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The Origin of Doubt

Author : Nathan Alling Long

Publisher :

Page : 134 pages

File Size : 14,54 MB

Release : 2018

Category : Fiction

ISBN : 9781941209738

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Book Description

The Origin of Doubt is a collection of flash fiction that represents the best of the genre. Each story is a gem, a glimpse into moments of yearning and unexpected perception, instants that many of us might otherwise miss. Nathan Long writes with a confident and assured hand, his sensibility generous and insightful. These are stories of male and female desire, of love and longing and loss. They are told to us like secrets, each simple moment a revelation that generates surprise and wonder. Reading them is sheer delight. --Patricia Smith, The Year of Needy Girls Long is a writer of focused and developed gifts, of a fecund imagination, at home in crossing genres as form and content make their evolving demands. These works span the gamut from traditional to queer trans-genre forms, marvelous to behold in times like these when political discourses and abuses of language have sunk to unforeseen lows. --Timothy Liu, author of Of Thee I Sing (Poetry Book-of-the-Year Award from Publishers Weekly) and Don't Go Back To Sleep The stories in The Origin of Doubt are superb examples of realism--accessible in style and replete with nuance, exuding an omniscient wisdom that is profound yet humble. Long has a special knack of presenting an oblique or mundane situation and making it momentous; stylistically, his use of significant detail is sharply effective, and his figurative language rich and resounding with meaning. --John Parras, author of Fire on Mount Maggiore Reading the fifty incisive fictional incisions of Nathan Alling Long's deft The Origin of Doubt, I found myself flashing on the origins of smithing samurai katana and wakizashi blades, the edgiest of edges, patiently folded, flattened and peened time and time again to strike out a sword honed to microscopic tolerances, thicknesses of molecules. These sharp and stropping fictions are cut and cutting and finely inscribe the margins and boundaries of the cauterized categories of age and gender. --Michael Martone, author of Michael Martone and Winesburg, Indiana



Darwin's Doubt

Author : Stephen C. Meyer

Publisher : Harper Collins

Page : 605 pages

File Size : 23,97 MB

Release : 2013-06-18

Category : Science

ISBN : 0062071491

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Book Description

When Charles Darwin finished The Origin of Species, he thought that he had explained every clue, but one. Though his theory could explain many facts, Darwin knew that there was a significant event in the history of life that his theory did not explain. During this event, the “Cambrian explosion,” many animals suddenly appeared in the fossil record without apparent ancestors in earlier layers of rock. In Darwin’s Doubt, Stephen C. Meyer tells the story of the mystery surrounding this explosion of animal life—a mystery that has intensified, not only because the expected ancestors of these animals have not been found, but because scientists have learned more about what it takes to construct an animal. During the last half century, biologists have come to appreciate the central importance of biological information—stored in DNA and elsewhere in cells—to building animal forms. Expanding on the compelling case he presented in his last book, Signature in the Cell, Meyer argues that the origin of this information, as well as other mysterious features of the Cambrian event, are best explained by intelligent design, rather than purely undirected evolutionary processes.



Unbelievers

Author : Alec Ryrie

Publisher : Harvard University Press

Page : 273 pages

File Size : 46,33 MB

Release : 2019-11-19

Category : Religion

ISBN : 0674243277

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Book Description

“How has unbelief come to dominate so many Western societies? The usual account invokes the advance of science and rational knowledge. Ryrie’s alternative, in which emotions are the driving force, offers new and interesting insights into our past and present.” —Charles Taylor, author of A Secular Age Why have societies that were once overwhelmingly Christian become so secular? We think we know the answer, pointing to science and reason as the twin culprits, but in this lively, startlingly original reconsideration, Alec Ryrie argues that people embraced unbelief much as they have always chosen their worldviews: through the heart more than the mind. Looking back to the crisis of the Reformation and beyond, he shows how, long before philosophers started to make the case for atheism, powerful cultural currents were challenging traditional faith. As Protestant radicals eroded time-honored certainties and ushered in an age of anger and anxiety, some defended their faith by redefining it in terms of ethics, setting in motion secularizing forces that soon became transformational. Unbelievers tells a powerful emotional history of doubt with potent lessons for our own angry and anxious times. “Well-researched and thought-provoking...Ryrie is definitely on to something right and important.” —Christianity Today “A beautifully crafted history of early doubt...Unbelievers covers much ground in a short space with deep erudition and considerable wit.” —The Spectator “Ryrie traces the root of religious skepticism to the anger, the anxiety, and the ‘desperate search for certainty’ that drove thinkers like...John Donne to grapple with church dogma.” —New Yorker



