Ranging through sectarianism, monotheism, religious exclusivity, and the moral dimensions of religious commitment, the author traces new and exciting lines of sociological inquiry in the field of religion.
Kirjahaku
Etsi kirjoja tekijän nimen, kirjan nimen tai ISBN:n perusteella.
1000 tulosta hakusanalla Bryan Healey
Fifty years ago Soka Gakkai was an organization of a few hundred people, all of them in Japan. Today it is one of the world's most rapidly expanding religious movements with members in virtually every country in Europe, the Americas, and Australasia, in most of Asia, and in several parts of Africa. It is also increasingly well publicized, sponsoring and promoting a variety of cultural and educational causes and establishing a high profile for itself in world affairs. All of this has created a movement which is a significant social phenomenon; yet to date Soka Gakkai has received little attention from Western academics. Bryan Wilson and Karel Dobbelaere have undertaken a thorough survey of the UK membership to try to trace the source of the movement's attraction and analyse its potential. In addition to a questionnaire survey they carried out some thirty interviews with members, who were encouraged to tell their story in their own way. These interviews and the questionnaire responses are liberally quoted throughout the book and add illuminating detail to its analysis. The decline in belief in an anthropomorphic deity; the sense that traditional religious institutions have become hollow; the emphasis on the private nature of belief and on personal autonomy are all characteristic features of contemporary western values. The authors suggest that Soka Gakkai has found a ready resonance with these changing currents of thought in contemporary society and conclude that Soka Gakkai's appeal to young people in particular makes it a faith whose time may have come.
Oxford Reading Tree inFact: Level 11: Our Siberian Journey
Bryan Alexander
Oxford University Press
2014
nidottu
In Our Siberian Journey, join an Arctic photographer on his long trek across the ice and snow with a herd of reindeer. Find out what he eats, wears and how he travels. Oxford Reading Tree inFact is a non-fiction series that aims to engage children in reading for pleasure as powerfully as fiction does. The variety of topics means there are books to interest every child in this compelling series. The series is written by top children's authors and subject experts. The books are carefully levelled, making it easy to match every child to the right book.
The Biology of African Savannahs
Bryan Shorrocks; William Bates
Oxford University Press
2014
sidottu
Savannah habitats comprise an ecologically important, but ultimately fragile, ecosystem. They constitute one of the largest biomes on Earth, covering almost 20% of the land surface, and can be simply described as tropical and subtropical grasslands with scattered bushes and trees. Most savannahs occur in Africa, although smaller areas can be found in South America, India, and Australia. They form a rich mosaic of diverse ecosystems, and this book offers a concise but comprehensive introduction to their ecology, biodiversity, and conservation. The Biology of African Savannahs describes the major plants (grasses, and trees such as Acacia) and animals (mainly large mammals) that live in this habitat, and examines the biological and ecological factors that influence their population size, interactions (such as predation), and community composition. Conservation issues such as climate change, hunting, and conflict between wildlife and domestic animals are also discussed. This new edition has been updated throughout with the latest research in the field, and contains new technique boxes which introduce readers to some of the analytical methods used to study African savannahs. This accessible text is suitable for both senior undergraduate and graduate students taking courses in savannah and tropical ecology as part of a wider ecology and/or conservation biology degree programme. It will also be of relevance and use to the many professional ecologists and conservation practitioners requiring a concise but authoritative overview of the topic.
The Biology of African Savannahs
Bryan Shorrocks; William Bates
Oxford University Press
2014
nidottu
Savannah habitats comprise an ecologically important, but ultimately fragile, ecosystem. They constitute one of the largest biomes on Earth, covering almost 20% of the land surface, and can be simply described as tropical and subtropical grasslands with scattered bushes and trees. Most savannahs occur in Africa, although smaller areas can be found in South America, India, and Australia. They form a rich mosaic of diverse ecosystems, and this book offers a concise but comprehensive introduction to their ecology, biodiversity, and conservation. The Biology of African Savannahs describes the major plants (grasses, and trees such as Acacia) and animals (mainly large mammals) that live in this habitat, and examines the biological and ecological factors that influence their population size, interactions (such as predation), and community composition. Conservation issues such as climate change, hunting, and conflict between wildlife and domestic animals are also discussed. This new edition has been updated throughout with the latest research in the field, and contains new technique boxes which introduce readers to some of the analytical methods used to study African savannahs. This accessible text is suitable for both senior undergraduate and graduate students taking courses in savannah and tropical ecology as part of a wider ecology and/or conservation biology degree programme. It will also be of relevance and use to the many professional ecologists and conservation practitioners requiring a concise but authoritative overview of the topic.
