We all yearn for inner peace and happiness, but for most of us, negative thoughts and disturbing events seem to make any meaningful, lasting peace unattainable.

Written in eight parts, Led by Grace leads us through a process of forgiveness that brings us to serenity. It begins with Sandra Lowe's first meditations in the spring of 2001 and ends with her 925-kilometer pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago de Compostela in the fall of 2009. In the Beginning is the first book in the collection.

Sandra courageously shares her powerful story of growing to know her Self. From her first meditations, she is taken on journeys where she receives lessons and becomes witness to miracles. Sandra deepens our understanding of each meditation with an insightful interpretation and offers a means for bringing each lesson into our lives.

As we place ourselves in Sandra's journal entries, we encounter a vulture pecking away at our legs, are taken to a City of Gold, cross bridges that light up, become naked and experience love, find the keys to our Soul, soar with eagles, paint our Self-portrait, bathe in divine waters, and walk with a monk and Jesus. The Led by Grace collection guides us to our Soul--to know It, to be It.

In the early twentieth century, many Americans were troubled by the way agriculture was becoming increasingly industrial and corporate. Mainline Protestant churches and cooperative organizations began to come together to promote agrarianism: the belief that the health of the nation depended on small rural communities and family farms. In Baptized with the Soil Kevin M. Lowe offers for the first time a comprehensive history of the Protestant commitment to rural America. Christian agrarians believed that farming was the most moral way of life and a means for people to serve God by taking care of the earth that they believed God created. When the Great Depression hit, Christian agrarians worked harder to keep small farmers on the land. They formed alliances with state universities, cooperative extension services, and each other's denominations. They experimented with ways of revitalizing rural church life-including new worship services like Rural Life Sunday, and new strategies for raising financial support like the Lord's Acre. Because they believed that the earth was holy, Christian agrarians also became leaders in promoting soil conservation. Decades before the environmental movement, they inspired in their congregations an ethic of environmental stewardship. They may not have been able to prevent industrial agribusiness, but their ideas have helped define significant and long-lasting currents in American culture.

In the late Nineteenth-century, the Japanese embarked on a program of westernization in the hope of building a strong and modern nation. Science, technology and medicine played an important part, showing European nations that Japan was a world power worthy of respect. It has been acknowledged that state policy was important in the development of industries but how well-organized was the state and how close were government-business relations? The book seeks to answer these questions and others. The first part deals with the role of science and medicine in creating a healthy nation. The second part of the book is devoted to examining the role of technology, and business-state relations in building a modern nation.

This book highlights the importance of individuals in the shaping of postwar Japan by providing an historical account of how physicists constituted an influential elite. An history of science perspective provides insight into their role, helping us to understand the hybrid identity of Japanese scientists, and how they reinvented not only themselves, but also Japan. The book is special in that it uses the history of science to deal with issues relating to Japanese identity, and how it was transformed in the decades after Japan's defeat. It explores the lives and work of seven physicists, two of whom were Nobel prize winners. It makes use of little-known Occupation period documents, personal papers of physicists, and Japanese language source material.

Nutrients play a significant role in brain development throughout fetal and postnatal life. This book reviews the evidence from animal and human research, highlighting the influence of specific nutrients on brain function and cognitive development. With a unique, integrative approach to the nutritional, environmental, and genetic influences on brain development, the book examines issues such as single versus multiple limiting nutrients, critical periods of deficiency, and the impact of the child-parent relationship on the architecture of the developing brain. The effect of undernutrition on the developing brain of infants and young children can be devastating and enduring. It can impede behavioural and cognitive development and educability, thereby undermining future work productivity. Chapter authors are experts in this field of research and provide an up-to-date insight into the role of the individual nutrients in brain development and function.

This volume considers the rise of a new mode of creating, spreading, and encountering moral claims and ideas as they are expressed within spectacles. Brian M. Lowe explains how spectacles emerge when we are saturated with mediated representations-including pictures, texts, and videos-and exposed to television and movies and the myriad stories they tell us. The question of which moral issues gain our attention and which are neglected increasingly relates to how societal concerns are supported-or obscured-by spectacles. This project explores how this new form of moral understanding came to be. Through a series of case studies, including the use of radio and comic books; the crafting of Russian national identity through art; television and film; the evolution of human rights law through film and journalism; and the promotion of animal rights campaigns, this book unveils some of the ways in which our spectacular environment shapes moral understanding, and is in turn shaped by spectacle.

Reimagining Rural: Urbanormative Portrayals of Rural Life examines the ways in which rural people and places are being portrayed by popular television, reality television, film, literature, and news media in the United States. It is also an examination of the social processes that reinforce urbanormative standards that normalize urban life and render rural life as something unusual, exotic, or deviant. This includes exploring the role of the media as agenda setting agent, informing people what and how to think about rural life. Further it includes scrutinizing the institution of formal education that promotes a homogenous urban-oriented curriculum, while in the process, marginalizing the unique characteristics of local rural communities. These contributions are some of the only studies of their kind, investigating popular cultural representations of rural life, while providing powerful evidence and unique challenges for an urban society to rethink and reimagine rural life, while confronting the many stereotypes and myths that exist.

