bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Tending the Home Fires
Authors: Camfield Gregg
Published: November 2023

Laughter is often the expression of joy that comes from compensation for some pain. So-called subversive satire yields a fairly simple compensation that comes from the liberation of anger, though as I suggested in the last chapter, nothing in such satire is fundamentally opposed to the status quo so much as it expresses a desire to change the flow of power within the status quo. That is to say, satire, as long as its irony is held in check by the satirist’s commitment to a clear set of moral values, is the fantasy of a simple inversion of perceived power structures rather than a fundamental refiguring of the idea of power. Humor as a mode of compensation is more complicated, in that it opens conceptions of power and order to imaginative reconsideration. The pleasure such openness entails is often mitigated by the fear of openness and the danger of doubt that it also entails. But as a compensation, humor is much healthier than satire because it makes possible a flexible psychic alternative to repression and aggression, as I suggested was true for both Irving and Parton.
Home, Sweat Home
Authors: Camfield Gregg
Published: November 2023

The previous chapter suggested how difficult it is to constrain humor, to fence in its potential to see the world in unorthodox ways. TI1e cases of Mark Twain and Marietta Holley suggest that for humor to work its magic, it is equally necessary to fence out of humor’s realm competing serious constructions of reality. Seriousness can be seen as the repression and suppression of individual freedom required both by physical and social exigencies. It can also be seen as the realm that protects individuality from some of the most vigorous consequences of reality. This paradox is particularly interesting in the face of domesticity, both because humor was considered a relief from dangerous levels of seriousness in the philosophy that sanctioned domesticity, and because many of the ideologues of domesticity, when describing home as a haven, implied that home was a place of, if not idleness, at least of relaxation. In a sense, then, the ideology of domesticity made home the proper place for humor.
European Discovery
Authors: Connelley Thomas
Published: November 2023

Like the explorers whose meanderings he documents here, historian Thomas Connelley travels widely in time from DeSoto’s rapacious days in the southern Appalachians (1540) to the Crawfords of New Hampshire, who set the tourism trade going in northern New England (beginning in the 1790s). The history of the mountains through which the AT passes is laced with heroes and villains, both serious scientists with an eye toward preservation and self-aggrandizing developers with an eye toward an easy fortune. This overview may open doors for further exploration, through reading, of your own. The Explorers: From DeSoto to Kephart Ong Lines Of Chained Indian Slaves And Concubines Struggled Across The Mountain trails. Behind them came more baggage carriers and a herd of squealing pigs. Ahead marched helmeted Spanish conquistadores with their leader, Hernando De Soto. De Soto might well have been the first white man to explore the Appalachians. During 1539 and early 1540, his column moved in a long, meandering line northward through Georgia and South Carolina.
The Land Underfoot
Authors: Lane Ferdinand
Published: November 2023

Geologist Ferdinand Lane explores the geological history of the Appalachian mountain range in the next selection. Lane’s review of the mountains’ biography, from 1950, gives a (then) settled interpretation of their origins. In the 1980s, John McPhee reported on a new, unresolved argument about the role of tectonic plates as causal factors in the formation of the Appalachians. Thus even something as solid as the rocks underfoot turns out to be as debatable as the weather overhead. Perhaps, when in a heavy sweat while scaling the tallest peaks along the AT Clingman’s Dome, North Carolina; Mt. Washington, New Hampshire; and Mt. Katahdin, Maine-hikers can distract themselves from their arduous efforts by contemplating how long it took the gods to build these mountains in the first place.
Appalachian Names
Authors: Sutton Ann & Myron
Published: November 2023

Despite the homogenizing effects of jet travel and television, we are still a polyglot nation with delightfully different regional accents and a host of exotic place names. A hiking trip on the AT brings many aural nuances to the attentive ear, and not just from the birds’ songs. “Appalachian” sounds different in the south (from about Pennsylvania onward) than it does in the north. Ann and Myron Sutton hiked the entire AT and noted the kaleidoscope of colorful place names Americans have invented, imported or expropriated in the Appalachian region. AT aficionado Robert Reddington wrote that “the name ‘Appalachian’ is apparently derived from the word ‘Appalachee,’ a tribe of the Muskhogean Indians who lived in northwest Florida. The tribe’s name is said to mean ‘people on the other side’ (of a river, presumably) in the Choctaw language The famous Spanish explorer, Hernando de Soto and his party became the first known white men to see as well as to visit the Appalachian Mountains [1539], which were mainly those in North Carolina. He is said to have named these mountains after the Apalachee tribe.”
Dreamers and Doers
Authors: Sutton Ann & Myron
Published: November 2023

