This book presents a study of twelfth-century humanism seen as an all-embracing discourse in which the human and the divine interact on equal terms. The book focuses on a number of twelfth-century intellectuals, especially Thierry of Chartres, Peter Abelard, William of Conches, Bernard Silvestris, and Alan of Lille. The book explains both the appeal and the demise of this humanism.

In a novel approach that the author terms "symbolic paradigm analysis," Paradise and Paradigm offers a "theoretically modular" systematic comparison of two "Persian" religions: early Syriac Christianity as the foundation of the East Syrian "Church of the East" (the Nestorian Church of Persia) and the Baha'i Faith, a new world religion. The author compares the hymns of the greatest poet of early Christianity, Saint Ephrem the Syrian, and the richly imagistic writings of the founder of the Baha'i religion, Baha'u'llah. The book employs an original analytic technique in the creation of "symbolic profiles" constructed on Ninian Smart's dimensional model of religion. As Buck skillfully demonstrates, formal similarities between any two religions are best comprehended in terms of paradigmatic differences, which nuance all parallels through a process of symbolic transformation. Buck also shows the communal reflexivity of paradise imagery in representing the ideal faith-community in both traditions.

"This book presents a study of twelfth-century humanism seen as an all-embracing discourse in which the human and the divine interact on equal terms. The book focuses on a number of twelfth-century intellectuals, especially on Thierry of Chartres, Peter Abelard, William of Conches, Bernard Silvestris, and Alan of Lille. Defining characteristic of their texts is the fact that God, nature and humanity enter into a trialogue of sorts, involving many disparate subjects and aiming to bring out the archetypal relatedness of all kinds of knowledge with respect to human nature. As the authors studied here engage the divine and the universe in a joint conversation, the book ultimately concentrates on trying both to understand its appeal and to explain its subsequent demise."--Back cover.

A charge to people who believe that you must believe in a young earth to be a Christian.

Volume III is the third part of the 3-volume book Mathematics of Harmony as a New Interdisciplinary Direction and 'Golden' Paradigm of Modern Science. 'Mathematics of Harmony' rises in its origin to the 'harmonic ideas' of Pythagoras, Plato and Euclid, this 3-volume book aims to promote more deep understanding of ancient conception of the 'Universe Harmony,' the main conception of ancient Greek science, and implementation of this conception to modern science and education.This 3-volume book is a result of the authors' research in the field of Fibonacci numbers and the Golden Section and their applications. It provides a broad introduction to the fascinating and beautiful subject of the 'Mathematics of Harmony,' a new interdisciplinary direction of modern science. This direction has many unexpected applications in contemporary mathematics (a new approach to a history of mathematics, the generalized Fibonacci numbers and the generalized golden proportions, the generalized Binet's formulas), theoretical physics (new hyperbolic models of Nature) and computer science (algorithmic measurement theory, number systems with irrational bases, Fibonacci computers, ternary mirror-symmetrical arithmetic).The books are intended for a wide audience including mathematics teachers of high schools, students of colleges and universities and scientists in the field of mathematics, theoretical physics and computer science. The book may be used as an advanced textbook by graduate students and even ambitious undergraduates in mathematics and computer science.