John Dominic Crossan explores the lost years of earliest Christianity, the years immediately following Jesus' execution. He establishes the contextual setting through a combination of literary, anthropological, historical and archaeological approaches. He challenges the assumptions about the role of Paul and the meaning of resurrection, and forges a new understanding of the birth of the Christian church. Here is a vivid account of early Christianity's interaction with the world around it, and of the new traditions and communities established as Jesus' companions continued their movement after his death.
Wrestling with doubt can be profoundly lonely, but Portland pastor Dominic Done offers a safe place to openly wrestle with your faith without being criticized or judged. Writing with humor and candor out of his own experiences, and incorporating Scripture, literature, and accounts of others who have doubted, Dominic Done argues that not only is questioning normal, it is often a path toward a rich and vibrant faith. Rather than viewing trust and doubt as incompatible, When Faith Fails provides readers with a way to wrestle and ask questions while growing ever closer to God. No subject is off-limits, and Dominic fearlessly and graciously addresses topics including: the experience of tragedy the difficult parts of the Bible the intersection of science and faith the times when God is silent By walking in the path that many others have trod, you can move through doubt into a deeper, fuller faith—a faith that doesn’t run from questions and the hard work of honest wrestling but instead embraces the mysteries of belief. "This book is for those of us who have experienced a gut check, or two, when it comes to some of the intersections between our lives and our faith. It’s for those of us who no longer want to add unnecessary explanations to our beliefs just because we can’t fully see what God is doing in our lives." —Bob Goff, New York Times bestselling author of Everybody, Always “This book is one of those books that I will be buying to give to multiple friends.” —Jefferson Bethke, New York Times bestselling author of Jesus > Religion “This book will help you surrender and trust the areas of your life that are meant to exude God-designed mystery, while also holding your hand as you search for substance and truth.” —Audrey Roloff, coauthor of A Love Letter Life, founder of Always More, and cofounder of Beating50Percent “Doubt is such a pertinent issue in this cultural moment. Dominic walks us through the issues of doubt with which we wrestle but he does so in pastoral practicality. One feels as though you are seated in his living room sipping coffee. Dominic is the type of soul who understands the questions of the heart. He never shames. He’s always transparent. He gives substantive hope.” —Emerson Eggerichs, PhD, New York Times bestselling author of Love & Respect
This fascinating book makes the results of a lifetime of scholarship readily available to nonspecialists who want to meet the historical Jesus. Eminent biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan collaborates with pastor Richard G. Watts to rediscover the life, the work, and the message of the Man from Galilee.
Two of today's most important and popular New Testament scholars, John Dominic Crossan and N. T. Wright, here air their very different understandings of the historical reality and theological meaning of Jesus' Resurrection. The book highlights points of agreement and disagreement between them and explores the many attendant issues.This book brings two leading lights in Jesus studies together for a long-overdue conversation with one another and with significant scholars from other disciplines.
In this revolutionary work, John Dominic Crossan reveals that the Passion and Resurrection Narratives in the four canonical Gospels are radical revisions of an earlier Gospel account. He argues boldly that the apocryphal Gospel of Peter, discovered in the grave of a Christian monk in Egypt circa 1886, contains the earliest version of the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. He describes how the authors of the four Gospels revised the early account of how their revision predominated as Roman authority grew. Lacking in the revision, he suggests, is the very heart of the earlier Passion: its depiction of Jesus' death as the consummation of Israel's pain and the resurrection as the vindication of Israel's faith.
The bestselling author and prominent New Testament scholar draws parallels between 1st–century Roman Empire and 21st–century United States, showing how the radical messages of Jesus and Paul can lead us to peace today Using the tools of expert biblical scholarship and a keen eye for current events, bestselling author John Dominic Crossan deftly presents the tensions exhibited in the Bible between political power and God’s justice. Through the revolutionary messages of Jesus and Paul, Crossan reveals what the Bible has to say about land and economy, violence and retribution, justice and peace, and ultimately, redemption. He examines the meaning of “kingdom of God” prophesized by Jesus, and the equality recommended to Paul by his churches, contrasting these messages of peace against the misinterpreted apocalyptic vision from the book of Revelations, that has been co-opted by modern right-wing theologians and televangelists to justify the United State’s military actions in the Middle East.