Leadership for Sergeants and Inspectors offers an easily accessible and practical guide to leadership in routine and complex situations across all areas of police work. The need to demonstrate leadership can occur at any moment: in public order situations, community meetings and among colleagues at work. Enhancing your leadership skills is an effective way of ensuring that you inspire and motivate others, as well as improving interactions with the wide range of people you will meet over the course of your career, from members of the public to social services and partner agencies. This book discusses leadership and teamwork, as well as other leadership skills, through a series of questions that you might consider within the course of your everyday police work. With clear and concise explanations, the author draws on 30 years' experience as a police officer to bring you detailed theory and practice across a range of leadership areas, including team work, equality and diversity, delegation, misconduct and discipline, communication, and assertiveness. There are also helpful hints and tips along the way, providing context to leadership issues within policing, as well as offering examples of leadership skills in practice. The second part of the book amounts to a series of skills checklists, closely aligned to the coverage of the 21 chapters and which you can dip into when immediate help is required. The checklists act as 'tool kit' for the busy police officer trying, with perhaps little time ahead, to deal with events efficiently and effectively. Whether you are just embarking on your police career, have been recently promoted, or simply want to refresh your leadership skills, Leadership for Sergeants and Inspectors will support and assist you, helping you to get the best out of your team, your colleagues, and your encounters with members of the public.
Fifty years after its publication, Bryan Wilson's Religion in Secular Society (1966) remains a seminal work. It is one of the clearest articulations of the secularization thesis: the claim that modernizations brings with it fundamental changes in the nature and status of religion. For Wilson, secularization refers to the fact that religion has lost influence at the societal, the institutional, and the individual level. Individual secularization is about the loss of authority of the Churches to define what people should believe, practise and accept as moral principles guiding their lives. In other words, individual piety may still persist, however, if it develops independently of religious authorities, then it is an indication of individual secularization. Wilson stresses that the consequences of the process of societalization in modern societies and on this basis he formulated his thesis that secularization is linked to the decline of community and is a concomitant of societalization. Revised and updated, Steve Bruce builds on Wilson's work by noting the changes in religious culture of the UK and US, in an appendix on major changes since the 1960s. Bruce also provides a critical response to the core ideas of Religion in Secular Society.
For three hundred years the ghetto defined Jewish culture in the late medieval and early modern period in Western Europe. In the nineteenth-century it was a free-floating concept which travelled to Eastern Europe and the United States. Eastern European “ghettos”, which enabled genocide, were crudely rehabilitated by the Nazis during World War Two as if they were part of a benign medieval tradition. In the United States, the word ghetto was routinely applied to endemic black ghettoization which has lasted from 1920 until the present. Outside of America “the ghetto” has been universalized as the incarnation of class difference, or colonialism, or apartheid, and has been applied to segregated cities and countries throughout the world. In this Very Short Introduction Bryan Cheyette unpicks the extraordinarily complex layers of contrasting meanings that have accrued over five hundred years to ghettos, considering their different settings across the globe. He considers core questions of why and when urban, racial, and colonial ghettos have appeared, and who they contain. Exploring their various identities, he shows how different ghettos interrelate, or are contrasted, across time and space, or even in the same place. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
Semantics for Reasons is a book about what we mean when we talk about reasons. It not only brings together the theory of reasons and natural language semantics in original ways but also sketches out a litany of implications for metaethics and the philosophy of normativity. In their account of how the language of reasons works, Bryan R. Weaver and Kevin Scharp propose and defend a view called Question Under Discussion (QUD) Reasons Contextualism. They use this view to argue for a series of novel positions on the ontology of reasons, indexical facts, the reasons-to-be- rational debate, moral reasons, and the reasons-first approach.
