Books on the topic 'Love offering'

When this book's author discovered a virtually unexplored treasure trove of letters to Simone de Beauvoir from Beauvoir's international readers, it inspired the author to explore the intimate bond between the famed author and her reading public. This correspondence, at the heart of the book, immerses us in the tumultuous decades from the late 1940s to the 1970s — from the painful aftermath of World War II to the horror and shame of French colonial brutality in Algeria and through the dilemmas and exhilarations of the early gay liberation and feminist movements. The letters provide a glimpse into the power of reading and the power of readers to seduce their favorite authors. The relationship between Beauvoir and her audience proved especially long, intimate, and vexed. The book traces this relationship, from the publication of Beauvoir's acclaimed The Second Sex to the release of the last volume of her memoirs, offering an unfamiliar perspective on one of the most magnetic and polarizing philosophers of the twentieth century. Along the way, we meet many of the greatest writers of Beauvoir's generation — Hannah Arendt; Dominique Aury, author of The Story of O; François Mauriac, winner of the Nobel Prize and nemesis of Albert Camus; Betty Friedan; and, of course, Jean-Paul Sartre — bringing the electrically charged salon experience to life. The book lays bare the private lives and political emotions of the letter writers and of Beauvoir herself. Her readers did not simply pen fan letters but, as the book shows, engaged in a dialogue that revealed intellectual and literary life to be a joint and collaborative production.

Chapter 9 offers two concluding ‘provocations’: one on wretchedness without God, the other on wretchedness with God. The first brings Sartre into dialogue with Marilyn McCord Adams’s work ‘God because of Evil’, arguing that Sartre’s account lends credence to her view that optimism is not warranted if one takes a robust realist approach to evil. Read as a phenomenologist of fallenness, Sartre may serve the apologetic purpose of making options ‘live’, in William James’s language; or, to use the phrase of Stephen Mulhall, to ‘hold open the possibility of taking religious points of view seriously’. The second provocation—on the question of wretchedness with God—suggests that Sartre can be read ‘for edification’ to help us see our failures in love. The book concludes that reading Sartre in this light can help redress ‘damaging cultural amnesia’ about religious commitment, offering an account of sin that cultivates humility, love, and mercy.

In addition to offering a chapter-by-chapter outline of the book, this Introduction discusses the historical, textual, and philosophical reasons why scholarship on Kant’s theory of evil has tended to be, in comparison to scholarship on Kant’s ethics, less well-received and less frequently discussed. Special consideration is paid to two claims that have been subject to much criticism: Kant’s claim that evil is motivated by self-love, and Kant’s claim that there is an evil universally rooted throughout human nature. Finally, this Introduction comments on the growing interest in Kant’s theory of evil, and attributes this interest, in part, to Kant’s intriguing but opaque references to the idea that evil involves self-deception.

According to the “standard theory”, propositional attitudes are two-place relations holding between subjects and propositions. The present chapter considers the prospects of offering an analog for non-propositional attitudes. Many of the same types of motivations and advantages that have made the standard theory of propositional attitudes attractive apply to non-propositional attitudes as well. Of course, in the case of non-propositional attitudes, objects other than propositions are called for and the suggestion to be offered is that non-propositional attitudes are two-place relations holding between subjects and properties. At the end of the chapter, the view is defended against a seemingly obvious objection—namely that subjects don’t typically fear, like, love, and so on, properties.

This chapter focuses on Toni Morrison’s renditions of new Shulamites in Song of Solomon (1977) and Beloved (1987). The female characters of both novels highlight the power and bold eroticism of the Shulamite’s voice, calling for a different perception of gender relations and feminine sexuality. While offering new representations of femininity, Morrison is no less eager to fashion a new grand Song as a base for a redefinition of the African-American community. In Song of Solomon, the ancient biblical love poem merges with African folk songs and legends and in Beloved, the ghostly Beloved is both a tormented and tormenting Shulamite as well as the spirit of the many slaves whose sufferings she embodies. Special attention is given to Morrison’s response to African-American commentaries on the verse ‘I am black, but comely’ and to points of affinity between her exegesis and feminist biblical criticism in the 1970s and 1980s.