The Origins of Reasonable Doubt

Author : James Q. Whitman

Publisher : Yale University Press

Page : 286 pages

File Size : 26,78 MB

Release : 2008-01-01

Category : Law

ISBN : 0300116004

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Book Description

To be convicted of a crime in the United States, a person must be proven guilty “beyond a reasonable doubt.” But what is reasonable doubt? Even sophisticated legal experts find this fundamental doctrine difficult to explain. In this accessible book, James Q. Whitman digs deep into the history of the law and discovers that we have lost sight of the original purpose of “reasonable doubt.” It was not originally a legal rule at all, he shows, but a theological one. The rule as we understand it today is intended to protect the accused. But Whitman traces its history back through centuries of Christian theology and common-law history to reveal that the original concern was to protect the souls of jurors. In Christian tradition, a person who experienced doubt yet convicted an innocent defendant was guilty of a mortal sin. Jurors fearful for their own souls were reassured that they were safe, as long as their doubts were not “reasonable.” Today, the old rule of reasonable doubt survives, but it has been turned to different purposes. The result is confusion for jurors, and a serious moral challenge for our system of justice.



Merchants of Doubt

Author : Naomi Oreskes

Publisher : A&C Black

Page : 368 pages

File Size : 27,89 MB

Release : 2011-10-03

Category : Technology & Engineering

ISBN : 1408828774

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Book Description

The U.S. scientific community has long led the world in research on such areas as public health, environmental science, and issues affecting quality of life. These scientists have produced landmark studies on the dangers of DDT, tobacco smoke, acid rain, and global warming. But at the same time, a small yet potent subset of this community leads the world in vehement denial of these dangers. Merchants of Doubt tells the story of how a loose-knit group of high-level scientists and scientific advisers, with deep connections in politics and industry, ran effective campaigns to mislead the public and deny well-established scientific knowledge over four decades. Remarkably, the same individuals surface repeatedly-some of the same figures who have claimed that the science of global warming is "not settled" denied the truth of studies linking smoking to lung cancer, coal smoke to acid rain, and CFCs to the ozone hole. "Doubt is our product," wrote one tobacco executive. These "experts" supplied it. Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, historians of science, roll back the rug on this dark corner of the American scientific community, showing how ideology and corporate interests, aided by a too-compliant media, have skewed public understanding of some of the most pressing issues of our era.



Beyond a Reasonable Doubt

Author : Shmuel Waldman

Publisher : Feldheim Publishers

Page : 338 pages

File Size : 24,73 MB

Release : 2005

Category : Faith (Judaism)

ISBN : 9781583308066

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Book Description

This book was written for the Jew who seeks evidence and proofs that the principal beliefs of Judaism are indeed true. Readable and friendly, inspiring and refreshing, this book presents the main issues of Judaism in depth. It includes compelling evidence to there being a Creator, evidence to the Divine origin of our Torah, to there being a spiritual soul and the World To Come, and Divine guidance throughout Jewish history. It discusses the problems with Evolution, and it deals with the Holocaust and human suffering. It also provides many other sources for further reading, and a glossary of terms. This edition is recommended for readers with a strong Torah background, seeking an informed, yet less secular, approach.



