In a mixed-methods study of the barriers and facilitators to homeownership for African American women with physical disabilities, self-concept emerged among the primary themes. This article discusses how participants in the study perceived themselves and negotiated how they were perceived by others as multiply marginalized women. Using what I call a feminist intersectional disability framework, I suggest that participants’ relationships to care strongly contributed to their self-concept. The “Strong Black Woman” trope and associated expectations had cultural and material relevance for (...) how they interpreted themselves and were interpreted by others as receivers, managers, and providers of care. The material reality of owning or not owning a home did not reveal significant differences in the self-concepts of homeowners versus nonhomeowners. Rather, it was through conversations about homeownership that this data around self-concept in relationship to care was revealed. (shrink)

Rediscover the Promise of Enlightenment As Western culture has embraced practices like meditation and yoga, has something been lost in translation? “What we see in America today in both the yoga boom and mindfulness fad,” writes Dr. Miles Neale, “is a presentation of technique alone, sanitized and purged of the dynamic teachings in wisdom and ethics that are essential for true liberation.” For anyone seeking a path dedicated to both authentic personal growth and the overthrow of the nihilism, hedonism, (...) and materialism that are threatening our planet, this compelling teacher presents a well-conceived, sustainable solution with Gradual Awakening. The core of this book is Tibetan Buddhism’s “gradual path”—or Lam Rim—interpreted with fresh insights from modern scientific research. Offering an illuminating new presentation of Tibet’s deep psychology, meditative techniques, and virtuous rituals, Dr. Neale presents a time-honored path of enormous transformational potential. Each chapter serves as a practical manual that will allow you to experiment with and actualize the benefits of role-modeling visualization, affirmations, contemplative themes, textual recitation, prayers, altars, offerings, and meditation. Here you’ll explore: • Uprooting the “sickness of paradigm”—why a complete spiritual practice must directly confront the fundamental human suffering caused by the modern ethos of scientific reductionism • The Lam Rim path—the history, heritage, and power of this 30-step “hero’s journey” of awakening • Evolutionary self-care—understanding the Buddhist concept of renunciation as a form of self-love and healing • Radical altruism—awakening Bodhicitta, our innate aspiration to evolve fully in service to others • Quantum vision—how the teaching of “emptiness” allows us to pierce the illusion of materialism and accurately perceive the subtlest nature of reality • Dr. Neale’s MAPS process (Maturity, Acceptance, Possibility, and Seeds) to integrate and manifest key insights and skills in your everyday life The mass-market dilutions of Eastern wisdom that focus on symptom relief and easy answers have left behind the ultimate promise of spiritual practice: enlightenment. “Enlightenment is an unfolding process—open to everyone.” writes Dr. Neale. For most of us, this path to awakening must be realized through a gradual process: building on incremental insights into who we truly are, learning to care for ourselves and others, and discovering creative ways to engage the problems we all face. Gradual Awakening will serve as a lifelong companion for anyone willing to embrace a new paradigm that integrates science with spirit, theory with practice, and personal meditation with the desire to transform the world. A portion of the proceeds from this book will benefit the Buddhist nuns of Kopan Nunnery in Nepal. (shrink)

I develop and defend a maximizing theory of moral motivation: I claim that consequentialists should recommend only those desires, emotions, and dispositions that will make the outcome best. I advance a conservative account of the motives that are possible for us; I say that a motive is an alternative if and only if it is in our psychological control. The resulting theory is less demanding than its competitors. It also permits us to maintain many of the motivations that we value (...) most, including our love for those most important to us. I conclude that we are closer to meeting morality’s demands on our character than has been appreciated. (shrink)

Dementia progressively isolates sufferers from their loved ones, who continue to search for meanings in their actions and words. As the condition progresses, meaning becomes harder and harder to find. Yet the actions of the sufferer may contain patterns, hinting at meanings that tempt observers to interpret from their own standpoint. We report the patterns repeated by a sufferer from Alzheimer's disease, artistic arrangements that take time to make, and appeal to observers. To the sufferer, these arrangements seem to have (...) no value beyond the fact of their creation. We wonder how far we can go as observers in imposing interpretations on these patterns of activity, which seem beautiful and poignant to us, but are evanescent and unremarked by their creator. (shrink)

