Polishing the Mirror
Polishing the Mirror

Author: Ram Dass

Publisher: Sounds True

Published: 2013-08-01

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 1622031679

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Sometimes illumination occurs spontaneously or, as Ram Dass experienced, in a heart-wrenching moment of opening. More commonly, it happens when we polish the mirror of the heart with daily practice—and see beyond the illusion of our transient thoughts and emotions to the vast and luminous landscape of our true nature. For five decades, Ram Dass has explored the depths of consciousness and love and brought them to life as service to others. With Polishing the Mirror, he gathers together his essential teachings for living in the eternal present, here and now. Readers will find within these pages a rich combination of perennial wisdom, humor, teaching stories, and detailed guidance on Ram Dass' own spiritual practices, including: Bhakti Yoga—opening our hearts to unconditional lovePractices for living, aging, dying, and embracing the natural flow of lifeKarma Yoga—how selfless service can profoundly transform usWorking with fear and suffering as a path to grace and freedomStep-by-step guidance in devotional chant, meditation and mantra practice, and much more For those new to Ram Dass' teachings, and for those to whom they are old friends, here is this vanguard spiritual explorer's complete guide to discovering who we are and why we are here, and how to become beacons of unconditional love.

The Mirror of Antiquity
The Mirror of Antiquity

Author: David Wills

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2009-03-26

Total Pages: 195

ISBN-13: 1443806609

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During the last century, writers as diverse as William Golding, Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, Evelyn Waugh, Virginia Woolf, and Laurie Lee, were captivated by Greece. They were joined in their production of travel accounts by hundreds of lesser-known authors. This book exposes how the responses of travellers were conditioned by much more than their own opinions and personalities. The British education system, classical scholarship, and the heroism demonstrated by the Greeks during the Nazi invasion of their country, all contributed to shaping travel narratives. The author analyses the way in which all of the major archaeological sites were described—including the Athenian Acropolis, Delphi, Olympia, Heinrich Schliemann’s Mycenae, and Sir Arthur Evans’ Knossos in Crete. The representation of the modern Greek people, particularly in the period after the Second World War, is also explored at length. Viewed as relics of the past, the Greeks in literature were given the qualities and appearance of their ancestors. David Wills shows how in the hands of twentieth century travel writers, Greece became less a modern country, and more a mirror of antiquity. This book is essential reading for all who are interested in the history of travel and tourism, reception of the classical past, and recent Greek history.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans
Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans

Author: Henri Cartier-Bresson

Publisher:

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13:

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This book provides the reader with a unique opportunity to confront and compare the visions of two seminal photographic masters, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Walker Evans.

Romantic Poetry
Romantic Poetry

Author: Karl Kroeber

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 520

ISBN-13: 9780813520100

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This anthology fills the need for a comprehensive, up-to-date collection of the most important contemporary writings on the English romantic poets. During the 1980s, many theoretical innovations in literary study swept academic criticism. Many of these approaches--from deconstructive, new historicist, and feminist perspectives--used romantic texts as primary examples and altered radically the ways in which we read. Other major changes have occurred in textual studies, dramatically transforming the works of these poets. The world of English romantic poetry has certainly changed, and Romantic Poetry keeps pace with those changes. Karl Kroeber and Gene W. Ruoff have organized the book by poet--Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelly, and Keats--and have included essays representative of key critical approaches to each poet's work. In addition to their excellent general introduction, the editors have provided brief, helpful forewords to each essay, showing how it reflects current approaches to its subject. The book also has an extensive bibliography sure to serve as an important research aid. Students on all levels will find this book invaluable.

The Marx Brothers and America
The Marx Brothers and America

Author: Robert E. Weir

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2022-08-17

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 1476688958

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The ground has shifted from the days in which "serious history" and "boring" went hand in glove. Textbooks and lectures have their place, but less traditional classrooms can be powerfully immersive and insightful. Take the 1929 Marx Brothers film The Cocoanuts and what it teaches about both the Great Depression and early sound films. The Marx Brothers are among the funniest comedy teams of all time. Four of their 13 films are on the American Film Institute's list of the 100 greatest American comedies ever made. For many contemporary viewers, though, "getting" the jokes is not always easy because the humor can be subjective and timebound. This work looks at the American past through the lens of the Marx Brothers' films and other projects. Each of the chapters focuses on a specific film, contextualizing the world at the time and how the Marx Brothers lampooned those subjects. Along the way, the book demonstrates what the Marx Brothers revealed about weighty topics like gambling, gender relations, immigration, medical care, Prohibition, race and war, all leavened with offbeat humor.

