Black Elk Speaks
Black Elk Speaks

Author: John G. Neihardt

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2014-03-01

Total Pages: 470

ISBN-13: 0803283938

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Black Elk Speaks, the story of the Oglala Lakota visionary and healer Nicholas Black Elk (1863–1950) and his people during momentous twilight years of the nineteenth century, offers readers much more than a precious glimpse of a vanished time. Black Elk’s searing visions of the unity of humanity and Earth, conveyed by John G. Neihardt, have made this book a classic that crosses multiple genres. Whether appreciated as the poignant tale of a Lakota life, as a history of a Native nation, or as an enduring spiritual testament, Black Elk Speaks is unforgettable. Black Elk met the distinguished poet, writer, and critic John G. Neihardt in 1930 on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota and asked Neihardt to share his story with the world. Neihardt understood and conveyed Black Elk’s experiences in this powerful and inspirational message for all humankind. This complete edition features a new introduction by historian Philip J. Deloria and annotations of Black Elk’s story by renowned Lakota scholar Raymond J. DeMallie. Three essays by John G. Neihardt provide background on this landmark work along with pieces by Vine Deloria Jr., Raymond J. DeMallie, Alexis Petri, and Lori Utecht. Maps, original illustrations by Standing Bear, and a set of appendixes rounds out the edition.

Visions in a Seer Stone
Visions in a Seer Stone

Author: William L. Davis

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2020-04-08

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 1469655675

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In this interdisciplinary work, William L. Davis examines Joseph Smith's 1829 creation of the Book of Mormon, the foundational text of the Latter Day Saint movement. Positioning the text in the history of early American oratorical techniques, sermon culture, educational practices, and the passion for self-improvement, Davis elucidates both the fascinating cultural context for the creation of the Book of Mormon and the central role of oral culture in early nineteenth-century America. Drawing on performance studies, religious studies, literary culture, and the history of early American education, Davis analyzes Smith's process of oral composition. How did he produce a history spanning a period of 1,000 years, filled with hundreds of distinct characters and episodes, all cohesively tied together in an overarching narrative? Eyewitnesses claimed that Smith never looked at notes, manuscripts, or books—he simply spoke the words of this American religious epic into existence. Judging the truth of this process is not Davis's interest. Rather, he reveals a kaleidoscope of practices and styles that converged around Smith's creation, with an emphasis on the evangelical preaching styles popularized by the renowned George Whitefield and John Wesley.

Throw Away Your Vision Board
Throw Away Your Vision Board

Author: Neil E. Farber, M.D.

Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform

Published: 2016-04-23

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 9781507847305

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Are you like so many people who have tried unsuccessfully to attain your goals with a vision board? Vision boards are based on the so-called, law of attraction; like always attracts like. As in the book, The Secret, if you think it and live it, the universe will deliver it to you. Unfortunately, the law of attraction does not work 99.9% of the time. In his thorough and candid analysis, Dr. Farber takes you through a fascinating history of the law of attraction as well as the good, the bad, and the ugly side of vision boards. As a certified "Advanced Law of Attraction Practitioner," Dr. Farber exposes the truth about the law of attraction. He shows how believing in this "law" may be detrimental to your health, inhibit your compassion for others, decrease your motivation, and lessen your chance of achieving goals. This is not just a book about what not to do. This book shows us how to upgrade our vision boards and boost our success by utilizing mind-brain science and positive psychology research. Dr. Farber has the solution to our goal-achieving desires. He introduces us to the "Key to Achieve Principles" and The Action Board goal-achieving system. As the inventor of The Action Board, Dr. Farber is the world's leading expert in this system!

Believing Is Seeing
Believing Is Seeing

Author: Errol Morris

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2014-05-27

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 0143124250

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Academy Award–winning director Errol Morris turns his eye to the nature of truth in photography In his inimitable style, Errol Morris untangles the mysteries behind an eclectic range of documentary photographs. With his keen sense of irony, skepticism, and humor, Morris shows how photographs can obscure as much as they reveal, and how what we see is often determined by our beliefs. Each essay in this book is part detective story, part philosophical meditation, presenting readers with a conundrum, and investigates the relationship between photographs and the real world they supposedly record. Believing Is Seeing is a highly original exploration of photography and perception, from one of America’s most provocative observers.

