A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
Based on his many years in both the art world as a gallery owner and educator, The Art Rules is a practical, operational guide for visual artists that demystifies the art world and empowers practitioners to find success on their own terms. Bringing together the personal experiences of hundreds of major art world leaders, Klein chronicles their success, their staying power, their interests, and their passions. Filling a major void, The Art Rules gives practitioners the tools they need to realize their potential. Ultimately, Klein shows, success is not particularly complicated, but it is rarely taught, shared, or demonstrated for the visual artist. This book does precisely that.
Examining Genesis in a philosophical light, Kass presents it not as a story of what happened long ago, but as the enduring story of humanity itself. He asserts that the first half of Genesis contains insights about human nature that “rival anything produced by the great philosophers.” Kass here reads these first stories—from Adam and Eve to the tower of Babel—as a mirror for self-discovery that reveals truths about human reason, speech, freedom, sexual desire, pride, shame, anger, and death. Taking a step further in the second half of his book, Kass explores the struggles in Genesis to launch a new way of life that addresses mankind’s morally ambiguous nature by promoting righteousness and holiness.
Even readers who don’t agree with Kass’s interpretations will find The Beginning of Wisdom acompelling book—a masterful philosophical take on one of the world’s seminal religious texts.
“A learned and fluent, delightfully overstuffed stroll through the Gates of Eden. . . . Mix Harold Bloom with Stephen Jay Gould and you’ll get something like Kass. A wonderfully intelligent reading of Genesis.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
“Throughout his book, Kass uses fruitful, fascinating techniques for getting at the heart of Genesis. . . . Innumerable times [he] makes a reader sit back and rethink what has previously been tediously familiar or baffling.”—Washington Post
“It is important to state that this is a book not merely rich, but prodigiously rich with insight. Kass is a marvelous reader, sensitive and careful. His interpretations surprise again and again with their cogency and poignancy.”—Jerusalem Post
We all know the saying, “That which does not kill us makes us stronger,” but is that really true? After all, for some people, traumatic experiences ultimately lead to genuinely debilitating outcomes. For others, though, adversity does seem to lead to “post-traumatic growth,” where individuals move through suffering and find their lives changed in positive ways. Why does this growth happen for some people and not others? How exactly does it happen? Can the positive results be purposefully replicated?
Peu d'études spécifiques ont été consacrées à Ben Sira 10,19-11,6. Lentz examine le texte en hébreu, grec, syriaque et latin, en essayant d'identifier les différences majeures entre ces versions et leurs orientations fondamentales respectives. Dans cette péricope, elle révèle trois thèmes importants: la crainte de Dieu, la sagesse et la loi. En prenant comme point de départ le thème de la crainte de Dieu dans le Deutéronome, les Psaumes et les Proverbes, Job et Qoheleth en plus de Ben Sira, Lentz examine la relation de ce thème avec la sagesse et la loi. La relation étroite entre la crainte de Dieu, la sagesse et la loi devrait inciter les spécialistes à se demander si celles-ci ne représentent pas trois aspects de la même réalité.
Few specific studies have been devoted to Ben Sira 10:19-11:6. Lentz examines the text in Hebrew, Greek, Syriac, and Latin, trying to identify the major differences between these versions and their respective fundamental orientations. In this pericope she reveals three important themes: the fear of God, wisdom, and the law. Taking as a point of departure the theme of the fear of God in Deuteronomy, Psalms, and Proverbs, Job, and Qoheleth, in addition to Ben Sira, Lentz examines the relationship of this theme with wisdom and the law. The close relationship between the fear of God, wisdom, and the law should lead scholars to ask if these do not represent three aspects of the same reality.
Divine Love and Wisdom has been called the most profound work of the Enlightenment scientist and seer Emanuel Swedenborg. It demonstrates how God’s love, wisdom, and humanity are reflected in creation and in ourselves, and suggests that the act of Creation is not a mystery of the past, but a miracle ongoing in every instant of the present. Like a blueprint of things unseen, Divine Love and Wisdom makes visible the hidden design of the universe, as well as the qualities of its Architect. Its vivid depiction of the spiritual mechanism of the world has impressed thinkers such as William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry James, Sr.