Reimagining Rural: Urbanormative Portrayals of Rural Life examines the ways in which rural people and places are being portrayed by popular television, reality television, film, literature, and news media in the United States. It is also an examination of the social processes that reinforce urbanormative standards that normalize urban life and render rural life as something unusual, exotic, or deviant. This includes exploring the role of the media as agenda setting agent, informing people what and how to think about rural life. Further it includes scrutinizing the institution of formal education that promotes a homogenous urban-oriented curriculum, while in the process, marginalizing the unique characteristics of local rural communities. These contributions are some of the only studies of their kind, investigating popular cultural representations of rural life, while providing powerful evidence and unique challenges for an urban society to rethink and reimagine rural life, while confronting the many stereotypes and myths that exist.

One of the central observations of the social sciences has been that the modern age is an age of constant change. This change has resulted in the emergence of new moral and ethical claims and understanding, which author Brian Lowe refers to as "moral vocabularies." Lowe skillfully seeks to explain under what conditions certain moral vocabularies are more likely to gain acceptance in the wider host society. By focusing on the animal rights and tobacco control movements, this absorbing work explores the process of moralization and the fragmentary nature of the emergence of new forms of moral and ethical meanings within the wider host society. Emerging Moral Vocabularies challenges the broad assertion that Western post-industrial societies are inevitably becoming more individualistic and self-centered, and instead encourages scholars to examine emerging forms for moral and ethical meaning, which form new moral boundaries.

This offers a varied perspective on the popular health/illness category of nerves. Relationships between gender and nerves are investigated in terms of biology and epidemiology, interpersonal and social relations, social construction of gender, affective and symbolic qualities of nerves.

Robert B. Textor Prize for Excellence in Anticipatory Anthropology, American Anthropological Association, 2000 Honorable Mention, Victor Turner Award, Society for Humanistic Anthropology, 2001 Leeds Prize, Society of Urban, National, and Transnational/Global Anthropology, 2001 Friendly gossip, political rallies, outdoor concerts, drugs, shoeshines, and sex-for-sale-almost every aspect of Latin American life has its place and time in the public plaza. In this wide-ranging, multi-disciplinary study, Setha M. Low explores the interplay of space and culture in the plaza, showing how culture acts to shape public spaces and how the physical form of the plaza encodes the social and economic relations within its city. Low centers her study on two plazas in San Jose, Costa Rica, with comparisons to public plazas in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere. She interweaves ethnography, history, literature, and personal narrative to capture the ambiance and meaning of the plaza. She also uncovers the contradictory ethnohistories of the European and indigenous origins of the Latin American plaza and explains why the plaza is often a politically contested space.

In step with the growing interest in place attachment, this volume examines the phenomena from the perspective of several disciplines-including anthropology, folklore, and psychology-and points towards promising directions of future research.

In the late Nineteenth-century, the Japanese embarked on a program of westernization in the hope of building a strong and modern nation. Science, technology and medicine played an important part, showing European nations that Japan was a world power worthy of respect. It has been acknowledged that state policy was important in the development of industries but how well-organized was the state and how close were government-business relations? The book seeks to answer these questions and others. The first part deals with the role of science and medicine in creating a healthy nation. The second part of the book is devoted to examining the role of technology, and business-state relations in building a modern nation.

This book originates in two symposia held during 1985 at the annual meetings of the Society for Applied Anthropology and the Environmental Design Research Association.

This book highlights the importance of individuals in the shaping of postwar Japan by providing an historical account of how physicists constituted an influential elite. An history of science perspective provides insight into their role, helping us to understand the hybrid identity of Japanese scientists, and how they reinvented not only themselves, but also Japan. The book is special in that it uses the history of science to deal with issues relating to Japanese identity, and how it was transformed in the decades after Japan's defeat. It explores the lives and work of seven physicists, two of whom were Nobel prize winners. It makes use of little-known Occupation period documents, personal papers of physicists, and Japanese language source material.

"Theorizing the City has become fundamental reading for those students of urban society and culture who wish to better understand twentieth-century city forms and spaces, as well as why certain race, gender, age, and class inequalities continue to be manifested today." -- Alejandro Lugo, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign "Using rich comparative material, this volume presents an intriguing anthropological vision of how cities are shaped. A major addition to a comparative anthropology of cities." --Judith Goode, co-editor of The New Poverty Studies "These informative essays make clear that anthropology has much to offer to urban theory and policy debates." --Nancy Foner, author of From Ellis Island to JFK: New York's Two Great Waves of Immigration Anthopological perspectives are not often represented in urban studies, even though many anthropologists have been contributing actively to theory and research on urban poverty, racism, globalization, and architecture. Theorizing the City corrects this omission. Following a brief history of urban anthroplogy, emphasizing developments in the field during the 1990s, this volume presents twelve ethnographies of major cities in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Europe. Five images of the city--the divided city, the contested city, the global city, the modernist city, and the postmodern city--serve as frameworks for the essays. Each section highlights current research trends such as poststructural studies of race, class, and gender in the urban context; political economic studies of transnational culture; and studies of the symbolic meanings and social production or urban spaces. Setha M. Low is professor of environmental psychology and anthopology and director of the Public Space Research Group at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is the author of On the Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture.