Three years, eleven countries, 1,200 families, 14,000 kilometers of adventures while walking in the footsteps of mankind through the Cradle of Life. Alexandre and Sonia Poussin undertake to walk the length of Africa entirely on foot, from the Cape of Good Hope to the Sea of Galilee. In a three-year trek along the Great Rift Valley of East Africa, their goal is to symbolically retrace the passage of early Man, from Australopithecus to Modern Man. Without sponsors, without support team, sharing the poverty of their hosts, they speak to us on each page of the generosity and enthusiasm of these men and women who populate the African continent. Day after day, Alexandre and Sonia become a bit more African themselves. In this volume, which recounts the first seven thousand kilometers up to Mount Kilimanjaro, we are privileged to share an intimate look into the heart of Africa and her people. The adventure continues in Africa Trek II.
Theologians, poets, artists, and laypeople alike have been fascinated by Saint Mary of Egypt's legend since it was first recorded in the seventh century. Mary's prominence is religious and symbolic, encompassing sin and sanctity, the excesses of nymphomania and asceticism, the charms of nubile youth and the wrinkles of old age. In Promiscuous Grace, scholar of religion Sonia Velázquez thinks with Saint Mary of Egypt about what beauty has to do with holiness. With an archive spanning medieval Spanish poetry, Baroque paintings, a seventeenth-century hagiographic drama, and Balzac's treatment of Saint Mary in Le chef-d'oeuvre inconnu, Velázquez argues for the relevance of the appeal to the senses and the importance of the surface in religious texts. She draws on insights from philosophy, literary history and theory, and religious, visual and gender studies, and pays close attention to the texture of the words and images that make the legend of Saint Mary of Egypt come alive and remain relevant today"--
By exploring the life and work of the influential feminist thinker Simone de Beauvoir, this book shows how each of us lives within political and social structures that we can--and must--play a part in transforming. It argues that Beauvoir’s careful examination of her own existence can also be understood as a dynamic method for political thinking. As the contributors illustrate, Beauvoir's political thinking proceeds from the bottom up, using examples from individual lives as the basis for understanding and transforming our collective existence. For example, she embraced her responsibility as a French citizen as making her complicit in the French war against Algeria. Here, she sees her role as an oppressor. In other contexts, she looks to the lives of individual women, including herself, to understand the dimensions of gender inequality. This volume’s six tightly connected essays home in on the individual’s relationship to community, and how one’s freedom interacts with the freedom of other people. Here, Beauvoir is read as neither a liberal nor a communitarian. The authors focus on her call for individuals to realize their freedom while remaining consistent with ethical obligations to the community. Beauvoir's account of her own life and the lives of others is interpreted as a method to understand individuals in relations to others, and as within structures of personal, material, and political oppression. Beauvoir's political thinking makes it clear that we cannot avoid political action. To do nothing in the face of oppression denies freedom to everyone, including oneself.
With her refreshing new book, [i]Ideas and Adventures 1200 to 1700[/i], covering five centuries of world history, Sonia (Sunny) Seherr-Thoss adds time traveler to her already extensively published world travel reportage. It is a fascinating narrative of world history, accessible to the general reader. Her book reads like a conversation with someone who has camped out in the thirteenth century, transported gold by camel caravan, and returned to relate her adventures. She leaves to others the chronicling of rulers and reigns, the carnage of battles, and the cataloging of maps and dates. Her vision of history is a retrospective on civilization, and an exploration of our multicultural heritage. Mrs. Seherr-Thoss notably includes in her history civilizations which are not typical Western Civ fare. The book takes a multi-disciplinary and multicultural approach to world history, in language which encourages cover-to-cover reading.
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