The New Century Edition of the Works of Emanuel Swedenborg is a modern-language, scholarly translation of Swedenborg’s theological works. The series’ easy-to-read style retains the dignity, variety, clarity, and gender-inclusive language of Swedenborg’s original Latin, bringing his thought to life.
This portable edition contains the text of the New Century Edition translation, but not the introduction, annotations, or other supplementary materials found in the deluxe edition.
Divine Love and Wisdom has been called the most profound work of the Enlightenment scientist and seer Emanuel Swedenborg. It demonstrates how God’s love, wisdom, and humanity are reflected in creation and in ourselves, and suggests that the act of Creation is not a mystery of the past, but a miracle ongoing in every instant of the present. Like a blueprint of things unseen, Divine Love and Wisdom makes visible the hidden design of the universe, as well as the qualities of its Architect. Its vivid depiction of the spiritual mechanism of the world has impressed thinkers such as William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry James, Sr.
The New Century Edition of the Works of Emanuel Swedenborg is a modern-language, scholarly translation of Swedenborg’s theological works. The series’ easy-to-read style retains the dignity, variety, clarity, and gender-inclusive language of Swedenborg’s original Latin, bringing his thought to life.
This portable edition contains the text of the New Century Edition translation, but not the introduction, annotations, or other supplementary materials found in the deluxe edition.
Dreaming of Justice, Waking to Wisdom reveals what could be thought of as the capstone of Rousseau’s thought, even if that capstone has been nearly invisible to readers. Despite criticizing philosophy for its corrosive effects on both natural goodness and civic virtue, Rousseau, argues Laurence D. Cooper, held the philosophic life as an ideal. Cooper expertly unpacks Rousseau’s vivid depiction of the philosophic life and the case for that life as the most natural, the freest, or, in short, the best or most choice-worthy of lives. Cooper focuses especially on a single feature, arguably the defining feature of the philosophic life: the overcoming of the ordinary moral consciousness in favor of the cognitivist view of morality. Cooper shows that Rousseau, with his particular understanding and embrace of the philosophic life, proves to be a kind of latter-day Socratic. Thorough and thought-provoking, Dreaming of Justice, Waking to Wisdom provides vital insight into Rousseau.
The image of the female caregiver holding a midnight vigil at the bedside of a sick relative is so firmly rooted in our collective imagination we might assume that such caregiving would have attracted the scrutiny of numerous historians. As Emily Abel demonstrates in this groundbreaking study of caregiving in America across class and ethnic divides and over the course of ninety years, this has hardly been the case.
While caring for sick and disabled family members was commonplace for women in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century America, that caregiving, the caregivers' experience of it, and the medical profession's reaction to it took diverse and sometimes unexpected forms. A complex series of historical changes, Abel shows, has profoundly altered the content and cultural meaning of care. Hearts of Wisdom is an immersion into that "world of care." Drawing on antebellum slave narratives, white farm women's diaries, and public health records, Abel puts together a multifaceted picture of what caregiving meant to American women--and what it cost them--from the pre-Civil War years to the brink of America's entry into the Second World War. She shows that caregiving offered women an arena in which experience could be parlayed into expertise, while at the same time the revolution in bacteriology and the transformation of the formal health care system were weakening women's claim to that expertise.
This revised and expanded English edition of Bernd U. Schipper’s 2012 Hermeneutik der Tora incorporates the results of his continued research and writings on Proverbs. For nearly a century, many biblical scholars have argued that the main theological traditions, such as the divine law, God’s torah, do not appear in the book of Proverbs. In this volume, however, Schipper demonstrates that Proverbs interacts in a sophisticated way with the concept of the torah. A detailed analysis of Proverbs 2 and other passages from the first part of the book of Proverbs shows that Proverbs engages in a postexilic discourse around “wisdom and torah” concerning the abilities of humans to fulfill the will of YHWH exemplified in the divine torah.
