This volume discusses the definitional problems and conceptual strategies involved in defining the human. By crossing the boundaries of disciplines and themes, it offers a transdisciplinary platform for exploring the new ideas of the human and adjusting to the dynamic in which we are plunged. The emerging cyborgs and transhumans call for an urgent reconsideration of humans as individuals and collectives. The identity of the human in the 21st century eludes definitions underpinned by simplifying and simplified dichotomies. Affecting all the spheres of life, the discoveries and achievements of recent decades have challenged the bipolar categorizations of human/nonhuman and human/machine, real/virtual and thus opened the door to transdisciplinary considerations. Ours is a new world where the boundaries of normality and abnormality, a legacy of the long history of philosophy, medicine, and science need dismantling. We are now on our way to re-examine, re-understand, and re-describe what normal-abnormal, human-nonhuman, and I-we-they mean. We find ourselves facing what resembles the liminal stage of a global ritual, a stage of being in-between—between the old anthropocentric order and a new position of blurred boundaries. The volume addresses philosophical, bioethical, sociological, and cognitive approaches developed to transcend the binaries of human-nonhuman, natural-artificial, individual-collective, and real-virtual.

This timely work addresses sensitive issues and relations between Muslims and Christians around the world. The book uniquely captures the opportunity for Christians and Muslims to come together and discuss pertinent issues such as pluralism, governance, preaching, Christian missionary efforts, and general misperceptions of Muslim and Christian communities. Joint authorship and discussion within the book is used to offer dialogue and responses between different contributors. This dialogue reveals that Christians and Muslims hold many things in common while having meaningful differences. It also shows the value of honestly sharing convictions while respecting and hearing the beliefs of another.

The birth of the social sciences and specifically of sociology begets some open questions, among which the debate on altruism and the concept of social solidarity. The term altruism was firstly used by Auguste Comte. It is one of the few terms born within the scientific field that will enter the common language roughly maintaining the same meaning. For the positivist Comte, altruism represented the powerful impulse to the intellectual and moral development of humanity to which we must strive as a future state. The term commonly means all those actions whose benefits fall on others and not on the agent (actor). In short, for Comte, altruism means "to live for others" (vivre pour autrui). The centrality of altruism as part of the reflections of social sciences can be found in many classic authors. Durkheim, for example, explains the foundations of social solidarity in modern society precisely through the opposition between altruism and egoism and defines its implications in the book Le Suicide in 1897, also identifying what will later become the main typology of suicide by contrasting altruistic suicide with egoistic suicide. Likewise, both Weber and Marx, while not using the term altruism as such, refer to it indirectly. The former, when describing the ethics of love for the charismatic authority as opposed to legal and rational authority, the latter, when corroborating his polemics against Christian charity. The interest in altruism as an object of study of social sciences, however, is progressively waning - especially in Europe. From the second half of the last century, theoretical and empirical studies show the indifference of social scientists towards this object, except for the Russian-American sociologist Sorokin, who in 1949 founded the Harvard Research Center in Creative Altruism. In recent years, however, the topic seems to take renewed vigor, especially in the United States with the birth in 2012 of the section "Altruism, Morality & Social Solidarity" within the American Sociological Association. It considered these three aspects as a single field of disciplinary specialization, since they are significantly dependent on socio-cultural reality. This is the situation in the United States. In Europe, there is a renewed interest in studies on altruism, especially in French-language sociology, above all starting from the numerous contributions to reading and re-reading work on Marcel Mauss's on gift of 1925, and in following the anti-utilitarian movement and studies of the school of social representations of Moscovici, which leads to the definition of the elementary forms of altruism. The book aims to analyze the concept of altruism starting from classical philosophy up to the systems of ideas of contemporaneity, considering the approaches and authors of reference in an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary way. The representations of altruism and egoism in contemporary society are constantly changing, following the transformations of society itself. Having abandoned the idea that the factors leading to altruism or egoism lay only in human nature, we find them in people’s conduct, freedom, relationships, their associative forms and society. The attention is thus turned to two elements of the daily life of individuals: culture and social relations. The book tries, therefore, through the meso-theories developed in recent decades, which study the relationships between life-world and social system, to describe the links between altruism, egoism, culture and social relations. We will pay particular attention to the relationality of individuals, in an attempt to overcome the dichotomy altruism/egoism by reading some aspects little considered by previous studies - or contemplated only indirectly or marginally. The ultimate goal is to highlight how positive actions are necessary for the contemporary society and how social sciences must go back and study positive socio-cultural actions and phenomena, not only negative, as a way to promote them for the well-being of the society.

