The book consists of readings on the central issue in philosophical theology: the existence of God. It may be used alone as a main book or as a... complement to works on related issues. It presents the most influential classical and contemporary statements on problems pertaining to a belief in God, including arguments for the existence of God, the nature of faith and reason, the problem of evil, and meaning of religious languages; readings are presented chronologically, allowing for an emphasis on historical continuities and connections.

Why are the paleolithic Venus of Willendorf, Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel frescoes, and Marcel Duchamp's ready-made urinal all considered works of art?... Why, strictly speaking, is a Cindy Sherman photograph more "art-like" than a Da Vinci portrait? How did the painters and sculptors of the Renaissance see their creations? And who decides what art is today? In the tradition of Marshall McLuhan and John Berger, this learned and deliciously subversive book gives us a new way of seeing our artistic heritage. Believing Is Seeing is a work of multicultural scope and glittering intelligence that bridges the gulf between classical Japanese painting and the films of Spike Lee, between high theory and pop culture. Probing beyond the rhetorical surface of standard art histories and drawing on a panoramic array of illustrative material, Mary Anne Staniszewski throws a fresh light on individual works and the often mystifying criteria by which they are valued.

Academy Award-winning filmmaker Errol Morris investigates the hidden truths behind a series of documentary photographs. In Believing is Seeing... Academy Award-winning director Errol Morris turns his eye to the nature of truth in photography. In his inimitable style, Morris untangles the mysteries behind an eclectic range of documentary photographs, from the ambrotype of three children found clasped in the hands of an unknown soldier at Gettysburg to the indelible portraits of the WPA photography project. Each essay in the book presents the reader with a conundrum and investigates the relationship between photographs and the real world they supposedly record. During the Crimean War, Roger Fenton took two nearly identical photographs of the Valley of the Shadow of Death-one of a road covered with cannonballs, the other of the same road without cannonballs. Susan Sontag later claimed that Fenton posed the first photograph, prompting Morris to return to Crimea to investigate. Can we recover the truth behind Fenton's intentions in a photograph taken 150 years ago? In the midst of the Great Depression and one of the worst droughts on record, FDR's Farm Service Administration sent several photographers, including Arthur Rothstein, Dorothea Lange, and Walker Evans, to document rural poverty. When Rothstein was discovered to have moved the cow skull in his now-iconic photograph, fiscal conservatives-furious over taxpayer money funding an artistic project-claimed the photographs were liberal propaganda. What is the difference between journalistic evidence, fine art, and staged propaganda? During the Israeli-Lebanese war in 2006, no fewer than four different photojournalists took photographs in Beirut of toys lying in the rubble of bombings, provoking accusations of posing and anti-Israeli bias at the news organizations. Why were there so many similar photographs? And were the accusers objecting to the photos themselves or to the conclusions readers drew from them? With his keen sense of irony, skepticism, and humor, Morris reveals in these and many other investigations how photographs can obscure as much as they reveal and how what we see is often determined by our beliefs. Part detective story, part philosophical meditation, Believing Is Seeing is a highly original exploration of photography and perception from one of America's most provocative observers.

In Sue Ellen Thompson's fourth book of poems, the acclaimed poet explores relationships between mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, the past and... the present.

Here is a genuinely different and practical book for the inquirer and potential convert to Orthodox Christianity. It is different in a number of ways,... all of which commend this volume to wide use by pastors whose task it is to introduce the members of their inquirers classes to an Orthodox way of life which will touch their lives in a full and complete way (Fr. Stanley Harakas). Chapters include: What We Believe About the One Apostolic Church, the Nicene Creed, Jesus, the Holy Trinity, the Divine Liturgy, Salvation, the Church Fathers, the Church Year, Symbols, the Sacraments, the Saints and the Theotokos, Life After Death, the Bible, Icons, Prayers for the Dead, and Prayer. Recently translated in Korean and Romanian.

Does Islam call for the oppression of women? Non-Muslims point to the subjugation of women that occurs in many Muslim countries, especially those that... claim to be "Islamic," while many Muslims read the Qur'an in ways that seem to justify sexual oppression, inequality, and patriarchy. Taking a wholly different view, Asma Barlas develops a believer's reading of the Qur'an that demonstrates the radically egalitarian and antipatriarchal nature of its teachings.Beginning with a historical analysis of religious authority and knowledge, Barlas shows how Muslims came to read inequality and patriarchy into the Qur'an to justify existing religious and social structures and demonstrates that the patriarchal meanings ascribed to the Qur'an are a function of who has read it, how, and in what contexts. She goes on to reread the Qur'an's position on a variety of issues in order to argue that its teachings do not support patriarchy. To the contrary, Barlas convincingly asserts that the Qur'an affirms the complete equality of the sexes, thereby offering an opportunity to theorize radical sexual equality from within the framework of its teachings. This new view takes readers into the heart of Islamic teachings on women, gender, and patriarchy, allowing them to understand Islam through its most sacred scripture, rather than through Muslim cultural practices or Western media stereotypes.