These Poems Need Homes- Who's Idea Was This Anyways Have you ever walked into a room and forgot why you came in? Have you ever made faces in the mirror, fielded a call from a telemarketer or played in a dirt hill? These Poems Need Homes- Who's Idea Was This Anyways? is a compilation of whimsical rhyming poems about life's little idiosyncrasies that everyone can relate to. Some of these poems will transport you back to happy childhood memories, while others will make you appreciate adulthood- all while leading you to a surprise ending. Originally published weekly in the daily newspaper, The Ravalli Republic, this collection of poems spans the first year of the popular poetry column "These Poems Need Homes". As a bonus, six new, previously unpublished poems are included in this entertaining collection. Easy to read and appreciate, These Poems Need Homes- Who's Idea Was This Aynways?, will have you grinning as you eagerly turn each page.
“Who could argue with the message the authors draw from the Bible’s Christmas stories? Light in the darkest time of the year, hope in a period of creeping despair—these are powerful and universal themes that can give everyone a stake in Christmas.” —USA Today In The First Christmas Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan—top Jesus scholars and authors of The Last Week—help us see the real Christmas story buried in the familiar Bible accounts. Basing their interpretations on the two nativity narratives in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, Borg and Crossan focus on the literal story—the inner truth rather than the historical facts—to offer a clear and uplifting message of hope and peace. With The First Christmas readers get a fresh, deep, and new understanding of the nativity story, enabling us to better appreciate the powerful message of the Gospels.
This work is a doctrinal examination of war termination strategy and conflict resolution as a dependent pair, requiring a plan to achieve both in unison in advance of a fight. The necessity of a plan for conflict resolution should be intuitively obvious for policymakers, yet a survey of recent conflicts, including Afghanistan and Iraq, shows that not to be the case. Beyond Guns and Steel: A War Termination Strategy provides a practical approach to establishing a plan for war termination and conflict resolution before the bullets fly. In explaining the difference between strategy and policy, Colonel Dominic J. Caraccilo clarifies the most important, and often the most constraining, element of a nation's power—its resources. He posits that termination strategy and conflict resolution are interdependent and need to be included in conflict plans from the outset. Caraccilo's book fills a void in current strategy for the development of long-term plans that bring conflicts to timely and acceptable conclusions, providing a methodology that allows interagency requirements and resources for war termination to be defined, allocated, and employed effectively.
Chicago has been called by many names. Nelson Algren declared it a “City on the Make.” Carl Sandburg dubbed it the “City of Big Shoulders.” Upton Sinclair christened it “The Jungle,” while New Yorkers, naturally, pronounced it “the Second City.” At last there is a book for all of us, whatever we choose to call Chicago. In this magisterial biography, historian Dominic Pacyga traces the storied past of his hometown, from the explorations of Joliet and Marquette in 1673 to the new wave of urban pioneers today. The city’s great industrialists, reformers, and politicians—and, indeed, the many not-so-great and downright notorious—animate this book, from Al Capone and Jane Addams to Mayor Richard J. Daley and President Barack Obama. But what distinguishes this book from the many others on the subject is its author’s uncommon ability to illuminate the lives of Chicago’s ordinary people. Raised on the city’s South Side and employed for a time in the stockyards, Pacyga gives voice to the city’s steelyard workers and kill floor operators, and maps the neighborhoods distinguished not by Louis Sullivan masterworks, but by bungalows and corner taverns. Filled with the city’s one-of-a-kind characters and all of its defining moments, Chicago: A Biography is as big and boisterous as its namesake—and as ambitious as the men and women who built it.
