Wisdom for Kings, Rulers, Leaders and Ordinary Folk speaks to the love motif of God for His people. The writing in the Book of Proverbs peregrinates through the books of the Old Testament and back into the New Testament as the Holy Spirit reveals the sincerity, depth and integrity of Scripture. The decision to use the Reflections to talk about the grace, mercy and love of Christ Jesus as seen in the Book of Proverbs was the right decision. Like the compendium of contributors to the Book of Proverbs, Jesus used everyday situations to talk about the spiritual hope available to all humanity. Many of the teachings of Jesus, originally found in the Book of Proverbs, point to the wisdom of God throughout the Holy Bible. Every word in the New Testament points to God, as the penultimate source of wisdom. Keywords: Enlightening, Life, Changing, Informative, Thought, Provoking, Eye, Opening, Practical, Wisdom, Unveiled, A, Must, Read, Before, Choosing, A, Friend, Or, A Spouse

Much philosophical work on pop culture apologises for its use; using popular culture is a necessary evil, something merely useful for reaching the masses with important philosophical arguments. But works of pop culture are important in their own right--they shape worldviews, inspire ideas, change minds. We wouldn't baulk at a book dedicated to examining the philosophy of The Great Gatsby or 1984--why aren't Star Trek and Superman fair game as well? After all, when produced, the former were considered pop culture just as much as the latter. This will be the first major reference work to right that wrong, gathering together entries on film, television, games, graphic novels and comedy, and officially recognizing the importance of the field. It will be the go-to resource for students and researchers in philosophy, culture, media and communications, English and history and will act as a springboard to introduce the reader to the other key literature in the field.

"The Original Story" is a comprehensive and lively guide to the Old Testament, offering an essential introduction for readers of all faiths and none. It provides a complete course covering history, archaeology, geography, and textual interpretation.

Continuing his series of sermons for the Common Lectionary (Revised), Bruce Taylor offers theologically rich, sacramentally sensitive, and biblically centered proclamations for the Sundays and major feast days of Year B, from Pentecost through Christ the King (Reign of Christ), and a sample of preaching from the Daily Lectionary. As in his other sermon collections, readers will find here a strong testimony to Christian unity and a deep appreciation of the heritage and contemporary relevance of the church as well as the importance of individual discipleship. Taylor's examples of story sermons are poignant and demonstrate how this style of preaching can be profound as well as engaging. Preachers and devotional readers alike will find Life Woven into God a welcome companion to their discovery of the treasures of the liturgical year and faithful exploration of Mark's Gospel, along with the accompanying Scripture passages commended for use in Christian worship.

Recent theoretical and methodological innovations in the anthropological analysis of South Asian societies have introduced distinctive modifications in the study of Indian social structure and social change. This book, reporting on twenty empirical studies of Indian society conducted by outstanding scholars, reflects these trends not only with reference to Indian society itself, but also in terms of the relevance of such trends to an understanding of social change more generally.The contributors demonstrate the adaptive changes experienced by the studied groups in particular villages, towns, cities, and regions. The authors view the basic social units of joint family, caste, and village not as structural isolates, but as intimately connected with one another and with other social units through social and cultural networks of various kinds that incorporate the social units into the complex structure of Indian civilization. Within this broadened conception of social structure, these studies trace the changing relations of politics, economics, law, and language to the caste system.Showing that the caste system is dynamic, with upward and downward mobility characterizing it from pre-British times to the present, the studies suggest that the modernizing forces which entered the system since independence--parliamentary democracy, universal suffrage, land reforms, modern education, urbanization, and industrial technology--provided new opportunities and paths to upward mobility, but did not radically alter the system. The chapters in this book show that the study of Indian society reveals novel forms of social structure change. They introduce methods and theories that may well encourage social scientists to extend the study of change in Indian society to the study of change in other areas.

Arguably the most decisive shift in the history of ideas in modern times was the complete demolition during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries - in the wake of the Scientific Revolution - of traditional structures of authority, scientific thought, and belief by the new philosophy and the philosophes, culminating in Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau. In this revolutionary process which effectively overthrew all justicfication for monarchy, aristocracy, and ecclesiastical power, as well as man's dominance over woman, theological dominance of education, and slavery, substituting the modern principles of equality, democracy, and universality, the Radical Enlightenment played a crucially important part. Despite the present day interest in the revolutions of the late eighteenth century, the origins and rise of the Radical Enlightenment have been astonishingly little studied doubtless largely because of its very wide international sweep and the obvious difficulty of fitting in into the restrictive conventions of 'national history' which until recently tended to dominate all historiography. The greatest obstacle to the Radical Enlightenment finding its proper place in modern historical writing is simply that it was not French, British, German, Italian, Jewish or Dutch, but all of these at the same time. In this novel interpretation of the Radical Enlightenment down to La Mettie and Diderot, two of its key exponents, particular stress is placed on the pivotal role of Spinoza and the widespread underground international philosophical movement known before 1750 as Spinozism.