Jim Palmer's critically acclaimed Divine Nobodies was only half the story - the deconstruction and shedding of a religious mentality that hindered his knowing God. In his next book, Jim takes the reader along into the wide open spaces of exploring and experiencing God beyond religion. Jim writes, "It is no secret that God can be lost beneath the waving banner of religion. Divine Nobodies is my story of how this happened to me. Sometimes you have to disentangle God from religion, even Christ from Christianity, to find the truth. With the help of some unsuspecting nobodies, I uncovered a new starting line with God. As I've put one foot in front of another, I've experienced God in ways that are deeply transforming." Each chapter revolves around a central question related to knowing God on fresh terms: Is God a belief system? Is the Bible a landing strip or launching pad? Can what we're feeling inside be God? Are we too religiously minded to be any earthly good? Brian McLaren wrote, "I am tempted to say that Jim Palmer could well be the next Don Miller, but what they have in common, along with an honest spirituality and extraordinary skill as storytellers, is a unique voice." The Library Reviews said of him, "Jim Palmer's casual, yet compelling writing style cuts through the religious rhetoric and gets to the real issues...readers will love this author! His sense of humor is alternately mixed with shocking sentences and poignant moments. Laced throughout is a refreshing honesty that ties his ideas together with a ribbon of reality...each turn of the page strips away a little more of the contrived mystery of Christianity until the simplicity and sincerity of it stands in realistic splendor." More and more people seek a deeper spirituality beyond status-quo religion. Others are left empty and weary from a shallow and narrow pop-Christianity. Palmer says that God's kingdom of love, peace, and freedom can be a present reality in any person's life. He proclaims that God is indeed in the process of birthing something deep and wide among unlikely people in unconventional ways, which is changing the world...one "nobody" at a time.

How does God call us? The answers are as different as we are. Sometimes God summons us through the Church and sometimes in spite of the Church. In the depths of loss and confusion God speaks to us, beckoning us to follow an unexplored path. While we are heading in one direction, God surprises us with an undeniable invitation to go another way. Wide Open Spaces includes essays by women who have experienced and responded to God's call in all of these ways. The ministers and Christian educators whose stories fill this book testify to God's grace in the midst of their lives as single people in family-centered contexts, as women whose callings also include parenthood and marriage, and as those who the Church refuses to fully accept. Discrimination, harassment and homophobia pierce the narratives in this book. Yet this is not a book about defeat.

This volume gathers nineteen of the most representative and defining essays from the journal ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment over the course of its first ten years. Following an introduction that traces the stages of ecocriticism's development, The ISLE Reader is organized into three sections, each of which reflects one of the general goals the journal has sought to accomplish. The section titled "Re-evaluations" provides new readings of familiar environmental writers and new environmental perspectives on authors or literary traditions not usually considered from a green perspective. The writings in "Reaching Out to Other Disciplines" promote cross-pollination among various disciplines and methodologies in the environmental arts and humanities. The writings in the final section, "New Theoretical and Practical Paradigms," are especially significant for the conceptual and methodological terrain they map. The ISLE Reader documents the state of research in ecocriticism and related interdisciplinary fields, provides a survey of the field, and points to new methodologies and possibilities for the future.

Love Westerns? Then smile, pardner! Pop culture expert Yardena Rand has interviewed over 1,000 Western fans who represent an audience 57 million strong in America alone. With hundreds of fans quoted, she takes a first-hand look at the enduring power of the myth of the American West, showing the diversity of the audience, why Westerns continue to have such pull, and top fan favorites.

First Published in 1992. This book is about space of a colony and how it was produced. It began as a study of the literature of the German colony of South-West Africa between the years 1884 and 1915. The author’s aim is to demonstrate the active role which literature had played in structuring the experience of the colony. If it could be shown that literature not only describes, but also helps to structure the forms of experience, then it would follow that it also plays an important role in structuring the experience of colonization, and hence the form of the colony itself. From the outset, therefore, the study was concerned with a number of issues centering around colonization, representation, experience, and social form, where spatiality is the concept which allows us to understand how these various aspects of colonialism interrelate.

