So, completely hypothetically, how do you think you would react if you went skydiving with your father and he died tragically. Then six months later, after living with a complete, irrational phobia of heights for most of your junior year, you found out you could fly. And I mean, fly. Like a superhero. Not only that, but then you're kidnapped by the government and taken to the Academy, where you find others like you. All with powers directly tied to a traumatic event in their lives. Just ripped from everything you've ever known and being forced to utilize the very thing that serves as a reminder of the most horrific moment of your life. Then, while juggling that ball of fun, you fall into a whole conspiracy about your captors, their true identity, how you got your powers, and how to escape. How would you react? You don't know? Yeah, makes sense. That's what I would have said six months ago. But, and you'll find this surprising, that's exactly what happened to me.
In this and every age, the church desperately needs prophecy. It needs the bold proclamation of God’s transforming vision to challenge its very human tendency toward expediency and self-interest — to jolt it into new insight and energy. For Luke Timothy Johnson, the New Testament books Luke and Acts provide that much-needed jolt to conventional norms. To read Luke-Acts as a literary unit, he says, is to uncover a startling prophetic vision of Jesus and the church — and an ongoing call for today’s church to embody and proclaim God’s vision for the world.
Ambivalence towards kings, and other sovereign powers, is deep-seated in medieval culture: sovereigns might provide justice, but were always potential tyrants, who usurped power and 'stole' through taxation. Rebel Barons writes the history of this ambivalence, which was especially acute in England, France, and Italy in the twelfth to fifteenth centuries, when the modern ideology of sovereignty, arguing for monopolies on justice and the legitimate use of violence, was developed. Sovereign powers asserted themselves militarily and economically provoking complex phenomena of resistance by aristocrats. This volume argues that the chansons de geste, the key genre for disseminating models of violent noble opposition to sovereigns, offer a powerful way of understanding acts of resistance. Traditionally seen as France's epic literary monuments - the Chanson de Roland is often presented as foundational of French literature - chansons de geste in fact come from areas antagonistic to France, such as Burgundy, England, Flanders, Occitania, and Italy, where they were reworked repeatedly from the twelfth century to the fifteenth and recast into prose and chronicle forms. Rebel baron narratives were the principal vehicle for aristocratic concerns about tyranny, for models of violent opposition to sovereigns and for fantasies of escape from the Carolingian world via crusade and Oriental adventures. Rebel Barons reads this corpus across its full range of historical and geographical relevance, and through changes in form, as well as placing it in dialogue with medieval political theory, to bring out the contributions of literary texts to political debates. Revealing the widespread and long-lived importance of these anti-royalist works supporting regional aristocratic rights to feud and revolt, Rebel Barons reshapes our knowledge of reactions to changing political realities at a crux period in European history.
Mental illness is the default state of every human being on the planet. The truth is that we’re all crazy. If you don’t believe me, then try telling that to the voices in your head. We all know this is true. Every one of us lives out our lives with an entire collection of voices in our heads, and this is completely normal. Some voices are helpful, some are empowering, and some are even kind to others. But then there are the other voices. The tyrannical ones who torment and exploit us. The ones who tell us that we’re stupid, that nobody likes us, that we’re unworthy of love, and who constantly remind us that we’re on the verge of being exposed as the incompetent imposter that we truly are. Why do we do this to ourselves? Why, as a society, do we condemn bullying, yet accept the spiteful, belittling, critical bullies that live in our heads? Why won’t these voices go away, and who put them there in the first place? Whether we recognize it or not, we’re all innately predisposed to mental illness. This conversation will help us understand the biological, psychological, and cultural vulnerabilities that push us toward mental illness. It’s only once we understand these issues that we can learn how to take the actions necessary to enhance our mental health. It’s time to face our inner critics. It’s time to stop posturing and playing the character that we’re expected to be. It’s time to show up to the world as our true authentic selves. Together, we’ll learn how to embrace our inner crazy, how to make friends with the voices in our heads, and how to redefine the culture of mental health.
Thank you for visiting our website. Would you like to provide feedback on how we could improve your experience?
This site does not use any third party cookies with one exception — it uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic.Learn More.