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Most people associate Nordic countries with peace, tranquility, civility, high living standards and generally progressive social arrangements. It is these very qualities that get Nordic countries rejected as policy models because they are too peaceful - what happens there is too remote and too easy compared to the harsh outside world.
How was it possible for drama, especially biblical representations, to appear in the Christian West given the church's condemnation of the theatrum of the ancient world?In a book with radical implications for the study of medieval literature, Lawrence Clopper resolves this perplexing question. Drama, Play, and Game demonstrates that the theatrum repudiated by medieval clerics was not "theater" as we understand the term today. Clopper contends that critics have misrepresented Western stage history because they have assumed that theatrum designates a place where drama is performed. While theatrum was thought of as a site of spectacle during the Middle Ages, the term was more closely connected with immodest behavior and lurid forms of festive culture. Clerics were not opposed to liturgical representations in churches, but they strove ardently to suppress May games, ludi, festivals, and liturgical parodies. Medieval drama, then, stemmed from a more vernacular tradition than previously acknowledged-one developed by England's laity outside the boundaries of clerical rule.
A vivid blow-by-blow of the controversies that have wracked the Catholic Church during the past twenty yearsLiberation theology, birth control, women's ordination, inclusive language, "radical feminism," homosexuality, religious pluralism, human rights in the church, and the roles of bishops and theologians-one man has stood at the dead center of all these controversial issues: Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. A teenage American POW as the Third Reich crumbled and a progressive wunderkind at the Second Vatican Council, Ratzinger, for twenty years, has been head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (until 1908 known as the Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition, or ...
Along with most of the rest of Western culture, has crime itself become more "civilized"? This book exposes as myths the beliefs that society has become more violent than it has been in the past and that violence is more likely to occur in cities than in rural areas. The product of years of study by scholars from North America and Europe, The Civilization of Crime shows that, however violent some large cities may be now, both rural and urban communities in Sweden, Holland, England, and other countries were far more violent during the late Middle Ages than any cities are today. Contributors show that the dramatic change is due, in part, to the fact that violence was often tolerated or even ac...
A brilliantly written and groundbreaking book about Dylan's music – now the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2016 – and its musical, political and cultural roots in early 20th-century America Growing up in Greenwich Village in the 1960s Sean Wilentz discovered the music of Bob Dylan as a young teenager. Almost half a century later, now a distinguished professor of American history, he revisits Dylan's work with the critical skills of a scholar and the passion of a fan. Drawing partly on his work as the current historian-in-residence on Dylan's official website, Sean Wilentz provides a unique blend of biography, memoir and analysis in a book which, much like its subject, shifts gears and changes shape as the occasion demands.
Who are you when your brain is not you?' Jane Lapotaire is one of the lucky ones. Many people do not survive, let alone live intelligently and well again once they have suffered cerebral haemorrhage. In the long haul back to life - 'nearly dying was the easy bit' - she's learned much, some of it very hard lessons. Some friendships became casualties; family relations had to be redefined; and her work as an actress took a severe battering. The stress of living is felt that much more keenly when 'sometimes I still feel as if I am walking around with my brain outside my body. A brain still all too available for smashing by noise, physical jostling, or any form of harshness'. But she has survived and now believes it herself when people say how lucky she is. This is a very moving, darkly funny, honest book about what happens when the 'you' you've known all your life is no longer the same you.
While Plato recommended expelling poets from the ideal society, W. H. Auden famously declared that poetry makes nothing happen. The 19 contributions to the present book avoid such polarized views and, responding in different ways to the “ethical turn” in narrative theory, explore the varied ways in which narratives encourage readers to ponder matters of right and wrong. All work from the premise that the analysis of narrative ethics needs to be linked to a sensitivity to esthetic (narrative) form. The ethical issues are accordingly located on different levels. Some are clearly presented as thematic concerns within the text(s) considered, while others emerge through (or are generated by) ...
Thirty Bible passages from the Old and New Testaments which can be read over 30 days, with explanation and practical comments designed to relate the Bible to the reader's own life.
Thirty-one of the most significant and revealing conversations with Dylan have been compiled in this volume. Among the highlights are the seminal "Rolling Stone" interviews by Jann Wenner, Jonathan Cott, Kurt Loder, and Mikal Gilmore.