A best gift for your loved ones. This is a fictional script that touches on topics like death, family, relationship, social expectations, regret and acceptance to deliver some social messages. While this book is an imaginary story, still you will realise – how valuable our life is. Currently, most of us value people for their materialistic assets, not for the kind of people they are. The book takes a bold and decisive look at how we, as humans, try to understand mystical happenings that often occur around us. We ignore this and avoid finding answers to them. We not only see events unfold from its imaginary character’s perspective, but also see how the living try to rationalise events that they do not comprehend.
Gersonides’ Afterlife is the first full-scale treatment of the reception of one of the greatest scientific minds of medieval Judaism: Gersonides (1288–1344). An outstanding representative of the Hebrew Jewish culture that then flourished in southern France, Gersonides wrote on mathematics, logic, astronomy, astrology, physical science, metaphysics and theology, and commented on almost the entire bible. His strong-minded attempt to integrate these different areas of study into a unitary system of thought was deeply rooted in the Aristotelian tradition and yet innovative in many respects, and thus elicited diverse and often impassionate reactions. For the first time, the twenty-one papers collected here describe Gersonides’ impact in all fields of his activity and the reactions from his contemporaries up to present-day religious Zionism.
The fourteen essays collected in this volume, notwithstanding their diversity of subject matter and approach, share a concern with the contexts to which we need to refer in order to understand not only the origins, but also the potential of Mikhail Bakhtin's thought: contexts both immediate and oblique, personal and impersonal, intellectual and theoretical. Five of the essays are by well-known Russian scholars whose work on Bakhtin has not previously been translated in English; the other nine papers are by established and emerging Bakhtin specialists in North America, the United Kingdom, and Europe.
Challenging conventional notions about the place of women in Muslim societies, the Bihishti Zewar (Heavenly Ornaments) gives life to the themes of religious and social reform that have too often been treated in the abstract. This instructional guidebook, used by the world's largest population of Muslims, is a vital source for those interested in modern Indian social and intellectual history, in Islamic reform, and in conceptions of gender and women's roles. The Bihishti Zewar was written in northern India in the early 1900s by a revered Muslim scholar and spiritual guide, Maulana Ashraf 'Ali Thanawi (1864-1943), to instruct Muslim girls and women in religious teachings, proper behavior, and prudent conduct of their everyday lives. In so doing, it sets out the core of a reformist version of Islam that has become increasingly prominent across Muslim societies during the past hundred years. Throughout the work, nothing is more striking than the extent to which the book takes women and men as essentially the same, in contrast to European works directed toward women at this time. Its rich descriptions of the everyday life of the relatively privileged classes in turn-of-the-century north India provide information on issues of personality formation as well as on family life, social relations, household management, and encounters with new institutions and inventions. Barbara Metcalf has carefully selected those sections of the Bihishti Zewar that best illustrate the themes of reformist thought about God, the person, society, and gender. She provides a substantial introduction to the text and to each section, as well as detailed annotations.
The question of what happens after death was a vital one in Shakespeare's time, as it is today. And, like today, the answers were by no means universally agreed upon. Early moderns held surprisingly diverse beliefs about the afterlife and about how earthly life affected one's fate after death. Was death akin to a sleep where one did not wake until judgment day? Were sick bodies healed in heaven? Did sinners experience torment after death? Would an individual reunite with loved ones in the afterlife? Could the dead communicate with the world of the living? Could the living affect the state of souls after death? How should the dead be commemorated? Could the dead return to life? Was immortality possible? The wide array of possible answers to these questions across Shakespeare's work can be surprising. Exploring how particular texts and characters answer these questions, Shakespeare and the Afterlife showcases the vitality and originality of the author's language and thinking. We encounter characters with very personal visions of what awaits them after death, and these visions reveal new insights into these individuals' motivations and concerns as they navigate the world of the living. Shakespeare and the Afterlife encourages us to engage with the author's work with new insight and new curiosity. The volume connects some of the best-known speeches, characters, and conflicts to cultural debates and traditions circulating during Shakespeare's time.
TBoan's Tales of the Fantastic 1: Fragments of Mind is a collection of fantasy genre short stories. The author calls them fragments because some of them are excerpts from larger bodies of unfinished works in progress. They are a mere taste of more yet to come! Yet, they stand on their own, each an escape from your everyday life into worlds of the fantastic... the epic, the paranormal, the magical, the mythical, and the macabre! Explore these new worlds, experience their different cultures and lifeways, and learn about characters and situations far different from your own! If you're into RPGs (Role Playing Games), and especially if you like fantasy anthologies in general, you'll love TBoan's Tales of the Fantastic 1: Fragments of Mind. Look forward for more to come from the TBoan's Tales of the Fantastic series!