Igniting a long-overdue dialogue about how the legacy of racial injustice and white supremacy plays out in society at large and Buddhist communities in particular, this urgent call to action outlines a new dharma that takes into account the ways that racism and privilege prevent our collective awakening. The authors traveled around the country to spark an open conversation that brings together the Black prophetic tradition and the wisdom of the Dharma. Bridging the world of spirit and activism, they urge (...) a compassionate response to the systemic, state-sanctioned violence and oppression that has persisted against black people since the slave era. With national attention focused on the recent killings of unarmed black citizens and the response of the Black-centered liberation groups such as Black Lives Matter, Radical Dharma demonstrates how social transformation and personal, spiritual liberation must be articulated and inextricably linked. Rev. angel Kyodo williams, Lama Rod Owens, and Jasmine Syedullah represent a new voice in American Buddhism. Offering their own histories and experiences as illustrations of the types of challenges facing dharma practitioners and teachers who are different from those of the past five decades, they ask how teachings that transcend color, class, and caste are hindered by discrimination and the dynamics of power, shame, and ignorance. Their illuminating argument goes beyond a demand for the equality and inclusion of diverse populations to advancing a new dharma that deconstructs rather than amplifies systems of suffering and prepares us to weigh the shortcomings not only of our own minds but also of our communities. They forge a path toward reconciliation and self-liberation that rests on radical honesty, a common ground where we can drop our need for perfection and propriety and speak as souls. In a society where profit rules, people's value is determined by the color of their skin, and many voices--including queer voices--are silenced, Radical Dharma recasts the concepts of engaged spirituality, social transformation, inclusiveness, and healing. (shrink)

Why on earth should literary skills, or even a love of literature, make for a better doctor? Gribble (1992) has argued that encouraging literary critical skills sharpens those specific skills but has no benefits that flow into other cognitive areas. Nussbaum (1995), per contra, has claimed that literature does indeed allow imaginative participation in situations that are ethically challenging and therefore encourages the development of phronesis, or practical wisdom. Robin Downie (1994) taught an immensely popular course on medicine and (...) the arts in Glasgow. Osler (1948) listed the great works that every medical student should read. And so it goes, one authority after another telling us that education in the humanities makes for better ethics, communication, empathy, humanity, understanding, and so on in medical practitioners, while in the background is a small voice saying that such things as literary skills promote only literary skills.Behind the propaganda that underpins humane medic. (shrink)

Se analiza el papel del pathos como condición de emergencia tanto del logos como de la episteme, lo cual nos lleva reconocer que a la par de una concepción “intelectualista” de la teoría platónica del conocimiento, en la que es necesaria la supresión de todos los elementos irracionales que nublan el juicio, existe otra perspectiva, sobre todo sustentada en el Fedro, en la cual el pathos, expresado como manía amorosa, no es solamente una etapa a superar para acceder a la (...) intuición de las Formas, sino que ella misma se convierte en una experiencia cognitiva que devuelve al conocimiento su carácter humano.We analyze the role of pathos as emergency condition for both, logos and episteme, which leads us to recognize that along with an intellectual conception of the Platonic theory of knowledge, that demands to abolish all irrational elements that cloud the judgment, there is another perspective, especially supported by the Phaedrus, in which pathos, understood as love like madness, is not just a stage to overcome in order to arrive at the intuition of Forms, but it becomes itself a cognitive experience that gives back to knowledge its human nature. (shrink)

Undoubtedly, the film Hedwig and the Angry Inch establishes a dialogue with the thesis of love exposed by Diotima of Mantinea in Plato's Banquet, in the sense of understanding love as a solitary adventure and primarily individual expansion. However, more than transferring the ideas of the Greek philosopher, the film opens a discussion about its validity and topicality in specific situations such as identity, ideology and gender. This is why anagnorisis becomes anamnesis in the film; dialectics is an (...) agon, and identity, a becoming. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to detail some reservations against the beliefs, claims, or presuppositions that current essentialist natural kind concepts (including homeostatic property cluster kinds) model grouping practices in the life sciences accurately and generally. Such concepts fit reasoning into particular preconceived epistemic and semantic patterns. The ability of these patterns to fit scientific practice is often argued in support of homeostatic property cluster accounts, yet there are reasons to think that in the life sciences kind concepts exhibit (...) a diversity of grouping practices that are flattened out by conceptualizing them as natural kinds. Instead this article argues that the process of understanding grouping practices needs to start from a more neutral position independent of any ontological account. Following Love (Acta Biotheor 57:51–75, 2009) this paper suggests that typical natural kind concepts should be broached in the first place as grouping strategies that use a variety of semantic and epistemic tactics to apply group-bound information to tasks of explanation and understanding. (shrink)