He comes as yet unknown into a hamlet of Lower Galilee. He is watched by the cold, hard eyes of peasants living long enough at a subsistence level to know exactly where the line is drawn between poverty and destitution. He looks like a beggar yet his eyes lack the proper cringe, his voice the proper whine, his walk the proper shuffle. He speaks about the rule of God and they listen as much from curiosity as anything else. They know all about rule and power, about kingdom and empire, but they know it in terms of tax and debt, malnutrition and sickness, agrarian oppression and demonic possession. What, they really want to know, can this kingdom of God do for a lame child, a blind parent, a demented soul screaming its tortured isolation among the graves that mark the edges of the village?" –– from "The Gospel of Jesus," overture to The Historical Jesus The Historical Jesus reveals the true Jesus––who he was, what he did, what he said. It opens with "The Gospel of Jesus," Crossan's studied determination of Jesus' actual words and actions stripped of any subsequent additions and placed in a capsule account of his life story. The Jesus who emerges is a savvy and courageous Jewish Mediterranean peasant, a radical social revolutionary, with a rhapsodic vision of economic, political, and religious egalitarianism and a social program for creating it. The conventional wisdom of critical historical scholarship has long held that too little is known about the historical Jesus to say definitively much more than that he lived and had a tremendous impact on his followers. "There were always historians who said it could not be done because of historical problems," writes Crossan. "There were always theologians who said it should not be done because of theological objections. And there were always scholars who said the former when they meant the latter.' With this ground–breaking work, John Dominic Crossan emphatically sweeps these notions aside. He demonstrates that Jesus is actually one of the best documented figures in ancient history; the challenge is the complexity of the sources. The vivid portrayal of Jesus that emerges from Crossan's unique methodology combines the complementary disciplines of social anthropology, Greco–Roman history, and the literary analysis of specific pronouncements, anecdotes, confessions and interpretations involving Jesus. All three levels cooperate equally and fully in an effective synthesis that provides the most definitive presentation of the historical Jesus yet attained.
This takedown of American gun culture argues that the nation’s founders did not intend the Second Amendment to guarantee an individual right to bear arms—and that this distortion of the record is an urgent threat to democracy. “At once eye-opening and enraging, One Nation Under Guns is that rare book that can help change the way we live in this country.”—Eddie S. Glaude Jr., bestselling author of Begin Again More than a hundred lives are lost to firearms every day in America. The cost is more than the numbers—it is the fear, the anxiety, the dread of public spaces that an armed society has created under the tortured rubric of freedom. But the norms of today are not the norms of American history or the values of its founders. They are the product of a gun culture that has imposed its vision on a sleeping nation. Historian Dominic Erdozain argues that we have wrongly ceded the big-picture argument on guns: As we parse legislation on background checks and automatic-weapons bans, we fail to ask what place guns should have in a functioning democracy. Taking readers on a brilliant historical journey, Erdozain shows how the founders feared the tyranny of individuals as much as the tyranny of kings—the idea that any person had a right to walk around armed was anathema to their notion of freedom and the peaceful republic they hoped to build. They wrote these ideas into the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, ideas that were subsequently affirmed by two centuries of jurisprudence. And yet the twin scourges of racism and nationalism would combine to create a darker American vision—a rogue and reckless freedom based on birth and blood. It was this freedom, not the liberty promised by the Constitution, that generated our modern gun culture, with its mystic conceptions of good guys and bad guys, innocence and guilt. By the time the U.S. Supreme Court reinvented the Second Amendment in 2008’s District of Columbia v. Heller, an opinion that Erdozain convincingly eviscerates, many Americans had already acceded to the fiction: the unfreedom of an armed society. To save our democracy, he argues, we must fight for the founders’ true idea of what it means to be free.
From his boyhood in Tipperary, Kildare, and Donegal to the pinnacle of biblical scholarship, John Dominic Crossan’s adventurous spirit has led him to seek out the truth no matter where it leads. In this delightful memoir, the former monk and controversial biblical scholar tells how his work as a pioneering historical Jesus expert has led him from the traditional Catholicism of his youth to a more complex, sophisticated faith. With characteristic wit and candor, he describes the joys and challenges of growing up in Ireland and reveals how his life experiences—from Ireland to America, Rome, and Israel, from monastery to university, from priesthood to marriage—have shaped his understanding of God, Jesus, the Church, and what it means to be a true Christian.
How can we study popular culture? What makes 'popular culture' popular? Is popular culture important? What influence does it have? An Introduction to Studying Popular Culture provides a clear and comprehensive answer to these questions. It presents a critical assessment of the major ways in which popular culture has been interpreted, and suggests how it may be more usefully studied. Dominic Strinati uses the examples of cinema and television to show how we can understand popular culture from sociological and historical perspectives.