Truth and Vision in Katherine Anne Porter's Fiction
Truth and Vision in Katherine Anne Porter's Fiction

Author: Darlene Harbour Unrue

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2008-12-01

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 0820333549

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My stories are fragments of a larger plan, Katherine Anne Porter once wrote. And on another occasion she praised a critic who perceived that all her work, from the very beginning, was part of an "unbroken progression, all related." In Truth and Vision in Katherine Anne Porter's Fiction, Darlene Unrue examines the encompassing themes that underlie Porter's shorter fiction and that combined to create the haunting events of her complex metaphorical novel, Ship of Fools. Porter believed that men and women are compelled toward discovering the truth about their existence, but that the nature of our world makes those truths difficult to discern. In her writing, Unrue finds, Porter explored not only this basic human need to confront the truth, but also the bewilderment and suffering that are so often the results of failing to fulfill that need. Often in Porter's fiction the movement toward truth is obstructed by the hollow beliefs and illusions that abound in the world--by the seductions of ideology and dogmatic religion, by romantic love or the vision of a golden past. Clinging to such illusions, using them to lend a false coherence to their lives, Porter's characters are led away from the hard realization that truth requires accepting the existence of the unknowable at the center of life, and that what is knowable lies within themselves. Drawing on essays, reviews, letters, and notes, as well as on the intricate fabric of the fiction, this study traces Porter's pursuit of the truth through the creation of a body of fiction in which, from fragments of life, she could assemble an honest vision of the world.

Objects of Vision
Objects of Vision

Author: A. Joan Saab

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2021-02-26

Total Pages: 167

ISBN-13: 0271088702

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Advances in technology allow us to see the invisible: fetal heartbeats, seismic activity, cell mutations, virtual space. Yet in an age when experience is so intensely mediated by visual records, the centuries-old realization that knowledge gained through sight is inherently fallible takes on troubling new dimensions. This book considers the ways in which seeing, over time, has become the foundation for knowing (or at least for what we think we know). A. Joan Saab examines the scientific and socially constructed aspects of seeing in order to delineate a genealogy of visuality from the Renaissance to the present, demonstrating that what we see and how we see it are often historically situated and culturally constructed. Through a series of linked case studies that highlight moments of seeming disconnect between seeing and believing—hoaxes, miracles, spirit paintings, manipulated photographs, and holograms, to name just a few—she interrogates the relationship between “visions” and visuality. This focus on the strange and the wonderful in understanding changing notions of visions and visual culture is a compelling entry point into the increasingly urgent topic of technologically enhanced representations of reality. Accessibly written and thoroughly enlightening, Objects of Vision is a concise history of the connections between seeing and knowing that will appeal to students and teachers of visual studies and sensory, social, and cultural history.

The Vision of the Soul
The Vision of the Soul

Author: James Matthew Wilson

Publisher: CUA Press

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 0813229286

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Ours is an age full of desires but impoverished in its understanding of where those desires lead—an age that claims mastery over the world but also claims to find the world as a whole absurd or unintelligible. In The Vision of the Soul, James Matthew Wilson seeks to conserve the great insights of the western tradition by giving us a new account of them responsive to modern discontents. The western— or Christian Platonist—tradition, he argues, tells us that man is an intellectual animal, born to pursue the good, to know the true, and to contemplate all things in beauty. Wilson begins by reconceiving the intellectual conservatism born of Edmund Burke’s jeremiad against the French Revolution as an effort to preserve the West’s vision of man and the cosmos as ordered by and to beauty. After defining the achievement of that vision and its tradition, Wilson offers an extended study of the nature of beauty and the role of the fine arts in shaping a culture but above all in opening the human intellect to the perception of the form of reality. Through close studies of Theodor W. Adorno and Jacques Maritain, he recovers the classical vision of beauty as a revelation of truth and being. Finally, he revisits the ancient distinction between reason and story-telling, between mythos and logos, in order to rejoin the two. Story-telling is foundational to the forms of the fine arts, but it is no less foundational to human reason. Human life in turn constitutes a specific kind of form—a story form. The ancient conception of human life as a pilgrimage to beauty itself is one that we can fully embrace only if we see the essential correlation between reason and story and the essential convertibility of truth, goodness and beauty in beauty. By turns a study in fundamental ontology, aesthetics, and political philosophy, Wilson’s book invites its readers to a renewal of the West’s intellectual tradition.