Category: Sciences (Page 1 of 8)

Here is a selection of titles added to the collection in the past week

 After humanity: a guide to C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man /Michael Ward. After Humanity is a guide to one of Lewis’s most widely admired but least accessible works, The Abolition of Man, which originated as a series of lectures on ethics that he delivered during the Second World War.  In After Humanity, Michael Ward sheds much-needed light on this important but difficult work, explaining both its general academic context and the particular circumstances in Lewis’s life that helped give rise to it, including his front-line service in the trenches of the First World War. After Humanity contains a detailed commentary clarifying the many allusions and quotations scattered throughout Lewis’s argument. It shows how this resolutely philosophical thesis fits in with his other, more explicitly Christian works. It also includes a full-color photo gallery, displaying images of people, places, and documents that relate to The Abolition of Man.

 Animal sacrifice in the ancient Greek world /edited by Sarah Hitch, Corpus Christi College, Oxford, Ian Rutherford, University of Reading. /  This volume brings together studies on Greek animal sacrifice by foremost experts in Greek language, literature and material culture. The chapters range across the whole of antiquity and go beyond the Greek world to consider possible influences in Hittite Anatolia and Egypt, while an introduction to the burgeoning science of osteo-archaeology is provided. The twentieth-century emphasis on sacrifice as part of the Classical Greek polis system is challenged through consideration of various ancient perspectives on sacrifice as distinct from specific political or even Greek contexts. Many previously unexplored topics are covered, particularly the type of animals sacrificed and the spectrum of sacrificial ritual, from libations to lasting memorials of the ritual in art.

Biology, religion, and philosophy: an introduction /Michael Peterson, Dennis Venema. TWU AUTHOR In this book we develop a philosophical discussion of the major topics shaping this interdisciplinary field of inquiry, acquainting the reader along the way with the major voices and viewpoints that have contributed to its advance. Of course, the issues covered are located within the broader scholarship on the relationship of science and religion, which is both historical and philosophical, a relation that has been conceived in multiple ways, as we shall see. Furthermore, the biosciences are special in that they pertain to life – to the whole organic world – leading us early on to consider their relation to the sciences of the inorganic world.

 My mother she killed me, my father he ate me: forty new fairy tales /edited by Kate Bernheimer; with Carmen Giménez Smith; foreword by Gregory Maguire.  Here are new stories sewn from old skins, gathered by visionary editor Kate Bernheimer and inspired by everything from Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen” to Charles Perrault’s “Cinderella” to the Brothers Grimm ,  from China, Japan, Vietnam, Russia, Norway, and Mexico.  This collection of fairy tales  charts the imaginative frontiers of the twenty-first century as powerfully as they evoke our earliest encounters with literature. and restores their place in the literary canon.

 On poetry and philosophy: thinking metaphorically with Wordsworth and Kant /Brayton Polka. Polka’s book  is unique in bringing poetry and philosophy together in a single study. The poet and the philosopher whom he makes central to his project are both revolutionary founders of modernity, Both the poet and the philosopher, as the author makes clear in his study, found their principles, at once poetically metaphorical and philosophically critical, on the religious values that are central to the Bible–that all human beings are equal before God.

 Proverbs: a shorter commentary /Bruce K. Waltke and Ivan D.V. De Silva.  TWU AUTHOR  Waltke and  De Silva offer an abridged and revised version of the preeminent commentary, which is more accessible to students, pastors, and Bible readers in general. In place of a technical analysis of the Hebrew text, they interpret the translated text, while also including their own theological reflections and personal anecdotes where appropriate. A topical index is added to help expositors with a book that is difficult to preach or teach verse by verse.

 Rocket science for the rest of us: cutting-edge concepts made simple /written by Ben Gilliand ; consultant, Jack Challoner. Want to understand black holes, antimatter, physics, and space exploration or a common sense guide to quantum physics that you can actually understand? Rocket Science for the Rest of Us is the book you’re looking for! Get a grip on even the most mysterious and complex sciences with Gilliland’s guide to dark matter, exo-planets, Planck time, earth sciences, and more.

 Space! /senior editor, Ben Morgan ; contributors, Robert Dinwiddie [and 5 others]. The ultimate space encyclopedia for children is designed to blow your mind with incredible CGI images, from the deep darkness of black holes to the spectacular sparkle of supernovas. .

 Spirituality in nursing: standing on holy ground /Mary Elizabeth O’Brien. Addresses the relationship between spirituality and nursing practice across a variety of settings related to caring for the ill and infirm.

 The brain: the story of you /David Eagleman. The dramatic story of the brain’s role in creating our world, our experience of it, and ourselves. Eagleman compares the brain to a cityscape with different neighborhoods where neural networks vie for supremacy and determine our behavior in ways we are not always aware or in control of. At the same time, he suggests that the brain works as a storyteller–creating a narrative that allows us to navigate and make sense of a world that it is busy constructing for us.