Well-documented story of the Ecumenical Councils of the Catholic Church. The second part of this work analyzes Vatican II and its effect on our world today. The turbulent history of the Catholic Church will come alive as the centuries unfold before the reader. God's tender care for His children amid life's storms and tumultuous times is evident and unmistakable.
Author and history professor Dominic Candeloro presents an intriguing narrative record of the earliest beginning of the Italian communities in Chicago. The stories of Chicago's Italian communities are an important part of the rich and diverse mosaic of the city's history. As a rail center, an industrial center and America's fastest growing major city, Chicago offered opportunities for immigrants from all nations. Italians in Chicago explores the lives of 10 significant members of the Chicago Italian-American community going back to the 1850s. This book is a collaborative and cumulative effort, and gives glimpses and echoes of what occurred in the Italian-American past in Chicago. Including vintage images and tales of such individuals as Father Armando Pierini, Anthony Scariano, and Joe Bruno, and groups such as the Aragona Club and the Maria Santissima Lauretana Society, this collection uncovers the challenges and triumphs of these Italian immigrants.
An epic and hilarious quest which reads like The Princess Bride meets Monty Python. Features a feisty princess, a disaffected dwarf, a soft-hearted warrior, a wise wizard and the very reluctant hero, Blart, himself.
“Written in prose so clear that we absorb its images as if by mind meld, “The Last Painting” is gorgeous storytelling: wry, playful, and utterly alive, with an almost tactile awareness of the emotional contours of the human heart. Vividly detailed, acutely sensitive to stratifications of gender and class, it’s fiction that keeps you up at night — first because you’re barreling through the book, then because you’ve slowed your pace to a crawl, savoring the suspense.” —Boston Globe A New York Times Bestseller A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice A RARE SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY PAINTING LINKS THREE LIVES, ON THREE CONTINENTS, OVER THREE CENTURIES IN THE LAST PAINTING OF SARA DE VOS, AN EXHILARATING NEW NOVEL FROM DOMINIC SMITH. Amsterdam, 1631: Sara de Vos becomes the first woman to be admitted as a master painter to the city’s Guild of St. Luke. Though women do not paint landscapes (they are generally restricted to indoor subjects), a wintry outdoor scene haunts Sara: She cannot shake the image of a young girl from a nearby village, standing alone beside a silver birch at dusk, staring out at a group of skaters on the frozen river below. Defying the expectations of her time, she decides to paint it. New York City, 1957: The only known surviving work of Sara de Vos, At the Edge of a Wood, hangs in the bedroom of a wealthy Manhattan lawyer, Marty de Groot, a descendant of the original owner. It is a beautiful but comfortless landscape. The lawyer’s marriage is prominent but comfortless, too. When a struggling art history grad student, Ellie Shipley, agrees to forge the painting for a dubious art dealer, she finds herself entangled with its owner in ways no one could predict. Sydney, 2000: Now a celebrated art historian and curator, Ellie Shipley is mounting an exhibition in her field of specialization: female painters of the Dutch Golden Age. When it becomes apparent that both the original At the Edge of a Wood and her forgery are en route to her museum, the life she has carefully constructed threatens to unravel entirely and irrevocably.
The pharaoh Akhenaten, who ruled Egypt in the mid-fourteenth century BCE, has been the subject of more speculation than any other character in Egyptian history. This provocative new biography examines both the real Akhenaten and the myths that have been created around him. It scrutinises the history of the pharaoh and his reign, which has been continually written in Eurocentric terms inapplicable to ancient Egypt, and the archaeology of Akhenaten's capital city, Amarna. It goes on to explore the pharaoh's extraordinary cultural afterlife, and the way he has been invoked to validate everything from psychoanalysis to racial equality to Fascism.
What was the relationship between President Franklin D. Roosevelt, architect of America’s rise to global power, and the 1936–39 Spanish Civil War, which inspired passion and sacrifice, and shaped the road to world war? While many historians have portrayed the Spanish Civil War as one of Roosevelt’s most isolationist episodes, Dominic Tierney argues that it marked the president’s first attempt to challenge fascist aggression in Europe. Drawing on newly discovered archival documents, Tierney describes the evolution of Roosevelt’s thinking about the Spanish Civil War in relation to America’s broader geopolitical interests, as well as the fierce controversy in the United States over Spanish policy. Between 1936 and 1939, Roosevelt’s perceptions of the Spanish Civil War were transformed. Initially indifferent toward which side won, FDR became an increasingly committed supporter of the leftist government. He believed that German and Italian intervention in Spain was part of a broader program of fascist aggression, and he worried that the Spanish Civil War would inspire fascist revolutions in Latin America. In response, Roosevelt tried to send food to Spain as well as illegal covert aid to the Spanish government, and to mediate a compromise solution to the civil war. However unsuccessful these initiatives proved in the end, they represented an important stage in Roosevelt’s emerging strategy to aid democracy in Europe.
