To an outside observer, the religious culture of the United States might seem astonishing. For German sociologist Michael Zoller, American Catholicism is more than that; it is a contradiction in terms. With its historical consciousness, emphasis on institutionalized structures, and combination of skepticism and assurance of grace, Catholicism seems to embody the very opposite of the American cultural principle. Zoller here reexamines widely held notions about secularization and the role of religion in civil society to show how Catholicism was integrated into the Protestant, egalitarian, and...
To an outside observer, the religious culture of the United States might seem astonishing. For German sociologist Michael Zoller, American Catholicism...
Using the tools of contemporary semiotic theory to analyze classical rabbinic hermeneutics and medieval mystical exegesis, Betty Rojtman unveils a striking modernity in these early forms of textual interpretation. The metaphor from rabbinic literature that describes the writing of the Torah--black fire on white fire--becomes, in Rojtman's analysis, a figure for the differential structures that can be found throughout rabbinic discourse. Moving through the successive levels of traditional commentary, from early Midrash to modern Kabbalah, Rojtman examines the tension between the fluidity and...
Using the tools of contemporary semiotic theory to analyze classical rabbinic hermeneutics and medieval mystical exegesis, Betty Rojtman unveils a str...
As stubborn, as surprising, as artful as life in its refusal to conform to a particular literary genre, Marcel Benabou s book is at once a memoir and a novel, a confession and a reflection on the prerogatives and imperatives of writing one s story. At its center, forever alluring and elusive, is the beautiful and ethereal Tamara, the exact incarnation of our narrator s most enduring fantasy a femme fatale for the lover of form. Who precisely our narrator is, is less certain: The young Manuel, who leaves his home in Morocco to study in Paris, only to encounter the enticing Tamara? Or the...
As stubborn, as surprising, as artful as life in its refusal to conform to a particular literary genre, Marcel Benabou s book is at once a memoir and ...
What is medieval religious drama, and what function does it serve in negotiating between the domains of theology and popular life? This book aims to answer these questions by studying three sets of these dramas: tenth-century Easter plays, twelfth-century Adam plays, and fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Passion plays. However, the author's intent is not to present a genre history. Instead, he seeks to mediate between the historical development of the plays and a systematic unfolding of the archetypal structure within which the plays grasp salvation history and act it out. His theoretical...
What is medieval religious drama, and what function does it serve in negotiating between the domains of theology and popular life? This book aims to a...
Patrice Gueniffey is the leading French historian of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic age. This book, hailed as a masterwork on its publication in France, takes up the epic narrative at the heart of this turbulent period: the life of Napoleon himself, the man who--in Madame de Stael's words--made the rest of "the human race anonymous." Gueniffey follows Bonaparte from his obscure boyhood in Corsica, to his meteoric rise during the Italian and Egyptian campaigns of the Revolutionary wars, to his proclamation as Consul for Life in 1802. Bonaparte is the story of how Napoleon became...
Patrice Gueniffey is the leading French historian of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic age. This book, hailed as a masterwork on its publication in ...
Money is an evil that does good, and a good that does evil. It inspires hymns to the prosperity it enables, manifestos about the poor it leaves behind, and diatribes for its corrosion of morality. In The Wisdom of Money, one of the world's great essayists guides us through the rich commentary that money has generated since ancient times--both the passions and the resentments--as he builds an unfashionable defense of the worldly wisdom of the bourgeoisie.
Bruckner begins with the worshippers and the despisers. Sometimes they are the same people--priests, for example, who...
Money is an evil that does good, and a good that does evil. It inspires hymns to the prosperity it enables, manifestos about the poor it leaves beh...
