The Agony and the Glory


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Glory and Agony


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Glory and Agony is the first history of the shifting attitudes toward national sacrifice in Hebrew culture over the last century. Its point of departure is Zionism's obsessive preoccupation with its haunting "primal scene" of sacrifice, the near-sacrifice of Isaac, as evidenced in wide-ranging sources from the domains of literature, art, psychology, philosophy, and politics. By placing these sources in conversation with twentieth-century thinking on human sacrifice, violence, and martyrdom, this study draws a complex picture that provides multiple, sometimes contradictory insights into the genesis and gender of national sacrifice. Extending back over two millennia, this study unearths retellings of biblical and classical narratives of sacrifice, both enacted and aborted, voluntary and violent, male and female—Isaac, Ishmael, Jephthah's daughter, Iphigenia, Jesus. Glory and Agony traces the birth of national sacrifice out of the ruins of religious martyrdom, exposing the sacred underside of Western secularism in Israel as elsewhere.




Alexandrina


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The Agony and Glory of the Cross


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The Agony and the Glory


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Alexandrina


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Pacific Agony


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"Depressed, cynical, and subversive, East Coaster Reginald Fortiphton has been brought to Seattle by a West Coast publishing company that wants him to write a guide to the American Northwest. His job is to travel, on their dime, from Eugene, Oregon, to Vancouver, shining an admiring light on the region which the publishers feel has been neglected by the New York publishing monopoly. To ensure that the project goes as planned, the very respectable Narcissa Whitman Applegate - notable member of the Willamette-Columbia Historical Legion and the Daughters of the Oregon Trail Historical Committee - is asked to annotate the manuscript. Her notes at the bottom of the page become progressively more outraged as the alienated Reginald's mock travel narrative skewers the region with merciless political observations - while he spirals into a depressive mania." "This acidic, satirical novel hilariously eviscerates contemporary American culture at the same time that it exposes some of the darker motivations of American middle-class liberalism." --Book Jacket.