Weaving the Scarlet Thread From the Feasts of Israel to Jesus! This intriguing and biblically sound book clearly shows the significance of each Feast... of the Lord—and how they all point to Jesus. Dr. Richard Booker depicts the unity found in God’s unfolding purposes for His people, be they Jew or Gentile, from the new birth found in Passover and the Crucifixion, all the way to entering God’s rest found in the Feast of Tabernacles and the Second Coming. The Always-Present One said to Moses, “Tell the people of Israel: ‘You will announce the Always-Present One’s appointed feasts (festivals) as holy gatherings. These {are} My special feasts (Leviticus 23:1-2 PEB). The Feasts of the Lord given originally to Israel are pictures of the Messiah, and represent seven phases of spiritual growth in the life of believers: • Passover. • Unleavened Bread. • First Fruits. • Pentecost. • Trumpets. • Atonement. • Tabernacles. Welcome the relevance and richness of celebrating the feasts today!

Nostalgia for the imagined warm family gatherings of yesteryear has colored our understanding of family celebrations. Elizabeth Pleck examines family... traditions over two centuries and finds a complicated process of change in the way Americans have celebrated holidays such as Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, Chinese New Year, and Passover as well as the life cycle rituals of birth, coming of age, marriage, and death. By the early nineteenth century carnivalesque celebrations outside the home were becoming sentimental occasions that used consumer culture and displays of status and wealth to celebrate the idea of home and family. The 1960s saw the full emergence of a postsentimental approach to holiday celebration, which takes place outside as often as inside the home, and recognizes changes in the family and women's roles, as well as the growth of ethnic group consciousness. This multicultural, comparative history of American family celebration, rich in detail and spiced with telling anecdotes and illustrations and a keen sense of irony, offers insight into the significance of ethnicity and consumer culture in shaping what people regard as the most memorable moments of family life.

Nationwide, more and more entrepreneurs are committing themselves to creating and running "third places," also known as "great good places." In his... landmark work, The Great Good Place, Ray Oldenburg identified, portrayed, and promoted those third places. Now, more than ten years after the original publication of that book, the time has come to celebrate the many third places that dot the American landscape and foster civic life. With 20 black-and-white photographs, Celebrating the Third Place brings together fifteen firsthand accounts by proprietors of third places, as well as appreciations by fans who have made spending time at these hangouts a regular part of their lives. Among the establishments profiled are a shopping center in Seattle, a three-hundred-year-old tavern in Washington, D.C., a garden shop in Amherst, Massachusetts, a coffeehouse in Raleigh, North Carolina, a bookstore in Traverse City, Michigan, and a restaurant in San Francisco.

The first International Women’s Day was celebrated in Copenhagen in 1910 and adopted by the Bolsheviks in 1913 as a means to popularize their... political program among factory women in Russia. By 1918, Women’s Day had joined May Day and the anniversary of the October Revolution as the most important national holidays on the calendar.Choi Chatterjee analyzes both Bolshevik attitudes towards women and invented state rituals surrounding Women’s Day in Russia and the early Soviet Union to demonstrate the ways in which these celebrations were a strategic form of cultural practice that marked the distinctiveness of Soviet civilization, legitimized the Soviet mission for women, and articulated the Soviet construction of gender. Unlike previous scholars who have criticized the Bolsheviks’ for repudiating their initial commitment to Marxist feminism, Chatterjee has discovered considerable continuity in the way that they imagined the ideal woman and her role in a communist society.Through the years, Women’s Day celebrations temporarily empowered women as they sang revolutionary songs, acted as strong protagonists in plays, and marched in processions carrying slogans about gender equality. In speeches, state policies, reports, historical sketches, plays, cartoons, and short stories, the passive Russian woman was transformed into an iconic Soviet Woman, one who could survive, improvise, and prevail over the most challenging of circumstances.

