviting us to think of philosophy as a form of hospitality and a kind of mental theatre. In this collection, organized around key words shared by philosophy and performance, the editors suggest that Shakespeare's plays supply readers, listeners, viewers, and performers with equipment for living. In plays ranging from A Midsummer Night's Dream to King Lear and The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare invites readers and audiences to be more responsive to the texture and meaning of daily encounters, whether in the intimacies of love, the demands of social and political life, or moments of ethical decision. Entertaining the Idea features established and emerging scholars, addressing key words such as role play, acknowledgment, judgment, and entertainment as well as curse and care. The volume also includes longer essays on Shakespeare, Kant, Husserl, and Hegel as well as an afterword by theatre critic Charles McNulty on the philosophy and performance history of King Lear.

This book examines how 'Therapeutic Recreation' transforms the social health of children enduring or recovering from life-threatening illnesses such as cancer and leukaemia. With studies drawn from 'Serious Fun' projects in the USA, the UK, France, Ireland and Israel, the author explores how camp experiences in convivial circumstances help to bring about healing. Employing central concepts from sociology and anthropology, such as 'liminality', 'mimesis' and 'salutogenesis', Healing Rites of Passage explains why a brief secluded holiday can reform the campers' shared situation of life-threatening illnesses towards health and flourishing. The whole process can be understood in terms of a 'rite of passage', as structured camp experiences enable children to shed previous 'sick roles' and pass through a series of challenges in order to achieve social re-integration with a renewed zest for living. An empirically grounded study that reveals the analytic value of master concepts in the social sciences, this book will appeal to scholars in the fields of sociology, anthropology, paediatrics, social theory and the sociology of health, illness and medicine.

This book examines how 'Therapeutic Recreation' transforms the social health of children enduring or recovering from life-threatening illnesses such as cancer and leukaemia. With studies drawn from 'Serious Fun' projects in the USA, the UK, France, Ireland and Israel, the author explores how camp experiences in convivial circumstances help to bring about healing. Employing central concepts from sociology and anthropology, such as 'liminality', 'mimesis' and 'salutogenesis', Healing Rites of Passage explains why a brief secluded holiday can reform the campers' shared situation of life-threatening illnesses towards health and flourishing. The whole process can be understood in terms of a 'rite of passage', as structured camp experiences enable children to shed previous 'sick roles' and pass through a series of challenges in order to achieve social re-integration with a renewed zest for living. An empirically grounded study that reveals the analytic value of master concepts in the social sciences, this book will appeal to scholars in the fields of sociology, anthropology, paediatrics, social theory and the sociology of health, illness and medicine.

In the course of the Reformation, artistic representation famously came under attack. Statues were destroyed, music and theater were forbidden, and poetry was denounced, all in the name of eradicating superstition and idolatry. The iconoclastic impulse that sparked these attacks, however, proved remarkably productive, generating a profusion of theological, polemical, and literary writing from Catholics and Protestants alike.Reformers like Luther had promised a return to the book, attacking Catholicism as a religion of images and icons. Becoming a religion of the book in the way that Reformers proposed, however, proved impossible: language is inescapably material; books are necessarily things, objects that are seen and touched. The antitheses at the heart of this opposition--word versus thing, text versus image--have had far-reaching effects on the modern world.James Kearney engages with recent work in the history of the book and the history of religion to investigate the crisis of the book occasioned by the Reformation's simultaneous faith in text and distrust of material forms. Drawing in a wide range of topics--from humanism and hermeneutics to secularization and enlightenment, from iconoclasm and anti-Semitism to barbarism and fetishism--and looking to a range of texts--including Erasmus's "Jerome," Spenser's "Faerie Queene," and Shakespeare's Tempest--"The Incarnate Text" tells the story of how this crisis of the book helped to change the way the modern world apprehends both texts and things.