Blackstone's Leadership for Sergeants and Inspectors
Bryan Boon
Oxford University Press
2026
nidottu
Thoroughly revised to reflect significant changes in policing over the past decade, this new edition of Blackstone's Leadership for Sergeants and Inspectors offers an accessible, practical guide to leadership in routine and complex situations across all areas of police work. In policing, the need to demonstrate leadership can arise at any moment: in public order situations, community meetings and among colleagues at work. Enhancing your leadership skills can help ensure that you inspire and motivate others, improving interactions with the wide range of people you will encounter, from members of the public to social services and partner agencies. This book discusses leadership and teamwork skills through a series of questions to consider during your everyday police work. With clear and concise explanations, the author draws on 30 years' experience as a police officer to bring you detailed theory and practice across a range of leadership areas, including ethical professionalism, stress management, equality, diversity and neurodiversity, multi-cultural teams, delegation, coaching, misconduct and discipline. Helpful hints and tips provide context to leadership issues and examples of leadership skills in practice. The book's 32 skills checklists act as a 'tool kit' for the busy police officer needing to deal with events efficiently and effectively. Whether you are just embarking on your police career, have been recently promoted, or simply want to refresh your leadership skills, Leadership for Sergeants and Inspectors will support and assist you, helping you to get the best out of your team, your colleagues, and your encounters with the public.
In epistemology the nagging voice of the sceptic has always been present. Over the last thirty years or so philosophers have thought of several promising ways to counter the radical sceptic: for instance, facts about the reliability of our cognitive processes, principles determining which possibilities must be ruled out in order to have knowledge, and principles regarding the context-sensitivity of knowledge attributions. In this entertaining and provocative book, Bryan Frances presents a new argument template for generating new kinds of radical scepticism, ones that hold even if all the clever anti-sceptical fixes defeat the traditional sceptic. Not only is the argument schema novel, but the sceptical consequences are entirely unexpected. Although the new sceptic concludes that we don't know that fire engines are red, that we sometimes have pains in our knees, or even that we believe that fire engines are red or that knees sometimes throb, he admits that we know millions of exotic truths such as the fact that black holes exist. You can know about the existence of black holes, but not about the colour of your shirt or even about what you believe regarding the colour of your shirt. The new sceptical arguments proceed in the usual way (here's a sceptical hypothesis; you can't neutralize it, you have to be able to neutralize it to know P; so you don't know P), but the sceptical hypotheses plugged into it are 'real live' scientific-philosophical hypotheses often thought to be actually true, such as error theories about belief, colour, pain location, and character traits. Frances investigates the questions, 'Under what conditions do we need to rule out these error theories in order to know things inconsistent with them?' and 'Can we rule them out?' Particular attention is paid to recent methods used to counter the traditional sceptic. Sharp, witty, and fun to read, Scepticism Comes Alive will be highly provocative for anyone interested in knowledge and its limits.
The Will to Survive describes how a small country, for much of its existence squeezed between two empires, surrounded by hostile neighbours and subjected to invasion and occupation, survived the frequent tragedies of its eventful history to become a sovereign democratic republic within the European Union. The Mongol, Ottoman, Habsburg, Nazi and Soviet empires have all since vanished; but Hungary, a victim of all five and despite suffering the consequences of being on the losing side in every war she has fought, still occupies the territory the Magyar tribes claimed for themselves in the ninth century. The author, whose interest in Hungary stems from his service there as British Ambassador during the declining years of Kadar's Communist regime, traces Hungary's story from the arrival of the Magyars in Europe to the accession of Hungary to membership of NATO and the European Union. The eleven hundred years covered by this stirring account embrace medieval greatness, Turkish occupation, Habsburg domination, unsuccessful struggles for independence, massive deprivation of territory and population after the First World War, a disastrous alliance with Nazi Germany motivated by the hope of redress, and forty years of Soviet-imposed Communism interrupted by a gallant but brutally suppressed revolution in 1956.