Appalachian Trail hikers often ask whether the footpath is actually an old Native American trail. In fact it’s not, for the native peoples chose more efficient paths at lower elevations to move their warriors and nomadic populations through the wilderness. Nonetheless, the network of Native American wilderness paths was the forerunner of the first trails used by settlers, and those trails in some cases became the paths of roads and highways to follow. Ann and Myron Sutton describe here the ancient woodland paths of native peoples.
Attitudes and Inclinations
Authors: Jebb Miles
Published: November 2023

While the equipment required for long-distance hiking has evolved enormously over the past century, the attitudes backpackers bring to the trail have changed as well. The results are mixed, according to the trail-tested British writer and walker Miles Jebb, whose hiking books describe long rambles through the Thames valley and the South Downs in England. Jebb sees the backpack, or rucksack, as a reflection of the walker’s attitudes and intentions. After tasting the hiking experience on America’s Appalachian Trail, Jebb recognized that not all walkers and hikers are stamped from the same mold, that indeed the typical North American long-distance backpacker brings some special attitudes and behaviors with him, or her, to the trail.
Pennsylvania
Authors: Emblidge David
Published: November 2023

An intricate, antique wrought iron bridge, 1890, at Swatara Creek, Pennsylvania. Trail miles: 232 Trail maintenance: Cumberland Valley AT Management Assoc., York Hiking Club, Susquehanna AT Club, Brandywine Valley Outing Club, Blue Mt. Eagle Climbing Club, Allentown Hiking Club, Philadelphia Trail Club, Appalachian Mt. Club (Delaware Valley chapter), Batona Hiking Club, Wilmington Trail Club Highest point: Big Pine Flat Ridge, +/-2,080 ft. (Michigan State Forest) Broadest rivers: Susquehanna (Clarks Ferry Bridge); Delaware Features: Extended ridge walk over ancient, sharply jumbled rocks, with pastoral valleys and historic sites (Civil War). AT follows northern end of Blue Ridge, crosses Cumberland Valley, traverses long Blue Mt. toward New Jersey. Hawk Mt. Sanctuary (birds!) and Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area offer rich leisure activities. The Pinnacle, “the best view in Pennsylvania.” Halfway point of the AT is 40 miles north of Pennsylvania-Maryland border (Mason-Dixon Line).
New York
Authors: Emblidge David
Published: November 2023

New York Ramblers hiking club on Black Mt., Harriman State Park, New York. Trail miles: 95 Trail maintenance: New York-New Jersey Trail Conference Highest point: Prospect Rock, 1,433 ft., on Prospect Mt., near Greenwood Lake Lowest point on the AT: 124 ft., near Bear Mt. Bridge Broadest river: Hudson, crossable on Bear Mt. Bridge Features: Surprisingly wild areas, with sharp climbs and descents, yet so close to New York City (views of Manhattan, 50 miles distant, at several points). First section of the AT was built in Bear Mt. State Park, 1922-23.
Massachusetts
Authors: Emblidge David
Published: November 2023

From Tyringham Cobble, the peaceable Tyringham Valley, Berkshire County, Massachusetts. Trail miles: 90.4 Trail maintenance: Appalachian Mt. Club (Berkshire chapter) Highest point: Mt. Greylock, 3,491 ft. Broadest river: Housatonic (one AT crossing) Features: Colorful mix of rugged mountains, pastoral valleys, and quintessential New England towns in the Berkshire hills. Highest mountain in southern New England (Mt. Greylock), crowned by full-service Bascom Lodge, staffed by Appalachian Mt. Club.
Vermont
Authors: Emblidge David
Published: November 2023

Stratton Pond, at Stratton Mt., southern Vermont. Trail miles: 146 Trail maintenance: Green Mt. Club, Dartmouth Outing Club Highest point: Killington Peak, 4,241 ft. (trail bypasses summit) Broadest river: Connecticut (shared with New Hampshire) Features: The Long Trail, completed in 1931 (Massachusetts to Canada), contiguous with the AT for about 100 miles from Massachusetts to Sherburne Pass in central Vermont. Vast forests, lovely villages, lofty peaks, some offering hikers off-season ski lift rides into the valleys below.
New Hampshire
Authors: Emblidge David
Published: November 2023