In this innovative hybrid of biography, memoir, and criticism, Eric G. Wilson describes how John Keats gave him solace during a bout of mental illness in spring 2012. While on a tour of the principal sites in Keats’s life—ranging from his London medical school to the small room in Rome where he died—Wilson discovered analogies between the poet’s troubles and his own. He was most struck by Keats’s enlivening vision of the soul.
For Keats, we don’t possess but rather make a soul. We do this by imaginatively transforming our suffering into empathy toward humans and nature alike. Tracking this idea in Keats’s tumultuous yet exhilarating life and work, Wilson struggles to envision his depression anew, desperate to overcome the apathy alienating him from his family.
How to Make a Soul offers fresh perspectives on Keats’s pragmatism, irony, comedy, ethics, and aesthetics, but is above all a lyrical celebration of those galvanizing instances when life springs into art.
"That over forty years after they were delivered these famous but unavailable Gifford Lectures should be published is occasion for celebration. Once again we hear Daube’s voice, patient and probing, as he turns over, tests, pushes fresh inquiries, and finds new insights. No man has had such a subtle sense of scriptural texts matched by such a supple sense of the practices and peculiarities of human beings engaged in the legal process. Law and Wisdom in the Bible is classic Daube." mdash;John T. Noonan Jr., United States Circuit Judge
David Daube (1909–99) was known for his unique and sophisticated research on Roman law, biblical law, Jewish Law, and medical ethics. In Law and Wisdom in the Bible, the first published collection of his 1964 Gifford Lectures, Daube derives from his complex understanding of biblical texts both ancient and contemporary notions about wisdom, justice, and education.
In addressing these and other profound issues, Daube crosses traditional disciplinary boundaries and bridges the
gap between humanism and religion, especially with regard to Christianity and Judaism. With his sophisticated understanding of Talmudic law and literature, his thinking, which is on full display in these lectures, revolutionized prevailing perceptions about the New Testament.
“Even with the all the hard work, we had more time (perhaps we took more time) to enjoy what was all around us: nights filled with starlight, days with clear blue skies and puffy clouds. Wonderful smells everywhere—fresh mown hay, wildflowers, and apple blossoms. Interesting sounds—the rumble of distant thunder, an owl calling in the woods, a flock of Canada geese winging over in the fall.”
In this paperback edition of a beloved Jerry Apps classic, the rural historian tells stories from his childhood days on a small central Wisconsin dairy farm in the 1930s and 1950s. From a January morning memory of pancakes piled high after chores, to a June day spent learning to ride a pony named Ginger, Jerry moves through the turn of the seasons and teaches gentle lessons about life on the farm. With recipes associated with each month and a new introduction exclusive to this 2nd edition, Living a Country Year celebrates the rhythms of rural life with warmth and humor.
In an age of artificial intelligence, alternative facts, and mistrust of truth, The Madness of Knowledge offers an opulent, enlarging, and sometimes unnerving psychopathology of intellectual life.
In this interpretive commentary on Theaetetus, Gregory Kirk makes a major contribution to scholarship on Plato by emphasizing the relevance of the interpersonal dynamics between the interlocutors for the interpretation of the dialogue’s central arguments about knowledge. Kirk attends closely to the personalities of the participants in the dialogue, focusing especially on the unique demands faced by a student—in this case, Theaetetus—and the ways in which one can embrace or deflect the responsibilities of learning. Kirk’s approach gives equal consideration to the dual demands of dramatic interpretation and philosophical argument that constitute the unique character of the Platonic text, and he develops an original interpretation of the Theaetetus, concluding that the uncertainty that characterizes wisdom supersedes the certainty of knowledge.
