Sometimes the path to our dreams is not always what we expect.When a magical tree burgeons from the palm of a humble street sweeper, he learns that he must let go of control and see things from an unfamiliar perspective if he is to live his dreams 'Above the Clouds'.This whimsical picture book with a magical realism hook is complete with 37 pages of beautifully pencilled drawings and 837 words.
Rural Ecologies is a collection of haiku united by their subject matter: a love of the natural world and the wonder it inspires. Michael J. Leach embraces contemporary practice in writing these short, contemplative verses 'in the spirit of haiku' rather than trying to contort each poem into three lines while pretending that English syllables can be considered Japanese morae.This is a thoughtful, sometimes playful, collection that celebrates the resonance of the momentary.
Drawings and Reflections invite you aboard 'the slow train of understanding.' It travels at a speed that allows the landscape to be clearly seen. Jeanne's 16 colour drawings will lift the spirit. They are fun just to sit with. Michael's 52 brief reflections each make a point to take to heart. Enjoy simple ideas about smarter Christian living. Read without haste and the benefits are lasting. Slowly does it.
Science exists by the creativity of God. But where to find God within physics? Where in society, in which God has become mostly irrelevant? An informed answer best includes a little knowledge of history, science, philosophy, theology and religion. Plus ideas about a way forward that are scriptural.__________________________________________Michael Spyker has spent a lifetime reflecting on the spiritual life within the context of a science and technology-driven world. The result is Science and Spirit, a work exploring the key issues of science and faith in the language of the ordinary person. It is an impressive and comprehensive feat of theological dialogue with the modern world. Throughout, it is sensitive to the power of the Spirit in the life of the world today; and therein lies its great value. Dr Mark Worthing, Author of God, Science and Contemporary Physics (Fortress Press) and Unlikely Allies. Monotheism and the Rise of Science (ISCAST/NEXUS books).
Jake is on a journey of double discovery. He travels through the Simpson Desert in central Australia bush camping and hears about the theological ideas of Liam his father who has died. Together with Baz, his father's best friend, Jake rides a thousand sandhills including Big Red and arrives at the iconic Birdsville Hotel. Simultaneously, they take a journey of the mind discussing concepts like eternal and universal love, a relational universe, sin and the centrality of choice, Trinitarian relating and more. Join Baz and Jake on their outback adventure. Enjoy Liam's stimulating and practical ideas on life, the gospel, relationality and wellbeing.
When Emma, a curious student, meets Joe, a middle-aged lecturer teaching spirituality at a nearby college, the conversations that follow outline a journey of discovery in faith, as Emma comes to grips with family problems, her art and her relationship with God.A remarkably honest look at issues that confront many people, this story will be uniquely helpful to those who want to explore spirituality and are curious about Christianity. Or perhaps they simply have an interest in a range of topical issues such as meditation, self-worth and identity.
When JH fails to return from a holiday Emma is worried. With Jake, she sets out on a search in the Flinders Ranges, camping. From JH they had learned about the real meaning of Eros and how being a Friend of Jesus is special. He told them about the language of love. It is all a matter of becoming authentically yourself. Being in love, and intimately living together out bush, Emma and Jake are faced with this language. Emma is determined to get it right. Jake finds a surprising solution. The ancient idea of Eros and the true meaning of love are given renewed relevancy in a story that is never superficial.
He is alone and suffers. His wife has died of cancer. She has an interesting job teaching children with disabilities.Country living brings relief to him, as does his skill in playing jazz/metal. A holiday might sort her future out, for there are questions. How about love and suffering and life as it happens?
When seventeen-year-old Ethan awakens after being drugged and kidnapped, he has no memory of his life or the world around him. Society is fractured and full of twins, each pair harbouring the secret of who is good and who is evil. Enlisting help from four teenagers at his treating hospital, and a shrewd detective named Jessica, Ethan's new-found companions are just as surprising, as they freely use potions and technologically advanced rings, items which prove to be invaluable protections. For not only is Ethan is confronted by the evil Nuns, he finds there are many dangers in this unknown world, the least of all being the morphing Snake-shifts. But the danger does not end there, as somebody is still after him, and the Time Leeches have begun to kill. But worse than that, he eventually learns the reason why he himself is the biggest danger to all.It is a story of mystery, deception, action and discovery, as Ethan struggles to find the truth of his stolen past and what it means for his future.
