Kirjahaku

In the sequel to his fascinating analysis of religion and science, 'What is God?', Loewen proceeds to ask the major question implicit in this previous work; What then is Human? His responses take us on a journey from what has been human and what we are today, and allow us to confront some of our favorite conceptual confusions, including such as those between morals and ethics, modesty and humility, and criticism and critique amongst many others. Along the way he defends Wal-Mart, analyses the Dixie Chicks, suggests we temporarily stop having children while also questioning our motives regarding their nascent sexuality, and tells us how we can share the consciousness of another in bizarre circumstances. Engaging the reader with both philosophical and personal narrative, 'A Modest Society' is a must read for all those concerned with not only the current state of social relations, but of humanity itself.

In On the Afterlife: You Will Get There from Here, author G. V. Loewen presents a new, fascinating model of the concepts of the afterlife, from early human societies to our own. Based on four "types," this theory stands apart from any kind of personal evaluation or judgment, whether or not the reader believes in the afterlife - either in the form of a return to life in this world, or a continuation of life in some other realm - or not. A fifth "type" is designated by the concept of "nothingness," an integral element of understanding what happens when we die. Beginning with a discourse on how we remember and memorialize life in death, and ending with a chapter on ethics, On the Afterlife: You Will Get There from Here demonstrates how the obligation is on us as human beings to make our lives worth dying for. This intriguing book will change the way you think of the afterlife. About the Author: G. V. Loewen is professor of the sociology of religion at The University of Saskatchewan, in Saskatoon, Canada. The author of twelve scholarly books, he is currently writing about people's personal experiences of art. Publisher's website: http://www.sbpra.com/GVLoewen Author photo by Jennifer Heller Cover artwork by Lina Kazan

What does it mean to be a self, and a self which lives? At first, we would seek to alter the "which" into a "who," giving us the sense not only of agency but also of individuality and even perhaps that of purpose. Who is the self who lives? But a distinction must be immediately made; that between self and selfhood. For if we share life with other creatures grand and minuscule, we also share the conception of self with all other persons, and extending in two directions; those predecessors to me who are now passed and constitute the once-living component of the past, as well as those successors, those to come who will also live as human selves. At least unless or until we develop into a new species, which has no need for either self or selfhood, this is what human life is as existence and not merely life. Existence is ipsissimous, life, only autochthonous. The one belongs to itself and is also "owned," while the other simply arises from itself and thenceforth is only as it could ever be. (From the introduction.)Thirty new essays from social philosopher G.V. Loewen, written over a focused period of six weeks, interrogate both the perennial self and its fashionable decoys, from identity politics to the idea of a cultural whole, and its primordial sensibilities, from Godhead to human finitude. Personalist statements concerning writing, parentage, self-loathing, regret, and last requests and bequests alike leaven scholarly essays about the fate of the modernist media self and its more authentic individually "owned" selfhood.Author Bio: G.V. Loewen was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades in Canada and the U.S. He is a philosopher in the traditions of hermeneutics and phenomenology. This is his 60th book.

Philosophy, Social ScienceFrom the book's introduction: "What is arrests my attention, commands it, but does not possess it for overlong. I too am a moving target, for others and even for the world in its own anonymous concern. I am a being completed only in mine ownmost death, and whence I am presented with its more radical otherness I find that it is, in itself, something value-neutral. I am apprehended by it, furtive being that I am, whether or not I have been in life a fugitive or figurehead, sought escape or merely egress, have myself grasped life, seized the day, nay the hour, or have placed myself into a personal corner, from which I then observe the living others and exempt myself from their daily doings. This heavy sleep about which I cannot come to an even term is yet no horror, once again, in itself. And just as the margins of existence are still part of the human situation, contributing to our shared historical conditions in a manner oft more significant than one might imagine, death too retains its stake in the very life that has given it ironic birth."Casting a broad net over the diverse affairs of ordinary people, social philosopher G.V. Loewen presents thirty new essays and studies, including radical interpretations of religious themes, critical glances at parenting fashions and technological fetishes, and a ground-breaking, if disturbing, study of youth in the illicit sex industry. This cutting-edge collection offers wide appeal.Author Bio: G.V. Loewen, the author of over sixty books about ethics, education, aesthetics, religion, health, and social theory, as well as fiction, was a professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

