A groundbreaking work of ethnography, urban studies, and theology, Mark Gornik's Word Made Global explores the recent development of African Christianity in New York City. Drawing especially on ten years of intensive research into three very different African immigrant churches, Gornik sheds light on the pastoral, spiritual, and missional dynamics of this exciting global, transnational Christian movement.
Today, body and language are prominent themes throughout philosophy. Each is strange enough on its own: this book asks what sense we might make of them together.
Described by Aristotle as the most vital of senses, touch contains both the physical and the metaphysical in its ability to express the determination of being. To manifest itself, touch makes a movement outwards, beyond the body, and relies on a specific physical involvement other senses do not require: to touch is already to be active and to activate. This fundamental ontology makes touch the most essential of all senses. This volume of ‘Law and the Senses’ attempts to illuminate and reconsider the complex and interflowing relations and contradictions between the tactful intrusion of the law and the untactful movement of touch. Compelling contributors from arts, literature and social science disciplines alongside artist presentations explore touch’s boundaries and formal and informal ‘laws’ of the senses. Each contribution unveils a multi-faceted new dimension to the force of touch, its ability to form, deform and reform what it touches. In unique ways, each of the several contributions to this volume recognises the trans-corporeality of touch to traverse the boundaries on the body and entangle other bodies and spaces, thus challenging the very notion of corporeal integrity and human being.
Volume 7 (2013): The Mystical Text (Black Clouds Course Through Me Unending . . . )Editors: Nicola Masciandaro & Eugene ThackerContributors: Cinzia Arruzza, Daniel Colucciello Barber, Ron Broglio, Aaron Dunlap, Kevin Hart, Karmen MacKendrick, Beatrice Marovich, Timothy Morton, Joshua Ramey, Christopher Roman, Daniel Whistler.
James Kirkland, a retired pastor, lives with his wife Lyn in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where they minister together through Starfish Ministries, a work they founded in 2002. One outreach of that ministry is two radio shows which have aired weekly for 28 years, and on which the host has become known as "Pastor Jim." The couple also ministers to victims of relationship betrayal through seminars, and their first book, "Healing For the Broken Hearted,"This book is written to provide God's children with an understandable, practical guide to Scripture which is designed for daily use. Each day's devotional is presented in a simple, one-page format, but is packed with useful and sound Bible truth. Expect a blessing as you read each day's entry....it certainly has been a blessing for me to be able to provide this resource to you!
Building on the metahistorical exploration of drama that was the subject of Tongues of Flame, Dawn Langman explores the practical pathways through which the art of acting can evolve beyond the ‘body and soul’ paradigm still broadly accepted in contemporary culture. Through the integration of Rudolf Steiner’s research in the arts of speech and eurythmy, and together with Michael Chekhov’s acting techniques, Langman raises the spiritual dimension of the human being from that vague sensing which many actors intuit – but which has, however, little bearing on their practice – into a precise methodology. In this second volume in her series on ‘The Actor of the Future’, she offers performance artists a clear pathway ahead, enabling them to develop their work out of spiritual insight and consciousness.
On bookshelves around the world, surrounded by ordinary books bound in paper and leather, rest other volumes of a distinctly strange and grisly sort: those bound in human skin. Would you know one if you held it in your hand? In Dark Archives, Megan Rosenbloom seeks out the historic and scientific truths behind anthropodermic bibliopegy—the practice of binding books in this most intimate covering. Dozens of such books live on in the world’s most famous libraries and museums. Dark Archives exhumes their origins and brings to life the doctors, murderers, and indigents whose lives are sewn together in this disquieting collection. Along the way, Rosenbloom tells the story of how her team of scientists, curators, and librarians test rumored anthropodermic books, untangling the myths around their creation and reckoning with the ethics of their custodianship. A librarian and journalist, Rosenbloom is a member of The Order of the Good Death and a cofounder of their Death Salon, a community that encourages conversations, scholarship, and art about mortality and mourning. In Dark Archives—captivating and macabre in all the right ways—she has crafted a narrative that is equal parts detective work, academic intrigue, history, and medical curiosity: a book as rare and thrilling as its subject.
The experience of the impossible churns up in our epoch whenever a collective dream turns to trauma: politically, sexually, economically, and with a certain ultimacy, ecologically. Out of an ancient theological lineage, the figure of the cloud comes to convey possibility in the face of the impossible. An old mystical nonknowing of God now hosts a current knowledge of uncertainty, of indeterminate and interdependent outcomes, possibly catastrophic. Yet the connectivity and collectivity of social movements, of the fragile, unlikely webs of an alternative notion of existence, keep materializing--a haunting hope, densely entangled, suggesting a more convivial, relational world. Catherine Keller brings process, feminist, and ecopolitical theologies into transdisciplinary conversation with continental philosophy, the quantum entanglements of a "participatory universe," and the writings of Nicholas of Cusa, Walt Whitman, A. N. Whitehead, Gilles Deleuze, and Judith Butler, to develop a "theopoetics of nonseparable difference." Global movements, personal embroilments, religious diversity, the inextricable relations of humans and nonhumans--these phenomena, in their unsettling togetherness, are exceeding our capacity to know and manage. By staging a series of encounters between the nonseparable and the nonknowable, Keller shows what can be born from our cloudiest entanglement.
"There was very fine, an elegant pain, hardly a pain at all, like the swift and fleeting burn of a drop of hot candle wax...Then the blood welled up and began to distort the pure, stark edges of my delicately wrought wound. "The chaos in my head spun itself into a silk of silence. I had distilled myself to the immediacy of hand, blade, blood, flesh." There are an estimated two to three million "cutters" in America, but experts warn that, as with anorexia, this could be just the tip of the iceberg of those affected by this little-known disorder. Cutting has only just begun to enter public consciousness as a dangerous affliction that tends to take hold of adolescent girls and can last, hidden and untreated, well into adulthood. Caroline Kettlewell is an intelligent woman with a promising career and a family. She is also a former cutter, and the first person to tell her own story about living with and overcoming the disorder. She grew up on the campus of a boys' boarding school where her father taught. As she entered adolescence, the combination of a family where frank discussion was avoided and life in what seemed like a fishbowl, where she and her sister were practically the only girls the students ever saw, became unbearable for Caroline. She discovered that the only way to find relief from overpowering feelings of self-consciousness, discomfort, and alienation was to physically hurt herself. She began cutting her arms and legs in the seventh grade, and continued into her twenties. Why would a rational person resort to such extreme measures? How did she recognize and overcome her problem? In a memoir startling for its honesty, humor, and poignancy, Caroline Kettlewell offers a clear-eyed account of her own struggle to survive this debilitating affliction.
