In many countries, supplies of food and water are inadequate to support the population, so the world falls deeper and deeper into what economists call the "Malthusian trap."Here, Malthus examines the tendency of human numbers to outstrip their resources, and argues that poverty, disease, and starvation are necessary to keep societies from moving beyond their means of subsistence.Public Domain (P)2013 Audible Ltd

    In two concise, powerful essays, the award-winning author offers unique insight into the true nature of extremism and proposes a reasoned and respectful approach to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He also comments on related issues--the Gaza pullout, Yasser Arafat's death, and the war in Iraq--in an extended interview at the end of the book.The brilliant clarity of these essays, coupled with Oz's ironic sense of humor in illuminating the serious, breathes new life into this old debate. Oz argues that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not a war of religion or cultures or traditions, but rather a real estate dispute--one that will be resolved not by greater understanding, but by painful compromise.Fresh, insightful, and inspiring, How to Cure a Fanatic brings a new voice of sanity to the cacophony on Israeli-Palestinian relations--a voice no one can afford to ignore.

    In it, Thoreau argues that individuals should not permit governments to overrule or atrophy their consciences, and that they have a duty to avoid allowing such acquiescence to enable the government to make them the agents of injustice. Thoreau was motivated in part by his disgust with slavery and the Mexican–American War (1846–1848).

    In her most impassioned and personal book to date, Judith Butler responds in this profound appraisal of post-9/11 America to the current US policies to wage perpetual war, and calls for a deeper understanding of how mourning and violence might instead inspire solidarity and a quest for global justice.

    At the same time, Roy makes clear that what millions of Indians need is not merely formal democracy, but liberation from the oppression, shame, and poverty imposed on them by India’s archaic caste system.

    As the youngest-ever op-ed columnist for The New York Times and the author of the critically acclaimed books Privilege and Grand New Party, Ross Douthat has emerged as one of the most provocative and influential voices of his generation. Now he offers a masterful and hard-hitting account of how American Christianity has gone off the rails — and why it threatens to take American society with it.In a story that moves from the 1950s to the age of Obama, Douthat brilliantly charts traditional Christianity’s decline from a vigorous, mainstream, and bipartisan faith — which acted as a “vital center” and the moral force behind the Civil Rights movement — through the culture wars of the 1960s and 1970s down to the polarizing debates of the present day. He argues that Christianity’s place in American life has increasingly been taken over, not by atheism, but by heresy: Debased versions of Christian faith that breed hubris, greed, and self-absorption. Ranging from Glenn Beck to Eat Pray Love, Joel Osteen to The Da Vinci Code, Oprah Winfrey to Sarah Palin, Douthat explores how the prosperity gospel’s mantra of “pray and grow rich”; a cult of self-esteem that reduces God to a life coach; and the warring political religions of left and right have crippled the country’s ability to confront our most pressing challenges, and accelerated American decline.His urgent call for a revival of traditional Christianity is sure to generate controversy, and it will be vital reading for all those concerned about the imperiled American future.

    His theories, which the French press has termed "l'hypothèse girardienne," have sparked interdisciplinary, even international, controversy. In The Scapegoat, Girard applies his approach to "texts of persecution," documents that recount phenomena of collective violence from the standpoint of the persecutor--documents such as the medieval poet Guillaume de Machaut's Judgement of the King of Navarre, which blames the Jews for the Black Death and describes their mass murder.Girard compares persecution texts with myths, most notably with the myth of Oedipus, and finds strikingly similar themes and structures. Could myths regularly conceal texts of persecution? Girard's answers lies in a study of the Christian Passion, which represents the same central event, the same collective violence, found in all mythology, but which is read from the point of view of the innocent victim. The Passion text provides the model interpretation that has enabled Western culture to demystify its own violence--a demystification Girard now extends to mythology.Underlying Girard's daring textual hypothesis is a powerful theory of history and culture. Christ's rejection of all guilt breaks the mythic cycle of violence and the sacred. The scapegoat becomes the Lamb of God; "the foolish genesis of blood-stained idols and the false gods of superstition, politics, and ideologies" are revealed.

    Focusing on the relationships among political leadership, the norms of the legal order, and the state of political emergency, Schmitt argues in Political Theology that legal order ultimately rests upon the decisions of the sovereign. According to Schmitt, only the sovereign can meet the needs of an "exceptional" time and transcend legal order so that order can then be reestablished. Convinced that the state is governed by the ever-present possibility of conflict, Schmitt theorizes that the state exists only to maintain its integrity in order to ensure order and stability. Suggesting that all concepts of modern political thought are secularized theological concepts, Schmitt concludes Political Theology with a critique of liberalism and its attempt to depoliticize political thought by avoiding fundamental political decisions.

