This Reader brings together a selection of key writings to explore the relationship between religion, media and cultures of everyday life. It provides an overview of the main debates and developments in this growing field, focusing on four major themes: Religion, spirituality and consumer culture Media and the transformation of religion The sacred senses: visual, material and audio culture Religion, and the ethics of media and culture. This collection is an invaluable resource for students, academics and researchers wanting a deeper understanding of religion and contemporary culture.

Childly Language explores how attitudes and cultural assumptions about children and childhood are revealed in contemporary English. It addresses such questions as: How is concern for children's safety and welfare reflected in the vocabulary and grammar of contemporary English? and When we say that an adult is being 'childish', what are we saying about the characteristics of children?

This book explores the paradoxes and unique characteristics of the World Economic Forum, highlighting contemporary issues and debates on global governance, economic development and corporate social responsibility. The Forum is one of the most influential, but least understood, global institutions. Its annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland and its regional summits held around the world attract a significant and powerful audience from the worlds of business, economics, politics and civil society. The participants, who include business and political leaders, representatives of international institutions and civil society organizations, academia and the media, meet to debate issues of global concern and to develop possible solutions. Forum members see the organization as an innovative venue bringing together different types of stakeholders to solve global problems. To its critics, however, the Forum’s public face conceals a private venue for making business deals. With clear and concise sections, including boxes containing key ideas and arguments, The World Economic Forum is a much needed introduction to an important and controversial organization and will be of considerable interest to students and practitioners of international business, international political economy, economics, development, international relations, and globalization.

International institutions, from the International Monetary Fund to the International Olympic Committee, are perceived as bastions of sclerotic mediocrity at best and outright corruption at worst, and this perception is generally not far off the mark. In the wake of the 2008 financial crash, Daniel W. Drezner, like so many others, looked at the smoking ruins of the global economy and wondered why global economic governance structure had failed so spectacularly, and what could be done to reform them in the future. But then a funny thing happened. As he surveyed their actions in the wake of the crash, he realized that the evidence pointed to the exact opposite conclusion: global economic governance had succeeded. In The System Worked, Drezner, a renowned political scientist and international relations expert, contends that despite the massive scale and reverberations of this latest crisis (larger, arguably, than those that precipitated the Great Depression), the global economy has bounced back remarkably well. Examining the major resuscitation efforts by the G-20 IMF, WTO, and other institutions, he shows that, thanks to the efforts of central bankers and other policymakers, the international response was sufficiently coordinated to prevent the crisis from becoming a full-fledged depression. Yet the narrative about the failure of multilateral economic institutions persists, both because the Great Recession affected powerful nations whose governments managed their own economies poorly, and because the most influential policy analysts who write the books and articles on the crisis hail from those nations. Nevertheless, Drezner argues, while it's true that the global economy is still fragile, these institutions survived the "stress test" of the financial crisis, and may have even become more resilient and valuable in the process. Bucking the conventional wisdom about the new "G-Zero World," Drezner rehabilitates the image of the much-maligned international institutions and demolishes some of the most dangerous myths about the financial crisis. The System Worked is a vital contribution to our understanding of an area where the stakes could not be higher.

Fictions of Fact and Value looks at logical positivism's major influence on the development of postwar American fiction, charting a literary and philosophical genealogy that has been absent from criticism on the American novel since 1945.

In an emergency, statesmen concentrate power and suspend citizens' rights. These emergency powers are ubiquitous in the crisis government of liberal democracies, but their nature and justification is poorly understood. Based on a pluralist conception of political ethics and political power, this book shows how we can avoid the dangers and confusions inherent in the norm/exception approach that dominates both historical and contemporary debate. The book shows how liberal values need never - indeed must never - be suspended, even in times of urgency. Only then can accountability remain a live possibility. But at the same time, emergency powers can sometimes be justified with reference to extra-liberal norms that also operate in times of normalcy. By emphasizing the continuity between times of normalcy and emergency, the book illuminates the norms of crisis government, broadening our understanding of liberal democratic government and of political ethics in the process.

The early modern period inherited a deeply-ingrained culture of Christian remembrance that proved a platform for creativity in a remarkable variety of forms. From the literature of church ritual to the construction of monuments; from portraiture to the arrangement of domestic interiors; from the development of textual rites to drama of the contemporary stage, the early modern world practiced 'arts of remembrance' at every turn. The turmoils of the Reformation and its aftermath transformed the habits of creating through remembrance. Ritually observed and radically reinvented, remembrance was a focal point of the early modern cultural imagination for an age when beliefs both crossed and divided communities of the faithful. The Arts of Remembrance in Early Modern England maps the new terrain of remembrance in the post-Reformation period, charting its negotiations with the material, the textual and the performative.

What is politics? What are the origins of political philosophy? What can we learn from the Greeks and Romans? In Greek and Roman Political Ideas, acclaimed classics scholar Melissa Lane introduces the reader to the foundations of Western political thought, from the Greeks, who invented democracy, to the Romans, who created a republic and then transformed it into an empire. Tracing the origins of political philosophy from Socrates to Cicero to Plutarch, Lane reminds us that the birth of politics was as much a story of individuals as ideas.

The world in which early Christianity developed consisted of a complex of distinct communities and cultural 'layers', which interacted with one another, sometimes co-operatively, and sometimes in confrontation. The Three Worlds of Paul of Tarsus explores this world through the life of the apostle Paul, examining the three fundamental cultural 'layers': * the native cultures * the common Hellenistic culture which had been spread in the east as a result of the conquests of Alexander * the culture of the political overlord, Rome. It shows how Paul, as a Jew, a Greek-speaker and a Roman citizen, participates in all of these 'layers'. The authors give an account of the places Paul visited, showing their historical, cultural and political differences and discuss the varied categories, such as religion, philosophy and language, which constituted identity.