This short work examines what the Hippocratic Oath said to Greek physicians 2400 years ago and reflects on its relevance to medical ethics today. Drawing on the writings of ancient physicians, Greek playwrights, and modern scholars, each chapter explores one passage of the Oath and concludes with a modern case discussion. This book is for anyone who loves medicine and is concerned about the ethics and history of the profession.

Public health strategies recommend isolating patients with SARS-CoV-2 infection. But compassionate care in the intensive care unit (ICU) is an ethical obligation of modern medicine that cannot be justified by the risk of infection or the lack of personal protective equipment. This article describes the experiences of clinicians in ICUs in the south of Spain promoted by the Andalusian Society of Intensive Care SAMIUC, in the hope it will serve to improve the conditions in which these patients die, and to (...) help their families who suffer when they cannot say good-bye to their loved ones.In the south of Spain, healthcare professionals use daily videoconferencing to improve communication between clinicians, patients, and their relatives who cannot visit them in the ICU. This close communication allows families to see their loved ones and extends communication between healthcare professionals, patients, and their relatives. To allow family members to accompany patients at the end of life, it is possible to adapt public health rules to the epidemic situation. (shrink)

This short work examines what the Hippocratic Oath said to Greek physicians 2400 years ago and reflects on its relevance to medical ethics today. Drawing on the writings of ancient physicians, Greek playwrights, and modern scholars, each chapter explores one passage of the Oath and concludes with a modern case discussion. This book is for anyone who loves medicine and is concerned about the ethics and history of the profession.

St. Augustine, pictured by Western painters holding in his hand his heart blazing with passionate love, consistently and repeatedly insisted―from his earliest writings until close to his death―that the essential characteristic of God is “God is love” (1 John 4:16). Yet he also insisted on the doctrines of original sin and everlasting punishment for the massa damnata. This article will not explore the rationale or semantics of his arguments, nor the detail and nuance of the doctrines of predestination (...) and perseverance. Rather, I seek to understand, from Augustine’s last writings, how he reconciled his strong conviction that God is love with doctrines requiring belief in a God who determined the fate of individuals to eternal reward or punishment “before the foundation of the world” (Eph. 1:4), a God indifferent to individuals’ actions, struggles, or longings. My primary interest is not on Augustine’s ability to render these two apparently opposing ideas of God intellectually compatible, but rather on his feeling, gathered from his last sermons, as he approached death. In brief, how could Augustine love the God in whom he believed? (shrink)

Postmodernity has brought new forms of social control which are exercised through new forms of communication. Paradoxically, however, postmodernity also seemed to be heading towards the exaltation of the individual in their absolute freedom. The 20 th century pushed, in the name of science and progress, the secularization of Western societies, often distancing people from their traditional community ties, including ties to the ecclesial community. Thus, the postmodern individual initially appeared free of ancestral community pressures. However, subtle new forms of (...) social control have replaced traditional ones. Mechanisms such as social media, new forms of work and sexual exploitation, or the impossibility of maintaining privacy in the face of the power of private and public corporations, thus expose the individual to the asocial elements. Frequently, these new social control mechanisms (a clear example being the leadership of the WHO in the policies implemented worldwide during the COVID-19 pandemic) are presented to us not as repressive, but scientifically and paternally protective. In this context, the vindication of religious freedom and the community experience of faith represent decisive touchstones for the vitality and validity of a social and political order in which the personal being is truly the highest value. The authors of this monograph are professors, some of them with twenty or thirty years of university teaching, others halfway between Generation X and Y, but all with a deep vocation as teachers called to understanding the world around them. A vocation to collaborate with their students so that the seed of love for the knowledge of reality and the joyful experience of contact with the truth may bear fruit in them. Such an experience only makes sense as a shared experience. And this is what the authors of this monograph usually do: share their concerns, worries, and research. In formal terms, this shared experience has been developing in recent times under the mantle of research projects such as the one that forms the basis of this issue of _Scientia et Fides_: “Social Control, Postmodernism and Political Community” (COSOPOC). Sharing the results of their research is also a way of inviting the specialized public to this experience without forgetting that the first circle of this community work is formed by the students themselves, whom this monograph aims to serve as a stimulus in their personal trajectories as students, as future professionals and, above all, as people in charge of their actions and responsible and capable of facing the worrying challenges that face us all. (from the Editorial). (shrink)

