Dr. Luvelle Brown has shifted the hearts and minds of our community to accept new ideas in public education through his inspirational leadership. He is a visionary leader who effects positive change in our children's lives. He possesses all the essential leadership gifts and readily displays them in this thought-provoking work. A Culture of Love speaks to the leadership gift of empowerment-enabling others to feel the difference. And, it profoundly speaks to the gift of love- care and compassion lending to a sense of significance, finding meaning in contribution.
Talk of love surrounds us, and romance is a constant concern of popular culture. Ann Swidler's Talk of Love is an attempt to discover how people find and sustain real love in the midst of that talk, and how that culture of love shapes their expectations and behavior in the process. To this end, Swidler conducted extensive interviews with Middle Americans and wound up offering us something more than an insightful exploration of love: Talk of Love is also a compelling study of how much culture affects even the most personal of our everyday experiences.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER To get ahead today, you have to be a jerk, right? Divisive politicians. Screaming heads on television. Angry campus activists. Twitter trolls. Today in America, there is an “outrage industrial complex” that prospers by setting American against American, creating a “culture of contempt”—the habit of seeing people who disagree with us not as merely incorrect, but as worthless and defective. Maybe, like more than nine out of ten Americans, you dislike it. But hey, either you play along, or you’ll be left behind, right? Wrong. In Love Your Enemies, social scientist and author of the #1 New York Times bestseller From Strength to Strength Arthur C. Brooks shows that abuse and outrage are not the right formula for lasting success. Brooks blends cutting-edge behavioral research, ancient wisdom, and a decade of experience leading one of America’s top policy think tanks in a work that offers a better way to lead based on bridging divides and mending relationships. Brooks’ prescriptions are unconventional. To bring America together, we shouldn’t try to agree more. There is no need for mushy moderation, because disagreement is the secret to excellence. Civility and tolerance shouldn’t be our goals, because they are hopelessly low standards. And our feelings toward our foes are irrelevant; what matters is how we choose to act. Love Your Enemies offers a clear strategy for victory for a new generation of leaders. It is a rallying cry for people hoping for a new era of American progress. Most of all, it is a roadmap to arrive at the happiness that comes when we choose to love one another, despite our differences.
A series of interconnected essays on love and courtship as themes in Dutch art, this study examines pictorial subjects and artists that have never been considered together: paintings and prints of "garden parties" by David Vinckboons and Esaias van de Velde, merry companies by Willem Buytewech, paintings of courting couples observing peasant festivities by Jan Miense Molenaer, two portraits by Frans Hals and two important landscape etchings by Rembrandt. Nevitt places these works in the context of the culture of love at the time, which manifested itself in the social practices of courtship and a variety of amatory texts.
In Love-Based Culture, thought leader Ivo Nelson provides 10 love-based principles that will help you create happy customers, energize employees, and enjoy rich year-to-year revenue growth, all while steering your business away from fear and toward love.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Julia's story of her transformative years in France in her own words is "captivating ... her marvelously distinctive voice is present on every page.” (San Francisco Chronicle). Although she would later singlehandedly create a new approach to American cuisine with her cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking and her television show The French Chef, Julia Child was not always a master chef. Indeed, when she first arrived in France in 1948 with her husband, Paul, who was to work for the USIS, she spoke no French and knew nothing about the country itself. But as she dove into French culture, buying food at local markets and taking classes at the Cordon Bleu, her life changed forever with her newfound passion for cooking and teaching. Julia’s unforgettable story—struggles with the head of the Cordon Bleu, rejections from publishers to whom she sent her now-famous cookbook, a wonderful, nearly fifty-year long marriage that took the Childs across the globe—unfolds with the spirit so key to Julia’s success as a chef and a writer, brilliantly capturing one of America’s most endearing personalities.
One of the most common—and wounding—misconceptions about literary scholars today is that they simply don’t love books. While those actually working in literary studies can easily refute this claim, such a response risks obscuring a more fundamental question: why should they? That question led Deidre Shauna Lynch into the historical and cultural investigation of Loving Literature. How did it come to be that professional literary scholars are expected not just to study, but to love literature, and to inculcate that love in generations of students? What Lynch discovers is that books, and the attachments we form to them, have played a vital role in the formation of private life—that the love of literature, in other words, is deeply embedded in the history of literature. Yet at the same time, our love is neither self-evident nor ahistorical: our views of books as objects of affection have clear roots in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century publishing, reading habits, and domestic history. While never denying the very real feelings that warm our relationship to books, Loving Literature nonetheless serves as a riposte to those who use the phrase “the love of literature” as if its meaning were transparent. Lynch writes, “It is as if those on the side of love of literature had forgotten what literary texts themselves say about love’s edginess and complexities.” With this masterly volume, Lynch restores those edges and allows us to revel in those complexities.
Love, Language, Place, and Identity in Popular Culture: Romancing the Other explores the varied representations of Otherness in romance novels and other fiction with strong romantic plots. Contributors’ approaches range from sociolinguistics to cultural studies, and the texts analyzed are set on four continents, with particular emphasis on Caribbean and Atlantic islands. What all the essays have in common is the exploration of representations of the Other, be it in an inter-racial or inter-cultural relationship. Chapters are divided into two parts; the first examines place, travel, history, and language in 20th-century texts; while the second explores tensions and transformations in the depiction of Otherness, mainly in texts published in the early 21st century. This book reveals that even at the end of the 20th century, these texts display neocolonialist attitudes towards the Other. While more recent texts show noticeable changes in attitudes, these changes can often fall short, as stereotypes and prejudices are often still present, just below the surface, in popular novels. The understudied field of popular romance, in which the Other is frequently present as a love interest, proves to be a fruitful area in which to explore the potential and the realities of the treatment of Otherness in popular culture. Scholars of literature, communication, romance, and rhetoric will find this book particularly useful.
As recent college graduates and childhood best friends, Sophie and Sadie start their new chapter of life with a trip to Spain. However, their girlie vacation quickly turns into a lover's paradise when Sophie lays eyes on a handsome Brit, Dylan. Now, after two years of struggling to settle in comfortably in England, Sophie begins to worry whether or not Dylan's love is enough and if their cultural differences will slowly eat away at her and threaten their strong bond? Then Dylan pops the question, Sophie is quick to put all her worries behind her. At their engagement party Sophie finally feels like she is fitting in and England is looking promising. But, suddenly, Dylan breaks off the engagement and, before she knows it, she is back on a plane headed for America without Dylan or an explanation. Distraught and traumatized, Sophie struggles to cope with the unexpected breakup and tries to fit back into her own culture, instantly realizing that all the things she didn't like about England were exactly what she missed the most. Back in the States, the fast pace of life and the open skies seemed to swallow her whole. Will Sophie and Sadie get back to where they left off, before Spain? Or will Sophie and Dylan's strong bond bring them back together? The pain threatens to change Sophie forever. Could it also threaten any chance of a reunion?
The music we listen to, the movies we watch—they're all telling us to keep chasing love, and that we'll finally be happy when we find it. But is love really all we need? The love that the world tells us to pursue is all about self, about following your heart’s desires. But what is the Christian worldview on love? When we follow Jesus, we realize that he invites us to reorient the focus of our lives, so instead of chasing love primarily for our own happiness, we are first and foremost to give love—to God and to others. In Chasing Love, Sean McDowell will invite readers into Jesus’ radical, upside-down approach to love, and in doing so, he’ll answer some of the toughest questions we’re asking about love today: How does Jesus speak to singleness? What does the gospel say about LGBTQ issues? Can sexual sin truly be forgiven? What if I’m not happy in my marriage?