Above tree line on Mt. Lafayette, in the Franconia Range, White Mts., New Hampshire. Trail miles: 160.6 Trail maintenance: Dartmouth Outing Club, Appalachian Mountain Club Highest point: Mt. Washington, 6,288 ft. >Broadest river: Connecticut (shared with New Hampshire), crossable by bridge Features: Extensive hiking above tree line in the Presidential Range and Franconia Range of White Mt. National Forest. Wild, unpredictable weather. Many peaks above tree line and several over 5,000 ft. Hut system (lodges accommodating 36 to 90 guests). Fragile, beautiful alpine flowers, shrubs, lichens. Pinkham Notch Camp, at the eastern foot of Mt. Washington, a full-service outdoor recreation center staffed by Appalachian Mt. Club.
H. Richard Niebuhr
Authors: Siker Jeffrey S
Published: November 2023

H.Richard Niebuhr (1894-1962) is generally recognized as one of the foremost Protestant theologians/ethicists in the twentieth century, and his continuing influence is readily apparent as we come to its close. Niebuhr sought to reflect on Christian faith and on the Christian Scriptures, quite self-consciously, from where he perceived himself to be situated, as a twentieth-century Christian moral philosopher convinced in a fundamental way of God’s sovereignty, of humanity’s lostness, sinfulness, and idolatry in response to God, and of God’s graciousness toward human beings made manifest in the person of Jesus Christ. Another fundamental conviction Niebuhr held was the radically historical character of all human existence, including his own existence and the existence of Christianity in all its variations. Niebuhr approached Scripture as a witness to God’s sovereignty and grace and to human sinfulness, and as witness to and participant in the radically historical character of human existence in all its faithfulness and sinfulness alike.
Paul Ramsey
Authors: Siker Jeffrey S
Published: November 2023

Paul Ramsey (1913-88) is generally recognized as one of the foremost Christian ethicists of the twentieth century. His career spanned some forty years, most of it teaching in the religion department at Princeton University from the 1940s to the 1980s. He is probably best known for his contributions to just war theory and to medical ethics, but he has also exercised a tremendous influence upon the field of religious ethics in general, both in Protestant ethics and in Catholic moral theology. A good deal of attention has been given to Ramsey’s thought, resulting in, for example, a 1973 book on Ramsey by Charles Curran; a book of essays by various scholars, Love and Society: Essays in the Ethics of Paul Ramsey (1974); and an entire issue (fall 1991) of the Journal of Religious Ethics devoted to essays on Ramsey. But Ramsey’s use of the Bible has not been treated in any of these analyses, and very little on this subject can be found elsewhere.’
Stanley Hauerwas
Authors: Siker Jeffrey S
Published: November 2023

Stanley Hauerwas (b. 1940) is currently among the most prolific and significant theological ethicists. His work has exercised a tremendous influence in theological ethics from the 1970s through the 1990s, and one imagines well beyond. A significant feature of Hauerwas’ writing has been his self-conscious concern with Scripture as a touchstone for reflecting on theological ethics. For example, he introduces his book A Community of Character (1981) with the following statement: “My wish is that this book might help Christians rediscover that their most important social task is nothing less than to be a community capable of hearing the story of God we find in the scripture and living in a manner that is faithful to that story.” For Hauerwas, all theological reflection necessarily entails hearing the stories of Scripture and performing these stories. At the same time, Scripture is a function and derivative of Christian community, which means that the story of God related in Scripture can only be truly heard and enacted in the broader context of such community. Hauerwas’s approach to the Bible, then, reflects an appreciation for how the Christian community inter-prets Scripture and how, in tum, Scripture interprets the Christian community. This dynamic conversation between Scripture and community lies at the heart of Hauerwas’s approach to the Bible.
Elizabeth Bishop’s Bramble Bushes
Authors: Langenbach James
Published: November 2023

Elizabeth Bishop’s first meeting with Marianne Moore, outside the third-floor reading room of the New York Public Library, has become a crucial episode in stories told about Bishop’s career. Missing from those stories is an account of a meeting that took place a year earlier, this one with a modernist poet more threatening and more crucial to Bishop’s sense of what it meant to be a writer. In the spring of 1933, T. S. Eliot came to Vassar College to attend the premiere production of his fragmentary drama Sweeney Agonistes. He also read his poetry to Vassar students and submitted to an interview for the Vassar Miscellany News: Elizabeth Bishop conducted the interview. The following week, this report appeared in the Miscellany News.
Richard Howard’s Modern World
Authors: Langenbach James
Published: November 2023