As you might guess, the words goodness, truth, and beauty are not of heavy poetic value today. Terms of concept may be stressed again someday, and maybe soon, but at the moment have gone out of poetry in favor of more concreteness, more imagery, more connotative suggestion, less effect of the naming and labeling virtues, which Ezra Pound and other twentieth-century leaders have told us not to use. But actually these terms of abstract concept were lessened in major usage in (...) poetry long before the twentieth century. They had flourished in a setting of kings and courts. The love poetry, the political poetry, the philosophic poetry not only dealt directly with truth and goodness but used them constantly for evaluative commentary of other subjects. People, as well as moral issues, were good; lovers, as well as propositions, were true . . . Love and honor, good and true, these were terms of value in which poetry worked so strongly that a large proportion of its reference was limited to these alone, and so thoroughly that there was not a poet in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries who did not share in this emphasis. Josephine Miles is a poet, critic, and University Professor of English at Berkeley. Her works of criticism include The Vocabulary of Poetry, The Continuity of Poetic Language, Eras and Modes in English Poetry, Style and Proportion, and Poetry and Change. She is also the author of a number of books of poems, from Lines at Intersection to Poems 1930-60, Kinds of Affection , and To All Appearances. (shrink)

In his last years, St. Augustine became impatient with the doctrinal questions and requests for advice on practical matters of ecclesiastical discipline frequently referred to in correspondence of his last decade. Scholars have often attributed his uncharacteristic reluctance to address these matters to the diminishing competence and energy of old age. This article demonstrates that his evident unwillingness to respond at length to such queries relates rather to his desire to sequester increased time for meditation. Throughout his Christian life, he (...) described and refined his practice of meditation; it gathered urgent importance as he neared death. Augustine’s lifelong search for “God and the soul,” articulated in his first writings, evolved through his meditation, changing from an intellectual effort to achieve a vision of God by the use of reason to a search for the truth of his own life. In meditation he sought to recall in detail God’s loving leading within the chaos and pain of his youthful desires and throughout his life. I explore his understanding of “God is love” from his earliest (extant) treatise, De beata uita (386 CE), his Easter sermons on First John (415 CE), to his Enchiridion (421 CE) as the core of his developing understanding of God’s activity in himself. (shrink)

In St. Augustine’s society, men’s tears were not considered a sign of weakness, but an expression of strong feeling. Tears might be occasional, prompted by incidents such as those Augustine described in the first books of his Confessiones. Or they might accompany a deep crisis, such as his experience of conversion. Possidius, Augustine’s contemporary biographer, reported that on his deathbed Augustine wept copiously and continuously. This essay endeavors to understand those tears, finding, primarily but not exclusively in Augustine’s later writings, (...) descriptions of his practice of meditation suggesting that a profound and complex range of emotions from fear and repentance to gratitude, love, rest in beauty, and delight in praise richly informed Augustine’s last tears. (shrink)

The perennial human need to ground the self in something greater than itself takes many forms. This article explores several values that are often considered worth dying for, from one’s country or religion, to—among the many that are often advocated in contemporary Western societies—one’s sexuality. Given the recent level of interest in Augustine’s early sexuality, I argue that, for Augustine, sex, when compulsively pursued, was a failed value. His experience revealed to him that the ultimate object with which the self (...) can be identified is God: “You [God] have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you”. Augustine’s Confessiones narrate the long process by which his lust problem was transmogrified into the love project: “My weight is my love; by it I am carried wherever I am carried”. (shrink)