Since the early 1960s, music fans have found Bob Dylan's spirituality fascinating, and many of them have identified Dylan as a kind of spiritual guru. This book, written by a scholar who is a longtime fan, examines Dylan's mystique, asking why audiences respond to him as a spiritual guide. This book reveals Bob Dylan as a major twentieth- and twenty-first-century religious thinker with a body of relevant work that goes far beyond a handful of gospel albums.
Evidence from Shang oracle bones to memorials submitted to Western Han emperors attests to a long-lasting debate in early China over the proper relationship between humans and gods. One pole of the debate saw the human and divine realms as separate and agonistic and encouraged divination to determine the will of the gods and sacrifices to appease and influence them. The opposite pole saw the two realms as related and claimed that humans could achieve divinity and thus control the cosmos. This wide-ranging book reconstructs this debate and places within their contemporary contexts the rival claims concerning the nature of the cosmos and the spirits, the proper demarcation between the human and the divine realms, and the types of power that humans and spirits can exercise.It is often claimed that the worldview of early China was unproblematically monistic and that hence China had avoided the tensions between gods and humans found in the West. By treating the issues of cosmology, sacrifice, and self-divinization in a historical and comparative framework that attends to the contemporary significance of specific arguments, Michael J. Puett shows that the basic cosmological assumptions of ancient China were the subject of far more debate than is generally thought.
In this book, Michael Sandel takes up some of the hotly contested moral and political issues of our time, including affirmative action, assisted suicide, abortion, gay rights, stem cell research, the meaning of toleration and civility, the gap between rich and poor, the role of markets, and the place of religion in public life. He argues that the most prominent ideals in our political life--individual rights and freedom of choice--do not by themselves provide an adequate ethic for a democratic society. Sandel calls for a politics that gives greater emphasis to citizenship, community, and civic virtue, and that grapples more directly with questions of the good life. Liberals often worry that inviting moral and religious argument into the public sphere runs the risk of intolerance and coercion. These essays respond to that concern by showing that substantive moral discourse is not at odds with progressive public purposes, and that a pluralist society need not shrink from engaging the moral and religious convictions that its citizens bring to public life.
Michael Rosenfeld offers a new theory of family dynamics to account for the interesting and startling changes in marriage and family composition in the United States in recent years. His argument revolves around the independent life stage that emerged around 1960. This stage is experienced by young adults after they leave their parents' homes but before they settle down to start their own families. During this time, young men and women go away to college, travel abroad, begin careers, and enjoy social independence. This independent life stage has reduced parental control over the dating practices and mate selection of their children and has resulted in a sharp rise in interracial and same-sex unions--unions that were more easily averted by previous generations of parents.Complementing analysis of newly available census data from the entire twentieth century with in-depth interviews that explore the histories of families and couples, Rosenfeld proposes a conceptual model to explain many social changes that may seem unrelated but that flow from the same underlying logic. He shows, for example, that the more a relationship is transgressive of conventional morality, the more likely it is for the individuals to live away from their family and area of origin.
“Sandel explores a paramount question of our era: how to extend the power and promise of biomedical science to overcome debility without compromising our humanity. His arguments are acute and penetrating, melding sound logic with compassion.”—Jerome Groopman, author of How Doctors ThinkBreakthroughs in genetics present us with a promise and a predicament. The promise is that we will soon be able to treat and prevent a host of debilitating diseases. The predicament is that our newfound genetic knowledge may enable us to manipulate our nature—to enhance our genetic traits and those of our children. Although most people find at least some forms of genetic engineering disquieting, it is not easy to articulate why. What is wrong with re-engineering our nature?The Case against Perfection explores these and other moral quandaries connected with the quest to perfect ourselves and our children. Michael Sandel argues that the pursuit of perfection is flawed for reasons that go beyond safety and fairness. The drive to enhance human nature through genetic technologies is objectionable because it represents a bid for mastery and dominion that fails to appreciate the gifted character of human powers and achievements. Carrying us beyond familiar terms of political discourse, this book contends that the genetic revolution will change the way philosophers discuss ethics and will force spiritual questions back onto the political agenda.In order to grapple with the ethics of enhancement, we need to confront questions largely lost from view in the modern world. Since these questions verge on theology, modern philosophers and political theorists tend to shrink from them. But our new powers of biotechnology make these questions unavoidable. Addressing them is the task of this book, by one of America’s preeminent moral and political thinkers.