In 1969 a book called Alone With America examined the careers of forty-one members of the third wave of twentieth-century American poetry—poets who like Ashbery, Merrill, and Rich were born with both T. S. Eliot’s and Elizabeth Bishop’s generation behind them. Its author, a poet who belongs to this third wave, does not appear. Not only does he not write about his own work: unlike most poet-critics, Richard Howard rarely seems to be addressing his own aesthetic principles when he discusses other poets. Reading Stevens’s or Lowell’s criticism, one always has the sense that it is made from the chips and sawdust on the workshop floor. But throughout the almost six hundred pages of the first edition of Alone With America (it was expanded in 1980), there are almost no sentences that could be used to characterize the work of Richard Howard. He attempts neither to own nor to disown his contemporaries, but receives them.
Ten
Authors: Langenbach James
Published: November 2023

Jorie Graham published her first book only sixteen years ago, but she has already produced a body of writing that feels like the accumulation of a lifetime. Like Yeats, who early in his career cautioned suspicious readers that “it is myself that I remake,” Graham has been driven to turn against her own best discoveries, risking everything she has achieved. Each of her books is a new beginning; in Materialism, each poem feels like an interrogation of the one preceding it. Graham has been unwilling to settle for anything settled, and she sometimes discards achievements that other poets would be willing to nurture for a long time. A different kind of writer would winnow more scrupulously in private, sharing only the distilled residue of her dissatisfaction. But Graham’s most self-conscious interrogations of poetry are driven by a kind of seriousness that impresses the most skeptical reader. The more she writes, the more necessary—the more truly elucidating—her public agon seems. Graham’s achievement seems big because she is satisfied with so little.
Introduction
Authors: Wattles Jeffrey
Published: November 2023

Children are taught to respect parents and other authority figures. Adolescents are urged to control their impulses. Adults are told to conduct themselves in accord with certain moral and ethical standards. Morality, then, may seem to be just an affair of imposition, a cultural voice that says “no” in various ways to our desires. To be sure, there are times when the word “no” must be spoken and enforced. But, time and again, people have discovered something more to morality, something rooted in life itself. The “no” is but one word in the voice of life, a voice that has other words, including the golden rule: Do to others as you want others to do to you. This book is about the life in that principle.

What could be easier to grasp intuitively than the golden rule? It has such an immediate intelligibility that it serves as a ladder that anyone can step onto without a great stretch. I know how I like to be treated; and that is how I am to treat others. The rule asks me to be considerate of others rather than indulging in self-centeredness. The study of the rule, however, leads beyond conventional interpretation, and the practice of the rule leads beyond conventional morality.
Modem Objections and Responses
Authors: Wattles Jeffrey
Published: November 2023

For centuries the golden rule had enjoyed favor as a principle in both religious and philosophical ethics. The honeymoon ended as philosophers exercised their critical freedom to reformulate traditional teachings in a manner more satisfying to the requirements of reason. The drama of the golden rule during early modern European ethics was the emergence, in response to philosophical critique, of the three alternative responses: retaining and revisioning the rule, using critique to clarify its meaning; retaining the rule in some reformulated version; and rejecting the rule or replacing it with a newly constructed principle designed to capture everything of value in the rule and to avoid the rule’s handicaps.

The stage was set by the outbreak of religious wars, international wars, and civil wars in Europe and by the response of Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), who used the golden rule as a basic principle of a peaceful society. For Hobbes, human motivation is predominantly egoistic, and in a “state of nature” (prior to the establishment of government), which is a war of all against all, each person has a right to defend himself by any means whatsoever. But there is also an obligation to seek peace, to enter a “civil society,” in which peace is secured and contracts enforced by a sovereign power with a monopoly on the use of force.
The Golden Rule of the Fatherhood of God and The Brotherhood of Man
Authors: Wattles Jeffrey
Published: November 2023