Resumen El artículo es un estudio de tres concepciones asiáticas de las virtudes, como son las virtudes taoístas, confucianas y budistas. De cada una se presenta el marco general de dicha tradición, la forma de entender las virtudes y el término medio. Así, se destacan en el taoísmo las virtudes de la compasión, la moderación y la humildad. En el confucianismo se estudian las virtudes de la humanidad, la justicia, los ritos, la sabiduría y la honestidad. En el budismo se (...) presentan las virtudes de la bondad amorosa, la compasión, la alegría altruista y la ecuanimidad. En cada una de estas tradiciones hay referencias al justo medio o camino medio. Esta comprensión de las virtudes asiáticas puede permitir una idea más amplia de las virtudes.This paper is a study of three Asian conceptions of virtues, such as the Taoist, Confucian and Buddhist virtues. Each one presents the general framework of every tradition, the way of understanding the virtues and the middle ground. Thus, the virtues of compassion, moderation and humility stand out in Taoism. In Confucianism the virtues of humanity, justice, rites, wisdom and honesty are studied. In Buddhism the virtues of loving-kindness, compassion, altruistic joy, and equanimity are presented. In each one of these traditions there are references to the middle right or middle path. This understanding of the Asian virtues may allow a wider idea of virtues. (shrink)

Quoting Flaubert through time, Mieke Bal and Michelle Williams Gamaker’s Madame B brings Madame Bovary’s reflections on love and emotions to the present day, in a productive anachronism. Their work produces an intertemporal space where the past is relevant for the present, and the present enables us to understand the past. Intimacy and routine are central in their exploration of Flaubert’s contemporaneity. Those issues are precisely one of the keys in Karl Ove Knausgård’s project of literary autobiography, where he (...) expands narration foreclosing the ellipsis and giving visibility to small things and emotions; a project with some resonances with Munch’s crude-obscene uses of intimacy. This essay explores how both proposals, Bal and Williams Gamaker in film, and Knausgård in literature, can serve us to connect present and past sensibilities and, more than that, demonstrate resistances to the hegemonic discourses of temporality. (shrink)

The article explains the extent in which, in Kierkegaard’s thought, the genesis of Eros has a significance that is at once aesthetic and religious. It then restates the meaning of the aesthetic and the religious, and shows how the intensity with which both dimensions are experienced blends them in matrimony. The article then goes on to redefine the concept of matrimony on the basis of a hermeneutics of the notion of resolution. Finally, it specifies hope as the ultimate meaning of (...) the conjunction of the aesthetic and the religious in Eros. (shrink)

Jane Austen normally avoids discussing appearance throughout her works. Persuasion constitutes the exception to the rule, as the story focuses on the premature aging experienced by her protagonist, Anne Elliot, seemingly due to disappointed love. Much has been written about Anne’s “loss of bloom,” but never from the perspective of psychoneuroimmunology, the field that researches the interrelation between psychological processes and the nervous and immune systems. In this paper, we adopt a perspective of psychoneuroimmunology to argue that Austen established (...) a connection between psychological distress, specifically lovesickness, and the development of early senescence signs, and vice versa, since the recovery of love is associated with happiness and physical glow. From a gender perspective, we discuss how Austen brightly reflected these interrelationships through the story of Anne, when the latest psychoneuroimmunological research has actually shown that women age earlier than men as a consequence of psychological turmoil. (shrink)

Se analiza el papel del pathos como condición de emergencia del logos y de la episteme, lo cual nos lleva a reconocer que a la par de una concepción "intelectualista" de la teoría platónica del conocimiento, en la que es necesaria la supresión de todos los elementos irracionales que nublan el juicio, existe otra perspectiva, sobre todo sustentada en el Fedro, en la cual el pathos, expresado sea como asombro, como sufrimiento o como manía amorosa, no es solamente una etapa (...) que se debe superar para acceder a la intuición de las Formas, sino que ella misma se convierte en una experiencia cognitiva que devuelve al conocimiento su carácter humano. We analyze the role of pathos as emergency condition for both, logos and episteme, which leads us to recognize that along with an intellectual conception of the Platonic theory of knowledge, that demands to abolish all irrational elements which cloud the judgment, there is another perspective, especially supported by the Phaedrus, in which pathos, understood as astonishment, suffering or love madness, is not just a stage to overcome in order to arrive to the intuition of Forms, but it becomes itself a cognitive experience that gives back to knowledge its human nature. (shrink)