What does it mean to deeply love a home place that haunts us still? From Mark Twain to Grant Wood to Garrison Keillor, regionalists from the Gilded Age to the Digital Age have explored the American Gothic and the homegrown fatalism that flourish in many of the nation's most far-flung and forgotten places. This book introduces us to a cast of real-life Midwestern characters grappling with the Gothic in their own lives, from promising young professionals debating the perennial “Should I stay or should I go” dilemma, to recent émigrés and entrepreneurs seeking personal reinvention, to faithful boosters determined to keep their communities alive despite the odds. The book considers the many ways a region's abiding spirit shapes the ethos of a land and its people, offering portraits of others who, like the author, are determined to live out the unique promise and predicament of the Gothic.

Freud’s analogy of the city of Rome as the human psyche in Civilization and its Discontents and Kristeva’s reading of Ovid’s Narcissus as a response to Freudian narcissism in Tales of Love have been treated as separate aspects of the reception of ancient Rome in psychoanalysis. In New Maladies of the Soul, however, Kristeva makes a direct connection between the two, building on Freud’s doubts about the usefulness of his analogy and offering a corrective image of her own. Kristeva, this chapter argues, thus locates the movement from Freud’s Rome to her specular city in what she calls a “mini-revolution in psychic life” that can be understood through the changes to the figure of Narcissus from Ovid to Plotinus. Psychoanalysis, in being both addressed to and partly founded on an erroneous narcissism, offers a valuable model for classical reception studies through its self-critical approach to narcissism’s ambivalent pleasures and dangers.

The Bride with White Hair (Ronny Yu, 1993) tells the tale of a heroic swordsman’s ill-fated love affair with a woman transformed by hatred into a white-haired killer, elevated the figure of the frosty-follicled executioner into one of the most enduring icons of the Hong Kong horror film. The timelessness and mysticism of the story lends itself to a highly hybridized type of horror, offering wuxia (swordplay), magical fantasy, romance and erotic scintillation alongside bloody fights, savage violence, and a monstrous depiction of malevolent conjoined twins. This chapter examines this film as emblematic of a particular cultural moment in the development of the Hong Kong fantasy-horror, appealing to a global fanbase for its supposedly transgressive and erotic content, and analyses the film in terms of its generic hybridity, its depictions of disability and morality, as well as in the context of the international marketing and reception of cult Hong Kong horror of the 1990s.

This work establishes and explores connections between Greek imperial literature and Latin poetry. As such, it challenges conventional thinking about literary and cultural interaction of the period, which assumes that imperial Greeks are not much interested in Roman cultural products (especially literature). Instead, it argues that Latin poetry is a crucially important frame of reference for Greek imperial literature. This has significant ramifications, bearing on the question of bilingual allusion and intertextuality, as well as on that of cultural interaction during the imperial period more generally. The argument mobilizes the Greek novels—a literary form that flourished under the Roman Empire, offering narratives of love, separation, and eventual reunion in and around the Mediterranean basin—as a series of case studies. Three of these novels in particular—Chariton’s Chaereas and Callirhoe, Achilles Tatius’ Clitophon and Leucippe, and Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe—are analysed for the extent to which they allude to Latin poetry, and for the effects (literary and ideological) of such allusion. After an Introduction that establishes the cultural context and parameters of the study, each chapter pursues the strategies of an individual novelist in connection with Latin poetry: Chariton and Latin love elegy (Chapter 1); Chariton and Ovidian epistles and exilic poetry (Chapter 2); Chariton and Vergil’s Aeneid (Chapter 3); Achilles Tatius and Latin love elegy (Chapter 4); Achilles Tatius and Vergil’s Aeneid (Chapter 5); Achilles Tatius and the theme of bodily destruction in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Lucan’s Bellum Civile, and Seneca’s Phaedra (Chapter 6); Longus and Vergil’s Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid (Chapter 7). The work offers the first book-length study of the role of Latin literature in Greek literary culture under the empire and thus provides fresh perspectives and new approaches to the literature and culture of this period.

This book examines Walter Pater’s deep engagement with Platonism throughout his career, as a teacher of Plato in Oxford’s Literae Humaniores, from his earliest known essay, ‘Diaphaneitè’ (1864), to his final book, Plato and Platonism (1893), treating both his criticism and fiction, including his studies on myth. Pater is influenced by several of Plato’s dialogues, including Phaedrus, Symposium, Theaetetus, Cratylus, and The Republic, which inform his philosophy of aesthetics, history, myth, epistemology, ethics, language, and style. As a philosopher, critic, and artist, Plato embodies what it means to be an author to Pater, who imitates his creative practice from vision to expression. Through the recognition of form in matter, Pater views education as a journey to refine one’s knowledge of beauty in order to transform oneself. Platonism is a point of contact with his contemporaries, including Matthew Arnold and Oscar Wilde, offering a means to take new measure of their literary relationships. The philosophy also provides boundaries for critical encounters with figures across history, including Wordsworth, Michelangelo and Pico della Mirandola in The Renaissance (1873), Marcus Aurelius and Apuleius in Marius the Epicurean (1885), and Montaigne and Giordano Bruno in Gaston de Latour (1896). In the manner Platonism holds that soul or mind is the essence of a person, Pater’s criticism seeks the mind of the author as an affinity, so that his writing enacts Platonic love.

