Cancer threatens the lives of people around the world. Women, in particular, are at risk of certain cancers with a genetic cause. Certain mutations in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes put mothers and daughters at risk of breast and ovarian cancers. Unlike many cancers that most commonly occur after age 60, these inheritable cancers threaten women’s lives, health and fertility even when they are young, before most would even begin to go for annual mammogram screenings to check for breast cancer. Three Daughters, Three Journeys takes on the biggest health issue of our time from a global perspective with three heroines fighting for their lives against cancer. Marzena, a Polish oncology nurse, has spent her life treating child patients with cancer. Then, she confronts it in her own family and her own body. Kamola, a rural Indian girl, knows she has symptoms of the same disease that took her mother, but feels afraid to discuss it with her father and brothers, knowing her family cannot afford medical treatment. Kamola confides in Dr Rini Mishra, a doctor testing a new treatment called Neelazin, using a bacterial anticancer protein in food, to destroy cancer cells. Selena, a wealthy woman of color in Chicago, finds out about her genetic risks of breast and ovarian cancer. She has a choice of preventative surgery that will save her life but remove any chance of having children. As she meets women who struggle to afford cancer treatment, Selena dedicates her life to providing affordable homes and counseling to families affected by the disease. Although the drug Neelazin is fictional, the possibility of new cancer treatments using bacterial anticancer proteins is being researched now. A problem with the current chemotherapy for cancer treatment is the high toxicity of most of these drugs, as these drugs can enter both normal and cancer cells, though preferably cancer cells, causing the death of normal cells as well that are important in maintaining health. Another problem is that current chemotherapeutic drugs mostly target a single or few key steps that are important for cancer growth and proliferation and inhibit the growth of cancer cells. The cancer cells respond by quickly changing these single targets, thereby becoming resistant to the drugs, as is reflected in stage IV cancer patients. An alternative to chemotherapy would be to exploit the bacterial evolutionary wisdom and use certain proteins that can have preferential entry to cancer cells in order to minimize normal cell toxicity and multiple targets in cancer cells through protein–protein complex formation, thus reducing resistance development in cancer cells. An interesting advantage of protein drugs is to express them as part of food, and some recent research seems to suggest that oral consumption of such foods may allow the therapeutic protein to reach the blood stream to target the cancer. Women with the genetic risk factors could soon have the choice of taking a pill or such anticancer protein-expressing food to treat or prevent cancer, rather than removing the healthy tissue of the breasts and ovaries. Hopefully, they would not have to choose between fertility and survival, as is the implied message in this book, fictional as it is at this time.
Ananda Abeysekara contends that democracy, along with its cherished secular norms, is founded on the idea of a promise deferred to the future. Rooted in democracy's messianic promise is the belief that religious political identity-such as Buddhist, Hindu, Sinhalese, Christian, Muslim, or Tamil can be critiqued, neutralized, improved, and changed, even while remaining inseparable from the genocide of the past. This facile belief, he argues, is precisely what distracts us from challenging the violence inherent in postcolonial political sovereignty. At the same time, we cannot simply dismiss the democratic concept, since it permeates so deeply through our modernist, capitalist, and humanist selves. In The Politics of Postsecular Religion, Abeysekara invites us to reconsider our ethical-political legacies, to look at them not as problems, but as aporias, in the Derridean sense-that is, as contradictions or impasses incapable of resolution. Disciplinary theorizing in religion and politics, he argues, is unable to identify the aporias of our postcolonial modernity. The aporetic legacies, which are like specters that cannot be wished away, demand a new kind of thinking. It is this thinking that Abeysekara calls mourning and un-inheriting. Un-inheriting is a way of meditating on history that both avoids the simple binary of remembering and forgetting and provides an original perspective on heritage, memory, and time. Abeysekara situates aporias in the settings and cultures of the United States, France, England, Sri Lanka, India, and Tibet. In presenting concrete examples of religion in public life, he questions the task of refashioning the aporetic premises of liberalism and secularism. Through close readings of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Arendt, Derrida, Butler, and Agamben, as well as Foucault, Asad, Chakrabarty, Balibar, and Zizek, he offers readers a way to think about the futures of postsecular politics that is both dynamic and creative.
Poised to spark debate among scholars of religious studies and other disciplines, Colors of the Robe sheds new light on the Sri Lankan Buddhist universe of ethics and politics and, more important, suggests innovative directions for the global study of religion, identity, culture, politics, and violence. In a volume that surpasses other studies in tracking, identifying, and locating Sri Lankan Buddhism in its sectarian, ethnic, cultural, social, and political constructions, Ananda Abeysekara lays down a challenge to postcolonial and postmodern theory. He argues that although criticisms have undermined the orientalist constructions of culture, they cannot help us understand, let alone theorize, the emergence of contemporary authoritative discourses that define distinctions involving religion and violence, identity and difference. Supplanting that aim, Abeysekara illuminates the shifting configurations that characterize the relations connected with postcolonial religious identity and culture."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
A great many theorists have argued that the defining feature of modernity is that people no longer believe in spirits, myths, or magic. Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm argues that as broad cultural history goes, this narrative is wrong, as attempts to suppress magic have failed more often than they have succeeded. Even the human sciences have been more enchanted than is commonly supposed. But that raises the question: How did a magical, spiritualist, mesmerized Europe ever convince itself that it was disenchanted? Josephson-Storm traces the history of the myth of disenchantment in the births of philosophy, anthropology, sociology, folklore, psychoanalysis, and religious studies. Ironically, the myth of mythless modernity formed at the very time that Britain, France, and Germany were in the midst of occult and spiritualist revivals. Indeed, Josephson-Storm argues, these disciplines’ founding figures were not only aware of, but profoundly enmeshed in, the occult milieu; and it was specifically in response to this burgeoning culture of spirits and magic that they produced notions of a disenchanted world. By providing a novel history of the human sciences and their connection to esotericism, The Myth of Disenchantment dispatches with most widely held accounts of modernity and its break from the premodern past.
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