White males, 100 million strong, constitute approximately 35 percent of the U.S. population, a percentage that declines slightly each year. They matter very much to discussions of race, ethnicity, and gender in the US due to their numbers and the enormous influence they have wielded—and continue to wield. In this highly original and readable work, Dominic Pulera offers the broadest and most balanced treatment of the white male experience in America to date. He contends that virtually all white males are sharing the American dream with women and people of color, in response to the nation's changing demographics and the multicultural mindset that informs policies and attitudes in our nation. Some white males are sharing the dream voluntarily; others are doing so involuntarily. The author also explores the heterogeneity of white male America, taking into account such factors as age, ethnicity, ideology, social class, regional background, occupational status, and sexual orientation. This timely work relies on a broad range of sources, including extensive field research and hundreds of interviews along with the best primary and secondary sources available. It includes original historical treatments, discussion of contemporary dynamics, and comparative material that takes into account the experiences of peoples in other countries. In doing so, Pulera places white males in the context of America's ongoing transition from a predominantly white country to one where people of color are increasingly numerous and consequently becoming more visible. Dominic J. Pulera is an independent scholar who lectures and writes about issues related to race, ethnicity, and gender. In the wake of his first book, Visible Differences: Why Race Will Matter to Americans in the Twenty-First Century, he spoke at 13 universities on 4 continents and appeared on a one-hour segment of Book TV (C-Span). He has been a frequent guest on radio and television programs in Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C.
Note that this is the complete and final version of The Drug Users Bible. People are dying because of ignorance. They are dying because unremitting propaganda is denying them vital safety information. They are dying because legislators and the media are censoring the science, and are ruthlessly pushing an ideological agenda instead. They are dying because the first casualty of war is truth, and the war on drugs is no different. This book makes a significant contribution in confronting this harrowing and tragic narrative. Over a 12 year period the author of this book self-administered over 180 psychoactive substances; both chemicals and plants. For each he recorded the life-sensitive safety data, including the anticipated onset times, the common threshold doses, the routes of administration, and the expected duration of the experience. In addition, for every compound he also produced a trip report, detailing the qualitative experience itself. This delivered another invaluable insight, enabling, for example, an objective assessment of the extent of any loss of judgement and self-control. This is a substantial body of work, embracing a wealth of direct support material, including addiction/overdose advice, relative harm tables, and legal briefings. Its contents also extend to cover aspects such as drug tourism, psychedelic exploration and drug related culture. It is crammed with detailed reference data, and even includes its own drug dictionary. The Drug Users Bible is a unique and unprecedented volume of encyclopaedic research, embracing the full extent of the drugscape. Its objective is to provide, without fear or compromise, core and critical information to support the health, welfare and well-being of the 250 million people in the world who use drugs. The book itself is lavishly illustrated with hundreds of photographs, taken by the author himself. THE TEN COMMANDMENTS The first section comprises a comprehensive introduction to crucial drug concepts and practices. This, in itself, is indispensable prior-reading for anyone who chooses to use a psychoactive substance. It contains, for example, a detailed risk mitigation procedure: 'The 10 Commandments of Safer Drug Use'. This presents a generic set of easily understood steps to aid personal safety, inclusive of an illustrated explanation of how to identity test the substances themselves. THE PSYCHOACTIVE DRUGS The full gamut of psychoactive chemicals and botanicals is meticulously covered. Well known examples include heroin, cannabis, xanax, kratom, cocaine, DMT, methamphetamine, ketamine, LSD, ayahuasca, alcohol, and MDMA. Lesser known examples include 4-ho-met, calea, ephenidine, mad honey, mapacho, a-PHP, and yohimbe. The scope also extends well beyond the most common categories, of psychedelics, stimulants, depressants and dissociatives. Included, for example, are dream herbs and nootropics. The investigation of psychoactivity was unbounded and unfettered. THE WORLDSCAPE Drug use does not occur in a vacuum, so the final section considers the wider context, with in-depth examination of everything from travel to the horrors of the war on drugs. Facts, science and genuine statistics replace the myths, fabrications and propaganda of the prevailing social order, again with welfare and safety emphasized. EDUCATION SAVES LIVES Education underpins harm reduction, and is the primary driver throughout. Indeed, personal safety is the first and last message, and guides the entire narrative. This is a book for drug users and their families. It is a book which will help to avert tragedy. It is a book which will save lives.