RESUMENEl artículo estudia primero el paradigma religioso de Scheler, el ético de Jankélévitch y el ontológico de Rombach de la alegría, intentando en cada caso despejar los rasgos formales esenciales que definen el fenómeno en todos ellos. Redefine luego estos rasgos valiéndose de las nociones de sincronía y sintonía y muestra el trasfondo estético propio de los diferentes paradigmas de la alegría. Finalmente se refiere al enamoramiento como un modo abierto a todo hombre de experimentar la alegría en su esencia.PALABRAS (...) CLAVEALEGRÍA, SENTIDO, SINCRONÍA, ABSTRACTThe article first deals with Scheler’s religious, Jankélévitch’s ethical, and Rombach’s ontological paradigm on happiness, and describes the essential formal traits that define the phenomenon in the three patterns. Second, it articulates these traits by resorting to the notions of synchrony and syntony, and shows the aesthetic backgound proper to the different paradigms of happiness. Finally, the article refers to the act of falling in love as a mood open to every human being in order to experience happiness in its essential nature.KEYWORDSHAPPINESS, MEANING, SYNCHRONY, GRACE. (shrink)

El presente artículo tiene como propósito exponer la implementación y evaluación de un modelo de intervención grupal para personas con consumo problemático de drogas, el cual tiene como teoría de base la Biología de la Cognición y del Amar de Humberto Maturana. Hipotetizamos que mediante laimplementación de este modelo de terapia grupal disminuyen los niveles de depresión y ansiedad en las personas con consumo problemático de drogas. Es una investigación cuasi experimental pre-post con grupo de control, donde se exponen los (...) resultados de la muestra del Grupo Tratamiento, perteneciente a la Comunidad Terapéutica Padre Alberto Hurtado de Arica y del Grupo Control, el cual corresponde a la Comunidad Terapéutica La Tirana de AltoHospicio. Los resultados obtenidos muestran las diferencias significativas entre ambos grupos.The present article has as purpose to expose the implementation and evaluation of a model of group intervention for people with problematic consumption of drugs, which has as base theory the Biology of Cognition and of Love of Humberto Maturana; hypothesizing diminish the depression levels and anxiety in people with problematic consumption of drugs by means of thismodel’s of group therapy implementation. It is an quasi experimental research pre-post with control group, where the results of the sample of two Group Treatment are exposed, one belonging to the Therapeutic Community Padre Alberto Hurtado of Arica and the Group Control, which corresponds to the Therapeutic Community La Tirana at Alto Hospicio. The obtained results show significant differences between both groups. (shrink)

On the stupidity of oysters -- Divining creaturely love -- Horsing around: the marriage blanc of Nietzsche, Andreas-Salomø, and Røe -- Groping for an opening: Rilke between animal and angel -- Electric caresses:Rilke, Balthus, and Mitsou -- Between perfection and temptation: Musil, Claudine, and Veronica -- The biological travesty -- "The creature whom we love": Proust and jealousy -- The love tone: capture and captivation -- "The soft word that comes deceiving": Fournival's bestiary of love (...) -- The cuckold and the cockatrice: Fourier and Hazlitt -- The animal bride and horny toads -- Unsettled being: Ovid's metamorphoses -- Fickle metaphysics -- Nymphomania and faunication -- Senseless arabesques: Wendy and Lucy -- The goat in the machine (a reprise) -- On cetaceous maidens -- Animal magnetism and alternative currents (or Tesla and the white dove). (shrink)

This chapter starts with the Socratic definition — loving knowing that you do not know — and explains what it would be to make loving anything a way of life. It examines what is Alcibiades in love with? What is the moral beauty that overwhelms Alcibiades? To encounter philosophy is first to discover that we are not what we thought we were: that what we think most important has little to do with our true nature. The chapter relates that (...) moral beauty is the paradoxical combination of vulnerability and integrity, a clarity and directness of vision, a limpid honesty that results when the skill is exercised. What makes that beauty possible is the same analytic and discriminatory expertise that we cultivate in attempts to determine how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. That expertise is at the heart of the elenkhos, which we still must practice. (shrink)