It its first two editions The Winning Brief explained the art of effective writing in 100 concise, practical, and easy-to-use tips, proving that the key to writing well is to understand the judicial readership. This third edition of Bryan A. Garner's modern classic delivers the same invaluable guidelines with even more supporting evidence. Covering everything from the rules for planning and organizing a brief to openers that can capture a judge's attention from the first few words, these tips add up to the most compelling, orderly, and visually appealing brief that an advocate can present. In Garner's view, good writing is good thinking put to paper. "Never write a sentence that you couldn't easily speak," he warns - and demonstrates how to do just that. Every tip begins with a set of quotable quotes from experts, followed by Garner's masterly advice on building sound paragraphs, drafting crisp sentences, choosing the best words ("Strike pursuant to from your vocabulary."), quoting authority, citing sources, and designing a document that looks as impressive as it reads. Throughout, Garner shows how to edit for maximal impact, using vivid before-and-after examples that apply the basics of rhetoric to persuasive writing. In this much-expanded third edition, Garner has perfected the text with nine new tips, hundreds of new examples, and amplified explanations throughout-all in his trademark style. Among the new sections are tips on understanding judges' reading habits, answering opponents' arguments, writing effective reply briefs, using authorities persuasively, and organizing arguments based on statutes and contracts. Quotable quotes, which Garner carefully assembled after years of wide reading and close study, have been expanded and improved throughout the book. There is also a new appendix on a remarkable brief that some consider the best ever written ("a beautiful marriage of rhetorical skill, thorough research, and humane lawyering"). Perhaps the biggest change to this edition is that every tip now ends with a summary checklist that recaps and crystalizes the subpoints just covered, with further ideas for improvement. Garner conceived these checklists in part as a way to help readers approach his book as a set of 100 tutorials. Reviewing and practicing each tip will offer brief-writers a degree of mastery that more cavalier colleagues will find difficult to equal. An invaluable resource for attorneys, law clerks, judges, paralegals, law students and their teachers, The Winning Brief has the qualities that make all of Garner's books so popular: authority, accessibility, and page after page of techniques that work. If you're writing to win a case, this book shouldn't merely be on your shelf--it should be open on your desk.
In epistemology the nagging voice of the sceptic has always been present. Over the last thirty years or so philosophers have thought of several promising ways to counter the radical sceptic: for instance, facts about the reliability of our cognitive processes, principles determining which possibilities must be ruled out in order to have knowledge, and principles regarding the context-sensitivity of knowledge attributions. In this entertaining and provocative book, Bryan Frances presents a new argument template for generating new kinds of radical scepticism, ones that hold even if all the clever anti-sceptical fixes defeat the traditional sceptic. Not only is the argument schema novel, but the sceptical consequences are entirely unexpected. Although the new sceptic concludes that we don't know that fire engines are red, that we sometimes have pains in our knees, or even that we believe that fire engines are red or that knees sometimes throb, she admits that we know millions of exotic truths such as the fact that black holes exist. You can know about the existence of black holes, but not about the colour of your shirt or even about what you believe regarding the colour of your shirt. The new sceptical arguments proceed in the usual way (here's a sceptical hypothesis; you can't neutralize it, you have to be able to neutralize it to know P; so you don't know P), but the sceptical hypotheses plugged into it are 'real live' scientific-philosophical hypotheses often thought to be actually true, such as error theories about belief, colour, pain location, and character traits. Frances investigates the questions, 'Under what conditions do we need to rule out these error theories in order to know things inconsistent with them?' and 'Can we rule them out?' Particular attention is paid to recent methods used to counter the traditional sceptic. Sharp, witty, and fun to read, Scepticism Comes Alive will be highly provocative for anyone interested in knowledge and its limits.
Phase Space Methods for Degenerate Quantum Gases
Bryan J. Dalton; John Jeffers; Stephen M. Barnett
Oxford University Press
2014
sidottu
Recent experimental progress has enabled cold atomic gases to be studied at nano-kelvin temperatures, creating new states of matter where quantum degeneracy occurs - Bose-Einstein condensates and degenerate Fermi gases. Such quantum states are of macroscopic dimensions. This book presents the phase space theory approach for treating the physics of degenerate quantum gases, an approach already widely used in quantum optics. However, degenerate quantum gases involve massive bosonic and fermionic atoms, not massless photons. The book begins with a review of Fock states for systems of identical atoms, where large numbers of atoms occupy the various single particle states or modes. First, separate modes are considered, and here the quantum density operator is represented by a phase space distribution function of phase space variables which replace mode annihilation, creation operators, the dynamical equation for the density operator determines a Fokker-Planck equation for the distribution function, and measurable quantities such as quantum correlation functions are given as phase space integrals. Finally, the phase space variables are replaced by time dependent stochastic variables satisfying Langevin stochastic equations obtained from the Fokker-Planck equation, with stochastic averages giving the measurable quantities. Second, a quantum field approach is treated, the density operator being represented by a distribution functional of field functions which replace field annihilation, creation operators, the distribution functional satisfying a functional FPE, etc. A novel feature of this book is that the phase space variables for fermions are Grassmann variables, not c-numbers. However, we show that Grassmann distribution functions and functionals still provide equations for obtaining both analytic and numerical solutions. The book includes the necessary mathematics for Grassmann calculus and functional calculus, and detailed derivations of key results are provided.
