The Leap
The Leap

Author: Steve Taylor

Publisher: New World Library

Published: 2017-02-14

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 1608684474

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What does it mean to be enlightened or spiritually awakened? In The Leap, Steve Taylor shows that this state is much more common than is generally believed. He shows that ordinary people — from all walks of life — can and do regularly “wake up” to a more intense reality, even if they know nothing about spiritual practices and paths. Wakefulness is a more expansive and harmonious state of being that can be cultivated or that can arise accidentally. It may also be a process we are undergoing collectively. Drawing on his years of research as a psychologist and on his own experiences, Taylor provides what is perhaps the clearest psychological study of the state of wakefulness ever published. Above all, he reminds us that it is our most natural state — accessible to us all, anytime, anyplace.

Central Prison
Central Prison

Author: Gregory S. Taylor

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2021-04-07

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 0807174882

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Gregory S. Taylor’s Central Prison is the first scholarly study to explore the prison’s entire history, from its origins in the 1870s to its status in the first decades of the twenty-first century. Taylor addresses numerous features of the state’s vast prison system, including chain gangs, convict leasing, executions, and the nearby Women’s Prison, to describe better the vagaries of living behind bars in the state’s largest penitentiary. He incorporates vital elements of the state’s history into his analysis to draw clear parallels between the changes occurring in free society and those affecting Central Prison. Throughout, Taylor illustrates that the prison, like the state itself, struggled with issues of race, gender, sectionalism, political infighting, finances, and progressive reform. Finally, Taylor also explores the evolution of penal reform, focusing on the politicians who set prison policy, the officials who administered it, and the untold number of African American inmates who endured incarceration in a state notorious for racial strife and injustice. Central Prison approaches the development of the penal system in North Carolina from a myriad of perspectives, offering a range of insights into the workings of the state penitentiary. It will appeal not only to scholars of criminal justice but also to historians searching for new ways to understand the history of the Tar Heel State and general readers wanting to know more about one of North Carolina’s most influential—and infamous—institutions.

The Language Animal
The Language Animal

Author: Charles Taylor

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2016-03-14

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 0674970276

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“We have been given a powerful and often uplifting vision of what it is to be truly human.” —John Cottingham, The Tablet In seminal works ranging from Sources of the Self to A Secular Age, Charles Taylor has shown how we create possible ways of being, both as individuals and as a society. In his new book setting forth decades of thought, he demonstrates that language is at the center of this generative process. For centuries, philosophers have been divided on the nature of language. Those in the rational empiricist tradition—Hobbes, Locke, Condillac, and their heirs—assert that language is a tool that human beings developed to encode and communicate information. In The Language Animal, Taylor explains that this view neglects the crucial role language plays in shaping the very thought it purports to express. Language does not merely describe; it constitutes meaning and fundamentally shapes human experience. The human linguistic capacity is not something we innately possess. We first learn language from others, and, inducted into the shared practice of speech, our individual selves emerge out of the conversation. Taylor expands the thinking of the German Romantics Hamann, Herder, and Humboldt into a theory of linguistic holism. Language is intellectual, but it is also enacted in artistic portrayals, gestures, tones of voice, metaphors, and the shifts of emphasis and attitude that accompany speech. Human language recognizes no boundary between mind and body. In illuminating the full capacity of “the language animal,” Taylor sheds light on the very question of what it is to be a human being.

Race for Profit
Race for Profit

Author: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2019-09-03

Total Pages: 364

ISBN-13: 1469653672

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LONGLISTED FOR THE 2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST, 2020 PULITZER PRIZE IN HISTORY By the late 1960s and early 1970s, reeling from a wave of urban uprisings, politicians finally worked to end the practice of redlining. Reasoning that the turbulence could be calmed by turning Black city-dwellers into homeowners, they passed the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968, and set about establishing policies to induce mortgage lenders and the real estate industry to treat Black homebuyers equally. The disaster that ensued revealed that racist exclusion had not been eradicated, but rather transmuted into a new phenomenon of predatory inclusion. Race for Profit uncovers how exploitative real estate practices continued well after housing discrimination was banned. The same racist structures and individuals remained intact after redlining's end, and close relationships between regulators and the industry created incentives to ignore improprieties. Meanwhile, new policies meant to encourage low-income homeownership created new methods to exploit Black homeowners. The federal government guaranteed urban mortgages in an attempt to overcome resistance to lending to Black buyers – as if unprofitability, rather than racism, was the cause of housing segregation. Bankers, investors, and real estate agents took advantage of the perverse incentives, targeting the Black women most likely to fail to keep up their home payments and slip into foreclosure, multiplying their profits. As a result, by the end of the 1970s, the nation's first programs to encourage Black homeownership ended with tens of thousands of foreclosures in Black communities across the country. The push to uplift Black homeownership had descended into a goldmine for realtors and mortgage lenders, and a ready-made cudgel for the champions of deregulation to wield against government intervention of any kind. Narrating the story of a sea-change in housing policy and its dire impact on African Americans, Race for Profit reveals how the urban core was transformed into a new frontier of cynical extraction.

Our Sufficiency is of God
Our Sufficiency is of God

Author: Timothy George

Publisher: Mercer University Press

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 376

ISBN-13: 0881462063

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Resources for preachers steadily appear, called forth by the perennial need on the part of working pastors for helpful and inspirational materials backed by tested experience, reverent scholarship, and creative insights. The essays in this book are of that cast, and each essay is the work of an experienced practitioner-scholar in the field of preaching. The chapters focus on the preaching ministry of Gardner Calvin Taylor, in whose honor the volume was prepared. They are offered, with affection and esteem, by colleagues, students, and friends, fellow preachers all, whose own attempts to speak the unsearchable riches of Christ owe much to the life and labors of Gardner C. Taylor.Considered by many as the greatest living American preacher, Gardner C. Taylor has often reminded other preachers about the need for divine help in fulfilling the call: All in all, a summons to the ministry is no light calling. The work of communicating the gospel requires us to be more than we are-to exceed who we are. This volume will lead readers to the realization of the need for grace and a sufficiency only found in God (II Cor 3:5, KJV) as indicated by the title: Our Sufficiency Is of God.