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in America were times of great economic expansion and inequality, opportunity and abuse, times of American power and of world war. Early scientific doctrines of evolution were being used to gain understanding of the human species and social life, and the result was a profound challenge to traditional religion. Does religion render a person less fit for the rigors of competition, or does real religion empower a person to deal in a progressive way with those very challenges? As that debate went on, America was a center of a dynamic, religiously motivated golden rule movement, affecting society, politics, economics, business, and interfaith relations. Many enthusiastic individuals chose the rule as their motto; a popular literature on the rule arose; many a store was called “Golden Rule Store”; it was the custom to bestow on exemplars of the rule the nickname “Golden Rule.” Authors expounding the maxims for the exercise of a given craft would dub their principles “golden rules,” and many books carried titles such as Golden Rules of Surgery. A Golden Rule Brotherhood was formed with the intention of unifying all the religions and peoples of the world. During this period the golden rule came to symbolize a wholehearted devotion to the service of humankind.
A Principle of Consistency In Mora Decision Making
Authors: Wattles Jeffrey
Published: November 2023

When contrasted with the contextual richness of the golden rule in earlier philosophy, twentieth-century discussions of the golden rule in analytic philosophy seem to gain precision and a kind of clarity at the cost of spiritual and even moral impoverishment, as the golden rule is reduced to a principle of consistency. By the end of the twentieth century, however, a new development is beginning to find the macrocosm within the microcosm; in other words, the concept of golden rule consistency is now being expanded with logical skill in the direction of a more adequate ethics.

First, a word about the loss of an earlier fullness of meaning. A backward glance reminds us that, in the beginning of Western philosophy, Greek thinkers asked about the arche, the cosmic source/origin/beginning/foundation—or archai, if there was an irreducible plurality of primal opposites or elements. Arche, in Latin, became princeps, which became principle in English. For Judaism, a principle was the distilled wisdom of experience and scriptural tradition. From early Christian days, Jesus was regarded as a princeps, and a believer might aim to live in a manner consistent with the divine will or with the divine paradigm revealed for believers to imitate. For David Hume (1711–1776), “principle” had a double meaning; it was both a fundamental factor (a source or spring) within the human mind, and it was also a proposition.
Twentieth-Century Religious Interpretations
Authors: Wattles Jeffrey
Published: November 2023

The very impulse to philosophy, metaphysics, and religious thought seems often to be motivated by a desire to explicate the common ground among human beings. The Hindu identification of the spiritual self of the agent with the spiritual self of the recipient of the agent’s action provides a basis for golden rule thinking. Buddhism analogously emphasizes the equal emptiness of agent and recipient, each one arising as code pendent phenomena of body and mind, each one lacking independent, substantial reality; after such a deconstruction of self-love, a new quality of compassion is to emerge, expressing the Buddha nature within.

The last of the histories presented in this book reviews efforts in religious philosophy and theology to articulate a spiritual interpretation of the golden rule. Marginalized in contemporary secular discourse, religious writing on the golden rule is scanty; in addition, the authors build so little on one another’s work that this history is more a narrative of the absence of a tradition. Christian scholarship has focused less on the golden rule and more on scriptural interpretation, theologies of love, and specific ethical issues. Since the “humanism” of the golden rule has seemed disconnected from the high moral standards of the Sermon on the Mount and from the teachings that have made Christianity unique among religions, the evangelical Christian revival following World War I has given little emphasis to the golden rule and has scarcely viewed the rule as a principle of harmony among religions. This remains the case, despite the fact that Karl Barth, the period’s leading evangelical theologian, who had argued against Harnack that world war demonstrated the abyss of human sinfulness and the naivete of theological optimism, finally turned to embrace the concept of the brotherhood of man.
Religious Dimensions of the Golden Rule
Authors: Wattles Jeffrey
Published: November 2023

The children’s game of leapfrog provides a metaphor of the relation between philosophical and spiritual progress. The first child goes forward by leaping over the child just in front of him. Then the first child kneels down, and the second one leaps over him. Every philosophic advance prepares a new spirititual advance, and vice versa.

There are many reasons to seek a level of meaning in the golden rule beyond the level of moral reason. Sometimes even the most exhaustive study of circumstances and principles and patterns does not suffice to indicate what is to be done, and the mind seeks for wisdom from beyond itself Moral reason points beyond itself, since it is committed to choosing the best course of action, all things considered. In attempting to take an ideal perspective in a complex situation, it is natural for the human mind to reach for an actual ideal, for God. Moreover, even when what is to be done is clear, the graciously spontaneous way to act may remain beyond one’s powers. If moral decision and action is to be wholehearted, it must draw on the full range of the personality, not only the mind, and it must respond to the fullness of the other person, including the spiritual dimension. In addition, many people need religious motivation to fuel the engine of moral conduct. Indeed, a reasonable, do-your-best ethic is misleading if grace is needed to do your best. Finally, it may be that without a religiously based sense of human kinship, the drive to assert and actualize equality on other grounds runs aground. In a world where nationalism and racism and domestic violence are so widespread, given the logical and practical fragility of the affirmation of human dignity, it is worth exploring resources for an acceptable religious ethics.
Corpses
Authors: Booth Allyson
Published: November 2023