In the twenty years since its publication, Celebration of Discipline has helped over a million seekers discover a richer spiritual life infused with... joy, peace, and a deeper understanding of God. For this special twentieth anniversary edition, Richard J. Foster has added an introduction, in which he shares the story of how this beloved and enduring spiritual guidebook came to be.Hailed by many as the best modern book on Christian spirituality, Celebration of Discipline explores the "classic Disciplines," or central spiritual practices, of the Christian faith. Along the way, Foster shows that it is only by and through these practices that the true path to spiritual growth can be found.Dividing the Disciplines into three movements of the Spirit, Foster shows how each of these areas contribute to a balanced spiritual life. The inward Disciplines of meditation, prayer, fasting, and study, offer avenues of personal examination and change. The outward Disciplines of simplicity, solitude, submission, and service, help prepare us to make the world a better place. The corporate Disciplines of confession, worship, guidance, and celebration, bring us nearer to one another and to God.Foster provides a wealth of examples demonstrating how these Disciplines can become part of our daily activities-and how they can help us shed our superficial habits and "bring the abundance of God into our lives." He offers crucial new insights on simplicity, demonstrating how the biblical view of simplicity, properly understood and applied, brings joy and balance to our inward and outward lives and "sets us free to enjoy the provision of God as a gift that can be shared with others." The discussion of celebration, often the most neglected of the Disciplines, shows its critical importance, for it stands at the heart of the way to Christ. Celebration of Discipline will help motivate Christians everywhere to embark on a journey of prayer and spiritual growth.

This revised edition of a cross-cultural study of rituals surrounding death has become a standard text in anthropology, sociology, and religion. Part... of its fascination and success is that in understanding other people's death rituals we are able to gain a better understanding of our own. Peter Metcalf and Richard Huntington refer to a wide variety of examples from different continents and epochs. They compare the great tombs of the Berawan of Borneo and the pyramids of Egypt, or the dramas of medieval French royal funerals and the burial alive of the Dinka "masters of the spear" in the Sudan, and other burials which at first sight seem to have little in common. Many of these cases are anthropological classics, and the authors use these examples partly in order to illustrate the many different ways in which anthropologists have tried to interpret these rites. A new introduction reviews theoretical developments in the anthropological study of death since the book first appeared in 1979.

What is it like to start a new community-not a suburb or a subdivision, but a town, intended to be a self-supporting community that combines the best of... the new technological innovations and the most cherished nostalgic elements of American towns? In 1997, six months after the first residents relocated to Celebration, Florida--Disney's "model" town--Doug Frantz and Cathy Collins and their two children moved in to participate in and report on this new venture. Their account, which The Richmond Style Weekly called a "fascinating and evenhanded" report from the trenches, follows the ups and downs of the two years the family lived this experiment firsthand; the new afterword details their surprisingly difficult transition back to a "normal life" in Westport, Connecticut. Their experience tells us as much about ourselves and our hopes and dreams as it does about the daily reality of building a community from the ground up.

"... a good book to add to an introduction to sociology course if you want to give your students a good sense of how sociology analyzes culture and... media....There is a lot in the book and Sternheimer does a good job of weaving together hard sociological data on stratification, inequalities, wage and labor trends to the narrative promoted by the celebrity culture along with changes in the structure and power relations in the industry itself. The book is an easy read with a lot of illustrations from celebrity magazines and so is very appropriate for undergraduate audiences."—Global Sociology Using examples from the first celebrity fan magazines of 1911 to the present, Celebrity Culture and the American Dream considers how major economic and historical factors shaped the nature of celebrity culture as we know it today. Equally important, the book explains how and why the story of Hollywood celebrities matters, sociologically speaking, to an understanding of American society, to the changing nature of the American Dream, and to the relation between class and culture. This book: Explores the relationship between celebrity culture, consumption, class, and social mobility Discusses social changes pertaining to class, gender, marriage and divorce, and race Includes numerous pictures from fan magazine articles and ads Examines the connections between celebrity culture and economic, political, and social changes Considers the importance of the structure of the entertainment industry to understand how celebrity culture is manufactured