In Travels in the Netherworld, Bryan J. Cuevas examines a fascinating but little-known genre of Tibetan narrative literature about the délok, ordinary men and women who claim to have died, traveled through hell, and then returned from the afterlife. These narratives enjoy audiences ranging from the most sophisticated monastic scholars to pious townsfolk, villagers, and nomads. Their accounts emphasize the universal Buddhist principles of impermanence and worldly suffering, the fluctuations of karma, and the feasibility of obtaining a favorable rebirth through virtue and merit. Providing a clear, detailed analysis of four vivid return-from-death tales, including the stories of a Tibetan housewife, a lama, a young noble woman, and a Buddhist monk, Cuevas argues that these narratives express ideas about death and the afterlife that held wide currency among all classes of faithful Buddhists in Tibet. Relying on a diversity of traditional Tibetan sources, Buddhist canonical scriptures, scholastic textbooks, ritual and meditation manuals, and medical treatises, in addition to the délok works themselves, Cuevas surveys a broad range of popular Tibetan Buddhist ideas about death and dying. He explores beliefs about the vulnerability of the soul and its journey beyond death, karmic retribution and the terrors of hell, the nature of demons and demonic possession, ghosts, and reanimated corpses. Cuevas argues that these extraordinary accounts exhibit flexibility between social and religious categories that are conventionally polarized and concludes that, contrary to the accepted wisdom, such rigid divisions as elite and folk, monastic and lay religion are not sufficiently representative of traditional Tibetan Buddhism on the ground. This study offers innovative perspectives on popular religion in Tibet and fills a gap in an important field of Tibetan literature.
Although attitudes toward the aged and their care are inherent in any society, gerontology itself is a relatively recent field of study and practice. Gerontology and the Construction of Old Age applies the methods of discourse analysis and textual analysis to texts and documents in this newly evolved and eclectic fi eld. Green explores and identifies the literary methods and discursive regularities through which aging and the aged have been made into objects of study and treatment, and which together form a mode of knowledge production that will infl uence future texts in the field.Because such formats of representation limit rational diagnoses of problems and rational courses of ameliorative action, policy implications in the fi eld of gerontology are a major interest of this study. Another interest is methodological. Within the broader constructionist approach to social reality, Green takes the position of constitutive realism: the notion that social reality is linguistically constructed, primarily in speech and writing.The book's two aims are to describe analytically the fi eld of gerontology. The field is important both for its growing academic presence and for its practical eff ects on discourse and policy concerning old age. It also hopes to help develop possibilities of inquiry associated with the linguistic, literary, and rhetorical turns of social science in recent years. Gerontology and the Construction of Old Age is a substantive investigation, at considerable theoretical depth, of gerontology itself, as well as a methodological treatise with broader implications for social science as it focuses upon the discourse of various professional fields.
Although attitudes toward the aged and their care are inherent in any society, gerontology itself is a relatively recent field of study and practice. Gerontology and the Construction of Old Age applies the methods of discourse analysis and textual analysis to texts and documents in this newly evolved and eclectic fi eld. Green explores and identifies the literary methods and discursive regularities through which aging and the aged have been made into objects of study and treatment, and which together form a mode of knowledge production that will infl uence future texts in the field.Because such formats of representation limit rational diagnoses of problems and rational courses of ameliorative action, policy implications in the fi eld of gerontology are a major interest of this study. Another interest is methodological. Within the broader constructionist approach to social reality, Green takes the position of "constitutive realism": the notion that social reality is linguistically constructed, primarily in speech and writing.The book's two aims are to describe analytically the fi eld of gerontology. The field is important both for its growing academic presence and for its practical eff ects on discourse and policy concerning old age. It also hopes to help develop possibilities of inquiry associated with the linguistic, literary, and rhetorical turns of social science in recent years. Gerontology and the Construction of Old Age is a substantive investigation, at considerable theoretical depth, of gerontology itself, as well as a methodological treatise with broader implications for social science as it focuses upon the discourse of various professional fields.
In Grandville, the first volume in the series, Talbot brings us a steampunk masterpiece.
At Toad Hall, lair of multibillionaire. Baron Aristotle Krapaud, a cabal of industrialists and fat cats plot the violent overthrow of the French state by the intervention of horribly beweaponed automaton soldiers. Meanwhile, the brutal murder of a famous Parisian artist, mysteriously stabbed to death in his locked and guarded studio.