The Reagan and Bush years have left us with a troublesome dilemma: how to balance our budget deficit against our social deficit. This book takes up the urgent question of how, in a time of economic crisis and constraint, we can meet the pent-up demand for spending on our nation’s neglected poor, infirm, and disadvantaged, old and young. Michael Piore’s ambitious response is to develop a new social theory that balances individual preferences against the claims and responsibilities of the community. By explaining the role of groups in economic and social life, this theory makes sense of a host of perplexing social phenomena and policy issues, from equal employment opportunity to international competitiveness to the decline of organized labor, from multicultural education to health insurance to the underclass.Piore traces our difficulties in addressing these issues to the limits of liberal social theory, particularly its sharp distinctions between individuality and community. He offers an alternative view of individuality as emerging through the discussions and debates conducted among a community’s members. These discussions, Piore suggests, have turned inward, away from the borderlands where social groups and economic organizations meet—and therein lies the crux of some of the country’s deepest political and economic problems. His book points beyond the liberal conception of politics as a negotiation among competing interests and of policymaking as technical decisionmaking. Instead, it prescribes a politics focused on the process of discussion and debate itself, a politics that enlarges the borderlands by broadening the range of people who talk to one another and the range of topics they address.
“Deep, informed, and reeks of common sense.”—Norman Ornstein“It is now beyond debate that rising inequality is not only leaving millions of Americans living on a sharp edge but also is threatening our democracy…For activists and scholars alike who are struggling to create a more equitable society, this is an essential read.”—David GergenWe are in an age of crisis. That much we can agree on. But a crisis of what, exactly? And how do we get out of it?In a follow up to their influential and much debated Death by a Thousand Cuts, Michael Graetz and Ian Shapiro focus on what really worries people: not what the rich are making or the government is taking from them but their own insecurity. Americans are worried about losing their jobs, their status, and the safety of their communities. They fear the wolf at the door. The solution is not protectionism or class warfare but better jobs, higher wages, greater protection for families suffering from unemployment, better health insurance, and higher quality childcare. And it turns out those goals are more achievable than you might think. The Wolf at the Door is one of those rare books that doesn’t just diagnose our problems, it shows how to address them.“This is a terrific book, original, erudite, and superbly well-informed, and full of new wisdom about what might and what might not help the majority of Americans who have not shared in our growing prosperity, but are left facing the wolf at the door…Everyone interested in public policy should read this book.”—Angus Deaton, Princeton University“Graetz and Shapiro wrestle with a fundamental question of our day: How do we address a system that makes too many Americans anxious that economic security is slipping out of reach? Their cogent call for sensible and achievable policies…should be read by progressives and conservatives alike.”—Jacob J. Lew, former Secretary of the Treasury
A renowned political philosopher updates his classic book on the American political tradition to address the perils democracy confronts today.The 1990s were a heady time. The Cold War had ended, and America’s version of liberal capitalism seemed triumphant. And yet, amid the peace and prosperity, anxieties about the project of self-government could be glimpsed beneath the surface.So argued Michael Sandel, in his influential and widely debated book Democracy’s Discontent, published in 1996. The market faith was eroding the common life. A rising sense of disempowerment was likely to provoke backlash, he wrote, from those who would “shore up borders, harden the distinction between insiders and outsiders, and promise a politics to ‘take back our culture and take back our country,’ to ‘restore our sovereignty’ with a vengeance.”Now, a quarter century later, Sandel updates his classic work for an age when democracy’s discontent has hardened into a country divided against itself. In this new edition, he extends his account of America’s civic struggles from the 1990s to the present. He shows how Democrats and Republicans alike embraced a version of finance-driven globalization that created a society of winners and losers and fueled the toxic politics of our time.In a work celebrated when first published as “a remarkable fusion of philosophical and historical scholarship” (Alan Brinkley), Sandel recalls moments in the American past when the country found ways to hold economic power to democratic account. To reinvigorate democracy, Sandel argues in a stirring new epilogue, we need to reconfigure the economy and empower citizens as participants in a shared public life.
