It is a tradition that may at times, for Christians, feel strangely familiar and will, for Christians and Jews, always challenge you to see yourself and your world through a new lens."--from the IntroductionJewish spirituality is an approach to life that encourages us to become aware of God's presence and purpose, even in unlikely places. "This world and everything in it is a manifestation of God's presence," says Rabbi Lawrence Kushner. "Our challenge and goal is to find it and then act in such a way as to help others find it too."In this special book, Kushner guides Christians through the rich wisdom of Jewish spirituality. He tailors his unique style to address Christians' questions, and, in doing so, opens new windows on their own faith.Jewish Spirituality is a window into the Jewish soul that people of all faiths can understand and enjoy. From the Talmud and Torah, to "repentence" (teshuva) and "repairing the world" (tikkun olam), Kushner shows all of us how we can use the fundamentals of Jewish spirituality to enrich our own lives.

    Based on the latest scholarship and richly illustrated, it is the most authoritative and accessible chronicle of the Jewish experience available. Michael Brenner tells a dramatic story of change and migration deeply rooted in tradition, taking readers from the mythic wanderings of Moses to the unspeakable atrocities of the Holocaust; from the Babylonian exile to the founding of the modern state of Israel; and from the Sephardic communities under medieval Islam to the shtetls of eastern Europe and the Hasidic enclaves of modern-day Brooklyn. The book is full of fascinating personal stories of exodus and return, from that told about Abraham, who brought his newfound faith into Canaan, to that of Holocaust survivor Esther Barkai, who lived on a kibbutz established on a German estate seized from the Nazi Julius Streicher as she awaited resettlement in Israel. Describing the events and people that have shaped Jewish history, and highlighting the important contributions Jews have made to the arts, politics, religion, and science, A Short History of the Jews is a compelling blend of storytelling and scholarship that brings the Jewish past marvelously to life.

    This book is about setting the limits of the natural and the limits of the known, wonders and wonder, from the High Middle Ages through the Enlightenment. A history of wonders as objects of natural inquiry is simultaneously an intellectual history of the orders of nature. A history of wonder as a passion of natural inquiry is simultaneously a history of the evolving collective sensibility of naturalists. Pursued in tandem, these interwoven histories show how the two sides of knowledge, objective order and subjective sensibility, were obverse and reverse of the same coin rather than opposed to one another.--From the IntroductionWonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 is about the ways in which European naturalists from the High Middle Ages through the Enlightenment used wonder and wonders, the passion and its objects, to envision themselves and the natural world. Monsters, gems that shone in the dark, petrifying springs, celestial apparitions--these were the marvels that adorned romances, puzzled philosophers, lured collectors, and frightened the devout. Drawing on the histories of art, science, philosophy, and literature, Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park explore and explain how wonder and wonders fortified princely power, rewove the texture of scientific experience, and shaped the sensibility of intellectuals. This is a history of the passions of inquiry, of how wonder sometimes inflamed, sometimes dampened curiosity about nature's best-kept secrets. Refracted through the prism of wonders, the order of nature splinters into a spectrum of orders, a tour of possible worlds.

    Featuring the Armchair series' characteristic whimsical illustrations, Barth for Armchair Theologians surveys Barth's theology as it emerges and culminates in his monumental Church Dogmatics as well as how his theology continues to be interpreted in the present day.Written by experts but designed for the novice, the Armchair series provides accurate, concise, and witty overviews of some of the most profound moments and theologians in Christian history. These books are essential supplements for first-time encounters with primary texts, lucid refreshers for scholars and clergy, and enjoyable reads for the theologically curious.

    Jameson’s inquiry looks at the postmodern across a wide landscape, from “high” art to “low” from market ideology to architecture, from painting to “punk” film, from video art to literature.

    NOW HE WANTS TO FIX IT--STARTING WITH POPE FRANCIS.In DIABOLICAL, Milo Yiannopoulos levels his critical eye and legendarily caustic wit at the Catholic Church, an institution he reveres but which, under the leadership of a "Lavender Mafia" of left-wing gay bishops, has become shambolic and depraved. Yes, there really is a gay mafia. And yes, their outfits are fabulous. Who is the real Pope Francis? And can the Church survive him? Milo Yiannopoulos traces the origins of the Church's descent into sin and shame, pointing the finger at left-wing reformers, trendy progressive bishops, gay clergy, and ultimately, Francis himself. The Catholic Church hasn't had a crisis like this since the Reformation. It won't survive unless it learns how to talk to men again, sets aside transitory political nostrums like environmentalism and identity politics, and gets back to worshiping Almighty God.

    She encourages readers to examine the ways in which works of art challenge how we experience not only the artist's feelings, but our own. Discussing performance art, painting, and photography, Doyle provides new perspectives on artists including Ron Athey, Aliza Shvarts, Thomas Eakins, James Luna, Carrie Mae Weems, and David Wojnarowicz. Confronting the challenge of writing about difficult works of art, she shows how these artists work with feelings as a means to question our assumptions about identity, intimacy, and expression. They deploy the complexity of emotion to measure the weight of history, and to deepen our sense of where and how politics happens in contemporary art. Doyle explores ideologies of emotion and how emotion circulates in and around art. Throughout, she gives readers welcoming points of entry into artworks that they may at first find off-putting or confrontational. Doyle offers new insight into how the discourse of controversy serves to shut down discussion about this side of contemporary art practice, and counters with a critical language that allows the reader to accept emotional intensity in order to learn from it.

