The Oxbow Revelation


Book Description

25 days in a life . . . It's 1975 and high school student Paul Roberts has recently left his church. He struggles to find a morality based upon something more than common belief or personal opinion. Then he becomes engaged in a series of conversations with a co-worker. Soon they have embarked upon a journey that neither had imagined possible. "...The Oxbow Revelation reads like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance crossed with East of Eden, with shades of American Graffiti as its backdrop." "... A serious, mysterious and sometimes sexy book about finding morality." Interwoven with humorous episodes of cruising the main drag and poignant stories of first love, Paul and his co-worker consider how the practical application of philosophical realism can guide human values. Originally poised to ignore the fact that their descriptions of realism also mirror the attributes of God, their examples keep echoing other religious stories, East and West. The mystery compounds until they can even understand the "virgin birth" through the eyes of realism. "Religious philosophy for the common man. You can focus on reason, ignoring every religious reference within the book, and the self-evident values remain. But don't ignore too much; this is cutting-edge religious scholarship." "...an opening salvo for a new religious realism." A compelling look at religion beyond belief.




The Laozi, Daodejing


Book Description

The Laozi, Daodejing (also published as The Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching) is a new translation and commentary for 2015 and beyond. Unlike many other translations, this book's commentary invites the reader into the interpretive process. It provides the reader with a look into the visuals that make up key Chinese characters in order to assist the reader in understanding its practical philosophy of Realism. The 2500 year old Chinese text is not about rights and wrongs, nor is it about trying to change the world so that it suits you. It is about how we regard value and how this sense of value may, in turn, inform ourselves. It is about how adapting our selves to the world as it exists may make the world a better place in which all can live. It might best be regarded as self-help philosophy.




Wisdom's Hiding Place


Book Description

We live in a world dominated by belief. We hear, are taught, convinced and converted. We affirm, worship, praise and preach. We argue, persecute and kill for belief. And all of this can happen without a hint of faith in sight. Our failure to understand the difference between faith and belief has always been with us. Problems with belief are not limited to religion; belief affects everything from politics to personal relationships. Here we consider a philosophy of realism. Within realism, we find that not only is faith opposed to belief, faith is a tool of reason whether we are religious or not. Remarkably, the evidence suggests that many popular religious ideas and "myths" began as psychological lessons in realism. Because what we view is so dependent upon how we view, we learn how realism can influence our psychology, inform our values, and reveal a path forward that avoids the pitfalls of belief.




The Rancho Gordo Heirloom Bean Grower's Guide


Book Description

Showcases fifty heirloom bean varieties and provides growing tips, flavor notes, and stories of their heritage.




Revelations of Ideology: Apocalyptic Class Politics in Early Roman Palestine


Book Description

In Revelations of Ideology, G. Anthony Keddie proposes a new theory of the social function of Judaean apocalyptic texts produced in Early Roman Palestine (63 BCE–70 CE). In contrast to evaluations of Jewish and early Christian apocalyptic texts as “literature of the oppressed” or literature of resistance against empire, Keddie demonstrates that scribes produced apocalyptic texts to advance ideologies aimed at self-legitimation. By revealing that their opponents constituted an exploitative class, scribes generated apocalyptic ideologies that situated them in the same exploited class as their constituents. Through careful historical and ideological criticism of the Psalms of Solomon, Parables of Enoch, Testament of Moses, and Q source, Keddie identifies an internally diverse tradition of apocalyptic class rhetoric in late Second Temple Judaism.




Revelations of Dominance and Resilience


Book Description

Chinua Achebe ("The art of fiction”) famously observed that until lions have their own historians “the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” In this volume chronicling the complex imperial and colonial entanglements of the Kpando region in eastern Ghana over recent centuries, the lions have found their proverbial historian. Drawing on an array of sources—archaeological, oral historical and documentary—Wazi Apoh brings locally nuanced perspective to the complex social political economic entanglements among Akpini, German and British actors. His illumination of previously silenced histories provides a rich platform from which to provoke us to imagine and act on the possibilities for restorative repatriation in the present. Its novel combination of historical study with analysis of ongoing dialogues over repatriation is a unique contribution to African studies.




Transatlantic Literary Ecologies


Book Description

Opening a dialogue between ecocriticism and transatlantic studies, this collection shows how the two fields inform, complement, and complicate each other. The editors situate the volume in its critical contexts by providing a detailed literary and historical overview of nineteenth-century transatlantic socioenvironmental issues involving such topics as the contemporary fur and timber trades, colonialism and agricultural "improvement," literary discourses on conservation, and the consequences of industrial capitalism, urbanization, and urban environmental activism. The chapters move from the broad to the particular, offering insights into Romanticism’s transatlantic discourses on nature and culture, examining British Victorian representations of nature in light of their reception by American writers and readers, providing in-depth analyses of literary forms such as the adventure novel, travel narratives, and theological and scientific writings, and bringing transatlantic and ecocritical perspectives to bear on classic works of nineteenth-century American literature. By opening a critical dialogue between these two vital areas of scholarship, Transatlantic Literary Ecologies demonstrates some of the key ways in which Western environmental consciousness and associated literary practices arose in the context of transatlantic literary and cultural exchanges during the long nineteenth century.




The Ox-Bow Man


Book Description

"Based on widely scattered sources - personal papers and correspondence; Clark's unpublished stories and poems; and interviews with family members, friends, and others - Benson focuses on Clark's intellectual and literary life as a writer, teacher, and westerner, balancing his account of the experiences, people, and settings of Clark's life with an examination of Clark's complex psyche and the crippling perfectionism that virtually ended his career. He also offers an assessment of Clark's place in Western writing."--Jacket.




Inherit the Holy Mountain


Book Description

Inherit the Holy Mountain puts religion at the center of the history of American environmentalism rather than at its margins, demonstrating how religion provided environmentalists with content, direction, and tone for the environmental causes they espoused.




Walker Percy


Book Description

In Walker Percy: Books of Revelations, Gary M. Ciuba examines how Percy's apocalyptic vision inspires the structure, themes, and strategies of his fiction. This book explores the unity of the southern novelist's fiction by focusing on its religious and artistic design—one of the first studies to approach Percy's work from this perspective. Ciuba considers Percy's six published novels—The Moviegoer, The Last Gentleman, Love in the Ruins, Lancelot, The Second Coming, and The Thanatos Syndrome—and also offers the first extended critical analysis of his unpublished work “The Gramercy Winner.” Although the novels are often seen as increasingly satiric jeremiads about the possible doom of America, Ciuba argues that Percy's fiction is principally shaped by a demythologized and partially realized form of eschatology. This apocalyptic vision has less to do with the end of the external world than with the demise of the protagonists' internal worldviews. According to Ciuba, Percy does more than offer direly comic warnings about the end of the world; he shows how the world actually ends and then may begin again in the everyday lives and extraordinary loves of his astonished seers.