Recreating the World/Word
Recreating the World/Word

Author: Lynda D. McNeil

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 1992-07-01

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 1438412630

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This book combines interdisciplinary and comparatist approaches (anthropology, philosophy, psychology, and language) in the investigation of the mythic mode of thought and language in the post-Symbolist poets Arthur Rimbaud, Georg Trakl, Hart Crane, and Charles Olson. Part One covers the philosophical tradition from Gottfried Herder to Ernst Cassirer. Part Two includes close analytical readings of individual poems by these authors as they enact the mythic mode. The conclusion relates the mythic mode to feminist studies of thought and language.

Recreating Africa
Recreating Africa

Author: James H. Sweet

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2004-07-21

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 0807862347

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Exploring the cultural lives of African slaves in the early colonial Portuguese world, with an emphasis on the more than one million Central Africans who survived the journey to Brazil, James Sweet lifts a curtain on their lives as Africans rather than as incipient Brazilians. Focusing first on the cultures of Central Africa from which the slaves came--Ndembu, Imbangala, Kongo, and others--Sweet identifies specific cultural rites and beliefs that survived their transplantation to the African-Portuguese diaspora, arguing that they did not give way to immediate creolization in the New World but remained distinctly African for some time. Slaves transferred many cultural practices from their homelands to Brazil, including kinship structures, divination rituals, judicial ordeals, ritual burials, dietary restrictions, and secret societies. Sweet demonstrates that the structures of many of these practices remained constant during this early period, although the meanings of the rituals were often transformed as slaves coped with their new environment and status. Religious rituals in particular became potent forms of protest against the institution of slavery and its hardships. In addition, Sweet examines how certain African beliefs and customs challenged and ultimately influenced Brazilian Catholicism. Sweet's analysis sheds new light on African culture in Brazil's slave society while also enriching our understanding of the complex process of creolization and cultural survival.

Visionary Worlds
Visionary Worlds

Author: Lee Irwin

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 1996-03-07

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 1438407602

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Visionary Worlds examines the role and significance of imagination and the myth-making processes that engage human beings in constructing a viable, living world of meaningful relations, beliefs, and social interactions. In this process of "world-building," we each draw on a wide variety of ideologies--religious, philosophical, aesthetic or scientific--which often conflict and clash with one another in the struggle to evolve a coherent and meaningful worldview. This unpredictable and fallible process often requires considerable readjustment or revisions as the complexities of an increasingly pluralistic society impinge upon us with greater divergence and multiplicity. This work examines the ways in which we all make and unmake our reality as part of the challenge of seeking greater spiritual maturity and relatedness to others.

The Knowledge
The Knowledge

Author: Lewis Dartnell

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2015-03-10

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 0143127047

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How would you go about rebuilding a technological society from scratch? If our technological society collapsed tomorrow what would be the one book you would want to press into the hands of the postapocalyptic survivors? What crucial knowledge would they need to survive in the immediate aftermath and to rebuild civilization as quickly as possible? Human knowledge is collective, distributed across the population. It has built on itself for centuries, becoming vast and increasingly specialized. Most of us are ignorant about the fundamental principles of the civilization that supports us, happily utilizing the latest—or even the most basic—technology without having the slightest idea of why it works or how it came to be. If you had to go back to absolute basics, like some sort of postcataclysmic Robinson Crusoe, would you know how to re-create an internal combustion engine, put together a microscope, get metals out of rock, or even how to produce food for yourself? Lewis Dartnell proposes that the key to preserving civilization in an apocalyptic scenario is to provide a quickstart guide, adapted to cataclysmic circumstances. The Knowledge describes many of the modern technologies we employ, but first it explains the fundamentals upon which they are built. Every piece of technology rests on an enormous support network of other technologies, all interlinked and mutually dependent. You can’t hope to build a radio, for example, without understanding how to acquire the raw materials it requires, as well as generate the electricity needed to run it. But Dartnell doesn’t just provide specific information for starting over; he also reveals the greatest invention of them all—the phenomenal knowledge-generating machine that is the scientific method itself. The Knowledge is a brilliantly original guide to the fundamentals of science and how it built our modern world.

The Rav
The Rav

Author: Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff

Publisher: KTAV Publishing House, Inc.

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 9780881256154

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"This first volume recounts the details of the lives of the Rav and his forebears. This volume and the next constitute a scholarly attempt to detail the quests and ideas of one of the major personalities of modern American Jewish Orthodoxy". -- Jacket.

From the Inside Out
From the Inside Out

Author: Ryan Kuja

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2018-05-22

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 1532616392

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“For the sake of the world, we question. For the sake of the gospel, we examine. For the sake of the dignity of the image-bearers we serve—as well as ourselves—we inquire.” The evolution that has taken place in the world of mission over the last twenty-five years has left many Christians asking brutally honest questions about what we do and why we do it. Are we doing more damage than good? What does it look like to truly love and serve the marginalized in an authentic and effective way? What, actually, is the gospel and is it truly good news? In this groundbreaking book, Ryan Kuja vividly examines the world of Christian mission as few have seen it. With a beautiful balance of storytelling and theological reflection birthed from his own painful and powerful experiences on and off the field—from rural villages in South Sudan to major cities across Asia, Africa, and Latin America—Ryan guides us into global mission’s past and present, revealing where the light and hope lie, helping recover a missional future that will usher us into a new era. This is mission reimagined for a world recreated . . . from the inside out.

Nihilism Before Nietzsche
Nihilism Before Nietzsche

Author: Michael Allen Gillespie

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 1996-10

Total Pages: 335

ISBN-13: 0226293483

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In the twentieth century, we often think of Nietzsche, nihilism, and the death of God as inextricably connected. But, in this pathbreaking work, Michael Gillespie argues that Nietzsche, in fact, misunderstood nihilism, and that his misunderstanding has misled nearly all succeeding thought about the subject. Reconstructing nihilism's intellectual and spiritual origins before it was given its determinitive definition by Nietzsche, Gillespie focuses on the crucial turning points in the development of nihilism, from Ockham and the nominalist revolution to Descartes, Fichte, the German Romantics, the Russian nihilists and Nietzsche himself. His analysis shows that nihilism is not the result of the death of God, as Nietzsche believed; but the consequence of a new idea of God as a God of will who overturns all eternal standards of truth and justice. To understand nihilism, one has to understand how this notion of God came to inform a new notion of man and nature, one that puts will in place of reason, and freedom in place of necessity and order.