Author: Mark Pizzato File Type: epub A new take on our bio-cultural evolution explores how the inner theatre of the brain and its animal-human stages are reflected in and shaped by the mirror of cinema. Creates a new model exploring the inner theater of human reality perceptions, fantasies, memories, and dreams in relation to art, ritual, everyday actions, and cultural events Employs neuroscience research, evolutionary theory, and various performance paradigms, drawing on what is known about the animal ancestry and neural circuitry of the human brain to probe the framework of our bio-cultural evolution Explains how the emotion pictures found in prehistoric caves represent turning points in human awareness Examines a wide range of beast-people films ranging from the 1931 Dracula to the Twilight series (20082012) and the 2014 Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, showing how viewers connect to the films and the potential positive and negative impacts they have **

Author: Wael B. Hallaq File Type: pdf Covering more than three centuries of legal history, this study presents an important account of how Islam developed its own law from ancient Near Eastern legal cultures, Arabian customary law and Quranic reform. The book explores the interplay between law and politics, demonstrating how the jurists and ruling elite led a symbiotic existence that paradoxically allowed Islamic law to become uniquely independent of the state.ReviewThe book is an essential contribution to the field. Highly recommended. Essential for collections on Islam and the history of law. --Choice...succinct, up-to-date, and stimulating account of the early history of Islamic law... --Joseph E. Lowry, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, University of Pennsylvania, International of Middle East StudiesBook DescriptionCovering more than three centuries of legal history,The Origins and Evolution of Islamic Law presents an important account of how Islam developed its own law while drawing on ancient near Eastern legal cultures, Arabian customary law and quranic reform. The book explores the interplay between law and politics, explaining how the jurists and the ruling elite led a symbiotic existence and mutual dependency that--seemingly paradoxically --allowed Islamic law and its application to be uniquely independent of the state. This book will appeal to students, lawyers and legal historians.

Author: Benjamin Bennett-Carpenter File Type: pdf How exactly does one explain Jesus? That is the central question of this book. But the task of explaining Jesus is complicated. For many nonbelievers, skeptics, or practitioners of non-Jesus-based religions or spiritualities, it can be very strange to refer to a particular man who lived in the first century CE as someone who is still living. Even for some believers, this idea can be a difficult thing to understandeven given the teachings of their faith. Thus, whether believer or nonbeliever or somewhere in-between, for the intellectually curious, there is need for an explanation. Explaining Jesus explores the possibilities of a secular, interdisciplinary, science-based explanation for the phenomenon of Jesus.**ReviewIf for an answer we should turn to Jesus, what is the question? How to understand the emotional and spiritual meaning of a personal relationship with Jesus? In his interesting and well-developed book, Explaining Jesus, Benjamin Bennett-Carpenter addresses this topic, drawing on theology and the humanities as well as on behavioral and natural sciences. For those who understand themselves as standing in an intimate relationship with Jesus, reading this book will be a challengingbut not necessarily negativeexercise in self-understanding. For those who dont see themselves, or Jesus, in that way, it is worth the effort to read it, to understand fellow humans in ways they might not have thought of before. (Willem B. Drees, Tilburg University) Explaining Jesus is a complex and sophisticated attempt by someone raised evangelical, but now a secular humanist, to explain the phenomenon that people experience Jesus as a living person. The authors response is neither reductive nor dismissive, and readers will learn much from following him on his remarkable intellectual journey. This is a book that speaks to Christians and non-Christians alike. (T.M. Luhrmann, Professor of Anthropology and Psychology, Stanford University, author of When God Talks Back) About the Author Benjamin Bennett-Carpenter serves as special lecturer in writing and rhetoric, liberal studies, and the Honors College at Oakland University and is the author of Death in Documentaries The Memento Mori Experience.

Author: Susan J. Wolfson File Type: pdf Reading is a weirdly phantasmic trade animating words to revive absent voices, rehearing the past, fantasizing a future. In Romantic Shades and Shadows, Susan J. Wolfson explores spectral language, formations, and sensations, defining an apparitional poetics in the finely grained textures of writing and their effects on present reading. Framed by an introductory chapter on writing and apparition and an afterword on haunted reading, the book includes chapters of sustained, revelatory close attention to the particular, often peculiar, literary imaginations of William Wordsworth, William Hazlitt, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, W. B. Yeats, and John Keats. Wolfson also explores the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (a self-confessed Ghost-Theorist), Mary Shelley, and other writers of the Long Romantic era, canonical as well as less familiar. All are encountered in freshly pointed ways on an arc of investigation that builds with generative force. Romantic Shades and Shadows is written with a lucidity, wit, and accessibility that will appeal to general readers, and with a critical sophistication and scholarly expertise that will engage advanced students, critics, and professional peers. **