Classical Reception
Classical Reception

Author: Anastasia Bakogianni

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2024-07-22

Total Pages: 434

ISBN-13: 3110773724

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In a time of acute crisis when our societies face a complex series of challenges (race, gender, inclusivity, changing pedagogical needs and a global pandemic) we urgently need to re-access the nature of our engagement with the Classical World. This edited collection argues that we need to discover new ways to draw on our discipline and the material it studies to engage in meaningful ways with these new academic and societal challenges. The chapters included in the collection interrogate the very processes of reception and continue the work of destabilising the concept of a pure source text or point of origin. Our aim is to break through the boundaries that still divide our ancient texts and material culture from their reception, and interpretive communities. Our contributors engage with these questions theoretically and/or through the close examination of cultural artefacts. They problematise the concept of a Western, elitist canon and actively push the geographical boundaries of reception as both a local and a global phenomenon. Individually and cumulatively, they actively engage with the question of how to marshal the classical past in our efforts to respond to the challenges of our mutable contemporary world.

Land and Liberty
Land and Liberty

Author: Christopher William England

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2023-02-14

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 1421445417

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A comprehensive history of Henry George and the single tax movement. In 1912, Sun Yat-sen announced the birth of the Chinese Republic and promised that it would be devoted to the economic welfare of all its people. In shaping his plans for wealth redistribution, he looked to an American now largely forgotten in the United States: Henry George. In Land and Liberty, Christopher William England excavates the lost history of one of America's most influential radicals and explains why so many activists were once inspired by his proposal to tax landed wealth. Drawing on the private papers of a network of devoted believers, Land and Liberty represents the first comprehensive account of this important movement to nationalize land and expropriate rent. Beginning with concerns about rising rents in the 1870s and ending with the establishment of New Deal policies that extended public control over land, natural resources, and housing, "Georgism" served as a catalyst for reforms intended to make the nation more democratic. Many of these concerns remain relevant today, including the exploitation of natural resources, rising urban rent, and wealth inequality. At a time when class divisions sparked fears that capitalism and democracy were incompatible, hopes of building a social welfare state using the rents of idle landlords revitalized the middle class's conviction that democracy and liberty could be reconciled. Against steep odds, George made land nationalization vital to the politics of a nation dominated by small farmers and helped push liberalism leftward through his calls for collective rights to land and natural resources.

Outline of a New Liberalism
Outline of a New Liberalism

Author: Nelson W. Keith

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2015-07-29

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 0739178091

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This book is revolutionary in intent, and is in many ways quite an uncommon work. It is iconoclastic, as it goes about dislodging roots. It attempts to release the stigmatized Other from entrapment by rationalism and modern liberalism. The stigmatized Other are legendarily marginalized from congenial social relations with mainstream society. They include peoples of color, women, gays and lesbians, among others. Entrapment through misrecognition is captured via marked contrasts existing between two major liberal configurations: modern liberalism and pragmatism. Accordingly the book is tasked with overcoming the systemic constraints placed upon the stigmatized Other to conform when such a demand runs disastrously counter to their inherently irrefragable self-definition. Conformity is reductionist, beholden to dyadic forms of thinking which impose a singular, mathematically-derived God’s Eye View upon reality. The difficulty here is that the imposed criteria for giving meaning, value and purpose to human life, have no place for what the stigmatized Other adopts. On the other hand, pragmatism of a particular stripe establishes a naturalistic, instead of the mathematical basis, for our understanding of human life. Naturalism counsels that human beings should situate themselves directly in the midst of what constitutes their sense of life, with experience providing the bases for all the related determinations. Experience draws upon conditions of flux and uncertainty as the basis of human life. To adhere to the God’s Eye View is to make human beings into ‘desiccated calculating machines.’ This book is located in the heart of this tension. Programmatically, it deconstructs the rationalism/modern liberalism combine, and constructs its replacement in pragmatism complemented by phronesis, as carriers of this alternative mode of thought. Consequential change emerges: a modern liberal world of fixity in social relations, mathematically-derived is displaced by one characterized by intersubjective relations, where lived experience forms its scientific and philosophical bases. The Ancients figure prominently in this book, as it is shaped around the central idea that the emancipation of the stigmatized Other is occurring in the context of perhaps the first engagement between the Platonic and the Protagorean (Sophistic) confrontation which lies at the heart of early Greek thought.