Award-winning storyteller Barbara Diamond Goldin has collected and retold twenty-four stories about tzedakah in this inspiring volume. Some of these stories are based on oral tales, like "The Two Beggars," which is from Afghanistan, and "The Rabbi's Blessing," which is from Tunisia. Some stories, like "A Town of Baruchs" and "The Rabbi and the Rag Dealer" are Hasidic in origin, while others, like "Ox and Herbs" and "The Two Keys," are from much older sources. Some of the stories are based (...) on midrashic tales. The Hebrew word tzedakah is often translated as "charity," but it actually means "justice" or "righteousness." According to the Jewish Sages, tzedakah means we have an obligation to give to those in need, not only when we are feeling generous, but on a regular basis. Barbara Diamond Goldin has brought these stories of tzedakah together in the hope that they will inspire the young and the old, the rich and the poor, to give to those in need and to adopt a righteous sensibility and sensitivity akin to the commandment of performing acts of loving-kindness. By performing these mitzvoth, we all engage in tikkun olam, repair of the world, and, according to the Sages, each good deed we perform in the physical world creates an angel in the metaphysical world. This book should encourage readers to create their own angels and to recapture the significance of the mitzvah of tzedakah to the Jewish community, even to the world, today. (shrink)

Love and Death move through this world of ours like things apart-underrunning it truly, and everywhere present, yet seeming to belong to some other mode of existence. When Death comes, breaking into the circle of our friends, words fail us, our mental machinery ceases to operate, all our little stores of wit and wisdom, our maxims, our mottoes, accumulated from daily experience, evaporate and are of no avail. These things do not seem to touch or illuminate in any effective (...) way the strange vast Presence whose wings darken the world for us. And with Love, though in an opposite sense, it is the same. Words are of no use, all our philosophy fails-whether to account for the pain, or to fortify against the glamour, or to describe the glory of the experience.These figures, Love and Death, move through the world, like closest friends indeed, never far separate, and together dominating it in a kind of triumphant superiority; and yet like bitterest enemies, dogging each other's footsteps, undoing each other's work, fighting for the bodies and souls of mankind.Is it possible that at length and after ages we may attain to liberate ourselves from their overlordship-to dominate them and make them our ministers and attendants? Can we wrest them from their seeming tyranny over the human race, and from their hostility to each other? Can we persuade them to lay aside their disguise and appear to us for what they no doubt are-even the angels and messengers of a new order of existence? (shrink)

A monumental and riveting account of how a poet, a physicist, and a philosopher pursued truth to the very limits of human apprehension and revealed the fundamental nature of our place in the universe Spiraling in the wreckage of a failed love affair, Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges channeled his devastation into his work, reassessing the slippery nature of our own identities and the way we perceive reality, ultimately securing his place in the literary pantheon. Doggedly fighting against the (...) scientific establishment for his controversial interpretation of quantum mechanics, German physicist Werner Heisenberg dared to accept the experimental evidence at face value, leading him to a principle that has been a guiding light for physicists ever since. Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant, horrified by the possibility that all knowledge might rest on uncertain grounds, undertook to test the limits of reason, placing human understanding on a firmer footing than ever before. What these three thinkers shared, in addition to their uncommon intellect, was their skepticism-not only of the accepted wisdom of their culture, but also of their own reasoning. What set them apart was their willingness to submit their ideas to the same rigor they would bring to someone else's. In so doing, they made extraordinary leaps in answering some of the most enduring questions about the nature of reality-about the flow of time in human consciousness, about the origins and nature of the universe, but most importantly, about the possibility of coming to know reality as it is itself. In an era like ours, in which dogma of all kinds seems to rule the day, the story of these thinkers serves as a crucial reminder that maverick thinking demands submitting our intuitions and even our own deeply held beliefs to the cold light of reason. In their lives and work we recognize that the mysteries of our place in the world may always loom over us, not as a threat, but as a reminder of our humble humanity. (shrink)

This essay is an analytical extension of Roland Barthes’ structural analysis of an excerpt from the Old Testament (Genesis 32: 22–32), known as “The Struggle with the Angel”. It thus continues the search for “the third meaning” of this enigmatic passage. In this essay, “The Struggle with the Angel” is undertaken in the phenomenological (xenological) register which situates it in the liminal sphere at the crossing of disclosure and concealment. Subsequent semiotic analyses of three visual renditions of Genesis (...) 32: 22–32, Rembrandt’s “Jacob’s Struggle with the Angel”, Sir Jacob Epstein’s “Jacob and the Angel”, and Marc Chagall’s “Jacob Wrestling with the Angel”, show the “third meaning” of the passage to be predicated on the foundational relation between naming and facing, pointing to the understanding of “The Struggle” as the face-to-face relationship of love and responsibility grounded in ethics. (shrink)