The drive to overcome nature is a projection of the anxiety about succumbing to our own nature. Inevitably, this conflict creates a vicious circle. For in subduing nature to our technical goals - themselves arranged so that our human frailty is to be overcome - we end up destroying the world in which we must live.Of late, we have begun to recognize this viciousness, both in our acts and more profoundly, in our thoughts. Yet the attempt to lose our nature by losing Nature holds an even deeper conflict: "The most effective means of escaping spiritual trial is to become spiritless, and the sooner the better. If only taken care of in time, everything takes care of itself." (Kierkegaard, 1844).Social philosopher G.V. Loewen is the author of forty books on ethics, education, aesthetics, religion, health and social theory, and more recently, metaphysical adventure fiction. He was a professor in the interdisciplinary human sciences for two decades."The Penumbra of Personhood is not only the cumulative effect and expression of the primordial characters of Dasein, flung along with my being into the world," writes the author, "it is also the most graceful and eloquent response to the unknown that we possess. It is, in its own thrown essence, the fullest divergence from any violence of the reactionary or technique of the manager. It is objectively what we are and thus what we have to offer our own time."Ironically, the State has to contend not with history, the writing of which it mainly controls, but rather morality, part of the pre-State metaphysics and a version of collective human vanity that also claims to be timeless.If it is at first striking that even in our time, morality has retained such a hold, on second glance it is at least not surprising. It has ironically become the weapon of the private person, and this is very much against its own cosmogonical backdrop.Morality is shared, as is belief that the one stems from the other, and in this they are quite unlike either ethics or opinion, also having become the pedestal upon which any demagogue can be placed. The uttering of a "higher law" betrays the moralist at every turn.Even if the State can delicately navigate these potentially dangerous currents while affording to ignore mere moral editorializing - an inevitable whirlpool in any democracy at least - if enough "private" people recognize that their misgivings are shared, morality can once again assume a vestige of its former mantle. It becomes a rip-tide of conventional "wisdom" against which this or that elected regime may ride or be ridden over.If this is the most vulgar expression of Dasein's will to life, and even ontically, will to freedom, then it cannot be ignored by the reflective person. It is the final avenue of appeal in a rationalist social organization.Equipped with its own divinity, morality finds that it still has some suasion in the courts, certainly within many families, and in the schools. It is society's "back door man," to use an old Blues phrase, to point up its consistent vulgarity.

With a decaying corpse washing up on a secluded beach, and a woman from the Renaissance era flinging an infant off the cliff above it, the heroes know they are in for a death-defying journey that will embrace the very source of death itself.The origin of human darkness in their world is actually an entirely other world, replete with soulless duplicates of themselves, ready to conquer and enslave everything they previously fought for and loved.Such is the life they would bring upon this world, that the legendary team must confront the true stakes of their ongoing conflict.With Smiley and Seraphim now squarely on their side, and a na ve but gutsy police captain, whose induction into the cabal's deepest secrets opens the heroes to a wider reality, multiple soul-searching sacrifices are in store, including no less than the ultimate murder.Says the book's publisher: "The second Kristen comes into her own in the next transfixing installment of the Kristen-Seraphim Saga, but this at a higher price than any of her comrades would have guessed. As deeply troubled as the heroes of this radical de-mythology of myth find themselves, readers will both mourn and rejoice with them at every turn of the existential table round which the entirety of the human future is to be decided."Life Worthy of Life is book 5 of an 11-volume epic.Author Bio - G.V. Loewen is the author of over 40 books in ethics, aesthetics education, and other areas, including metaphysical adventure fiction. The author is originally from Victoria, British Columbia, and some of the book is based there. A professor for 25 years, the author retired in 2018.

Cultural Criticism In the two dozen essays written over a nine-month span, from 2020 to 2021, G.V. Loewen attempts to cast the darkest denizens of our own dubious days into the less lurid chiaroscuro of cultural critique. The sense throughout that saying is also doing and that words thus carry a greater gravity than is often given them, should be kept in mind. For us, if the word and the deed are to be brought together, at once ethics and aesthetics must again be separated, if never to be utterly parted. They must travel beside one another, in mutual aid, but they cannot simply become each other, as they did during the period beginning with Goya and ending with Bacon, with the 1920s and 1930s reaching the high-water mark of this culture critique. For us, the 'scandal of art', as Paul Ricoeur has aptly put it, must indeed 'balance', or at the least balance out, the 'scandal of the false consciousness'. But the scales upon which this confrontation occurs is held by the hand of ethics alone. Adapted from the preface]With compassion and criticism both, Loewen's second collection of essays on Culture and cultures alike places the reader at the heart of contemporary existence. With titles such as 'The Depth Psychology of Nervous Wrecks', 'Who was that Unmasked Man', 'Rendering unto Caesar's Palace', 'Gender: the ever-bending story', and 'Gandalf Hitler', we are immediately aware that this heart is one of contradiction, conflict, even absurdity. In a word, it is wholly and irrevocably human, and it is to this humanity, much more realistic than anything either the PC or Neo-Con forces could ever muster, that the philosopher directs us. And we would be wise to attend.About the Author: G.V. Loewen is the author of over forty-five books in ethics, education, aesthetics, health and social theory, and more recently, fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Time. I can have it. I can give it. It can be taken from me, or it can be allowed for me. I can save it and I can lose it. I can make up for its loss, or I can waste it. I can arrive when it is right, or be somewhere when it is wrong. I can even stop it, or it can run on so quickly that I could never catch up.More obscurely, a stitch in it saves nine.Time flies and yet drags, but mostly it simply passes. It could come again, or it might never come at all. I am a child of it, but I also end up quite out of it, even so. It can weigh heavily, or it can go unnoticed. It is money and it is free. We can have it down, but at some point it will be up. And it can be marked.What follows is a phenomenology of marked time. In a world where everyone has the time for something or other, or yet does not have the time for any specific thing, marking time is of the utmost.Author Bio: G.V. Loewen is the author of over 45 books on ethics, education, aesthetics, health and social theory, and more recently, fiction. He was a professor of interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades and is now retired. Originally from Victoria, British Columbia, he currently lives on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia.