Trench soldiers in the Great War inhabited worlds constructed, literally, of corpses. Dead men at the front blended with the mud and duckboard landscape, emerging through the surface of the ground and through the dirt floors of dugouts: “In the ground here there are several strata of dead, and in marry places the delving of the shells has brought out the oldest and set them out in display on the top of the new ones” (Barbusse 2 78). Live soldiers found themselves buried in falling dirt while shells disinterred their dead companions from shallow graves. Casualty lists that wound around buildings or spilled into extra newspaper columns shocked a civilian population confronted with statistics documenting the erasure of a generation; the corps escapes of trench warfare embodied that erasure. As one witness described it: “You walk on the ground of Verdun as though on the face of the Country” (Henry de Motherland qtd. in Meyer 64).Elaine Scary has pointed out that injured bodies bear no relation to the issues that are being contested in war: “Does this dead boy’s body ‘belong’ to his side, the side ‘for which’ he died, or does it ‘belong’ to the side ‘for which’ someone killed him, the side that ‘took’ him? That it belongs to both or neither makes manifest the nonreferential character of the dead body” (rr9). Intuitive responses of soldiers to enemy corpses confirm this nonreferentiality: the “belligerence” that we describe as characterizing the relationship between nations at war collapses when a French soldier comes across a German corpse or when a German soldier happens upon a British one.
Forgetful Objects
Authors: Booth Allyson
Published: November 2023

Virginia Woolf’s story “Solid Objects” (1920) marvels at the ability of objects to evoke astonishingly different worlds while standing in close proximity to one another and juxtaposes that ability against the human intolerance for such proximities. At the beginning of the story, the narrator is so far away from two friends that their bodies do not seem to be bodies at all, but are perceived instead as “one small black spot” (79) on a beach. By the end of the story, large psychological distances separate the previously indistinguishable bodies: John and Charles still speak the same language yet seem suddenly to be “talking about different things” (86). Their friendship ends, the possibility of relationship cancelled by differences in their perceptions of the potential meaning of the “solid objects” of the story’s title. John’s preoccupation with objects begins at the beach when, as he is digging absentmindedly in the sand, he happens upon “a full drop of solid matter.” The “smoothing of the sea had completely worn off any edge or shape, so that it was impossible to say whether it had been bottle, tumbler, or window-pane; it was nothing but glass” (80). Whereas, to the narrator, two pages previously, nothing had seemed “so solid” as the bodies of the two men, the lump of glass almost immediately usurps visually the apparent solidity of Charles: John holds it up “so that its irregular mass blotted out the body and extended right arm of his friend.”
Introduction: Giving and Thinking
Authors: Webb Stephen H
Published: November 2023

Everybody in the United States seems to be involved in a great debate about gift giving that has inestimable political ramifications. Now more than ever before, we need theological clarification about what generosity is and how giving should be formulated and practiced. Although private acts of donation are widely lauded as crucial for the health of our country, public acts of giving are coming under increasing scrutiny. On one side of the current debate, giving is the problem, and the solution demands an honest reconceptualization of generosity. To simplify an ongoing conversation, conservatives are arguing that giving must be connected to merit, that gifts should be earned. Generosity should be careful, calculated, measured by what it produces. The language of giving, in other words, should reflect the language of business and economics. A gift should be an investment. Otherwise, gifts are wasted, squandered; they create disorder and dependence, and thus giving threatens to become, ironically, immoral.
Squandering
Authors: Webb Stephen H
Published: November 2023

Gratuitous means, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “free, spontaneous, voluntary”–something freely granted or given without claim or merit, without, that is, the possibility of exact compensation or direct repayment. It derives from the Latin gratia, meaning favor, and gratus, meaning pleasing. Gratuitous is also related to gratitude, the act of being thankful (as well as to other words like gratify, gratulate, and even agree). The gratuitous begets or summons gratitude: we are grateful for something that is given uncaused, for no reason-or at least for reasons internal to our benefit and external to the interests of the giver. The gratuitous act occupies a difficult temporality: it is not motivated by the expectation of a return (the future), by the requirements of the situation (the present), or by a prior obligation (the past). The gratuitous is occasional, both in the sense of happening now and then and in the sense of causing a special occasion (the reception of a gift calls for a party, just as most parties involve gift giving), and this lack of regularity or predictability makes it appear almost without motivation.
How Giving Works
Authors: Webb Stephen H
Published: November 2023

