Tasting Paradise on Earth


Book Description

Preparing and consuming food is an integral part of identity formation, which in contemporary China embodies tension between fast-forward modernization and cultural nostalgia. Jin Feng’s wide-ranging exploration of cities in the Lower Yangzi Delta—or Jiangnan, a region known for its paradisiacal beauty and abundant resources—illustrates how people preserve culinary inheritance while also revamping it for the new millennium. Throughout Chinese history, food nostalgia has generated cultural currency for individuals. Feng examines literary treatments of Jiangnan foodways from late imperial and twentieth-century China, highlighting the role played by gender and tracing the contemporary metamorphosis of this cultural landscape, with its new platforms for food culture, such as television and the internet. As communities in Jiangnan refashion their regional heritage, culinary arts shine as markers of ethnic and social distinction.




A Taste of Heaven on Earth


Book Description

A Taste of Heaven on Earth explores the spiritual foundation of the nineteenth-century utopian Oneida Community founded by John Humphrey Noyes, whose members sought purity of heart in all thoughts, words, and activities. Following graduation from college with honors, Noyes studied at two theological seminaries, opening his heart to receive God. He discovered the Holy Spirit as our ever-present teacher, revealing the wisdom and experiences of Christ, and that the purpose of human life is preparing the heart to hear this Internal Teacher and implementing its teachings. Spend pleasant hours with many of the nearly three hundred members of Noyes’s communities, people of all personalities and proclivities—how they loved and learned, worked and played, prayed and made music, and lived together with openness and harmony. All were married to all in this unique community, showing that a happy marriage may exist between two hundred and fifty as well as two. They practiced enlightened sexuality, learned emotional intelligence and spiritual self-examination, thrived with variety in work, enjoyed lifelong learning, and nurtured all children as their own. Most of all, they practiced openness to God, the only source of lasting joy and contentment.




Tastes of Paradise


Book Description

From the extravagant use of pepper in the Middle Ages to the Protestant bourgeoisie's love of coffee to the reason why fashionable Europeans stopped sniffing tobacco and starting smoking it, Schivelbusch looks at how the appetite for pleasure transformed the social structure of the Old World. Illustrations.




A Taste of Heaven


Book Description

Does the Bible tell us specifically what heaven will be like? What will the new earth and the capital city, New Jerusalem, be like? Is heaven a real, physical place or just some kind of spiritual realm unlike anything on earth? What will people look like in heaven? What will we do forever and ever? Will there be buildings, families, nations in heaven? What language will we speak? Where is heaven? Will we see God there? Find answers to these and over 300 questions you've always wanted to ask about Heaven. This easy-to-read book is based on doctoral research, but written for the layman to present a Biblical picture of what life in eternity will be like. My hope is to bring new excitement and understanding to the average person in the pew, as well as to the Bible scholar. Perhaps it will even encourage those who do not believe everything in the Bible but do believe in a heaven. Yes, I believe the Bible tells us much about what Heaven will be like. Eden, the tabernacle, the promised land, the kingdom parables, the millennial kingdom, the church, all paint a picture of eternity. Many of the great themes and teachings of Scripture present, at the very least, a type or taste of what Heaven will be like. "Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things wich God hath prepared for the that love him. But God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit" (1 Cor 2:9,10). Life is short and full of troubles. The good things of this world are so temporary. They are but a taste of better, eternal things to come. Only those things which last forever are real and worthwhile. But how can you look forward to something you know little about? I hope this book will fill in some of those blanks for you, encourage you to read God's Word, and give you a taste of heaven.




Taste


Book Description

div What does eating have to do with aesthetic taste? While most accounts of aesthetic history avoid the gustatory aspects of taste, this book rewrites standard history to uncover the constitutive and dramatic tension between appetite and aesthetics at the heart of British literary tradition. From Milton through the Romantics, the metaphor of taste serves to mediate aesthetic judgment and consumerism, gusto and snobbery, gastronomes and gluttons, vampires and vegetarians, as well as the philosophy and physiology of food. The author advances a theory of taste based on Milton’s model of the human as consumer (and digester) of food, words, and other commodities—a consumer whose tasteful, subliminal self remains haunted by its own corporeality. Radically rereading Wordsworth’s feeding mind, Lamb’s gastronomical essays, Byron’s cannibals and other deviant diners, and Kantian nausea, Taste resituates Romanticism as a period that naturally saw the rise of the restaurant and the pleasures of the table as a cultural field for the practice of aesthetics. /DIV




As It Is in Heaven


Book Description

The loss of a real and heartfelt belief in God—and by “real” I mean an experience that is both steady and moving, ethereal though down-to-earth, sentimental but never trite—comes from an earlier more foundational loss, namely that of an ardent and directed desire for heaven, and more specifically, that paradisal longing for the resurrected life. This book seeks to recover the neglected nature of heaven, degraded into something “out-there” and unknown, degraded further into a vague wish for immortality and the often empty words of consolation. Or even worse, the almost comic book reduction of heaven to an earthly social(ist) paradise, the immanentization of the Christian eschaton. The vague “better place,” which is meant well, often means nothing at all, or worse than that can hamper us when approaching and engaging the mystery of grief. This book will address and interrogate various questions about the nature of the afterlife—on the status of guilt, forgiveness, friendship, love, embodiment, sexuality—and propose various paths to answers. We are talking about that sacred innermost promise: the hope of paradisal reunion most secret and yet most universal, never abstract and shapeless, but embodied and individual. We must wonder whether our casual forgetting of this estuary of human hope, the resurrected life, has caused us to lose ourselves in such a way that we do not even know what we have lost.




Wisdom's Children


Book Description

Provides an in-depth introduction to the Christian theosophic tradition that began with Jacob Bo¬hme, bringing us into a startling new world of Christian experiential spirituality that is the Christian equivalent of Sufism and Kabbalism.




Shelley and the Revolution in Taste


Book Description

This book brings together the themes of diet, consumption, the body, and human relationships with the natural world, in a highly original study of Shelley. A campaigning vegetarian and proto-ecological thinker, Shelley may seem to us curiously modern, but Morton offers an illuminatingly broad context for Shelley's views in eighteenth-century social and political thought concerning the relationships between humanity and nature. The book is at once grounded in the revolutionary history of the period 1790-1820, and informed by current theoretical issues and anthropological and sociological approaches to literature. Morton provides challenging new readings of much-debated poems, plays, and novels by both Percy and Mary Shelley, as well as the first sustained interpretation of Shelley's prose on diet. With its stimulating literary-historical reassessment of questions about nature and culture, this study will provoke fresh discussion about Shelley, Romanticism, and modernity.




Taste


Book Description




To My Annie


Book Description