Based on decades of research, A Privilege of Intellect is D. A. Drennen’s portrait of the English cardinal John Henry Newman (1801–90), whose conversion to the Roman Catholic Church in 1845 significantly boosted the presence of the Catholic Church in England and caused many Anglicans to follow his example. Newman—who will be beatified this fall—devoted his life both to the Church and to the university, demonstrating that religious faith and intellectual pursuits could exist in harmony. Drennen’s biography combines theology with psychology and philosophy and will appeal to anyone interested in the history of the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church.
To dive deep into your inner life. To navigate its complexity and explore your story in depth. To discover who you are exactly—the courage you have when life breaks apart, how conscious you become in that process, and how rich you feel learning the meaning of your life. On a search for wholeness, Bobbe Tyler delves deep to find and tell her story—the trauma of familial mental illness, marriage and divorce, spiritual despair, accountability, addiction and the joy of recovery, surviving loss, and finally that which matters most: love in all its ways. The rewards of her wisdom belong not to her alone but, by way of her unflinching examination of life’s many paths, to all who have a story of their own to tell—who have faced a life-choice gone wrong, or met the peace that had always seemed just out of reach. This searing self-appraisal provides a model for those who seek to know themselves better and are willing to sound their depths to find their story in full.
Examine new insights into the conceptual worldview of biblical wisdom communities
The Bible is full of metaphors. On the surface, these metaphors seem like simple literary flourishes that have been added to the text for artistic effect. This book, however, argues that biblical metaphors reflect more basic, prelinguistic cognitive structures. These conceptual metaphors developed out of common concrete experiences and only gradually developed into the complex metaphors that one finds within biblical texts. This book explores how common sensory activities like seeing, hearing, touching, eating, breathing, and walking developed into the abstract metaphors for wisdom that one finds in Proverbs, Job, and Qohelet. Because it traces the cognitive development of a set of related metaphors across several congruent texts, it provides a model by which scholars can trace the cognitive development of biblical metaphors more generally in the Hebrew Bible and other early Jewish and Christian texts.
Features:
- A synthesis of conceptual metaphor theory that provides a workable theory for examining biblical texts
- An analytical framework for studying sensory experience and sensory metaphors in biblical texts
- Diagrams
Singing the Chaos: Madness and Wisdom in Modern Poetry combines both a historical and a critical approach toward the works of major British, American, French, German, and Russian poets. Comprehensive in scope and arranged chronologically to survey a century of high poetic achievement, the study is unified by Pratt's overriding argument that "modern poets have endowed a disintegrating civilization with humane wisdom by 'singing the chaos' that surrounds them, making ours a great age in spite of itself."
In developing this central theme, Pratt brings alive the energy, the freshness, and the originality of technique that made Baudelaire, Pound, Yeats, Rilke, Eliot, and others the initiators of the revolution in poetry. He brings a more complete, clearer perspective to other major themes: modernism as an age of irony; poets as both madmen and geniuses; the modern poet as tragic hero; the dominance of religious or visionary truths over social or political issues; and the combination of radical experiments in poetic form with an apocalyptic view of Western civilization. His detailed treatment of the Fugitive poets and his recognition of their prominent role in twentieth-century literature constitute an important historical revision.
Brilliantly informed, insightful, and, above all, accurately sympathetic to the points of view of the poets Pratt presents, Singing the Chaos is that rare book that belongs on all shelves devoted to modernist poetry.
The late Philadelphia Daily News sportswriter Stan Hochman was known for his many zingers, such as “Harry Litwack, the stoic Temple coach, stalks the sidelines like a blind man at a nudist colony.” As a reporter, he was more interested in how athletes felt, what their values were, how they lived their lives, or what made them tick than he was about how many runs they scored or punches they landed.
In Stan Hochman Unfiltered, his wife Gloria collects nearly 100 of his best columns from the Daily News about baseball, horse racing, boxing, football, hockey, and basketball (both college and pro), as well as food, films, and even Liz Taylor. Each section is introduced by a friend or colleague, including Garry Maddox, Bernie Parent, Larry Merchant, and Ray Didinger, among others.