All of the theologians discussed in chapter 3 have wrestled with the problem of relating God’s overwhelming generosity to human affairs and concerns. I have argued that a correlation needs to be drawn between God’s practice of generosity and our own. The most difficult aspect of making this correlation is to relate the divine excess to human preoccupations with reciprocity. The goal is to portray the power of God’s giving as sovereign but not dominating, free but involved. Pushing divine excess too far leaves little or no room for a human countergift, yet subjecting God to the logic of reciprocity diminishes the gratuity of God’s grace. God either monopolizes giving or gives only in the form of exchange. None of these theologians satisfactorily accounts for a divine giving that both exceeds and maintains our own, initiating but also entering into acts that involve an extravagant outpouring and a cooperative return.
Examination of the Agent and Action
Authors: Garfield Jay L
Published: November 2023

This existent agent Does not perform an existent action. Nor does some nonexistent agent Perform some nonexistent action. An existent entity has no activity. There would also be action without an agent. An existent entity has no activity. There would also be agent without action.
Examination of Combination
Authors: Garfield Jay L
Published: November 2023

If, arising from the combination of Causes and conditions, The effect is in the combination, How could it arise from the combination? If, arising from the combination of Causes and conditions, The effect is not in the combination, How could it arise from the combination? If the effect is in the combination Of causes and conditions,
Examination of the Tathāgata
Authors: Garfield Jay L
Published: November 2023

Neither the aggregates, nor different from the aggregates, The aggregates are not in him, nor is he in the aggregates. The Tathāgata does not possess the aggregates. What is the Tathāgata? If the Buddha depended on the aggregates, He would not exist through an essence. Not existing through an essence, How could he exist through otherness-essence? Whatever is dependent on another entity, Its selfhood is not appropriate. It is not tenable that what lacks a self Could be a Tathāgata.
Examination of Fire and Fuel
Authors: Garfield Jay L
Published: November 2023

This chapter, the only one in this set of chapters ostensibly addressing an external phenomenon, is in fact concerned entirely with a standard counterexample to the kind of arguments Nāgārjuna’ offered in the two previous chapters on subjectivity in action and in perception. Recall that in those discussions Nāgārjuna’ argues that subject and object cannot be intrinsically and distinctly identified as entities because of their mutual dependence. Buddhist schools asserting substantial identity in the context of dependent coorigination, such as Vaibhā śika and Sautriintika schools, used the example of fire and fuel to demonstrate the compossibility of substantial independent identity and dependent origination, as well as the possibility of the one-way dependence relation that these schools assert that actions and perception bear to the self. Just as fire depends on fuel but not vice versa, they would argue, and just as fire and fuel have distinct identities despite the fact that the former depends for its existence on the latter, action and perception can depend on the subject but not vice versa.
Examination of the Initial and Final Limits
Authors: Garfield Jay L
Published: November 2023

But suppose that one could see that the self, considered as agent or as subject, lacks inherent existence, and still one argued that nonethe less it must do so in virtue of its impermanence and being subject to change. Then, one might argue, birth, aging, and death must be real as the conditions of the self’s unreality.
Examination of Combination
Authors: Garfield Jay L
Published: November 2023

This chapter examines the possibility that, while no effect could be inherently dependent upon any single cause, it might be that the correct understanding of dependent arising and the thoroughgoing interdependence of phenomena that Nāgārjuna’ urges involves the inherent dependence of any phenomenon on the combination of all of its conditions. Thus, while every phenomenon would, as Nāgārjuna’ has been arguing, be completely dependent on all others, this dependence itself would be inherently existent. Much of the argument is a reprise of arguments that we have seen already, particularly in Chapters I and VII. But the temporal analysis of Chapter XIX is also in evidence.
Examination of the Twelve Links
Authors: Garfield Jay L
Published: November 2023