Not Sure

Author : John D. Suk

Publisher : Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

Page : 220 pages

File Size : 47,6 MB

Release : 2011-09-02

Category : Biography & Autobiography

ISBN : 0802866506

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Book Description

In 2002, while touring North America with his wife in an RV, John Suk -- lifelong Christian, longtime pastor, and noted leader in the Christian Reformed Church -- experienced a crippling crisis of faith. He emerged from that dark time with a strange new gift -- doubt. In Not Sure Suk takes readers on an eyes-wide-open, deeply personal voyage through the past and present of Christian belief, reexamining Christian faith -- in his own life and in fifteen centuries of Christian history -- through a skeptic's eyes. He exposes major pitfalls of modern Christian movements and questions what he considers to be faulty paradigms: the "personal relationship with Jesus," the "health-and-wealth gospel," and traditional ethnicity-based belief systems. In the end he is left clinging to what is for him a truer, wiser kind of faith in Jesus Christ -- faith that struggles and lives with doubt.



Cioran – A Dionysiac with the voluptuousness of doubt

Author : Ion Dur

Publisher : Vernon Press

Page : 183 pages

File Size : 11,57 MB

Release : 2019-05-31

Category : Philosophy

ISBN : 1622734602

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Book Description

Since its inception philosophical thought has been fixated by death. Death, as much as life, has been the unrelenting driving force behind some of history’s greatest thinkers. Yet, for Emil Cioran, a Romanian-French philosopher, even philosophy cannot attempt to understand nor contain the inevitable unknown. Considered to be an anti-philosopher, Cioran approached and reflected on the human experience with a despairing pessimism. His works are characterised by a brooding, fatalistic temperament that reveals and defines itself in his irony, black humour and inimitable style. Although Cioran’s later works have received much scholarly recognition, little attention has been paid to the texts he wrote in his adolescent. Grounded in the historical context of interwar Romania, this book presents for the first time an analysis of the little-known works of this pioneering Romanian thinker. Deeply affected by his upbringing, this book offers a glimpse into Cioran’s first attempts to delve into philosophical enterprise, before turning its attention to his later works, On the Heights of Despair (1934), The Transfiguration of Romania (1936) and Twilight of thoughts (1940; written in France). Using both the French and Romanian editions of these works, but also their original manuscripts, this volume seeks to provide a re-reading that takes language rather than a social or political critique as its focal point. As an important and provocative contribution to the existing literature on Cioran, this book will be an essential point of reference for students and researchers, alike.



Speaking of Faith

Author : Krista Tippett

Publisher : Penguin

Page : 276 pages

File Size : 20,36 MB

Release : 2008-01-29

Category : Religion

ISBN : 1101202149

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Book Description

A thought-provoking, original appraisal of the meaning of religion by the host of public radio's On Being Krista Tippett, widely becoming known as the Bill Moyers of radio, is one of the country's most intelligent and insightful commentators on religion, ethics, and the human spirit. With this book, she draws on her own life story and her intimate conversations with both ordinary and famous figures, including Elie Wiesel, Karen Armstrong, and Thich Nhat Hanh, to explore complex subjects like science, love, virtue, and violence within the context of spirituality and everyday life. Her way of speaking about the mysteries of life-and of listening with care to those who endeavor to understand those mysteries--is nothing short of revolutionary.



Debating Darwin's Doubt

Author : David Klinghoffer

Publisher : Discovery Institute

Page : 0 pages

File Size : 23,9 MB

Release : 2015

Category : Evolution (Biology)

ISBN : 9781936599288

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Book Description

In 2013 Stephen Meyer's book Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design became a national bestseller, provoking a wide-ranging debate about the adequacy of Darwinian theory to explain life's history. In Debating Darwin's Doubt: A Scientific Controversy that Can No Longer Be Denied, leading scholars in the intelligent design community respond to critiques of Meyer's book and show that the core challenge posed by Meyer remains unanswered: Where did the influx of information essential to the creation of new body plans come from? In addition to ten chapters by Stephen Meyer, Debating Darwin's Doubt also includes contributions from biologists Richard Sternberg, Douglas Axe, and Ann Gauger; philosopher of biology Paul Nelson; mathematicians William Dembski and David Berlinski; and Center for Science and Culture research coordinator Casey Luskin. In forty-four chapters, these contributing authors explore topics such as orphan genes, cladistics, small shelly fossils, protein evolution, the length of the Cambrian explosion, the God-of-the-Gaps objection to intelligent design, and criticisms raised by proponents of theistic evolution. Anyone who wants to understand the cutting-edge of current scientific debates over modern Darwinian theory needs to read this book.