"Does it matter? You can read the message we're sending out." Kristen was now suddenly bored. Tired out. Killing was not really her thing. She didn't enjoy it, like Evie, and she didn't remain unaffected by it, like her sister. She wasn't much good at it technically either, like Mike. It didn't give her something to hang her hat on, like it had for Kylie for a while. And shamefully, she felt little remorse in it, even after all the other possibilities had been barred to her. Unlike Mary. No, she was most like Michelle. Maybe that's why her successor had actually fallen in love with the second Michi. Well, she had left them together with their fashion photographer who used to also be hers and hers alone. Kristen suddenly felt quite lonely. 'Kriss', double-s, that's who I am now. No, it wouldn't do. It was ludicrous. She was still Kristen, just the one that now no one needed. Except for her sister. That was really the key to all of this horror after all. Loyalty to her beloved sister, making up for all of her cowardice she'd shown back in their family home worlds ago." (from the book)Faced with both staggering reincarnations and canny returns of those the heroes never expected to see again, their post-sacred community comes apart through conflicting loyalties and the questioning of their faithless faith. What is love? What is freedom? What is friendship? And what, most importantly, is trust?Author Bio: Social philosopher G.V. Loewen is the author of over forty-five books in ethics, education, aesthetics and religion, and more recently fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences in both the USA and Canada for over two decades.

"The back-stage people must be so used to not only seeing beauty but also constructing it that they never seemed to even glance at Kristen and the other models. But with Michelle it was different. With her, one didn't see beauty, but rather felt oneself in the presence of the Beautiful itself. The truth of beauty. For a long while, in human consciousness, beauty, truth and the good were so associated with one another as to be the same thing. Hah. Well, we now know that beauty can be deceptive, the good situational, and the truth as ugly as hell." And the truth is about to get a lot uglier than even the veteran heroes could have imagined. With the now sisterless Seraphim returned and out for the blood of the world, with the inhuman future of sentient machine-souls archiving the vast billions of surplus spirits washed up on their post-historical shores, and with the major nations of the world gutted and paranoid, the beloved comrades embark on a climactic series of adventures that will take the very presence of the future to resolve the future of the present. Completing a major narrative arc for Kristen-Seraphim, book seven careens forward into the very crucible of human vanity and desire: immortality. That the enduring cast and crew that readers have come to know take into their ambit the world leaders themselves, is not even the most stunning event. The heroes had never known exactly what their lives really meant, thus providing the truer mystery that must be solved, lest all, including themselves, be lost.

"You don't need lauding, Kristen Anne. Good fucking Christ, didn't you get enough of that at school? And then who takes up with Mr. Perfect, letting yet more time slip by before you even thought to look for me? And then when your precious friends pushed you to confront your bad conscience, you did everything you could to avoid it. I know, sister. We merged, right? I know everything about your feelings regarding me. Then when I thought we were tight, when we were dancing in the blood of our enemies together, raking them with no stopping us, you lied to me, there on the roof-top of that unholy school. I should have killed you then and there." Seraphim declared coolly."And saved me the torment of doing it myself." Her sister softly replied.Not many people yet realized that the self who dreams is not the same self who then wakes and lives out the day, day after day. And in such dreams from which we do awaken - and indeed, there are those additional to the unconscious from which we never again emerge - what, perchance, remains of the days within which all dreams come to grief? (From the book.)Imagine yourself set down indeed. In volume eight of Kristen-Seraphim, we follow the startling itinerary of the six only partially human heroes who had left Earth for points unknown at the end of the previous arc. The two sisters of fate find that the wider, cosmic mystery centers around their most intimate acts, that Smiley's alien kinfolk are only half-glad to welcome him home, and that their bare survival will require of them all of their skills and genius, metaphysical and otherwise. It will also require their shocking return to the world they had all once believed was their truest home. In turn, the remainder of the legendary community is forced to awaken from an unexpected dormancy to provide the epic narrative with its most astonishing climax yet. According to one reviewer, "A stunning display of imaginative discourse, this first full-length novel of the ever-widening saga will appeal as much to adult readers, given its ingenious plot devices. 'The myth that myth is dead' animates the narrative and gives it a life beyond its own storytelling. More than this, we now understand for the first time the true relations amongst the principals, their origins, and perhaps also a nascent sense of their destinies, as well as perhaps our very own."

