Beacon Paperback

In the ninth century BCE, the peoples of four distinct regions of the civilized world created the religious and philosophical traditions that have continued to nourish humanity to the present day: Confucianism and Daoism in China, Hinduism and Buddhism in India, monotheism in Israel, and philosophical rationalism in Greece. Later generations further developed these initial insights, but we have never grown beyond them. Now, Karen Armstrong reveals how the sages of this pivotal "Axial Age" can speak clearly and helpfully to the violence and desperation that we experience in our own times. The Axial Age faiths began in recoil from the unprecedented violence of their time. There was a remarkable consensus in their call for an abandonment of selfishness and a spirituality of compassion. The traditions of the Axial Age were not about dogma--all insisted on the primacy of compassion even in the midst of suffering.--From publisher description.

When Kim, a hearing-impaired girl, begins going to a regular school after having been in a special one, she finds that she isn't as different as she had feared because everyone she meets has individual differences, too.

In this work, Buber expounds upon and defends the Zionist experiment - a federal system of communities on a co-operative basis. He looks to the anarchists Proudhon, Kropotkin and Gustav Landauer, but selects only that part of their doctrines appropriate to his case.

Almost fifty years ago Melville Herskovits set out to debunk the myth that black Americans have no cultural past. Originally published in 1941, his unprecedented study of black history and culture recovered a rich African heritage in religious and secular life, the language and arts of the Americas.

first edition

Defines the nature of writing, as well as the historical, political and personal forces responsbile for the formal changes in writing from the classical period to the present. Ranging far beyond the confines of most literary criticism, this is an incisive analysis of language and speech, tone and style.

Based on the Campbell lectures in Christian faith and morality at Michigan State University in 1967, sponsored by the Dept. of Higher Education of the National Council of Churches and the National Campus Ministry Association. Includes bibliographical references.

"Takes a journey through the glory days of New Zealand cricket, covering each of the initial fifty Test victories. An analysis of the game is preceded by a look at key events surrounding the match, and the inside story is revealed by one of the pivotal players involved."--Blurb.

"'...All investigations of detail over the last half century have proved divergent rather than convergent, and leave us with a portrait of Gnosticism in which the absence of a unifying character seems to be the salient feature' - Hans Jonas, Preface, 1958. No modern writer that I am aware of has brought life to Gnosticism as Jonas has. While in no way neglecting historical or theological issues, Jonas didn't get bogged down in them: he insisted on revealing the existential import of Gnosticism. Indeed, at the end of this book he explores the commonalities of ancient Gnosticism and Heidegger's existentialism. What does it mean to feel one is in a cosmos in which God is alien or absent? Jonas provides a broad sweep of the conditions at the time Gnosticism developed at the beginning of the Christian era. His writing is that of a scholar but not targetted only to scholars... He writes: '... Gnosticism is actually a product of synceticsm [so ] each of these theories can be supported from the sources and none of them is satisfactory alone; but neither is the combination of all of them [supportable] which would make Gnosticism out to mere a mere mosaic of these elements and so miss its autonomous essence.' Yet nearly fifty years later some scholars look for a single source for Gnosticism while many are unable to find a suitably bounded definition. Jonas would not cage Gnosticism. Instead he asserts 'The gnostic movement - such as we must call it - was a widespread phenomena in the critical centuries indicated, feeding like Christianity on the impulses of a widely prevalent human situation, and therefore erupting in many places, many forms, and many languages.' Jonas discusses many Gnostic texts and themes..." -- Amazon.com.

A collection of essays by critic Clement Greenberg on painting and sculpture of the late nineteenth / early twentieth century European art, and American art of the first half of the twentieth century.

The Street is a novel published in 1946 by African-American writer Ann Petry . Set in World War II era Harlem, it centers on the life of Lutie Johnson. Petry's novel is a commentary on the social injustices that confronted her character, Lutie Johnson, as a single black mother in this time period. Lutie is confronted by racism, sexism, and classism on a daily basis in her pursuit of the American dream for herself and her son, Bub. Lutie fully subscribes to the belief that if she follows the adages of Benjamin Franklin by working hard and saving wisely, she will be able to achieve the dream of being financially independent and move from the tenement in which she lives on 116th Street. Franklin is embodied in the text through the character Junto, named after Franklin's secret organization of the same name. It is Junto, through his secret manipulations to possess Lutie sexually, who ultimately leads Lutie to murder Junto's henchman, Boots. Junto represents Petry's deep disillusionment with the cultural myth of the American dream.

This new book by the stern censor of the human frailties of mediaeval Christianity is ostensibly less a new history of the papal Inquisition than an attempt to find in the Middle Ages a justification for a sweeping condemnation of that authoritarianism which threatens the ideal of individual liberty today. And yet, if it is not a new history of the Inquisition, neither is it a very successful final judgment of authoritarian intolerance, for the exact nature of present dangers to liberty is left undefined, except for a passing reference or so to Abyssinia and Spain and to the problem of individual responsibility and freedom in contemporary England; and the connection between mediaeval universalism in the Church and modern totalitarianism in the State is not at all clear. Nevertheless, it is a significant book, and it is necessary to consider it seriously from the point of view of the premise which is the real foundation of Coulton's attitude towards the human failure of mediaeval Christianity: Can the historian not condemn the mediaeval Inquisition as a violation of the eternal law of humanitarian and social justice, as a violation of the modern ideal of individual liberty, and as a violation even of the primitive (therefore eternal) Christian ideal of toleration. -- From (August 28, 2013).

"The English translation of my "Grundriss der Dogmengeschichte" has been made, in accordance with my expressed wish, by my former pupil and esteemed friend, Mr. Edwin Knox Mitchell. It is my pleasant duty to express to him my heartiest thanks. English and American theological literature, possess excellent works, but they are not rich in products within the realm of the History of Dogma. I may therefore perhaps hope that my "Grundriss" will supply a want. I shall be most happy, if I can with this book do my English and American friends and fellow-workers some service - a small return for the rich benefit which I have reaped from their labors. In reality, however, there no longer exists any distinction between German and English theological science. The exchange is now so brisk that scientific theologians of all evangelical lands form already one Concilium. Adolf Harnack. Wilmerdorf near Berlin, March 17th, 1892"--

Role of erotic figures of literature in contemporary ideas of love, analyzing Tristan, Don Juan, Hamlet, Lolita, Doctor Zhivago, etc.