The respected Trappist monk Thomas Merton spent several years reading and reflecting upon four different translations of the Chinese classic that bears Chuang Tzu's name. The result is this collection of poetic renderings of the great sage's work that conveys its spirit in a way no other translation has and that was Merton's personal favorite among his more than fifty books. Both prose and verse are included here, as well as a short section from Merton discussing the most salient themes of Chuang Tzu's teachings.

    "Pema Ch?dr?n and Alice Walker in Conversation" reveals the revolutionary power of"tonglen" through a dialogue between two hearts and minds forged in very different cultures-and yet deeply joined in the simple practice of compassion. Take a front-row seat as the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker and American-born Buddhist nun Pema Ch?dr?n reflect on anger, joy, fear, and the union of spirituality and social activism. Hear their personal experiences of the "giving and taking" meditation and how it has helped heal their lives. Let their combined wisdom illuminate the realm, available to us all, where the barriers between self and others dissolve. Recorded live at San Francisco's Palace of Fine Arts, "Pema Ch?dr?n and Alice Walker in Conversation" comes with a seven-page booklet covering tonglen instructions and suggestions for further reading. Includes a lively Q&A session.

    Based on John Dewey's lectures on esthetics, delivered as the first William James Lecturer at Harvard in 1932, Art as Experience has grown to be considered internationally as the most distinguished work ever written by an American on the formal structure and characteristic effects of all the arts: architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and literature.

    Collins includes the Latin of Jerome's Bible, of canon law, of the liturgy and papal bulls, of scholastic philosophers, and of the Ambrosian hymns, providing a survey of texts from the fourth century through the Middle Ages.An "Answer Key" to this edition is now available. Please see An Answer Key to A Primer of Ecclesiastical Latin, prepared by John Dunlap.

    Uniquely comprehensive, The American Intellectual Tradition includes classic works in philosophy, religion, social theory, political thought, economics, psychology, and cultural and literary criticism. Organized chronologically into thematic sections, the two volumes trace the evolution of intellectual writing and thinking from its origins in Puritan beliefs to the most recent essays on diversity and postmodernity. Pedagogical features include introductions and headnotes to the selections, updated bibliographic material throughout, and detailed chronologies at the end of each book. Addressing such highly contested subjects as race, class, gender, aesthetics, political religion, and the role of the United States in the world, The American Intellectual Tradition, Fifth Edition, is invaluable for undergraduate courses in intellectual history. It is also an excellent supplement for graduate seminars and classes in American history, American studies, and American literature. Volumes I and II now offer new selections from Roger Williams, John Humphrey Noyes, Asa Gray, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Charles Augustus Briggs, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Walter Lippmann, Thurman Arnold, Henry Luce, Henry A. Wallace, Albert Einstein, Aldo Leopold, James Baldwin, George Kennan, Milton Friedman, Herbert Marcuse, Edward Said, Gloria Anzaldua, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Joan W. Scott, Samuel Huntington, and Carl Sagan.

    When American lives or vital interests are at stake, the public—and especially the news media and political opponents—expect aggressive leadership. But, contrary to the dramatizations of Hollywood, rarely does a president have that option.In Presidents in Crisis, a former director of the Situation Room takes the reader inside the White House during seventeen grave international emergencies handled by the presidents from Truman to Obama: from North Korea’s invasion of South Korea to the revolutions of the Arab Spring, and from the thirteen days of the Cuban Missile Crisis to the taking of American diplomats hostage in Iran and George W. Bush’s response to the attacks of September 11, 2001. In narratives that convey the drama of unfolding events and the stakes of confrontation when a misstep can mean catastrophe, he walks us step by step through each crisis. Laying out the key players and personalities and the moral and political calculations that the leaders have had to make, he provides a fascinating insider’s look at modern presidential decision making and the fundamental role in it of human frailty.Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade imprint, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in history--books about World War II, the Third Reich, Hitler and his henchmen, the JFK assassination, conspiracies, the American Civil War, the American Revolution, gladiators, Vikings, ancient Rome, medieval times, the old West, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

    In an accessible voice, A Short History of Chinese Philosophy clearly illuminates Confucianism, Taoism, Mohism, Yin-Yang, and more. For those interested in philosophy or Asian studies, this is the perfect window into ancient and modern Chinese ideology.

