A Simple power-packed guide that helps us take appropriate responsibility for our experience and establish healthy boundaries with others. Once your have read this book you will keep it in your briefcase or on your bedside table, referring to it often. You will not find a more practical, down to earth guide to contemporary spirituality. You will want to order copies for all your friends.
This groundbreaking collection of no-holds-barred writing from the pages of "Libido" magazine--"our favorite source of contemporary erotica" ("Playboy")--assembles 40 superb stories and poems that will satisfy both the body and the mind.
This work is not only a general inquiry into ecstatic states of consciousness and an historical outline of the ecstatic poetic tradition but also an intensive study of five representative poets--Rumi, Wordsworth, Whitman, Dickinson, and Tagore. In a refreshingly original, wide-ranging engagement with concepts in psychology, religion, philosophy, aesthetics, sociology and history, this book demonstrates that the poetics and aesthetics of ecstasy represent an ancient, ubiquitous theory of poetry that continues to influence writers in the current century.
Clubbing explores the cultures and spaces of clubbing. Divided into three sections: Beginnings, The Night Out and Reflections, Clubbing includes first-hand accounts of clubbing experiences, framing these accounts within the relevant research and a review of clubbing in late-1990s Britain. Malbon particularly focuses on: the codes of social interaction among clubbers issues of gender and sexuality the effects of music the role of ecstasy clubbing as a playful act and personal interpretations of clubbing experiences.
Health, illness and disease are topics well-suited to interdisciplinary inquiry. This book brings together scholars from around the world who share an interest in and a commitment to bridging the traditional boundaries of inquiry. We hope that this book begins new conversations that will situate health in broader socio-cultural contexts and establish connections between health, illness and disease and other socio-political issues. This book is the outcome of the first global conference on Making Sense of: Health, Illness and Disease, held at St Catherine's College, Oxford, in June 2002. The selected papers pursue a range of topics from the cultural significance of narratives of health, illness and disease to healing practices in contemporary society as well as patients' illness experiences.
For Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-81), who lived with epileptic seizures for more than thirty years, illness is an ineradicable part of existence. Epilepsy in his writings denotes both a set of physical symptoms and a state of survival in which the protagonists incessantly try to articulate, theorize, or master what is ungraspable in their everyday experience. Their attempts to deal with what they cannot control or comprehend results in disappointment, or what Dostoevsky called a mystical terror. Dostoevsky's heroes are unable fully to understand this state, and their existence becomes 'epileptic' in so far as self-knowledge and self-coincidence are never achieved. Fung explores new critical pathways by reexamining five of Dostoevsky's post-Siberian novels. Drawing on insights from writers including Benjamin, Blanchot, Freud, Lacan and Nietzsche, the book takes epilepsy as a trope for discussing the unspeakable moments in the texts, and is intended for students and scholars who are interested in the subject of modernity, critique of the visual, and dialogues between philosophy and literature. Paul Fung is Assistant Professor in English at Hang Seng Management College, Hong Kong.
The Russian Kurosawa offers a new historical perspective on the work of the renowned Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa. It uncovers Kurosawa's debt to the intellectual tradition of Japanese-Russian democratic dissent, reflected in the affinity for Kurosawa's worldview expressed by such Russian directors as Grigory Kozintsev and Andrei Tarkovsky. Through a detailed discussion of the Russian subtext of Kurosawa's cinema, most clearly manifested in the director's films based on Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gorky, and Arseniev, the book shows that Kurosawa used Russian intertexts to deal with the most politically sensitive topics of postwar Japan. Locating the director in the cultural tradition of Russian-inflected Japanese anarchism, the book challenges prevalent views of Akira Kurosawa as an apolitical art house director or a conformist studio filmmaker of muddled ideological alliances by offering a philosophically consistent picture of the director's participation in post-war debates on cultural and political reconstruction.
"You cannot read Lifesigns and not be moved... This book will undoubtedly find its place among the classics of twentieth-century literature." --Grand Rapids Press The inspirational writings of Henri Nouwen have touched millions of readers all over the world. Much beloved as a lecturer, spiritual guide, and especially as an author, he communicated a profound message of hope that finds great resonance in today's world. In his now classic work Lifesigns, he explores what he saw as three of the most vital aspects of his ministry. The first of these is the Gospel invitation to intimacy, which Nouwen describes as communion with God and relationship with others. The second is the call to fecundity, exhorting us to be open to a fruitful life of change and growth. And the third, the experience of ecstasy, extends the Gospel promise "that your joy may be full." Inspired by L'Arche, the worldwide network of communities where handicapped people and their assistants try to live together in the spirit of the Scriptures, Nouwen shows how these three elements offer the essential key to a life free from the domination of fear and filled instead with hope and love.
... a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase in the mind itself. Thus Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce's Stephen Hero: defines the phenomenon that has ever since been known as the literary epiphany. The essays gathered in this volume comprise a wide survey of this phenomenon. With recurrent reference to its most famous creators, notably William Wordsworth, who was the first to consciously explore and delineate those momentous spots in time in his Prelude, Walter Pater, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, this book intends to provide a broad and unbiased exploration into the various types and categories of the moment of moment that can be distinguished, ranging from William Blake, Ann Radcliffe and Charles Maturin through the nineteenth-century sonnet tradition and the naturalistic novel to modernist and postmodernist exponents such as Ezra Pound and Elizabeth Bowen, Philip larkin and Seamus Heaney, and include contributions by acclaimed experts in the field such as Martin Bidney, Robert Langbaum, Jay Losey, and Ashton Nichols.