Venice and its environment are perceived to be in peril due to rising sea levels, tourism, and modern development. Are these threats myths or reality? This book explores Venice's environmental risks based on interviews with Venetian environmental campaigners and draws on the mythology of the Venetian Republic. Campaigners' opinions about the mobile dams nearing completion to protect the city reveal that Venice now represents an environmentally-threatened retreat from modernity. This reputation has been established as sustainable development and climate change policies have risen to the top of political agendas in many cities and countries. The book investigates how environmentalism has been transformed from a theory underpinning counter-cultural movements to part of a dominant holistic culture in Western societies. Rather than constraining Venice in search of a mythical harmony with nature, this book offers a ten-point proposal to modernize the city while preserving its ancient heritage.
A dazzling account of the men (and occasional woman) who led the world’s empires, a book that probes the essence of leadership and power through the centuries and around the world. From the rise of Sargon of Akkad, who in the third millennium BCE ruled what is now Iraq and Syria, to the collapse of the great European empires in the twentieth century, the empire has been the dominant form of power in history. Dominic Lieven’s expansive book explores strengths and failings of the human beings who held those empires together (or let them crumble). He projects the power, terror, magnificence, and confidence of imperial monarchy, tracking what they had in common as well as what made some rise to glory and others fail spectacularly, and at what price each destiny was reached. Lieven’s characters—Constantine, Chinggis Khan, Trajan, Suleyman, Hadrian, Louis XIV, Maria Theresa, Peter the Great, Queen Victoria, and dozens more—come alive with color, energy, and detail: their upbringings, their loves, their crucial spouses, their dreadful children. They illustrate how politics and government are a gruelling business: a ruler needed stamina, mental and physical toughness, and self-confidence. He or she needed the sound judgement of problems and people which is partly innate but also the product of education and experience. A good brain was essential for setting priorities, weighing conflicting advice, and matching ends to needs. A diplomatically astute marriage was often even more essential. Emperors (and the rare empresses) could be sacred symbols, warrior kings, political leaders, chief executive officers of the government machine, heads of a family, and impresarios directing the many elements of "soft power" essential to any regime’s survival. What was it like to live and work in such an extraordinary role? What qualities did it take to perform this role successfully? Lieven traces the shifting balance among these elements across eras that encompass a staggering array of events from the rise of the world’s great religions to the scientific revolution, the expansion of European empires across oceans, the great twentieth century conflicts, and the triumph of nationalism over imperialism. The rule of the emperor may be over, but Lieven shows us how we live with its poltical and cultural legacies today.
Talking to patients is not always easy. Sometimes you have to deliver bad news or encourage them to change their behaviour such as quitting smoking or practicing safe sex. With this easy to use pocket-sized guide you can quickly access information on how to reach your patient with confidence whilst promoting a healthier lifestyle. The Nursing & Health Survival Guides have evolved - take a look at our our app for iPhone and iPad.
Forging a Special Operations Force: The U.S. Army Rangers details the origins and development, combat philosophy, and key engagements of America's elite fighting force. Structured topically, the book gives a chronological review of the history of the Ranger from the 17th century to the present day, with special attention paid to the establishment of the 1st Ranger Battalion in the post-Vietnam era—the origins of the elite fighting force that exists today. Authored by a lifetime soldier who served in combat with the 75th Ranger Regiment, this book is replete with information garnered from dozens of interviews with the individuals who created the initial Ranger Force. By integrating the words and firsthand accounts of these founding fathers, the work offers insights unavailable elsewhere. Additionally, the author delves into the unique psyche of the soldiers who volunteer for—and are accepted into the ranks of—the ‘Rangers’.
