Fidelity with Plausibility

Fidelity with Plausibility
Author: Wesley J. Wildman
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 472
Release: 1998-01-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9780791435953

Virtually all human endeavors can be analyzed and modeled and understood through computer-aided study, and that is very much at the core of operations research, game theory, and decision science.Understanding the potential impact of any action is critical to the success of that action, and in ESTIMATING IMPACT Alexander Kott and Gary Citrenbaum, with a stellar group of contributors, demonstrate how military or humanitarian interventions (or the decision not to intervene) can be rigorously analyzed beforehand and their likely impacts and ramifications predicted at levels appropriate to their scope. A wide range of modeling programs are available that support plan assessment and impact forecast, and they allow accurate prediction within an interdependent set of political, military, economic, social, information, and infrastructure systems, and experts involved in the use and development of these tools demonstrate how, when, and why they should be used.

Site Fidelity: Stories

Site Fidelity: Stories
Author: Claire Boyles
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2021-06-15
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 039353183X

Finalist for the 2022 Reading the West Debut Fiction Award Finalist for the 2022 Colorado Book Award for Literary Fiction Longlisted for the 2022 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection Set in the western sagebrush steppe, Site Fidelity is a vivid, intimate, and deeply human exploration of life on the shifting terrain of our changing planet. Firmly rooted in the modern American West, Site Fidelity follows women and families who feel the instinctual, inexplicable pull of a home they must work to protect from the effects of economic inequity and climate catastrophe. A seventy-four-year-old nun turns to eco-sabotage to stop a fracking project. A woman delivers her own baby in a Nevada ghost town. A young farmer hides her chicken flock from the government during a bird flu epidemic. An ornithologist returns home to care for her rancher father and gets caught up trying to protect a breeding group of endangered Gunnison sage grouse. In lean, lyrical prose, Claire Boyles evokes the bleakness and beauty of our threatened western landscapes. Spanning the decades from the 1970s to a plausible near future, this knockout debut introduces unforgettable characters who must confront the challenges of caregiving and loss alongside the very practical impacts of fracking, water rights law, and other agricultural policies. Site Fidelity is a vivid, intimate, and deeply human exploration of life on the shifting terrain of our changing planet.

Fidelity

Fidelity
Author: Grace Paley
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 97
Release: 2014-07-15
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 146687581X

Just before her death in 2007 at the age of eighty-four, Grace Paley completed Fidelity, a wise and poignant book of poems. Full of memories of friends and family and incisive observations of life in both her beloved hometown, New York City, and rural Vermont, the poems are sober and playful, experimenting with form while remaining eminently readable. They explore the beginnings and ends of relationships, the ties that bind siblings, the workings of dreams, the surreal strangeness of the aging body—all imbued with her unique perspective and voice. Mournful and nostalgic, but also ruefully funny and full of love, Fidelity is Grace Paley's passionate and haunting elegy for the life she was leaving behind.

Rhetorical Public Speaking

Rhetorical Public Speaking
Author: Nathan Crick
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 163
Release: 2022-10-20
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1000738620

This textbook offers an innovative approach to public speaking by employing the rhetorical canon as a means of constructing artful speech in a multi-mediated environment. By stressing how contemporary public speaking continues the classical art of persuasion, this book provides a foundation to guide students in constructing and delivering messages that address matters of concern and interest to their audience. This edition features contemporary as well as historical examples to highlight key concepts and show how rhetoric works in practice. It not only emphasizes the traditional skills of face-to-face oratory, but it also includes a chapter solely dedicated to highlighting the techniques and tactics of digital social influencing that adapts public speaking to online platforms. Each chapter includes speech excerpts, summaries, and exercises for review and retention. This textbook for courses in public speaking and rhetoric will particularly appeal to instructors wishing to foreground speaking as engaged citizens on public and political issues. Online resources include an instructor’s manual with discussion and test questions, video links, and sample materials.

Religion within the Limits of History Alone

Religion within the Limits of History Alone
Author: Demian Wheeler
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 528
Release: 2020-09-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1438479352

Among the greatest challenges facing religious thinkers today is that created by historicism, the notion that human beings and their myriad understandings of reality are utterly historical, conditioned by contingent circumstances and tied to particular contexts. In this book, Demian Wheeler confronts the historicist challenge by delineating and defending a particular trajectory of historicist thought known as pragmatic historicism. Rooted in the German Enlightenment and fully developed within the early Chicago school of theology, pragmatic historicism is a predominantly American tradition that was philosophically nurtured by classical pragmatism and its intellectual siblings, naturalism and radical empiricism. Religion within the Limits of History Alone not only undertakes a detailed genealogy of this pragmatic historicist lineage but also sets forth a constructive program for contemporary theology by charting a path for its future development. Wheeler shows that pragmatic historicism is an underdeveloped resource for contemporary theology since it offers a model for normative religious thought that is theologically compelling yet wholly nonsupernaturalistic, deeply pluralistic, unflinchingly liberal, and radically historicist.

Christ Actually

Christ Actually
Author: James Carroll
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2014
Genre: Church and the world
ISBN: 0670786039

Critically acclaimed and bestselling author James Carroll has explored every aspect of Christianity, faith, and Jesus Christ except this central one: What can we believe about -- and how can we believe in -- Jesus in the twenty-first century in light of the Holocaust and other atrocities of the twentieth century and the drift from religion that followed?

Human Rights: Moral or Political?

Human Rights: Moral or Political?
Author: Adam Etinson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 519
Release: 2018-03-09
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0191022225

Over the past decade or so, philosophical speculation about human rights has tended to fall into two streams. On the one hand, there are "Orthodox" theorists, who think of human rights as natural rights: moral rights that we have simply in virtue of being human. On the other hand, there are "Political" theorists, who think of human rights as rights that play a distinctive role, or set of roles, in modern international politics: setting universal standards of political legitimacy, serving as norms of international concern, and/or imposing limits on the exercise of national sovereignty. This edited volume explores this disagreement, its underlying sources, and related issues in the philosophy of human rights. Using the Orthodox-Political debate as a springboard for broader reflection, the volume covers a diverse range of questions about: the relevance of the history of human rights to their philosophical comprehension; how to properly understand the relationship between human rights morality and law; how to balance the normative character of human rights - their description of an ideal world - with the requirement that they be feasible in the here and now; the role of human rights in a world shaped by politics and power; and how to reconcile the individualistic and communitarian aspects of human rights. All chapters are accompanied by useful and probing commentaries, which help to create dialogues throughout the entire volume.

Effing the Ineffable

Effing the Ineffable
Author: Wesley J. Wildman
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2018-10-09
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1438471254

In Effing the Ineffable, Wesley J. Wildman confronts the human obsession with ultimate reality and our desire to conceive and speak of this reality through religious language, despite the seeming impossibility of doing so. Each chapter is a meditative essay on an aspect of life that, for most people, is fraught with special spiritual significance: dreaming, suffering, creating, slipping, balancing, eclipsing, loneliness, intensity, and bliss. These moments can inspire religious questioning and commitment, and, in extreme situations, drive us in search of ways to express what matters most to us. Drawing upon American pragmatist, Anglo-American analytic, and Continental traditions of philosophical theology, Wildman shows how, through direct description, religious symbolism, and phenomenological experience, the language games of religion become a means to attempt, and, in some sense, to accomplish this task.