Hochman penned a candid, cantankerous column about whether Pete Rose belongs in the Baseball Hall of Fame; wrote a graphic account of the Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier fight of the century; and skewered Norman “Bottom Line” Braman, the one-time owner of the Eagles. He also wrote human-interest stories, including features about the importance of kids with special needs playing sports.
In addition to being a beloved writer, Hochman was also known for his stint on WIP’s radio as the Grand Imperial Poobah, where he would settle callers’ most pressing debates. Hochman long earned the respect and admiration of his subjects, peers, and readers throughout his career, and Stan Hochman Unfiltered is a testament to his enduring legacy.
“Although of a relatively scarce breed,” the Arkansas Times observed in the obituary of the itinerant writer it had once employed, “Mike Trimble was Arkansas’s and perhaps the country’s greatest self-deprecating journalist.” Readers will find in this fifty-year inventory of Trimble’s wit and wisdom all the vindication they might seek for that quaint judgment—the rare humble author. Whether he was chronicling, in the 1980s, rising political worthies like the far-into-the-future governors Asa Hutchinson and Mike Beebe, or, more often, the ordinary and feckless people that he encountered every day, befriended, and spent most of his career writing about, Trimble usually found a way, subtly or artlessly, to bring up his own failings, such as identifying the wrong person as the dead woman in an obituary he had written in his earliest days for his first employer, the Texarkana Gazette. Like the yokels in the vaudeville duos Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Rowan and Martin, and Fey and Poehler, Trimble’s confessed bumblings were purposeful and studied instruments of his humor.
Arkansas produced more than its quota of weirdos, fabulists, con men, oleaginous politicians, charlatans, creeps, visionaries, and fantastical creatures—from Albert Pike, Arvin the Wino, Dr. Brinkley the Great Depression’s goat-gland sex therapist, Editor Weston, and the salty riverboat queen Ray Dorthy all the way to Say McIntosh and Red the Irish Setter. Mike Trimble, the South’s best and funniest storyteller, put them all down on paper for some of the best reading since Catch-22. Trimble turned humor into art and history into vaudeville.
These are volatile times. Fear, suspicion, and cynicism are chronic. A mere tweet inflames the passions of millions while click-bait “hot takes” stoke the amygdalas of everyone with an Internet connection. We treat those not in our tribe as a threat and deem anyone with a different opinion as evil. Mistaking myopia for measure, we lack all sense of proportion in our judgments. We are shortsighted, mired in the present, ignorant of history, and blind to the future. We thought that technology would save us by connecting us to each other and the world’s information. Instead, it enticed our vices, encouraged our biases, and eroded the one virtue we need now more than ever: wisdom.
A Time for Wisdom is for readers who feel beleaguered by the incivility of the modern world, dispirited by its coarse rhetoric and toxic partisanship. It is an invitation to escape the shallow cacophony and restore peace and perspective to our daily lives. Written by two psychologists, the book takes the best scientific research on wisdom and integrates it with timeless concepts that have, for ages, guided troubled souls through life’s hardships. From this foundation, the authors present four steps we can follow to practice wisdom in the 21st Century:
- Receiving knowledge.
- Practicing detachment.
- Experiencing tranquility.
- Cultivating transcendence.
These are profound and spiritual principles that can bring us immense satisfaction when we aspire to live by them.
In A Time for Wisdom, the authors show us how. They commend a course of action towards the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, towards calm and clear moral reasoning. They lead us out of the circus of contemporary life and show us a path beyond our petty self-centeredness. By journeying along that path, we can, like the great sages and scientists before us, rise above the immediacy of the moment and partake of the numinous and the infinite.
Our emerging world system is bringing the great traditions and cultures it has spawned into ever more intimate and dangerous contact. Langan argues that we must struggle toward a unity of discourse respectful of genuine experiences of varying civilizations if we are to live peacefully on one planet.
Drawing on examples from a diversity of eras and places—from ancient Egypt to medieval Europe to modern Africa—Curnow explores the ways we have sought to overcome the problems posed by our existence, such as love and death, with a steadfast wisdom. He shows how many cultures have attributed wisdom to deities such as Apollo, Odin, and Sarasvati, and how, especially, we have placed it within the vehicle of the proverb, which has safeguarded its lessons throughout time and across cultures.