What is to forgive someone? Is it primarily a change in one’s emotions, in one’s behavior, or something else? What is the connection between forgiveness and blaming attitudes like resentment? What is the relationship between forgiveness and free will? The chapters in this book explore not only these questions about the nature of forgiveness but also questions about the norms of forgiveness. Is forgiveness necessarily gift-like, and thus always discretionary? Is forgiveness ever prohibited or required? What is the relationship between forgiveness and apology? Does love require us to forgive? How does one maintain self-respect when one forgives? Is it morally permissible to forgive people for doing evil? And what would a utilitarian theory of the norms of forgiveness look like? This volume contains entirely new chapters on forgiveness by some of the world’s leading moral philosophers. Some contributors have been writing about forgiveness for decades. Others have taken the opportunity here to develop their thinking about forgiveness they broached in other work. For some contributors, this is their first time stepping into the forgiveness literature. While all the contributions address core questions about the nature and norms of forgiveness, they also collectively break new ground by raising entirely new questions, offering original proposals and arguments, and making connections to what have until now been treated as separate areas within philosophy.

This study uses the material transmission history of Dante’s innovative first book, the Vita nuova (New Life), to intervene in recent debates about literary history, reconceiving the relationship between the work and its reception, and investigating how different material manifestations and transformations in manuscripts, printed books, translations, and adaptations participate in the work. Just as Dante frames his collection of thirty-one poems surrounded by prose narrative and commentary as an attempt to understand his own experiences through the experimental form of the book, so later scribes, editors, and translators use different material forms to embody their own interpretations of it. Traveling from Boccaccio’s Florence to contemporary Hollywood with stops in Emerson’s Cambridge, Rossetti’s London, Nerval’s Paris, Mandelstam’s Russia, De Campos’s Brazil, and Pamuk’s Istanbul, this study builds on extensive archival research to show how Dante’s strange poetic forms continue to challenge readers. In contrast to a conventional reception history’s chronological march, each chapter analyzes how one of these distinctive features has been treated over time, offering new perspectives on topics such as Dante’s love of Beatrice, his relationship with Guido Cavalcanti, and his attraction to another woman, while highlighting Dante’s concern with the future, as he experiments with new ways to keep Beatrice alive for later readers. Deploying numerous illustrations to show the entanglement of the work’s poetic form and its material survival, Dante’s New Life of the Book offers a fresh reading of Dante’s innovations, demonstrating the value of this philological analysis of the work’s survival in the world.

Relatives are omnipresent in cancer care and commonly accompany cancer patients to physician consultations, increasing the complexity of the resultant communication. Relatives can provide important collaborative history, support, and advocate for their loved one, as well as have their own needs addressed. Relatives may also desire to protect their loved ones, and challenges arise if they invite the clinician to collude in keeping secrets. Optimally including relatives in a consultation is a complex task. Specific skills—for instance, asking permission, using circular questions and offering summaries—can enrich triadic communication. When breaking bad news, strategies for three-person consultations that have been used in communication skills training deliver benefits to both patients and their relatives. The successful accomplishment of three-person consultations is one hallmark of the mature clinician. It requires skill and time, but can certainly promote optimal patient care.

Advance care planning (ACP) is a process of formal decision-making that aims to help patients establish decisions about future care that take effect when they lose capacity. In our experience, guidance for clinicians rarely provides detailed practical advice on how it can be successfully carried out in a clinical setting. This may create a barrier to ACP discussions which might otherwise benefit patients, families and professionals. The focus of this paper is on sharing our experience of ACP as clinicians and offering practical tips on elements of ACP, such as triggers for conversations, communication skills, and highlighting the formal aspects that are potentially involved. We use case vignettes to better illustrate the application of ACP in clinical practice.