    Together they express a philosophy, or a moral code, by which Confucius, one of the most humane thinkers of all time, believed everyone should live. Upholding the ideals of wisdom, self-knowledge, courage and love of one’s fellow man, he argued that the pursuit of virtue should be every individual’s supreme goal. And, while following the Way, or the truth, might not result in immediate or material gain, Confucius showed that it could nevertheless bring its own powerful and lasting spiritual rewards.This edition contains a detailed introduction exploring the concepts of the original work, a bibliography and glossary and appendices on Confucius himself, The Analects and the disciples who compiled them. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

    Never before, Lapham argues, have voices of protest been so locked out of the mainstream conversation, so marginalized and muted by a government that recklessly disregards civil liberties. In the midst of the “war on terror,” we face a crisis of democracy as serious as any in our history. Gag Rule is a rousing and necessary call to action in defense of the right to raise our voices and have those voices heard.

    Moving away from the Marxist/Freudian approaches that had concerned him earlier, Baudrillard developed in this book a theory of contemporary culture that relies on displacing economic notions of cultural production with notions of cultural expenditure.Baudrillard uses the concepts of the simulacra—the copy without an original—and simulation. These terms are crucial to an understanding of the postmodern, to the extent that they address the concept of mass reproduction and reproduceability that characterizes our electronic media culture.Baudrillard's book represents a unique and original effort to rethink cultural theory from the perspective of a new concept of cultural materialism, one that radically redefines postmodern formulations of the body.Sheila Glaser is an editor at Artforum magazine.

    Krishnamurti, or just U.G., was a speaker and philosopher, often known as an "anti-guru" or as "the man who refused to be a guru." This book is a compilation of discussions between U.G. Krishnamurthi and various questioners in India, Switzerland, Australia, the Netherlands, and the U.K. According to U.G., "The religious states of bliss and ecstasy can never be experienced, can never be grasped, contained, much less given expression to you, by man. That beaten track will lead you nowhere. There is no oasis situated yonder; you are stuck in a mirage."

    But the environmental emergency is also a crisis for our philosophical habits of thought, confronting us with a problem that seems to defy not only our control but also our understanding. Global warming is perhaps the most dramatic example of what Timothy Morton calls “hyperobjects”—entities of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions that they defeat traditional ideas about what a thing is in the first place. In this book, Morton explains what hyperobjects are and their impact on how we think, how we coexist with one another and with nonhumans, and how we experience our politics, ethics, and art.Moving fluidly between philosophy, science, literature, visual and conceptual art, and popular culture, the book argues that hyperobjects show that the end of the world has already occurred in the sense that concepts such as world, nature, and even environment are no longer a meaningful horizon against which human events take place. Instead of inhabiting a world, we find ourselves inside a number of hyperobjects, such as climate, nuclear weapons, evolution, or relativity. Such objects put unbearable strains on our normal ways of reasoning.Insisting that we have to reinvent how we think to even begin to comprehend the world we now live in, Hyperobjects takes the first steps, outlining a genuinely postmodern ecological approach to thought and action.

    But six weeks later, a second examination revealed there was no cancer -- he had won "a reprieve from death." Faced with a repressive cultural environment and the threat of a spell in a prison farm, Gao fled Beijing and began a journey of 15,000 kilometers into the remote mountains and ancient forests of Sichuan in southwest China. The result of this epic voyage of discovery is Soul Mountain.Bold, lyrical, and prodigious, Soul Mountain probes the human soul with an uncommon directness and candor and delights in the freedom of the imagination to expand the notion of the individual self.

    Fifty-five million years ago, during the early Eocene period, a sudden burst of lightning frightened a herd of small prehistoric horses. In the ensuing panic, one of the horses, a five-year-old mare no bigger than a fox terrier, fell into a lake and drowned. On June 23rd, 1975, in Austin, Texas, a drop of oil combusted in a car engine. This tiny explosion happened just as the Ford Pinto, driven by a one-armed hitchhiker named Jimmy, pulled into the parking lot of the Timber Creek Apartments, home to the young woman in the passenger seat, a twenty-two-year-old biology student named Clarissa Sanders. Machine is the story of the hidden connections between these two seemingly unrelated events. Omnivorous in its pursuit of knowledge?every single one of its eighty-eight pages a daring mixture of fact and fiction, science and art?this short novel relentlessly pursues one of life's great mysteries: where does Fate end and coincidence begin?

    It provides scriptural solutions to life altering problems such as low self-esteem, abuse, and depression. Black Girls Don’t Cry frees us from the bondage of regrets, encourages us to drop the baggage from our past, and moves us forward towards a renewed strength in Christ.