Including a collection of one hundred sayings that offer a rich record of wisdom’s reification, this history gives new insight into what wisdom actually is and where we might find it.
Every religion acknowledges certain spiritual principles and records them in its sacred literature and traditions. This book curates these ancient teachings and shows how they apply to modern life with the help of parables, quotations, and commentaries.
By reading Wisdom from World Religions, people from all walks of life will be inspired to pursue their own spiritual growth and to contemplate questions central to our existence, such as how, through love and creativity, can we be agents of divinity on earth?
Uplifting and instructional, this is a book to be treasured, studied, and practiced.
Wisdom in the Open Air traces the Norwegian roots of the strain of thinking called “deep ecology”—the search for the solutions to environmental problems by examining the fundamental tenets of our culture. Although Arne Naess coined the term in the 1970s, the insights of deep ecology actually reflect a tradition of thought that can be seen in the history of Norwegian culture, from ancient mountain myths to the radical ecoactivism of today.
Beginning with an introduction to Norway’s emphasis on nature and the wild, Reed and Rothenberg explore the birth of the environmental movement in the 1960s and 1970s. What follows is a collection of writings by prominent Norwegian thinkers on humanity and nature, most never before published in English. From Peter Wessel Zapffe, a twentieth-century Kierkegaardian figure, the list goes on to include Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess, activist-critic-artist Sigmund Kvaloy, wilderness educator Nils Faarland, novelist Finn Alneas, sociologist Johan Galtung, and social reformer Erik Dammann. Their fascinating points of view offer thoughts on the significance of modern life and what it means to be human in the face of the deteriorating global environment of the twentieth century. Wisdom in the Open Air asks and answers a fundamental question concerning the ecomovement: what is the role of deep, often abstract, thinking in the attempt to avert a very real ecological crisis?
Money is an evil that does good, and a good that does evil. It inspires hymns to the prosperity it enables, manifestos about the poor it leaves behind, and diatribes for its corrosion of morality. In The Wisdom of Money, one of the world’s great essayists guides us through the rich commentary that money has generated since ancient times—both the passions and the resentments—as he builds an unfashionable defense of the worldly wisdom of the bourgeoisie.
Bruckner begins with the worshippers and the despisers. Sometimes they are the same people—priests, for example, who venerate the poor from within churches of opulence and splendor. This hypocrisy endures in our secular world, he says, not least in his own France, where it is de rigueur even among the rich to feign indifference to money. It is better to speak plainly about money in the old American fashion, in Bruckner’s view. A little more honesty would allow us to see through the myths of money’s omnipotence but also the dangers of the aristocratic, ideological, and religious systems of thought that try to put money in its place. This does not mean we should emulate the mega-rich with their pathologies of consumption, competition, and narcissistic philanthropy. But we could do worse than defy three hundred years of derision from novelists and poets to embrace the unromantic bourgeois virtues of work, security, and moderate comfort. It is wise to have money, Bruckner tells us, and wise to think about it critically.
By exploring a practical, rather than propositional, understanding of religious belief, this book provides a new construct through which to view philosophy of religion. Terrence W. Tilley shifts the focus of debate from the justification of rational belief to the exercise of wisdom in making or maintaining a commitment to religious practices. It is through practices, Tilley concludes, that religious belief is formed.
After analyzing the strengths and limitations of the modern approaches, Tilley applies the concept of wisdom to the process of making a religious commitment. Wisdom, as explored by Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, and John Henry Newman, may be thought of as the bridge between intellectual and moral virtues. Roughly, it can be described as the ability to put intellect into action in a context. Because wisdom is a virtue requiring concrete display, the book discusses the wisdom of commitment to specific religious practices of a range of traditions. These examples demonstrate the issues and complexities involved in the wisdom of making a religious commitment. This important challenge to contemporary philosophy of religion will be of special interest to students and teachers of theology and philosophy of religion.
