This book tells the story of how a team of colleagues at Boston College took an unusual approach (working with a design consultancy) to renewing their core and in the process energized administrators, faculty, and students to view liberal arts education as an ongoing process of innovation. It aims to provide insight into what they did and why they did it and to provide a candid account of what has worked and what has not worked. Although all institutions are different, they believe their experiences can provide guidance to others who want to change their general education curriculum or who are being asked to teach core or general education courses in new ways. The book also includes short essays by a number of faculty colleagues who have been teaching in BC’s new innovative core courses, providing practical advice about the challenges of trying interdisciplinary teaching, team teaching, project-or problem-based learning, intentional reflection, and other new structures and pedagogies for the first time. It will also address some of the nuts and bolts issues they have encountered when trying to create structures to make curriculum change sustainable over time and to foster ongoing innovation.
Sheed & Ward, in partnership with the Commonweal Foundation and with funding from the Pew Charitable Trust, proudly presents the first of two volumes in a groundbreaking series called American Catholics in the Public Square. The result of a three-year study sponsored by Pew aimed at understanding the contributions to U.S. civic life of the Catholic, Jewish, mainline and evangelical Protestant, African-American, Latino, and Muslim communities in the United States, the two volumes in this series gather selected essays from the Commonweal Colloquia and the joint meetings organized by the Commonweal Foundation and The Faith and Reason Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington. Participants in the Commonweal colloquia and the joint meetings—leading Catholic scholars, journalists, lawyers, business and labor leaders, novelists and poets, church administrators and lobbyists, activists, policy makers and politicians—produced approximately forty-five essays presented at ten meetings that brought together over two hundred and fifty participants. The two volumes in the American Catholics in the Public Square Series address many of the most critical issues now facing the Catholic Church in the United States by drawing from the four goals of the colloquia-to identify, assess, and critique the distinctive elements in Catholicism's approach to civic life; to generate concrete analyses and recommendations for strengthening Catholic civic engagement; to encompass a broad spectrum of political and social views of Catholics to encourage dialogue between Catholic leaders, religious and secular media, and political thinkers; to reexamine the long-standing Catholic belief in the obligation to promote the common good and to clarify how Catholics may work better with those holding other religious or philosophical convictions toward revitalizing both the religious environment and civic participation in the American republic. This first volume, American Catholics and Civic Engagement: A Distinctive Voice, i
In this provocative book, the authors argue that the core religious value of forgiveness can play a real, strategic role in the arena of international conflict and diplomacy.
PBS's Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, which Bob Abernethy conceived and anchors, has been described as "the best spot on the television landscape to take in the broad view of the spiritual dimension of American life . . ." by the Christian Science Monitor. "Finally," wrote the San Francisco Chronicle, "something intelligent on TV about religion." Now, together with his coauthor William Bole, Abernethy has turned his attention to making a book that asks all the big questions—and elicits the most surprising answers from a who’s-who of today’s serious religious and spiritual thinkers from across the spectrum of faiths and denominations. In this thoughtful collection, extraordinary people give their personal and private accounts of their own spiritual struggle. Their insights on community, prayer, suffering, religious observance, the choice to live with or without a god, and the meanings that are gleaned from everyday life form an elegant meditation on the desire for something beyond what we can see and measure. More than fifty contributors, including Jimmy Carter, Francis Collins, The Dalai Lama, Robert Franklin, Irving Greenberg, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Harold Kushner, Anne Lamott, Madeleine L’Engle, Thomas Lynch, Martin Marty, Mark Noll, Rachel Remen, Marilynne Robinson, Barbara Brown Taylor, Studs Terkel, Thich Nhat Hanh, Phyllis Tickle, Desmond Tutu, Jean Vanier, and Marianne Williamson.
An important prerequisite for successful conservation is a good understanding of what we seek to conserve. Nowhere is this more the case than in the fight to protect plant biodiversity, which is threatened by human activity in many regions worldwide. This book is written in the belief that tools that enable more people to understand biodiversity can not only aid protection efforts but also contribute to rural livelihoods. Among the most important of those tools is the field guide. Plant Identification provides potential authors of field guides with practical advice about all aspects of producing user-friendly guides which help to identify plants for the purposes of conservation, sustainable use, participatory monitoring or greater appreciation of biodiversity. The book draws on both scientific and participatory processes, supported by the experience of contributors from across the tropics. It presents a core process for producing a field guide, setting out key steps, options and techniques available to the authors of a guide and, through illustration, helps authors choose methods and media appropriate to their context.
It’s summer 1968, and the world is reeling from war and assassinations, protests and riots. In a sunny British seaside town, a producer, a novelist, and an actress are enduring their own more private crises on the set of a disaster-plagued movie. All are leading secret lives—one is in the closet; another is an alcoholic; and the third is sleeping with her costar—and as the shoot zigs and zags, these layers of secrets become increasingly more untenable. Pressures build inexorably—and that’s before the FBI and CIA get involved. Someone is going to crack—or maybe they all will. By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, Trio is an enthralling novel that asks the vital questions: What makes life worth living? And what do you do if you find it isn’t?
The mode in which instruction has hitherto been conveyed, on the peculiar subjects of the present work, has chiefly been by small books, in question and answer, denominated catechisms. But such, however respectable in themselves, or however advantageous for children, are wholly insufficient for persons who are in search of extended knowledge, and desirous of furnishing their minds with useful information. On these subjects there has not hitherto been published any work in which they are collectively to be found; nor could a knowledge of them be obtained but by the consultation of many and expensive writings. That they are generally important to be known will not probably be denied. It has consequently been the object of the author to compress all the interesting information that could be obtained respecting them, within as narrow a compass, and at the same time to render this information as entertaining, and as devoid of technical words and phrases, as possible. The scheme of the work will, it is hoped, be found sufficiently simple. The passage in smaller characters at the head of each article, is in general so arranged as to reply to the questions, “What is?” “What are?” or “How do you know?” For instance: “What is flint?” The answer will be found thus: “Flint is a peculiarly hard and compact kind of stone, generally of smoke-grey colour, passing into greyish white, reddish, or brown. It is nearly thrice as heavy as water, and, when broken, will split in every direction, into pieces which have a smooth surface.” The author is aware that, in many instances, the definitions are defective: but this has, in general, arisen from a necessity of rendering them short, and at the same time of using such terms as would be likely to convey information to the minds of persons who have had no previous knowledge of the systems of natural history.
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.