In this book, David M. Black asks questions such as 'why do we care?' and 'what gives our values power?' using ideas from psychoanalysis and its adjacent sciences such as neuroscience and evolutionary biology in order to do so. Why Things Matter explores how the comparatively new scientific discipline of consciousness studies requires us to recognize that subjectivity is as irreducible a feature of the world as matter and energy. Necessarily inter-disciplinary, this book draws on science, philosophy and the history of religion to argue that there can be influential values which are not based exclusively on biological need or capricious life-style choices. It suggests that many recent scientific critics of religion, including Freud, have failed to see clearly the issues at stake. This book will be key reading for psychoanalysts and psychotherapists as well as counsellors with an interest in the basis of religious feeling and in moral and aesthetic values. The book will also be of interest to scholars of psychoanalysis, philosophy and religion.

Andrew Sayer undertakes a fundamental critique of social science's difficulties in acknowledging that people's relation to the world is one of concern. As sentient beings, capable of flourishing and suffering, and particularly vulnerable to how others treat us, our view of the world is substantially evaluative. Yet modernist ways of thinking encourage the common but extraordinary belief that values are beyond reason, and merely subjective or matters of convention, with little or nothing to do with the kind of beings people are, the quality of their social relations, their material circumstances or well-being. The author shows how social theory and philosophy need to change to reflect the complexity of everyday ethical concerns and the importance people attach to dignity. He argues for a robustly critical social science that explains and evaluates social life from the standpoint of human flourishing.

What matters most to you? Money? Fame? Looks? Pleasure? Sports? Reading? Our lives are so often filled with things that aren't important in the overall scheme of things, that it is often difficult to discern what is vital and what is, well, trivial. Life is a gift from God; therefore, it is valuable and behooves every one of us to consider carefully how we will spend it and to what end. After over forty years of ministry, Rev. James Osborn has decided that there are some things that really matter and some things that don't. Osborn believes that once conceived and born into our world, every one of us is immortal. We will live forever in eternity, and we need to realize that most things in life won't matter in eternity. Dive into These Things Matter and discover the eternal importance of character, prayer, obedience, and many more. James Osborn is a retired pastor, but still serves as the senior adult Sunday school teacher at Liberty Baptist Church. He spent more than forty years as the pastor of various churches in Maryland as well as working For The Baptist Convention of Maryland/Delaware and MasterLife. James currently lives in Westminster, Maryland.

In the big picture of life, some things really matter and some things really don't matter. Try to keep everything in perspective and live for what matters in the end. It matters that you learn to let God be your best friend in the world. Other people may fail you, but He never will. It matters that you keep the Ten Commandments. God gave you these rules to follow because He loves you and wants you to have the best life possible. It matters that you learn to view yourself as God views you. He absolutely thinks the world of you and He made you the way that you are for a special reason. It matters that you learn to resist the lies of compromise. What have you gained if you've enjoyed everything the world has to offer, but have lost your soul in the process? If you've lost your soul you have lost all that there is to lose. It matters that you learn to fight the enemy! Live with your armor on. Be a warrior and not a wimp. Give it all you've got and do damage to the devil's camp. Bottom line, having God say Well done good and faithful servant is what matters in the end!

When Molly's birthday is the day before a science test, she and her friends find a way to celebrate and study at the same time! Act out this charming story as the children find a way to study and learn about science while doing fun activities like baking a cake and riding carnival rides. This colorful script teaches students that they can apply their studies to fun everyday activities. The six roles in this script are written at different reading levels, supporting differentiation and English language learner strategies. Teachers can easily implement these strategies by assigning specific roles to their students in a way that best accommodates readers of all levels. All students can participate in this activity, helping them gain confidence and feel successful while building fluency! An accompanying song and poem about the garden gives readers exciting additional opportunities to engage in the story and build fluency. Students will also practice other important skills like reading aloud, interacting cooperatively, and using expressive voices and gestures while performing this story together. All of the features in this colorful script make it the perfect tool for a diverse classroom of learners to practice repeated reading and fluency!