This book is about the inner workings of one of nature’s most complex animal societies: the honey bee colony. It describes and illustrates the results of more than fifteen years of elegant experimental studies conducted by the author. In his investigations, Thomas Seeley has sought the answer to the question of how a colony of bees is organized to gather its resources. The results of his research—including studies of the shaking signal, tremble dance, and waggle dance, and other, more subtle means by which information is exchanged among bees—offer the clearest, most detailed picture available of how a highly integrated animal society works. By showing how several thousand bees function together as an integrated whole to collect the nectar, pollen, and water that sustain the life of the hive, Seeley sheds light on one of the central puzzles of biology: how units at one level of organization can work together to form a higher-level entity.
In explaining why a hive is organized the way it is, Seeley draws on the literature of molecular biology, cell biology, animal and human sociology, economics, and operations research. He compares the honey bee colony to other functionally organized groups: multicellular organisms, colonies of marine invertebrates, and human societies. All highly cooperative groups share basic problems: of allocating their members among tasks so that more urgent needs are met before less urgent ones, and of coordinating individual actions into a coherent whole. By comparing such systems in different species, Seeley argues, we can deepen our understanding of the mechanisms that make close cooperation a reality.
The controversy over the management of national forests in the Pacific Northwest vividly demonstrates the shortcomings of existing management institutions and natural resource policies. The Wisdom of the Spotted Owl explores the American policymaking process through the case of the spotted owl -- a case that offers a striking illustration of the failure of our society to cope with long-term, science-intensive issues requiring collective choices.
Steven Lewis Yaffee analyzes the political and organizational dynamics from which the controversy emerged and the factors that led to our stunning inability to solve it. He examines the state of resource management agencies and policy processes, providing insight into questions such as:
- What caused the extreme polarization of opinion and lack of communication throughout the 1980s and early 1990s?
- How can the inadequate response of government agencies and the failure of the decisionmaking process be explained?
- What kinds of changes must be made to enable our resource policy institutions to better deal with critical environmental issues of the 1990s and beyond?
Before the Greeks, people thought human action was required to maintain the order of the universe and so conducted rituals and sacrifices to renew and restore it. But beginning with the Hellenic Age, the universe came to be seen as existing quite apart from human action and possessing, therefore, a kind of wisdom that humanity did not. Wearing his remarkable erudition lightly, Brague traces the many ways this universal wisdom has been interpreted over the centuries, from the time of ancient Egypt to the modern era. Socratic and Muslim philosophers, Christian theologians and Jewish Kabbalists all believed that questions about the workings of the world and the meaning of life were closely intertwined and that an understanding of cosmology was crucial to making sense of human ethics. Exploring the fate of this concept in the modern day, Brague shows how modernity stripped the universe of its sacred and philosophical wisdom, transforming it into an ethically indifferent entity that no longer serves as a model for human morality.
Encyclopedic and yet intimate, The Wisdom of the World offers the best sort of history: broad, learned, and completely compelling. Brague opens a window onto systems of thought radically different from our own.
The lyceum movement gained momentum in the decades preceding the Civil War, presenting members with the opportunity to participate in literary life and engage with the issues of the day. While urban lyceums played host to a who’s who of nineteenth-century intellectual life, literary societies also cropped up in thousands of villages across the nation, acting as influential sites of learning, creativity, and community engagement. In rural New England, ordinary men and women, farmers and intelligentsia, selectmen and schoolchildren came together to write and perform poetry and witty parodies and debate a wide range of topics, from women’s rights and temperance to slavery, migration, and more.
Wit and Wisdom takes readers inside this long-forgotten tradition, providing new access to the vibrant voices, surprising talents, and understated humor on display on many a cold winter’s night. Having uncovered dozens of handwritten newspapers produced by village lyceums across Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Massachusetts, Joan Newlon Radner proves that these close-knit groups offered a vital expression of the beliefs, ambitions, and resilience of rural New Englanders.
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