If there was ever a need-to-know book, Afterlife is it. On his daily call-in radio show, the most common questions Hanegraff fields are about the hereafter. For instance, millions are voraciously reading about the near-death experiences of young children. Consumers are desperate for knowledge and reassurance about what comes after life on the earth. Hank Hanegraff, one of the most remarkable theological minds of the 21st century, explains the marvelous way this physical life connects our past to our eternal future. Afterlife gives reader a clear and concrete understanding about what happens after death to us and to those we love.
A tale of our world and of the afterlife, told to George by Chloe, his deceased daughter. George tells his friend Charles of a strange incident. He says his daughter comes to speak to him while he is asleep. Immediately after she stops speaking, he wakes up and rushes to his computer to type out what she has told him. Chloe relates to George her experiences from the moment of her death, her conversation with a mysterious gatekeeper of the afterlife, and her extensive conversations with other spirits she has come into contact with. James is a Dubliner who died from alcoholism, estranged from his family; Jessie is a model who got caught up in drugs and eventually prostitution; Craig is an effervescent American real estate agent whose life revolved around making money; April married for money and found that after their baby was born and her husband was promoted at work he had no time for them; and Clarissa, who knew well in advance that she was going to die from skin cancer. Throughout the telling of his daughter’s story, George intermittently pauses and questions Charles as to his thoughts on various aspects of the story. Charles is a corporate man and the philosophical arguments and the pure unbelievable nature and emotion of the story leave him virtually speechless. At first George confides only in Charles. But when their wives become suspicious of the men’s activities on the occasions he read his notes out to Charles, George has no choice but to agree to Charles telling them their secret. George is confused as to what he should do with his notes. He finally decides to enlist Charles’s help to reveal to the world the ‘secret’ of his daughter’s story.
'This book enthralled me: in it I travelled with characters who found themselves experiencing the agony caused to others by their actions during their lifetime, and with those who had created and were locked into their own pain. A truly beautiful book.' Annabel Muis, Reiki Master and co-author of Turning Points; Regaining joy after loss “My name is Athar. At least it is now that I am here, in heaven. I can tell you the story only now. I couldn’t back then, when it was too painful, when it hurt too much. But now I know what happens. More than that, I now know why. I am not here to tell you what to believe. I am here to tell you what is true.” The Afterlife: A Journey To is an inspirational voyage of discovery through heaven's many portals - you will experience heaven’s many levels BEFORE you get there.
Happiness. We spend our life and all our efforts in its pursuit. Yet do we really know what it is and how it occurs? Are we secure in how to achieve and maintain it? Are we certain that we are maximizing our potential to obtain it? Our answers to these questions may not be as firm as we would like them to be. The principles and strategies we produce or receive from others may not provide the happiness they promise or we desire. We may be able to blame interference or seemingly unchangeable circumstances as causes for this shortfall. But we may also sense that our lack of insight arrests our happiness at levels short of its potential. We are searching, often not even knowing what we are looking for. This book investigates in a thorough manner what happiness is and how we might achieve happiness. It is written as a theoretical and practical guide that does not require prior philosophical training. Striving to cover all facets of human pursuits of happiness, its philosophical considerations include topics of law, economics, political science, sociology, history, anthropology, psychology, biology, and physics. Its inclusive examination reveals happiness as an intensely individual phenomenon as well as a systematic force that shapes human destiny and matters beyond up to a cosmic scale. The book illuminates these subjective and objective functions of happiness. Its insights about the nature of happiness may help us to understand the general subject matters of our search as well as the general terrain and rules by which we must abide in our pursuit of happiness. However, it does not presume to know what specific objectives and pursuits will make us happy. Rather, it develops, describes, and encourages us to discover tools to find, understand, and define our personal happiness and to pursue the implementation of this vision with optimized preparedness. Its objective is not to indoctrinate but to empower us. The book proposes that humans are generally endowed with all internal constituents and mechanisms to develop their happiness to its fullest possible extent. Unless our faculties are pathologically impeded, we might only have to become aware of these inherent forces to actuate them. Improving our happiness seems to be a function of comprehensively revealing our concept of happiness and permitting it to take its natural place. The mission of the book is to assist in this process. Finding what makes us happy requires that we achieve knowledge of who we are and of what we want. It requires us to be mindful of our wishes, our needs, our personality. Once we understand our motivations, we must arrange and implement them to their best effect in relation to one another, our capacities, other humans, and our nonhuman environment. The book supports us in gaining these insights and in the resulting tasks. The book further examines how much happiness we can expect to obtain even under the best circumstances. It describes external and internal constraints that threaten our achievements. But it also shows perspectives that may enable us to conquer limitations. Thus, we may not only gain clarity about our happiness but also confidence in its pursuit. Visit the book website with the same name to learn more.
