Weinstein argues that Plato's 'fighting spirit' in the Republic plays an essential role in rational agency.

"A profoundly personal exploration of our soul'squest for the direct mystical experience of the Divine. It combines the ancient wisdom of the East, Kundalini and insights from Joseph Campbell and C. G. Jung to illumine your path to God.

A celebration of the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist who put Albany on the world’s literary map. Award-winning novelist William Kennedy is perhaps best known for his Albany Cycle, a series of novels that put Albany on the world’s literary map alongside James Joyce’s Dublin, Gabriel García Márquez’s Macondo, and William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County. Bootlegger of the Soul offers a fresh and authoritative overview of Kennedy’s long literary career and his astonishing trajectory from journalist to struggling novelist to Pulitzer Prize winner. Included here are reviews, interviews, and scholarly essays on Kennedy’s work, as well as essays, speeches, a play, and a short story by the author himself, together with more than fifty historical and personal photographs. Lively, readable, and brimming with the infectious wit and lyrical prose that animates Kennedy’s novels, Bootlegger of the Soul is a celebration of a writer still working hard at his craft at age ninety. “There are no dead sentences in [Kennedy’s] work. His language is vigorous, full of energy He’s just a pure writer.” — Saul Bellow “William Kennedy’s cycle of Albany novels may be one of the most exuberant literary feats of the past half-century.” — Colum McCann “Kennedy’s art is an eccentric triumph, a quirky, risk-taking imagination at play upon the solid paving stones, the breweries, the politicos, and pool sharks of an all-too-actual city.” — Thomas Flanagan

Inspired by a penchant for Neoplatonic philosophy, Soul's Flight takes the reader on a metaphysical journey through poetry that expresses a family's grief over their mother's death.

This book offers an original and detailed reading of Plato's Republic, one of the most influential philosophical works in the emergence of Western philosophy. The author discusses the Republic in terms of discursive events and political acts. Plato's act is placed in the context of a politico-discursive crisis in Athens at the end of the fifth and the beginning of the fourth century B.C that gave rise to the dialogue's primary question, that of justice. The originality of Dr. Ophir lies in the way he reconstructs the Republic's different spatial settings - utopian, mythical, dramatic and discursive - using them as the main thread of his interpretation. Against the background of Plato's critique of the organisation of civic-space in the Greek polis, the author relates the spatial settings in the Plato text to each other. This provides a basis for a re-examination of the relationship between philosophy and politics, which Plato's work advocates, and which it actually enacted.

Recent years have seen unprecedented attention to faith-based institutions as agents of social change, spurred in part by cuts in public funding for social services and accompanied by controversy about the separation of church and state. The debate over faith-based initiatives has highlighted a small but growing segment of churches committed to both saving souls and serving society. What distinguishes faith-based from secular activism? How do religious organizations express their religious identity in the context of social services? How do faith-based service providers interpret the connection between spiritual methodologies and socioeconomic outcomes? How does faith motivate and give meaning to social ministry? Drawing on case studies of fifteen Philadelphia-area Protestant churches with active outreach, Saving Souls, Serving Society seeks to answer these and other pressing questions surrounding the religious dynamics of social ministry. While church-based programs often look similar to secular ones in terms of goods or services rendered, they may show significant differences in terms of motivations, desired outcomes, and interpretations of meaning. Church-based programs also differ from one another in terms of how they relate evangelism to their social outreach agenda. Heidi Rolland Unruh and Ronald J. Sider explore how churches navigate the tension between their spiritual mission and the constraints on evangelism in the context of social services. The authors examine the potential contribution of religious dynamics to social outcomes as well as the relationship between mission orientations and social capital. Unruh and Sider introduce a new vocabulary for describing the religious components and spiritual meanings embedded in social action, and provide a typology of faith-based organizations and programs. Their analysis yields a framework for Protestant mission orientations that makes room for the diverse ways that churches interrelate spiritual witness and social compassion. Based on their observations, the authors offer a constructive approach to church-state partnerships and provide a far more objective understanding of faith-based social services than previously available.

This is a story of a world that was once ruled by Warlocks and Witches who presence is no longer felt. There were those who wanted to rule for the people and for all to prosper under their reign and then there were those who wanted to rule through power and fear. These were either the The Dark Masters or The Masters of Light. In time with help from the common folk the Masters of Light managed to defeat the Dark Masters and their Unholy armies. With the Masters of Light using their abilities and help from man they managed to destroy most of the Magical gemstones that The Dark Masters cherished so highly. They were then able to over power them and imprison them or worse put an end to them. One thousand years had passed since the Evil Dark Masters were walking the lands bringing with them death,chaos and destruction. Time had moved on and people had forgotten the truth of their own history. But what lay dead, hidden or imprisoned will one day return. It will return without knowing and without thought. Are there any now in the world willing to learn their past, live their present and shape what future lay ahead.

This book reads Jean-Jacques Rousseau with a view toward deepening our understanding of many political issues alive today, including the place of women in society, the viability of traditional family structures, the role of religion and religious freedom in nations that are becoming ever more secular, and the proper conduct of American constitutional government. Rousseau has been among the most influential modern philosophers, and among the most misunderstood. The first great philosophic critic of the Enlightenment, he sought to revive political philosophy as it was practiced by Plato, and to make it useful in the modern world. His understanding of politics rests on deep and often prescient reflections about the nature of the human soul and the relationship between our animal origins and the achievements of civilization. This book demonstrates that the implications Rousseau drew from those reflections continue to deserve serious attention.

After the battle of Antietam in 1862, Harriet Eaton traveled to Virginia from her home in Portland, Maine, to care for soldiers in the Army of the Potomac. Portland's Free Street Baptist Church, with liberal ties to abolition, established the Maine Camp Hospital Association and made the widowed Eaton its relief agent in the field. One of many Christians who believed that patriotic activism could redeem the nation, Eaton quickly learned that war was no respecter of religious principles.Doing the work of nurse and provisioner, Eaton tended wounded men and those with smallpox and diphtheria during two tours of duty. Eaton struggled with the disruptions of transience, scarcely sleeping in the same place twice, but found the politics of daily toil even more challenging. Conflict between Eaton and coworker Isabella Fogg erupted almost immediately over issues of propriety. Though Eaton praised some of the surgeons with whom she worked, she labeled others charlatans whose neglect had deadly implications for the rank and file. If she saw villainy, she also saw opportunities to convert soldiers and developed an intense spiritual connection with a private, which appears to have led to a postwar liaison.Published here for the first time, the uncensored nursing diary is a rarity among medical accounts of the war, showing Eaton to be an astute observer of human nature and not as straight-laced as we might have thought. This edition includes an extensive introduction by the editor, transcriptions of relevant letters and newspaper articles, and a comprehensive biographical dictionary of the people mentioned in the diary.