Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture
Author: René Girard File Type: pdf Evolution and Conversion explores the main tenets of Rene Girards thought in a series of dialogues. Here, Girard reflects on the evolution of his thought and offers striking new insights on topics such as violence, religion, desire and literature. His long argument is a historical one in which the origin of culture and religion is reunited in the contemporary world by means of a reinterpretation of Christianity and an understanding of the intrinsically violent nature of human beings. He also offers provocative re-readings of Biblical and literary texts and responds to statements by Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins. Including an introduction by the authors, this is a revealing text by one of the most original thinkers of our time. **Review For those who want a lively, general introduction to the thought of this seminal religious thinker [Rene Girard], Evolution and Conversion is a book not to be missed. * Theology * Girard is now well known for his multidisciplinary writings on religion and violence ... This book develops and reassesses ideas set out thirty years ago. * Theological Book Review * About the Author Rene Girard (1923-) was Andrew B. Hammond Professor Emeritus of French Language, Literature, and Civilization at Stanford University, USA, from 1981 to his retirement in 1995. A historian, literary critic and philosopher, he is the author of over 30 books including Violence and the Sacred.
Author: Michael Lovenheim
File Type: pdf
While there are many great research articles, good books, and provocative policy analyses related to the economics of education, these materials are often written to influence the policy process and not necessarily for students with limited knowledge of the underlying policies and the economic framework. This textbook is intended to serve as a foundation for a broad-based course on the economics of education. Its goal is to provide an overview of economics of education research to lay out the evidence as clearly as possible, note agreements, disagreements, and unresolved points in literature, and to help students develop the tools necessary to draw their own conclusions. **
Author: Daniel Clément
File Type: pdf
The Bungling Host motif appears in countless indigenous cultures in North America and beyond. In this groundbreaking work Daniel Clement has gatherednearlyfour hundred North American variants of the story to examine how myths acquire meaning for their indigenous users and explores how seemingly absurd narratives can prove to be a rich source of meaning when understood within the appropriate context. In analyzing the Bungling Host tales, Clement considers not only material culture but also social, economic, and cultural life Native knowledge of the environment and the world of plants and animals. Clements analysis uncovers four operational modes in myth construction and clarifies the relationship between mythology and science. Ultimately he demonstrates how science may have developed out of an operational mode that already existed in the mythological mind. **
Author: Nina Mickwitz
File Type: pdf
Can comics be documentary, and can documentary take the form of, and thus be, comics? Examining comics as documentary, this book challenges the persistent assumption that ties documentary to recording technologies, and instead engages an understanding of the category in terms of narrative, performativity and witnessing. Through a cluster of early twenty-first century comics, NinaMickwitz argues that these comics share a documentary ambition to visually narrate and represent aspects and events of the real world. **
Author: Matt Losada
File Type: pdf
Investigates how Argentine cinema has represented rural spaces and urban margins from the 1910s to the present. The Projected Nation examines the representation of rural spaces and urban margins in Argentine cinema from the 1910s to the present. The literary and visual culture of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries formulated a spatial imaginaryoften articulated as an opposition between civilization and barbarism, or its inversioninto which the cinema intervened. As the twentieth century progressed, the new medium integrated these ideas with its own images in various ways. At times cinema limited itself to reproducing inherited representations that reassure the viewer that all is well in the nation, while at others it powerfully reformulated them by filming spaces and peoples previously excluded from the national culture and left behind in the nations modernizing process. Matt Losada accounts for historical events, technological factors, and the politics of film form and viewing in assessing a selection of works ranging from mass-marketed cinema to the political avant-garde, and from the canonical to the nearly unknown. Matt Losada is Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Kentucky. **
Author: Jody Lyneé Madeira
File Type: pdf
In Taking Baby Steps, Jody Lynee Madeira takes readers inside the infertility experience, from dealing with infertility-related emotions to forming treatment relationships with medical professionals and confronting difficult medical decisions. Based on hundreds of interviews, this book investigates how women, men, and medical professionals negotiate infertilitys rocky terrain to create life and build familiesa journey across personal, medical, legal, and ethical minefields that can test mental and physical health, friendships and marriages, spirituality, and financial security. **From the Inside Flap Jody Lynee Madeiras interviews capture the voices of fertility patients as they struggle with decisions about whether to keep trying after repeated failures, how many embryos to implant at a time, and whether to experiment with potentially risky procedures. This volume will provide guidance (and perhaps some solace) for those undergoing fertility treatment and their friends and relatives. It also adds new depth to our understanding of the concept of informed consent and of the human capacity for decision-making in the face of often heartbreaking challenges. June Carbone, Robina Chair in Law, Science, and Technology, University of Minnesota Taking Baby Stepsturns the experience of infertility inside out, portraying the rigors and uncertainties of fertility math from the perspective of those who use technology to have children and the doctors who treat them. Madeira challenges the stereotype of the desperate infertile woman, a contemporary offshoot of older notions of women as hysterical, and replaces it with a carefully considered, nuanced portrait of how emotions matter for the many difficult decisions fertility patients must make. This beautifully written, deeply researched book not only enhances our understanding of how infertility feels but also provides a much-needed corrective to our impoverished notions of informed consent. Rene Almeling, Associate Professor of Sociology, Yale University, and author ofSex Cells The Medical Market for Eggs and Sperm Taking Baby Steps is a wonderful accomplishment. Beautifully written, it takes the reader through the personal, social, and legal chronologies of conception through IVF. Madeira weaves together three areas of lawreproduction, emotion, and contractsto present a complex picture of the experience of infertility and its treatment. In this way, the book offers readers a respectful intimacy with its subjects alongside an insightful account of the role of law and of technology. While we often think of conception as a sexual collaboration between partners, Madeira introduces us to the notion of collaboration between patients and physicians. Her exploration of informed consent would enrich any torts or contracts class, though this is not a typical law school text. In reading womens accounts about IVF, I didnt just feel that I was hearing womens voices I felt like I knew the women themselves. Taking Baby Steps makes a massive contribution to the field of reproductive rights and practices. Carol Sanger,Professor of Law, Columbia University, and author ofAbout Abortion Terminating Pregnancy in Twenty-First-Century America About the Author JodyLynee Madeira is Professor of Law at the Maurer School of Law, Indiana UniversityBloomington, and the author of *Killing McVeigh The Death Penalty and the Myth of Closure. *