 The dangerous class: the concept of the lumpenproletariat /Clyde W. Barrow. Barrow argues that recent discussions about the downward spiral of the American white working class have reactivated the concept of the lumpenproletariat,  even though it is a term so ill-defined as to not be theoretical. Using techniques from etymology, lexicology, and translation, Barrow brings analytical coherence to the concept of the lumpenproletariat, revealing it to be an inherent component of Marx and Engels’ analysis of the historical origins of capitalism. The Concept of the Lumpenproletariat is the first comprehensive analysis of the concept of lumpenproletariat in Marxist political theory. Barrow excavates and analyzes the use of this term from its introduction by Marx and Engels in 1846 through the central role of the relative surplus population in Post-Marxist political theory. He argues that, when organized by a strong man-whether a Bonaparte, a Mussolini, or a Trump-the lumpenproletariat gravitates toward a parasitic and violent lumpen-state created in its own image, and such a state primarily serves the interests of the equally parasitic finance aristocracy. Thus, Barrow updates historical discussions of the lumpenproletariat in the context of contemporary American politics and suggests that all post-industrial capitalist societies now confront the choice between communism or dystopia.

 The dark tower, and other stories /C.S. Lewis ; edited by Walter Hooper. A compilation of all of Lewis’s shorter fiction including several science fiction tales.

 The heart of a woman: the life and music of Florence B. Price // Rae Linda Brown ; edited and with a foreword by Guthrie P Ramsey, Jr. ; afterword by Carlene J. Brown. Price (1887-1953) was the first African American woman composer to achieve national recognition. Brown discusses Price in the context of the Harlem Renaissance and deals with issues of race, gender, and class. She draws on interviews with Price’s colleagues, on music manuscripts located in major repositories of African American material and in private collections, on contemporary black newspapers and journals, on census records, and on archival materials as well as the relevant published sources.

 The rural /edited by Myvillages. An investigation through texts, interviews, and documentation of the complex relationship between the urban, the rural, and contemporary cultural production. This anthology offers an urgent and diverse cross-section of rural art, thinking, and practice, with writings that consider ways in which artists respond to the socioeconomic divides between the rural and the urban-from reimagined farming practices and food systems to architecture, community projects, and transnational local networks. Edited by three artists who have been working within rural situations and communities for the last twenty years, this anthology is formed as a document, tool, and navigation device for future artistic practice in which “the rural” is filtered through a lens sharpened by an audience-based model of art that practices from within the culture it addresses.

 The studio /edited by Jens Hoffmann. This collection, expanding on current critical interest in issues of production and situation, looks at the evolution of studio-and “post-studio”-practice over the last half century. Among the topics surveyed here are the changing portrayal and experience of the artist’s role since 1960; the diversity of current studio and post-studio practice; the critical strategies of artists who have used the studio situation as the subject or point of origin for their work;  and the expanded field of production that arises from responding to new conditions in the world outside the studio.

 The sublime /edited by Simon Morley. This anthology examines how contemporary artists and theorists explore ideas of the sublime, in relation to the unpresentable, transcendence, terror, nature, technology, the uncanny, and altered states. Providing a philosophical and cultural context for discourse around the sublime in recent art, the book surveys the diverse and sometimes conflicting interpretations of the term as it has evolved from the writings of Longinus, Burke, and Kant to present-day writers and artists.

  The tradition /Jericho Brown. WINNER OF THE 2020 PULITZER PRIZE FOR POETRY. Brown’s daring new book details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. His poetic concerns are both broad and intimate, and at their very core a distillation of the incredibly human. Poems of fatherhood, legacy, blackness, queerness, worship, and trauma are propelled into stunning clarity by Brown’s mastery, and his invention of the duplex–a combination of the sonnet, the ghazal, and the blues–is testament to his formal skill. The Tradition is a cutting and necessary collection, relentless in its quest for survival while reveling in a celebration of contradiction.

 This is my body: a memoir of religious and romantic obsession /Cameron Dezen Hammon. In this memoir of faith and faltering, musician Cameron Dezen Hammon, a Jewish New Yorker, finds herself searching for love, meaning — a sign. She’s led to Coney Island, where during a lightning storm, she is baptized in the murky waters of the Atlantic by a group of ragtag converts. She follows her boyfriend and new God to Houston, Texas, the heart of American evangelical subculture. Her job at a suburban megachurch there has her performing on stage, awash in lights and smoke,  grappling with outdated gender expectations and ultimately her identity as both a believer and feminist. This Is My Body weaves her zealous conversion with the search for a more progressive and fluid theology. From speaking in tongues to street preaching, from biblically sanctioned discrimination to sexual assault, she invites readers inside this tender and harrowing journey. Part inspiring spiritual memoir, part incisive cultural critique, her story of finding and losing faith is ultimately one of rebuilding a truer, braver self.

 Willmoore Kendall contra mundum /Willmoore Kendall ; edited by Nellie D. Kendall. The author invites the reader to travel along with him as he investigates many of the political questions that have long confronted US society.  A posthumous collection originally published by 1971 by Arlington House, this reprinted edition includes for the first time Kendall’s provocative essay, “The ‘Open Society’ and its Fallacies.” The essays, speeches, and part of a projected book included in this work direct the reader’s attention to subjects that reflect the general theme running through all of Kendall’s political thought–the ways that majority rule can bring about government that is sound and just.