The Pythagorean idea that number is the key to understanding reality inspired Neoplatonist philosophers in the fourth and fifth centuries to develop theories in physics and metaphysics based on mathematical models. The theories produced by this revived interest in Pythagoreanism were to become influential in medieval and early modern philosophy, and this book makes use of some newly-discovered evidence to examine for the first time the development of those theories.
The death of Jesus is one of the most hotly debated questions in Christianity today. In his massive and highly publicized The Death of the Messiah, Raymond Brown -- while clearly rejecting anti-Semitism -- never questions the essential historicity of the passion stories. Yet it is these stories, in which the Jews decide Jesus' execution, that have fueled centuries of Christian anti-Semitism. Now, in his most controversial book, John Dominic Crossan shows that this traditional understanding of the Gospels as historical fact is not only wrong but dangerous. Drawing on the best of biblical, anthropological, sociological and historical research, he demonstrates definitively that it was the Roman government that tried and executed Jesus as a social agitator. Crossan also candidly addresses such key theological questions as "Did Jesus die for our sins?" and "Is our faith in vain if there was no bodily resurrection?" Ultimately, however, Crossan's radical reexamination shows that the belief that the Jews killed Jesus is an early Christian myth (directed against rival Jewish groups) that must be eradicated from authentic Christian faith.
This is the ideal introduction to the thought of the third-century AD writer Plotinus, one of the greatest of ancient philosophers, now enjoying a major revival of interest. Dominic O'Meara has tailored the book carefully to the requirements of students: he writes clearly and authoritatively, assumes no knowledge of Greek or expertise in ancient philosophy, stays close to the texts, and relates Plotinus's ideas to modern philosophical concerns.
To the naked eye, the most evident defining feature of the planets is their motion across the night sky. It was this motion that allowed ancient civilizations to single them out as different from fixed stars. “The Observer’s Guide to Planetary Motion” takes each planet and its moons (if it has them) in turn and describes how the geometry of the Solar System gives rise to its observed motions. Although the motions of the planets may be described as simple elliptical orbits around the Sun, we have to observe them from a particular vantage point: the Earth, which spins daily on its axis and circles around the Sun each year. The motions of the planets as observed relative to this spinning observatory take on more complicated patterns. Periodically, objects become prominent in the night sky for a few weeks or months, while at other times they pass too close to the Sun to be observed. “The Observer’s Guide to Planetary Motion” provides accurate tables of the best time for observing each planet, together with other notable events in their orbits, helping amateur astronomers plan when and what to observe. Uniquely each of the chapters includes extensive explanatory text, relating the events listed to the physical geometry of the Solar System. Along the way, many questions are answered: Why does Mars take over two years between apparitions (the times when it is visible from Earth) in the night sky, while Uranus and Neptune take almost exactly a year? Why do planets appear higher in the night sky when they’re visible in the winter months? Why do Saturn’s rings appear to open and close every 15 years? This book places seemingly disparate astronomical events into an understandable three-dimensional structure, enabling an appreciation that, for example, very good apparitions of Mars come around roughly every 15 years and that those in 2018 and 2035 will be nearly as good as that seen in 2003. Events are listed for the time period 2010-2030 and in the case of rarer events (such as eclipses and apparitions of Mars) even longer time periods are covered. A short closing chapter describes the seasonal appearance of deep sky objects, which follow an annual cycle as a result of Earth’s orbital motion around the Sun.
Given its brevity, Plato's Meno covers an astonishingly wide array of topics: politics, education, virtue, definition, philosophical method, mathematics, the nature and acquisition of knowledge and immortality. Its treatment of these, though profound, is tantalisingly short, leaving the reader with many unresolved questions. This book confronts the dialogue's many enigmas and attempts to solve them in a way that is both lucid and sympathetic to Plato's philosophy. Reading the dialogue as a whole, it explains how different arguments are related to one another and how the interplay between characters is connected to the philosophical content of the work. In a new departure, this book's exploration focuses primarily on the content and coherence of the dialogue in its own right and not merely in the context of other dialogues, making it required reading for all students of Plato, be they from the world of classics or philosophy.
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