    The works of Maimonides, particularly The Guide for the Perplexed, are reckoned among the fundamental texts that influenced all subsequent Jewish philosophy and also proved to be highly influential in Christian and Islamic thought. Spanning subjects ranging from God, prophecy, miracles, revelation, and evil, to politics, messianism, reason in religion, and the therapeutic role of doubt, Maimonides and the Book That Changed Judaism elucidates the complex ideas of The Guide in remarkably clear and engaging prose. Drawing on his own experience as a central figure in the current Israeli renaissance of Jewish culture and spirituality, Micah Goodman brings Maimonides’s masterwork into dialogue with the intellectual and spiritual worlds of twenty-first-century readers. Goodman contends that in Maimonides’s view, the Torah’s purpose is not to bring clarity about God but rather to make us realize that we do not understand God at all; not to resolve inscrutable religious issues but to give us insight into the true nature and purpose of our lives.

    This autobiographical history of Scientology is told by one of L. Ron Hubbard’s staunchest defenders.

    The history of the Camino is recounted, as well as several of the myths, legends, and miracle stories that have become attached--and given special meaning--to this itinerary. Emphasizing that personal myths are an essential part of this lore, this chronicle also includes stories from the confraternity of the pilgrims, people from all corners of the world who visit this walk for a great diversity of reasons, but all of whom leave having experienced the same miracle--that this pilgrimage will play a defining role in their lives.

    If the present generation is too dull to understand it rightly, a future, finer and better generation will arise to understand it. The Jews who wish for a State shall have it, and they will deserve to have it."—PrefaceTheodor Herzl's passionate advocacy of the founding of a Jewish state grew out of his conviction that Jews would never be assimilated into the populations in which they lived. Born in Budapest, Hungary in 1860, Herzl encountered anti-Semitism when he attended a scientific secondary school. Later, as a newspaper correspondent in Paris, he was shocked and dismayed by the anti-Semitic prejudice surrounding the notorious Dreyfus affair (Herzl said in later years that it was the Dreyfus affair that had made a Zionist out of him). Herzl concluded that the only solution for the majority of Jews would be organized emigration to a state of their own.He discussed the political and historic rationale for such a homeland in this extraordinary and influential book, first published as a pamphlet, Der Judenstaat, in Vienna in 1896. The Jewish question, he wrote, was not a social or religious question but a national question that could be solved only by making it "a political world question to be discussed and settled by the civilized nations of the world in council." In 1897, at a world congress of Zionism, he declared, "We want to lay the foundation stone for the house which will become the refuge of the Jewish nation. Zionism is the return to Judaism even before the return to the land of Israel."The present volume is a complete and unabridged republication of The Jewish State, reproduced from the edition published by the American Zionist Emergency Council, New York, 1946. Translated by Sylvie D'Avigdor, it includes an introduction by Louis Lipsky, and a biography of Herzl based on the work of Alex Bein. For Jews, scholars, historians, anyone seeking to understand the history of the 20th century, The Jewish State is indispensable reading. This edition makes it widely available in an inexpensive high-quality format.

    Herman and Noam Chomsky show that, contrary to the usual image of the news media as cantankerous, obstinate, and ubiquitous in their search for truth and defense of justice, in their actual practice they defend the economic, social, and political agendas of the privileged groups that dominate domestic society, the state, and the global order.Based on a series of case studies—including the media’s dichotomous treatment of “worthy” versus “unworthy” victims, “legitimizing” and “meaningless” Third World elections, and devastating critiques of media coverage of the U.S. wars against Indochina—Herman and Chomsky draw on decades of criticism and research to propose a Propaganda Model to explain the media’s behavior and performance. Their new introduction updates the Propaganda Model and the earlier case studies, and it discusses several other applications. These include the manner in which the media covered the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement and subsequent Mexican financial meltdown of 1994-1995, the media’s handling of the protests against the World Trade Organization, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund in 1999 and 2000, and the media’s treatment of the chemical industry and its regulation. What emerges from this work is a powerful assessment of how propagandistic the U.S. mass media are, how they systematically fail to live up to their self-image as providers of the kind of information that people need to make sense of the world, and how we can understand their function in a radically new way.

    Sayed Ammar Nashawani's lectures on the biographies of the fourteen infallible figures in Shi'a Islam.An invaluable resource that represents a Shi'a view of the history of Islam, the Prophet and Imams for the present day audience. This excellent book will be of benefit to many in understanding the true nature of Islam and also illustrate how the illustrious figures as representing and manifesting universal human values that can serve humanity at large

    The worst part: you could be infected, too.