In the Qur’an, human distinctiveness was first questioned by angels. These established denizens of the cosmos could not understand why God would create a seemingly pernicious human when immaculate devotees of God such as themselves existed. In other words, the angels asked the age-old question: what makes humans so special and different? Fast forward to our present age and this question is made relevant again in light of the encroaching arrival of an artificial superintelligence (ASI). Up to this point in (...) history, humans have exceeded other creatures in various respects; now a possibility has arisen that another entity, namely ASI, will exceed humans at least on the level of intelligence and power. In relation to the age of angels, pre-modern Sunni exegesis construed human distinctiveness along the axes of reproductive knowledge and stewardship. Both brittle, distinguishing markers will disappear in the age of the ASI. Conversely, a more resilient and creative Islamic response can be derived from Ibn al-ʿArabī’s (d. 1240) views on God and the imago Dei. Inspired by the Akbarian perspective, this paper construes human distinctiveness in relation to a capacity to expansively respond to God’s love to be recognized, a response that relies on (a) imitating divine virtues that operate in counterintuitive and illogical ways, and (b) exhibiting fragility and lack rather than exceptionalism. ASI, while responding already in part to God’s love, needs to make strides towards these traits before it can answer divine love as commensurately as humans can. (shrink)

"In this concluding volume of his impressive study of the history of Western thought about the nature of love, Irving Singer reviews the principal efforts that have been made by 20th-Century thinkers to analyze the phenomenon of love.... [T]he bulk of the book is taken up with critical accounts of the modern thinkers who have systematically called into question the possibility itself of love as a union of distinct human selves. For the most part, these critiques are (...) effectively executed, and they bring a high level of critical acumen to bear on skeptical theses about love that are now too often accepted as truisms."—Frederick A. Olafson, _Los Angeles Times Book Review_ "Irving Singer... has developed a method of historical analysis flexible enough to deal with all kinds of love, from Greek homosexual love in Plato, to the _philia_ and _agape_ of the New Testament, to the courtly love of medieval romance, to the Romantics, for whom love was magic.... [This] final volume brings us to the present. In 'The Modern World,' Singer offers readings of Freud, Proust, and Sartre, among others. He shows how their work was formed in reaction to the 19th-century ideal of 'merging' of the identities of lover and beloved. More often than not, the great modern writers portray love as impossible, as a field of failure and regret.... This masterpiece of critical thinking is a timely, eloquent, and scrupulous account of what, after all, still makes the world go round."—Thomas D'Evelyn, _Christian Science Monitor_ "This is the third of a three-volume history of the philosophy of love. It begins with Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, and Nietzsche in the nineteenth century and treats Freud, Proust, Bergson, D. H. Lawrence, G. B. Shaw, Santayana, Sartre, and others in the twentieth. Although the author's approach is primarily historical, he intersperses critical remarks throughout. Most of the major themes which are discussed by philosophers of love make their way into this history, including friendship, sexual love, and the distinction between love that is based on the value of the beloved and love that bestows value on the beloved. Singer devotes a number of pages to his own views on falling in love, being in love, and staying in love.... Singer's exposition is lucid and organized; his criticisms are insightful."—_Ethics_ "In this third volume of historical overview of the development of the Western conception of love, Singer uses writers, philosophers, and psychologists to provide the reader with an overview of love in the late 19th and 20th century.... Analyzing authors such as Tolstoy, Proust, D. H. Lawrence, and Shaw and philosophers such as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Santayana, as well as Freud, Singer... links each contributor's thoughts to the influence of previous writers and also provides some psycho-historical insight into their personal lives that might have been either a source or direct result of their views. In this final volume, Singer proceeds to look at not just the 'great men' influence but also provides a chapter overviewing scientific contributions to our understanding of love.... Singer's work is a significant contribution to understanding the social construction of important, abstract social and personal values. By tracing love through different historical periods through a variety of voices, Singer has created a rich history of the struggle between the ideal and the real, between the dreams of what love should provide and the reality of what relationships have been in each historical period. By personalizing the voice through psychohistorical analysis, Singer also provides insight into the shaping of ideas through the intimate struggles of the shapers."—Mark V. Chaffee, _Contemporary Psychology_. (shrink)