"At some length Kristen managed some small revenge by grabbing onto Mary and fingering her little friend to a decent climax of her own, realizing only afterwards that Evelyn had been helping out from behind, as it were. Which then left the dark-haired mortal enemy of all that was evil in the world. Evie, the avenging angel, the fullest-blooded princess of the night; fearless, peerless, faultless. Yes, faultless, by gods. Blood lust be damned, I love you and my god I need you now. The both of you. Like never fucking before.""In silence now, a silence made sacral and unforgiving at once by the ultimate act of compassion, so dreadful as to turn the tail of the finest warrior-cat, she found the place that mere demons would shun, requiring a grace they could never master. Seraphim nodded once to her would-be-wretched mother and closed her tail around her throat. Her mother smiled back at her, ruby orbs shining filial light into her own. That was something that would never, ever come again. But knowing I had it, knowing I was loved by them; well, that makes all the difference in the universe, doesn't it?"With Kris and Mike on the outs for the first time, Seraphim forced into a ritualistic reconciliation with her mate's felid sister, Hedodronica, under the threat of Decamonican vengeance, and the first Kristen at a loss regarding her personal future, the heroes realize their collective task is far from finished. Martin must lead teams in search of the remaining liminals, and while Sir Robert finds himself being an interspecies mediator, Russian premier Kirisovsky and the felid diplomats attempt to contact aliens perhaps as old as the Earth itself. Not least, the first Michelle must manage her world-wide social revolution that their new friends, the felids themselves, have stated is crucial for both their worlds. But the true key for all concerned is how to regain their own humanity given everything that has already passed before them. Notes one reviewer: "Between interstellar intrigues, metaphysical conflicts, sibling bonds, and lover's leaps, book nine of the vast and deep saga has the reader immediately enveloped. Throw in elite car ads, shocking revelations about the origins of religion, stinging indictments from objective observers of the human condition and all of its failings, as well as the overarching architectonic task at hand-to rid the universe of mythopoetic persona and thus take control of human destiny-and one cannot afford to blink. The game's never been as afoot, and as the cosmic mystery and adventure of Kristen-Seraphim hurtles ever onward, prepare yourselves for an 'archaeology of the soul' itself."

Do not love the dead. Do not hate the living. For life and world are one thing, and you are both, present in the second but the fullest presence of the first. Now the jaguar stood up and swaggered her tail back and forth. "Some of you might imagine that my speaking with you is a miraculous thing, or the work of an occult force. It is neither. It's simply our new friend's technology, discovered and sharpened in the same way that we make better cars than we used to; better, safer, more energy efficient. All of us benefit from that. It's by way of these skills that we are what we are today. But I do want to say that in my experience of animating a part of nature, I am very aware that human's use of the world has endangered it, taken it to the brink. It fills me with sorrow, something beyond my control to mitigate within this being. Animals do feel things after all. Not as we do, but they know pain, anguish even, though they know not its source. They don't have gods and devils immortal, but they have come to know we humans as both."Latent within the all in all is something deeper that awaits its advent. Deeper, wider, darker and yet blinding as is the truth itself. A supernova of supernature. The legendary community can only themselves await it in turn. But as it gradually begins to show itself, through freshly painted Renaissance masterworks, through the consciousness of semi-alien children, through the distorted ambit of the felid dreamscape, and finally, through the culmination of the heroic team's entire history, both Kristens, Seraphim, Mike, Smiley, Velvet and everyone else find themselves playing out the final scenes, with their own equally final fates to be forever decided.From a reviewer: "The grand finale of Kristen-Seraphim overtakes all of its previous narrative in an unbelievable torrent of political and metaphysical action. The world transformation has begun, but on no less than three worlds. We expect to learn of ultimate things; cosmic truths, personal fates, the end of time and time anew, and the narrative answers to all of these. More than this, and most importantly, a new Decalogue literally commands us to act as we have never acted before."