Public Secrets, Public Spaces explores the possibility of symbolic public space in the context of Chinese cinema. Focusing especially on women, children, and the dispossessed, Stephanie H. Donald looks at the ways public space is constructed and occupied and how it interacts with Opublic secrets, O the unstated common-sense knowledges of everyday life, extraordinary to those who are not initiated into the routines of a particular cultural place and space. In traditional societies public secrets are organized through observable ritual; in modern societies they are embedded in the cultural discourse of the routine and the everyday. As we see in this perceptive book, film offers a rich medium for unearthing these secrets

Public spaces mirror the complexities of urban societies: as historic social bonds have weakened and cities have become collections of individuals public open spaces have also changed from being embedded in the social fabric of the city to being a part of more impersonal and fragmented urban environments. Can making public spaces help overcome this fragmentation, where accessible spaces are created through inclusive processes? This book offers some answers to this question through analysing the process of urban design and development in international case studies, in which the changing character, level of accessibility, and the tensions of making public spaces are explored. The book uses a coherent theoretical outlook to investigate a series of case studies, crossing the cultural divides to examine the similarities and differences of public space in different urban contexts, and its critical analysis of the process of development, management and use of public space, with all its tensions and conflicts. While each case study investigates the specificities of a particular city, the book outlines some general themes in global urban processes. It shows how public spaces are a key theme in urban design and development everywhere, how they are appreciated and used by the people of these cities, but also being contested by and under pressure from different stakeholders.

In both the UK and the US there is a sense of dissatisfaction and pessimism about the state of urban environments, particularly with the quality of everyday public spaces. Explanations for this have emphasized the poor quality of design that characterizes many new public spaces; spaces that are dominated by parking, roads infrastructure, introspective buildings, a lack of enclosure and a poor sense of place, and which in different ways for different groups are too often exclusionary. Yet many well designed public spaces have also experienced decline and neglect, as the services and activities upon which the continuing quality of those spaces have been subject to the same constraints and pressures for change as public services in general. These issues touch upon the daily management of public space, that is, the coordination of the many different activities that constantly define and redefine the characteristics and quality of public space. This book draws on three empirical projects to examine the questions of public space management on an international stage. They are set within a context of theoretical debates about public space, its history, contemporary patterns of use and changing nature in western society, and about the new management approaches that are increasingly being adopted.

This book documents an understudied phenomenon in Austronesian languages, namely the existence of recurrent submorphemic sound-meaning associations of the general form -CVC. It fills a critical gap in scholarship on these languages by bringing together a large body of data in one place, and by discussing some of the theoretical issues that arise in analyzing this data. Following an introduction which presents the topic, it includes a critical review of the relevant literature over the past century, and discussions of the following: 1. problems in finding the root (the "needle in the haystack" problem), 2. root ambiguity, 3. controls on chance as an interfering factor, 4. unrecognized morphology as a possible factor in duplicating evidence, 5. the shape/structure of the root, 6. referents of roots, 7. the origin of roots, 8. the problem of distinguishing false cognates produced by convergence in root-bearing morphemes from legitimate comparisons resulting from divergent descent, and 9. the problem of explaining how submorphemes are transmitted across generations of speakers independently of the morphemes that host them. The remainder of the book consists of a list of sources for the 197 languages from which data is drawn, followed by the roots with supporting evidence, a short appendix, and references.

In New York - wie auch in vielen anderen Großstädten - wächst die Zahl der öffentlichen Plätze, die Privatpersonen gehören und auch privat betrieben werden. Als Gegenleistung für die Schaffung dieser Plätze und Einrichtungen, erhalten die Erbauer von der Stadt Sonderkonzessionen (in der Regel für die Gebäudehöhe). Dieses Buch dokumentiert und beschreibt anhand von Fotos, Lageplänen und Karten über 300 öffentliche Plätze in New York, die in privater Hand sind. Zu den bekanntesten zählen u.a. das Trump Tower Atrium, die Sony Arkade und die Citicorp Mall. Jede Beschreibung enthält Informationen zu Größe, Fertigstellungsdatum, Architekten/Landschaftsarchitekten, Gebäudeeigentümer, Öffnungszeiten und Lage. Zu den Abbildungen gehört jeweils ein Foto sowie eine maßstabsgetreue Zeichnung, die verdeutlichen, wie sich der Bau in die angrenzende Gebäude-/Straßenlandschaft einpaßt. (y05/00)