Paul J. Griffiths

"Most forms of private vice and public evil are kindled and sustained by lies. Acts of adultery and other personal betrayals, financial fraud, government corruption--even murder and genocide--generally require an additional moral defect: a willingness to lie. In [this book] ... Harris argues that we can radically simplify our lives and improve society by merely telling the truth in situations where others often lie"--Dust jacket flap.

"What social conditions and intellectual practices are necessary in order for religious cultures to flourish? Paul Griffiths finds the answer in "religious reading" - the kind of reading in which a religious believer allows his or her mind to be furnished and his or her heart instructed by a sacred text, understood in the light of an authoritative tradition. Memorization and recitation, lectio divina, legal and exegetical commentary, scholasticism, and a host of related practices fall under this rubric. Griffiths offers two case studies of religious reading, focusing on pedagogical practices and the use of literacy.". "In examining and analyzing these practices, Griffiths develops a picture of the intellectual and moral commitments involved in being a religious person. Griffiths favorably contrasts the practices and pedagogies of traditional religious cultures with those of our own fragmented and secularized culture and insists that religious reading should be preserved. He concludes with the controversial proposal that the modern university should make room for traditional scholastics."--BOOK JACKET.

"Christian thinkers have traditionally distinguished between good and bad forms of the appetite for knowledge, calling the good "studiousness" and the bad "curiosity." The former is aimed at joyful contemplation of what can be known as gift given; the latter seeks ownership and control of what can be known as property for the taking. Paul J. Griffiths's Intellectual Appetite offers an extended study of the difference between the two, with special attention to the question of ownership: What is it like to think of yourself as the owner of what you know, and how might it be different to think of what you know as a gift given you?" "How these questions are answered has a deep impact on a number of issues in contemporary educational and legal theory. Most fundamentally, there is the question of what it means to know something at all. On that, this book offers an account of knowledge in terms of intimacy: to know something (a mathematical formula, a past event, another human being, the lineaments of a galaxy) is to become intimate with it according to its kind." "There are also important and currently pressing ancillary questions; for example, that of what plagiarism is and how it should be addressed. Plagiarism is often understood in part as theft of intellectual property, and since it is essential to the argument of this book that seeking knowledge ought not to be understood as seeking ownership, the book offers a theological defense of plagiarism."--Jacket.

"In her first collection in five years, Anne Carson contemplates "decreation"--An activity described by Simone Weil as "undoing the creature in us" - an undoing of self. But how can we undo self without moving through self, to the very inside of its definition? Where else can we start?" "Anne Carson's Decreation starts with form - the undoing of form. Form is various here: opera libretto, screenplay, poem, oratorio, essay, shot list, rapture. The undoing is tender, but tenderness can change everything, or so the author appears to believe."--Jacket.