    It provides a comprehensive introduction to visual thinking and picture reading in Indian art and thought. Ultimately, the book shows that profound Hindu and Buddhist intuitions on the riddles of life and death are universally recognizable.

    But questions about the categories of "art" and "art history" acquired increased urgency during the 1970s, when new developments in critical theory and other intellectual projects dramatically transformed the discipline. The first edition of Critical Terms for Art History both mapped and contributed to those transformations, offering a spirited reassessment of the field's methods and terminology.Art history as a field has kept pace with debates over globalization and other social and political issues in recent years, making a second edition of this book not just timely, but crucial. Like its predecessor, this new edition consists of essays that cover a wide variety of "loaded" terms in the history of art, from sign to meaning, ritual to commodity. Each essay explains and comments on a single term, discussing the issues the term raises and putting the term into practice as an interpretive framework for a specific work of art. For example, Richard Shiff discusses "Originality" in Vija Celmins's To Fix the Image in Memory, a work made of eleven pairs of stones, each consisting of one "original" stone and one painted bronze replica. In addition to the twenty-two original essays, this edition includes nine new ones—performance, style, memory/monument, body, beauty, ugliness, identity, visual culture/visual studies, and social history of art—as well as new introductory material. All help expand the book's scope while retaining its central goal of stimulating discussion of theoretical issues in art history and making that discussion accessible to both beginning students and senior scholars.Contributors: Mark Antliff, Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, Stephen Bann, Homi K. Bhabha, Suzanne Preston Blier, Michael Camille, David Carrier, Craig Clunas, Whitney Davis, Jas Elsner, Ivan Gaskell, Ann Gibson, Charles Harrison, James D. Herbert, Amelia Jones, Wolfgang Kemp, Joseph Leo Koerner, Patricia Leighten, Paul Mattick Jr., Richard Meyer, W. J. T. Mitchell, Robert S. Nelson, Margaret Olin, William Pietz, Alex Potts, Donald Preziosi, Lisbet Rausing, Richard Shiff, Terry Smith, Kristine Stiles, David Summers, Paul Wood, James E. Young

    H. Abrams definitively studies the Romantic Age (1789–1835)—the age in which Shelley claimed that "the literature of England has arisen as it were from a new birth." Abrams shows that the major poets of the age had in common important themes, modes of expression, and ways of feeling and imagining; that the writings of these poets were an integral part of a comprehensive intellectual tendency which manifested itself in philosophy as well as poetry, in England and in Germany; and that this tendency was causally related to drastic political and social changes of the age.But Abrams offers more than a work of scholarship, for he ranges before and after, to place the age in Western culture. he reveals what is traditional and what is revolutionary in the period, providing insights into those same two forces in the ideas of today. He shows that central Romantic ideas and forms of imagination were secularized versions of traditional theological concepts, imagery, and design, and that modern literature participates in the same process. Our comprehension of this age and of our own time is deepened by a work astonishing in its learning, vision, and humane understanding.

    Guiding the reader through a church outside Rome, Sant'Agnese fuori le Mura, she draws upon history, theology, anthropology, and folklore to illuminate the spiritual meanings embedded in its architecture.

    Tom Wright also looks at the way we interpret the different Gospel narratives about Jesus, showing how modern readers coming fresh to these texts can do so in an informed and discriminating way. Written in a lively, non-technical style, and illustrated throughout with full-colour photographs, The Original Jesus offers a compelling insight into what Jesus really stood for, why he was crucified, and how it was that his followers came to regard him as nothing less than the human face of God.

    It is also a study of gender, that is, a study of how sex roles and possibilities are conceptualized by both men and women, even though asymmetric power relationships and men's greater access to knowledge have informed the cultural construction of categories such as "male" and "female," "heretic" and "saint." Finally, these essays are about the creativity of women's voices and women's bodies.Bynum discusses how some women manipulated the dominant tradition to free themselves from the burden of fertility, yet made female fertility a powerful symbol; how some used Christian dichotomies of male / female and powerful / weak to facilitate their own imitatio Christi, yet undercut these dichotomies by subsuming them into humanitas. Medieval women spoke little of inequality and little of gender, yet there is a profound connection between their symbols and communities and the twentieth-century determination to speak of gender and "study women."

    While acknowledging the many women whose contributions to visual culture since the Middle Ages have often been neglected, Whitney Chadwick's survey reexamines the works themselves and the ways in which they have been perceived as marginal, often in direct reference to gender. In her discussion of feminism and its influence on such a reappraisal, the author also addresses the closely related issues of ethnicity, class, and sexuality.This expanded edition incorporates recent developments in contemporary art. Chadwick addresses the turn toward autobiography in much recent women's art. She considers issues such as the personal versus the political and the private versus the public, and analyzes the differences between women's art today and the seminal feminist work of the 1970s and 1980s.

    With breathtaking command of medieval Muslim sources as well as the vast literature on medieval European and Muslim culture, Carole Hillenbrand has produced a book that shows not only how the Crusades were perceived by the Muslims, but how the Crusades affected the Muslim world - militarily, culturally, and psychologically.