In this fascinating and topical beginners guide, Ellis Cashmore explores the intriguing issue of celebrity culture: its origins, its meaning and its... global influence. Covering such varied perspectives as fame addiction, the ‘celebrification’ of politics and celebrity fatigue, Cashmore analyzes the relationship celebrity has with commodification and the consumer society, and investigates the new media and the quest for self-perfection. Cashmore takes readers on a quest that visits the Hollywood film industry of the early twentieth century, the film set of Cleopatra in the 1970s, the dressing room of Madonna in the 1980s, the burial of Diana in the 1990s, and the Big Brother house of the early 2000s. Author of Beckham and Tyson, Cashmore collects research, theory, and case studies en route as he explores the intriguing issue of celebrity culture: its origins, its meaning, and its global influence. Including reviews of existing literature, and an outline of key contemporary topics, this absorbing book skilfully explains why we have become so captivated by the lives and loves of the celebrity and, in so doing, presents the clearest, most comprehensive, wide-ranging, and accessible account of celebrity culture to date.

Time magazine named Bono and Bill and Melinda Gates their Persons of the Year. The United Nations tapped Angelina Jolie as a goodwill ambassador. Bob... Geldof organized the Live8 concert to push the G8 leaders summit on AIDS and debt relief. What has come to be called celebrity diplomacy attracts wide media attention, significant money, and top official access around the world. But is this phenomenon just the latest fad? Are celebrities dabbling in an arena that is out of their depth, or are they bringing justified notice to important problems that might otherwise languish on the crowded international diplomatic scene? This book is the first to examine celebrity diplomacy as a serious global project with important implications, both positive and negative. Intended for readers who might not normally read about celebrities, it will also attract audiences often turned off by international affairs. Celebrities bring optimism and buzz to issues that seem deep and gloomy. Even if their lofty goals remain elusive, when celebrities speak, other actors in the global system listen.

From $10,000 tweets to making money in the afterlife, a recovering gossip columnist explores the business lessons that power the Hollywood Industrial... ComplexWhy do celebrities get paid so much more than regular people to do a job that seems to afford them the same amount of leisure time as most retirees? What do Bush-era economics have to do with the rise of Kim Kardashian? How do the laws of supply and demand explain why the stars of Teen Mom are on the cover of Us Weekly? And how was the sale of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s baby pictures a little like a street drug deal? After a decade spent toiling as an entertainment journalist and gossip columnist, Jo Piazza asks the hard questions about the business behind celebrity. Make no mistake: Celebrity is an industry. Never in the course of human history has the market for celebrities been as saturated as it is today. Nearly every day most Americans will consume something a celebrity is selling—a fragrance, a sneaker, a song, a movie, a show, a tweet, or a photo in a magazine. With the benefits of Piazza’s unique access to the celebrity market, Celebrity, Inc. explains in detail what generates cash for the industry and what drains value faster than a starlet downs champagne—in twelve fascinating case studies that tackle celebrities the way industry analysts would dissect any consumer brand.

This book looks at the evolution and impact of celebrity politics in the United States. It discusses how closely intertwined the worlds of politics... and Hollywood have become, how celebrityhood pervades the political process—from campaigns and elections to governing, lobbying, and legislating, and the long-term implications of this trend. Chapter topics cover media image-makers, the money machine, the celebrity presidency, activist celebrities, sports politicos, satire: the downside of celebrityhood, and public evaluations of the celebrity regime. For anyone interested in the politics and pop culture of America.

In contemporary society, the cult of celebrity is inescapable. Anyone can be turned into a celebrity, and anything can be made into a celebrity event.... Celebrity has become a part of everyday life, a common reference point. But how have people like Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Bill Clinton or Princess Diana impressed themselves so powerfully on the public mind? Do they have unique qualities, or have their images been constructed by the media? And what of the dark side of celebrity – why is the hunger to be in the public eye so great that people are prepared to go to any lengths to achieve it, as numerous mass murderers and serial killers have done.Chris Rojek brings together celebrated figures from the arts, sports, politics and other public spheres, from O.J. Simpson and Marilyn Monroe to Hitler and David Bowie, and touches on many movements and fads, including punk, rock-and-roll and fashion. Rojek analyzes the difference between ascribed celebrity, which derives from bloodline, and achieved celebrity, which follows on from personal achievement - the difference between Princess Margaret and, say, Woody Allen. He also shows how there is no parallel in history to today's ubiquitous "living" form of celebrity, powered by newspapers, PR departments, magazines and electronic mass media.