Are You Focused on What Matters Most? If you were asked to tell your life story, would it be one of a life well-lived? According to author Brett Atlas, as our lives evolve at an ever-increasing pace, we have become detached from the universal truths which define our existence. As a result, we risk prioritizing the immaterial while neglecting the essential.In Three Things Matter Most, Atlas explains that how we approach time, relationships, and money has the biggest impact on our lives. The way we balance these three precious resources makes the difference between a life filled with meaning and a life rife with disappointment. Drawing from centuries of wisdom, philosophy, and psychology, as well as from personal experience, Atlas offers an easy-to-follow road map to self-fulfillment and happiness. You're Here Only Once. Make It Count.

This reader's theater script builds fluency through oral reading. The creative script captures students' interest, so they will want to practice and perform. Included is a fluency lesson and approximate reading levels for the script roles.

While being rooted in the academic discourse, The Things That Really Matter comprehensively explores the most fundamental aspects of human life in an accessible, non-technical language, adding fresh perspectives and new arguments and considerations that are designed to stimulate further debate and, in some cases, a deliberate redirection of research interests in the respective areas. It features a series of conversations about the things in our life that we all, in one way or another, wrestle with if we are at all concerned about what kind of world we live in and what our role in it is: things like birth, age, and death, good and evil, the meaning of life, the nature of the self and the role the body plays for our identity, our gendered existence, love and faith, free will, beauty, and our experience of the sacred. Situating abstract ideas in concrete experience, The Things That Really Matter encourages the reader to participate in an open-ended dialogue involving a variety of thinkers with different backgrounds and orientations. Lively and accessible, it shows thinking as an open-ended process and a collaborative endeavour that benefits from talking to each other rather than against each other, featuring real conversations, where ideas are explored, tested, changed, and occasionally dropped. It is thinking in motion, personal yet universal.

Spanning three thousand years and five major cultures, the traditions of Eastern philosophy play a major role in any study of human thought today; to ignore the East is to miss the valuable insights of philosophers from the Persian, Indian, Chinese, Tibetan and Japanese traditions. In this book, every major stream of Eastern thought, whether idealistic or materialistic, is presented. The author reveals here the wisdom of the East, from Avicenna to Zoroaster, from Buddha to Gandhi. Entries cover not only the philosophers themselves but also the philosophical terms and concepts, the historical background, the doctrines, teachings and writings of the East. Whether we wish to consult the I Ching, to understand Zen koan, or to read from the Upanishads, this volume will be a valuable tool in our quest.

Though the wonders of ancient Roman culture continue to attract interest across the disciplines, it is difficult to find a lively, accessible collection of the full range of the era's literature in English. The Oxford Anthology of Roman Literature provides a general introduction to the literature of the Roman empire at its zenith, between the second century BC and the second century AD. Two features of this extraordinarily fertile period in literary achievement as evidenced by this anthology are immediately and repeatedly clear: how similar the Romans' view of the world was to our own and, perhaps even more obviously, how different it was. Most of the authors included in the anthology wrote in Latin, but as the anthology moves forward in time, relevant Greek texts that reflect the cultural diversity of Roman literary life are also included, something no other such anthology has done in the past. Roman literature was wonderfully creative and diverse, and the texts in this volume were chosen from a broad range of genres: drama, epic, philosophy, satire, lyric poetry, love poetry. By its very nature an anthology can abbreviate and thus obscure the most attractive features of even a masterpiece, so the two editors have not only selected texts that capture the essence of the respective authors, but also have included accompanying introductions and afterwords that will guide the reader in pursuing further reading. The presentations of the selections are enlivened with illustrations that locate the works within the contexts of the world in which they were written and enjoyed. The student and general reader will come away from this learned yet entertaining anthology with a fuller appreciation of the place occupied by literature in the Roman world.