The Truth-Teller makes the case that Shakespeare repeatedly responds to sixteenth-century debates over the revolutionary potential of Cynic critical activity—debates that persist in later centuries and that inform major developments in Western intellectual history. To live one’s truth may have been a radical (and controversial) proposition for ancient Greek democracy, but Shakespeare reveals it to be an equally vexed task for drama, which aimed both to represent political truths and warn against the dangers of over-identifying with the figure of the lone truth teller. The book contends that aspiring critics from the sixteenth century to the present cathect onto the figure of the Cynic because they mistake literary character for viable political formula. Shakespeare, the book argues, works to diagnose this interpretive error through his Cynic characterizations of Lear’s Fool, Hamlet, and Timon of Athens. Offering new ways of thinking about early modernity’s engagement with classical models as well as literature’s engagement with politics, The Truth-Teller insists upon the necessity of literary thinking to political philosophy.

Dying at the Margins: Reflections on Justice and Healing for Inner-City Poor gives voice to a most vulnerable and disempowered population—the urban dying poor—and connects them to the voices of leaders in end-of-life care. Chapters written by these experts in the field discuss the issues that challenge patients and their loved ones, as well as offering insights into how to improve the quality of their lives. In an illuminating and timely follow-up to Dancing with Broken Bones, all discussions revolve around the actual experiences of the patients previously documented, encouraging a greater understanding about the needs of the dying poor, advocating for them, and developing best practices in caring. Demystifying stereotypes that surround poverty, Moller illuminates how faith, remarkable optimism, and an unassailable spirit provide strength and courage to those who live and die at the margins. As with his previous book, Dying at the Margins serves as a rallying call for not only end-of-life professionals, but compassionate individuals everywhere, to understand and respond to the needs of the especially vulnerable, yet inspiring, people who comprise the world of the inner-city dying poor.

Mistletoes are an enigmatic group of plants. Lacking roots and depending on other plants for their livelihood, they have inspired a range of beliefs throughout the world. Some people regard them as mystical plants endowed with magical properties, others as destructive weeds that devalue native habitats, and still others as beautiful native plants that support wildlife. This book represents the first thorough treatment of mistletoes in Australia. It summarises their evolutionary origin and global distribution, highlighting diversity patterns in Australasia, and describes the ecology and life history of mistletoes, detailing the variety of animals that depend on them for food and shelter. The book discusses the cultural significance of mistletoes, compares imported European beliefs with home-grown Indigenous lore and looks at the role of mistletoe in contemporary art, design and medicine. It also explores the management of mistletoes, noting those situations where mistletoe becomes too abundant and offering practical solutions to achieve a more balanced outcome. Finally, there is a guide to identifying mistletoes, including detailed species accounts for all 46 species found in southern Australia. With 51 specially commissioned watercolours by artist Robyn Hulley and more than 130 colour photographs, Mistletoes of Southern Australia is the definitive authority on these intriguing native plants.

