Open Embrace


Book Description

In a fresh vision of love, sex, and marriage, the Torodes challenge the widespread acceptance of contraception and offer a model of family planning that celebrates new life and respects our bodies' God-given design.




Open Embrace


Book Description

The Covid-19 pandemic has sharpened the divisions within and among countries. Nationalism continues to stir India, with the re-election of Narendra Modi in 2019, and in the US, despite the defeat of Donald Trump in 2020. The pandemic and the unsettling expansionism of China are reasons for heightened bilateral cooperation between the world's oldest and largest democracies, but they are increasingly protectionist and volatile. India and the US are trying hard to figure out their respective roles in the emerging world and their biliteral ties, as fears of a new Cold War, or even a military confrontation loom large. Both democracies are also grappling with contesting visions of their nationhood. Renewed debates over national security, borders, international trade, economic order, immigration, citizenship, state-society relations, the place of minorities, and institutional trust in both countries are noisy and fractious. In India, Narendra Modi's Hindutva Strategic Doctrine is reshaping India and advancing a new framework for its ties with the world; in the US, a significant portion of Trump's 'America First' nationalism has been embraced by his successor Joe Biden, demonstrating the salience of nationalism. Strategic commentaries tend to treat international relations in isolation from domestic politics. In a first, Open Embrace explores the domestic motivations of the strategic policies of India and the US. This new, wholly revised edition accounts for the post-pandemic shift in global politics and ongoing changes in the US politics around the defeat of Trump by Biden.




Touching and Being Touched


Book Description

Touch is a fundamental element of dance. The (time) forms and contact zones of touch are means of expression both of self-reflexivity and the interaction of the dancers. Liberties and limits, creative possibilities and taboos of touch convey insights into the ‘aisthesis’ of the different forms of dance: into their dynamics and communicative structure, as well as into the production and regulation of affects. Touching and Being Touched assembles seventeen interdisciplinary papers focusing on the question of how forms and practices of touch are connected with the evocation of feelings. Are these feelings evoked in different ways in tango, Contact improvisation, European and Japanese contemporary dance? The contributors to this volume (dance, literature, and film scholars as well as philosophers and neuroscientists) provide in-depth discussions of the modes of transfer between touch and being touched. Drawing on the assumptions of various theories of body, emotion, and senses, how can we interpret the processes of tactile touch and of being touched emotionally? Is there a specific spectrum of emotions activated during these processes (within both the spectator and the dancer)? How can the relationship of movement, touch, and emotion be analyzed in relation to kinesthesia and empathy?




Exclusion & Embrace


Book Description

Life at the end of the twentieth century presents us with a disturbing reality. Otherness, the simple fact of being different in some way, has come to be defined as in and of itself evil. Miroslav Volf contends that if the healing word of the gospel is to be heard today, Christian theology must find ways of speaking that address the hatred of the other. Reaching back to the New Testament metaphor of salvation as reconciliation, Volf proposes the idea of embrace as a theological response to the problem of exclusion. Increasingly we see that exclusion has become the primary sin, skewing our perceptions of reality and causing us to react out of fear and anger to all those who are not within our (ever-narrowing) circle. In light of this, Christians must learn that salvation comes, not only as we are reconciled to God, and not only as we "learn to live with one another", but as we take the dangerous and costly step of opening ourselves to the other, of enfolding him or her in the same embrace with which we have been enfolded by God.




Embrace Your Magnificence


Book Description

What started as a love letter to her young daughter has become Fabienne Fredrickson’s message to women everywhere: "You are a magnificent being, truly deserving of a full and abundant life." In Embrace Your Magnificence, Fabienne lays out a course in self-esteem. She shows that when you realize how great you truly are, you free yourself to confidently shift your life. When you see how glorious and brave you are, you gather the courage to break out of your shell, stop playing small, and step into your potential. When you honor, love, and value yourself, you accept all the abundance the universe has in store for you. By living the principles within these 72 inspiring lessons, Fabienne has created an extraordinary life for herself and her family. Her advice—which comes from real-world experiences in both her personal life and her work with clients—is universally beneficial and can be applied in anyone’s life. With love, appreciation, and compassion, Fabienne encourages you to move forward in your own journey, so you too can have a richer, fuller, more abundant life.




Information Experience


Book Description

This book comprises innovative research on the information behavior of various age groups. It also looks at special populations such as ethnic minorities, indigenous peoples, and users with disabilities. The book presents research and reflections on designing systems that help the new generation cope with a complex knowledge society.