A collection of twelve short stories - previously published in four separate books, mixed in with poetry - now assembled together in one anthology, as a part two to Beyond And Between The Veil. The answer to whether the rooster crows because the sun rises, or if the sun rises because the rooster crows? A bright-eyed alley cat interrupts a conversation between two old friends from high school. Two wood nymphs go off on a dare. A paranormal study of phenomena in the woods. A walk around the corner, for groceries, with detours. The story of the Devil's son, who moved out to make a life. A pow wow between forest giants. The explanation behind contrails in the sky. The flight of a messenger pigeon carrying a desperate message. The brief story of two strangers who enter a young couple's life in a blink. A behind the scenes look at how riverboat tour seasons come to a close. The answer to what you tell the man in the alley whom asks you for directions.

Based on a true story of one long-distance relationship, this honest and revealing book is an invitation to look at your love relationship through different eyesthe eyes that can see beyond the obvious and take you to the world you might not know otherwise. ... beeping signal of my cell. My heart started to pulse with excitementwhat is there this time? One thing is certain; this is an invitation again to recognize myself through the eyes of my lover. He knows where to look, what to touch, how to open the power of my soul. Sensual connection beyond physical pleasure, out of this dimension, the cosmic wrestle of our essences. Do you remember me? Remember? You asked for it. Im not your half. Im different, but Im youyour deepest soul desires. It is a loving dancequick, quick, slowan ecstatic mythical song of two souls. He penetrated into me. It hurts, it gives pleasure, and I melt finding comfort. I know Im in good hands; I can forget myself now and dissolve into eternity. We fly. We reach the peak of the apogee. Your surrender and your presence draw me deeper into the unknown realms where the body doesnt exist. You never fail to carry on with me. Im never alone, my mystical lover ...

2000 Years and Beyond brings together some of the most eminent thinkers of our time - specialists in philosophy, theology, anthropology and cultural theory. In a horizon-scanning work, they look backwards and forwards to explore what links us to the matrix of the Judaeo-Christian tradition from which Western cultural identity has evolved. Their plural reflections raise searching questions about how we move from past to future - and about who 'we' are. What do the catastrophes of the twentieth century signify for hopes of progress? Can post - Enlightment humanism and its notion of human nature survive without faith? If the 'numinous magic global capitalism' is our own giant shadow cast abroad, does that shadow offer hope enough of a communal future? Has the modern, secularized West now outgrown its originating faith matrix? Often controversial and sometimes visionary, these seven new essays ask: how do we tell - and rewrite - the story of the Common Era? Introduced by Paul Gifford, and discussed in a lively dialogic conclusion, they add their distinctive voices to a debate of profound and urgent topicality.

Reading Heikki Räisänen’s hermeneutics in context, Timo Eskola explores the development of Western New Testament interpretation. Reclaiming a Wredean approach to the Scriptures, Räisänen focuses on tradition and interpretation. He builds on Weberian sociology, adopted through Peter Berger’s theories, and substitutes sacralized culturalism for biblical theology. After examining fourteenth century Quran-criticism and its impact on Reimarus, Eskola discusses the genesis of the revised history-of-religion theory that Räisänen developed when investigating the Quran’s relationship to the Bible. Sociology then becomes a link between standard historicism and poststructuralism as Räisänen reinterprets Berger’s sociology of knowledge. Räisänen’s sacralized culturalism finally becomes the theory from which his magnum opus The Rise of Christian Beliefs has been written.

Rudolf Steiner declared in 1919: "The forces that have so far guided human progress will be exhausted by the middle of this century". Elsewhere he spoke of "an acute illness of civilization" or "a real blind alley that will end in catastrophe -- the beginning of the Earth's death". Today it is dear that we live in the midst of a tremendous spiritual battle for the future of civilization. Materialistic thinking and technology are leading toward destruction of the environment and a degeneration in the quality of human life. However, many individuals are working for a new spiritual understanding, and their work enables new forces to unfold. If these healthy forces are taken up in the right way, they can lead toward the respiritualization of mankind and the earth; yet if misused for egotistic ends, they can only lead into the depths of evil. The choice lies with each individual. Richard Seddon has gathered together many of the comments Steiner made regarding the end of the millennium, creating a rich mosaic of his indications on this subject.a