TOWARDS THE NEW LIFE Theology and Importance of Christian Initiation for the Life of Faith The book is in equal parts a presentation and an invitation. The subject matter of both is the mystagogical initiation leading to the personal encounter with God and eventually to the union within the Church in Christ, which happens initially and particualry in the sacramental liturgy. Mystagogy was the essential experience of life in the early Church and now is being so intensely discussed and postulated by the ecclesial Magisterium and through the teaching of the recent popes and synods. Within the ten chapters of this book the reader proceeds through the aspects strictly associated with Christian initiation, noticeable in catechumenate and suggestive for further Christian life. It is not surprising then, that the study begins with answering the question about the sense of dealing with catechumenate at all. The response developed in the first chapter covers four key points: the contemporary state of our faith, the need for dialogue in evangelization, the importance of liturgy in the renewal of faith and the obvious requirement of follo- wing the Church’s Magisterium, quite explicit in the subject undertaken within this book. The introductory chapter is meant to evoke interest in catechumenate as such and encourage comprehension of its essence, in order to keep it in mind while planning contemporary evangelization. For doing this with success and avoiding pastoral archeology, we need a competent insight into the main message and goal of Christian initiation. Catechumenate is the first and most venerable model of formation and growth in faith and therefore worth knowing. The second chapter tries to cope with the reasons and ways of the present return to the sources of catechumenate with respect to Christian initiation understood to be the building of the relationship with God. The example of catechumenate helps us to discover, how to learn wisely from the history. This would definitely mean to keep the structure and liturgy of catechumenate as a vehicle of God’s message, which must be interpreted and adapted always anew and with careful and intelligent consideration of the historical flavour on particular stages within the history of salvation and cultural conditions of the recipients. For that reason we refer to the Biblical resources and to the historical examples of catechumenate including its flourishing and declining periods, after which we are slowly approaching the present reinterpretation of the catechumenal process enhanced by the official teaching of the Church. As the result of the latter, particularly owing to the Vatican Council II, we are now dealing with the renewed liturgy of baptism displayed in two liturgical books: The Rite of Baptism for Children and the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA). This version for adults is the subjectmatter of the whole chapter, in which a reader can find theological analyses of the particular rites as well as numerous indications for improving one’s life with Christ in the Church. You can find interesting associations among the rites of initiation themselves and astounding coherence between those rites and the sacraments of the Eucharist, penance and other sacraments, which simply means the ordinary life of faith. Deep and convincing theology of the process of initiation proves the inspiring spiritual power of the initial and constitutive sacraments of baptism and confirmation, which may seem attractive not only for catechumens but also for the faithful baptized in their infancy, and even more, since they might have not yet had a chance to see what a plausible treasure they have been conveying in their baptismal personality. How much challenge for further and constant realization in life may offer these introductory events of Christian initiation, yet not sufficiently appreciated by those who have already been baptized and confirmed! We all should submit to permanent re-evangelization according to this primary pattern, which always remains essential and fundamental. Very typical and very post-conciliar approach to Christian formation appears in the communal dimension, which guards and guarantees the ecclesial profile of initiation and prepares a person to be a living member of the Church. The sixth chapter of the book is dealing with ecclesial issues in liturgy. They refer to comprehending the word of God, especially in the context of liturgy, which brings about a peculiar theological sense to it and giving a special character to proclaiming the Gospel, which the Pope Francis calls “liturgical proclamation”. The ecclesial premises influence the responsibility for the fact of accompanying the candidates, who aim at becoming Christ’s disciples. As the Church is teaching also in the theological and pastoral introduction to the RCIA, this is the duty of all Christians, which means: priests, religious and the lay, because the Church is one organism in whose womb the new members are conceived and raised. As this fact is strongly claimed by the Church the method of initiation arises to great importance. The seventh chapter is dedicated to the analysis of the catechumenal method stemming from Christ’s pedagogy and His mystery of Incarnation introducing a very important issue of implementing the Divine into the human. The chapter concerning this method opens a more practical part of the book. The crucial message of it is to make mystagogy a natural and obvious method which is the way of building bonds with Christ in the community of the people who already have these bonds and who are eager to tighten them and are aware of the beauty and necessity of closeness with Christ. Christian initiation is the process of entering the Kingdom of God and meeting Christ up to the union with Him – not so much learning dogmas and moral requirements. This is a special time when candidates-catechumens-elected mature in love and in their attitude to Christ and people, which results in prayer and new way of life. As in the past catechumenate nowadays inspires the faithful in their imagination of love and mercy as well as reminds us about various important details of the paschal way of life, which constitute our baptismal vocation, but may be forgotten and now with the help of catechumenate can be recognized anew, while accompanying adults on their catechumenal way. The book is meant for those who are already involved in catechumenal process and are responsible for the rites and formation as well as for those who are interested in what the Church is offering to all who consciously decide to know and follow Christ. You can learn from this book, what is the nature and specificity of the method suggested by the Rite itself for guiding people to God the Saviour and to the community of His people. The aim of the study is to present the universal way of evangelization, which was suggested and revealed by God in His pedagogy, particularly through Jesus Christ and smoothly adopted by the early Church. This way, which can be called a method, is so complete, substantial and clear that it deserves rediscovery, description and promotion, which has already started in the Church’s teaching by making direct references to such categories as: initiation, catechumenate, liturgical formation, the rereading the Mystery of Christ, the living participation in the Mystery and faith nourished by the Mystery. The most engaging point with Christian initiation is the fact, that this seems to be the most effective way of reviving the parish, taking place on the solid and safe ground of liturgy with the most convincing and objective fact that is our baptism and our new identity born in baptismal regenerating bath. On the grounds of our personal relationship with God and our Christian vocation we can become active apostles of Christ. Evangelization begins with ourselves and in our hearts. Thinking about the Church’s mission, we should have in mind our personal mission within the Church and we should refer to it’s roots – first to our immersion into Christ’s death and resurrection and to the anointment with the Holy Spirit. In this Spirit we have all been sent to follow Christ wherever He goes, not necessarily where we would like to direct our steps, but He would. Let us cling to Him and follow Him! Together with the constantly transforming and growing Church! Towards the new life!