Broken Open


Book Description

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • This inspiring guide to healing and growth illuminates the richness and potential of every life, even in the face of loss and adversity—now updated with additional toolbox materials and a new preface by the author In the more than twenty-five years since she co-founded Omega Institute—now the world’s largest center for spiritual retreat and personal growth—Elizabeth Lesser has been an intimate witness to the ways in which people weather change and transition. In a beautifully crafted blend of moving stories, humorous insights, practical guidance, and personal memoir, she offers tools to help us make the choice we all face in times of challenge: Will we be broken down and defeated, or broken open and transformed? Lesser shares tales of ordinary people who have risen from the ashes of illness, divorce, loss of a job or a loved one—stronger, wiser, and more in touch with their purpose and passion. And she draws on the world’s great spiritual and psychological traditions to support us as we too learn to break open and blossom into who we were meant to be.




Perspectives in Motion


Book Description

Focusing on visual approaches to performance in global cultural contexts, Perspectives in Motion explores the work of Adrienne L. Kaeppler, a pioneering researcher who has made a number of interdisciplinary contributions over five decades to dance and performance studies. Through a diverse range of case studies from Oceania, Asia, and Europe, and interdisciplinary approaches, this edited collection offers new critical and ethnographic frameworks for understanding and experiencing practices of music and dance across the globe.




Touching Space, Placing Touch


Book Description

Given that touch and touching is so central to everyday embodied existence, why has it been largely ignored by social scientists for so long? What is the place of touch in our mixed spaces of sociality, work, domesticity, recreation, creativity or care? What conceptual resources and academic languages can we reach towards when approaching tactile activities and somatic experiences through the body? How is this tactile landscape gendered? How is touch becoming revisited and revalidated in late capitalism through animal encounters, tourism, massage, beauty treatments, professional medicine, everyday spiritualities or the aseptic touch-free spaces of automated toilets? How is touch placed and valued within scholarly fieldwork and research itself, integral as it is to the production of embodied epistemologies? How is touch involved in such aesthetic experiences as shaping objects in sand, or encountering fleshly bodies within a painting? The goal of this edited collection, Touching Space, Placing Touch is twofold: 1. To further advance theoretical and empirical understanding of touch in social science scholarship by focussing on the differential social and cultural meanings of touching and the places of touch. 2. To develop a multi-faceted and interdisciplinary explanations of touch in terms of individual and social life, personal experiences and tasks, and their related cultural contexts. The twelve essays in this volume provide a rich combination of theoretical resources, methodological approaches and empirical investigation. Each chapter takes a distinct aspect of touch within a particular spatial context, exploring this through a mixture of sustained empirical work, critical theories of embodiment, philosophical and psychoanalytic approaches to gendered touch and touching, or the relationship between visual and non-visual culture, to articulate something of the variety and variability of touching experiences. The contributors are a mixture of established and emerging researchers within a growing interdisciplinary field of scholarship, yet the volume has a strong thematic identity and therefore represents the formative collection concerning the multiple senses of touch within social science scholarship at this time.




How to Dance with a Partner


Book Description

The Solution to Your Biggest Problem in Social Dancing "I just wanted to thank you again for your class tonight. You always get me to dance my best. You have built a simple, logical, understandable system, demonstrably superior to anything that this dancing mouse has seen." ~ Erin King, social dancer This book solves the biggest problem in social dancing. The problem is how to communicate unambiguously. Dance teachers have an enormous wealth of knowledge. However, when explaining how to communicate, they are surprisingly vague. This vagueness is not the fault of dance teachers. Until now, there was no clearly defined method for communicating. This is the most important advance since men and women started dancing together. Be the Smartest Dancer in Your Group "I have been a huge fan of your method. Thanks so much for early access several years ago." ~ Paul Hughes, ballroom dance instructor Learn the language for partner dancing. This book explains how to communicate every step in every social dance following the three laws of balance, connection, and direction. The method is so simple that the main rules fit on a single sheet of paper which you can learn in an afternoon. You learn to communicate as effortlessly in dancing as you do in speaking. For the first time, you have a clearly defined language so you know what to do without confusion. You only need to learn how to communicate once. You apply the same principles with every person in every dance. You understand more. You learn faster. Your dancing is easier. Learn To Dance Gently "We went somewhere else first, but they just tried to teach us a routine. We like what you are doing so much better. You are teaching us how to dance." ~ Tabitha and Don, new dancers You learn how to dance without the use of force. You learn to dance without pushing and pulling. You learn to dance without the use of tension and pressure. The benefits are transformative. You learn to dance safely. You learn to dance naturally. You learn to dance as one with your partner with more freedom to express yourself. You learn to dance as light as a feather.