The lively comedy of this novel in which a young woman comes of age amid the distractions and temptations of London high society belies the challenges... it poses to the conventions of courtship, the dependence of women, and the limitations of domesticity. Contending with the perils and the varied cast of characters of the marriage market, Belinda strides resolutely toward independence. Admired by her contemporary, Jane Austen, and later by Thackeray and Turgenev, Edgeworth tackles issues of gender and race in a manner at once comic and thought-provoking. The 1802 text used in this edition also confronts the difficult and fascinating issues of racism and mixed marriage, which Edgeworth toned down in later editions.About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

The lively comedy of this novel in which a young woman comes of age amid the distractions and temptations of London high society belies the challenges... it poses to the conventions of courtship, the dependence of women, and the limitations of domesticity. Contending with the perils and the varied cast of characters of the marriage market, Belinda strides resolutely toward independence. Admired by her contemporary, Jane Austen, and later by Thackeray and Turgenev, Edgeworth tackles issues of gender and race in a manner at once comic and thought-provoking. The 1802 text used in this edition also confronts the difficult and fascinating issues of racism and mixed marriage, which Edgeworth toned down in later editions.

The seminal book about IQ and class that ignited one of the most explosive controversies in decades, now updated with a new Afterword by Charles Murray ... Breaking new ground and old taboos, Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray tell the story of a society in transformation. At the top, a cognitive elite is forming in which the passkey to the best schools and the best jobs is no longer social background but high intelligence. At the bottom, the common denominator of the underclass is increasingly low intelligence rather than racial or social disadvantage. The Bell Curve describes the state of scientific knowledge about questions that have been on people's minds for years but have been considered too sensitive to talk about openly -- among them, IQ's relationship to crime, unemployment, welfare, child neglect, poverty, and illegitimacy; ethnic differences in intelligence; trends in fertility among women of different levels of intelligence; and what policy can do -- and cannot do -- to compensate for differences in intelligence. Brilliantly argued and meticulously documented, The Bell Curve is the essential first step in coming to grips with the nation's social problems.

The startling and groundbreaking novel that inspired Luis Buñuel's film by the same name is finally available once more. In a world that blurs the... lines between feminism and female sexuality, Belle de Jour remains as vital and controversial today as it was in its 1960 debut.Severine Serizy is a wealthy and beautiful Parisian housewife. She loves her husband, but she cannot share physical intimacy with him, and her vivid sadomasochistic fantasies drive her to seek employment at a brothel. By day, she enacts her customers' wildest fantasies under the pseudonym "Belle de Jour"; in the evenings, she returns home to her chaste marriage and oblivious husband. Famous for its unflinching eroticism, Joseph Kessel's novel continues to offer an eye-opening glance into a unique female psyche.

Have you ever wondered what it's like to get bitten by a zombie? To live through a bioweapon attack? To have every aspect of your life governed by... invisible ants? In Cory Doctorow's collection of novellas, he wields his formidable experience in technology and computing to give us mindbending sci-fi tales that explore the possibilities of information technology — and its various uses — run amok. "Anda's Game" is a spin on the bizarre new phenomenon of "cyber sweatshops," in which people are paid very low wages to play online games all day in order to generate in-game wealth, which can be converted into actual money. Another tale tells of the heroic exploits of "sysadmins" — systems administrators — as they defend the cyber-world, and hence the world at large, from worms and bioweapons. And yes, there is a story about zombies, too.

A big mystery surrounds Woodrow's family. His mother, Belle Prater, simply disappeared, and no one knows why. So when he goes to live next door to his... cousin, Gypsy, she finds that the two of them have a lot to sort out together. Soon they become best friends and join forces on a quest that sends out plenty of ripples through the local community. Humour and mystery combine to create unforgettable characters and an award-winning story that will appeal to all readers

Germaine Lauzon has won a million trading stamps from a department store. Her head swimming with dreams of refurbishing and redecorating her... working-class home from top to bottom with catalogue selections ranging from new kitchen appliances to “real Chinese paintings on velvet,” she invites fourteen of her friends and relatives in the neighbourhood over to help her paste the stamps into booklets.Raucous, reckless and rude, the women shamelessly share their most secret hopes and fears, complain stridently about their friends and relatives, fantasize wistfully about escaping the misogynist drudgery of their lives and surreptitiously tuck most of the stamps into their purses and clothing, self-righteously appropriating what they consider to be Germaine’s “illegitimate” good fortune.While earlier attempts had been made to stage the realities of Québécois life using colloquial language and a realist backdrop of working-class Montréal, these populist hits were considered rustic and anomalous, while “real” (Parisian) French continued to dominate theatre and “high culture” until the end of the 1950s.As Québec searched for a new socio-political identity and a language that could articulate its rapidly emerging post-colonial reality throughout the “quiet revolution,” Michel Tremblay struggled to find an authentic Québécois voice. Written in 1965, it took three years for him get a first production of Les Belles Soeurs in 1968. Premiering at the Théâtre du Rideau-Vert in the same year that René Lévesque founded the nationalist Parti Québécois, this first of what was to become more than a dozen plays in Tremblay’s Cycle of Les Belles Soeurs became an overnight success. In one fell stroke, Joual, the distinctive Québec vernacular that had evolved over centuries since the end of French colonial rule had been legitimized, and Michel Tremblay, much like Chaucer in English and Dante in Italian, had become “the father of the Québécois language.”

To encourage the wides distribution possible, this booklet is available at a nominal price for use by you or your oraganization. You may place your name... or the name of your oraganization in the space below.