Given an analysis of the nature of nirva1,1a, one might well ask how to achieve it. In this chapter, Nāgārjuna’ provides a straightforward answer. The twelve links of dependent origination are regarded by all Buddhist schools as providing an analysis of the nature of interdependence in the context of human existence. The tone of this chapter is decidedly positive, marking the turning of a dialectical corner in the preceding two chapters. Having elucidated the Madhyamika account of the nature of conventional and ultimate reality, Nāgārjuna’ does not need at this point so much to emphasize the emptiness of the twelve links. Rather he can assume that to provide an account of them as dependently arisen is, ipso facto, to demonstrate that fact. Their emptiness is therefore simply presupposed. This chapter is thus a straightforward exposition of how, in light of the interdependence of the twelve links, to enter into and to exploit the cycle in the service of liberation.
Examination of Views
Authors: Garfield Jay L
Published: November 2023

The final chapter of the text, like the previous chapter, applies the results of the climactic analyses of Chapters XXIV and XXV. It is noteworthy that all of the classic erroneous views discussed and refuted in this chapter are refuted earlier in the text. Indeed, Chapters XXIV and XXV are immediately preceded by a chapter on errors. One might therefore think that this chapter is otiose, or at least misplaced. For here Nāgārjuna’ considers a range of alternative metaphysical views conflicting with Nāgārjuna’analysis in terms of emptiness.
Sacred Lands and Religious Assemblies in America
Authors: Everett William Johnson
Published: November 2023

Germans and Indians have struggled for a more adequate federal formation of their public life within an ancient heritage of monarchy and traditional order. Their experiences have lifted up for us the importance of independent ecclesial forms for generating the dynamic of publicity, the need for reconciliation of past injustice in order to cultivate trust and participation, and the power of deep images of divine agency and order for shaping the cultural basis for constitutional order. The constitutional forms and the implicit covenants underlying them are laced by geography and gender. Relationships of peoples to their lands and of men with women powerfully shape the kinds of publics and covenants that can emerge beyond the boundaries of household and parentage.
Jewish Women and Christian Origins
Authors: Kraemer Ross S
Published: November 2023

If writing women’s lives is never simple, to write about Jewish women’s lives during the years and in the regions where Christianity first emerged is fraught with distinctive perils. In recent years, Christian scholars (especially, though by no means exclusively, some feminist Christian scholars) have had considerable interest in painting a particularly gloomy portrait of Jewish women’s participation in Jewish life at the time of Jesus, so that Jesus himself can be seen as a first-century liberator of women. In service both to contemporary Christian the ology and to modern debates about issues such as women’s ordination to Christian ministerial office, extravagant and derogatory claims have sometimes been made about women in first-century Judaism.
Women’s Religions and Religious Lives In The Greco-Roman City
Authors: LiDonnici Lynn R
Published: November 2023

The religious landscape of the Greco-Roman city was rich, varied, and exciting. Almost every aspect of life, from sports to shopping to taking a bath, from eating to cleaning the house, was made part of a whole system of hopes, practices, and beliefs that involved divine forces (the gods and goddesses) with the minute details of everyday activity. Religion was a fully functional dimension of public life (reflected by rites that all city members were expected to share), as well as an intellectual space for reflection on the most deeply held personal concerns (reflected by private, voluntary worships of a staggering variety). Many of these activities were shared by women and men, but there were some very important worships that both genders felt it was important to separate.
Women In The Q Communit(IES) And Traditions
Authors: Levine Amy-Jill
Published: November 2023

As the parentheses in the title suggest, any discussion of Q must be qualified, queried, and questioned. Indeed, to discuss women in the Q communit(ies) and traditions requires several leaps of faith: Q is a hypothetical source, divided into hypothetical literary strata representing equally hypothetical social settings; efforts to reconstruct women’s history are hampered by Q’s androcentric language, the difficulties of moving from single examples to collective experience, and the frequent silence of the source regarding explicit mention of women.
(RE) presentations of Women in the Gospel of Matthew and Luke-Acts
Authors: D’Angelo Mary Rose
Published: November 2023

Re-presentations is a particularly apt description of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke; these works in some sense present Jesus again by rethinking Mark’s narrative so as to integrate the sayings of Q. Both provide (independent) stories about the birth and childhood of Jesus that supply Jesus with the father he lacks in Mark (6:3-4) and bring the narratives closer to ancient biographies. Both aim at cleaner narrative and more elegant diction. Both texts use language and forms that associate them with the Bible, offering themselves as an extension or completion of the sacred writings.
Reading Real Women Through The Undisputed Letters of Paul
Authors: MacDonald Margaret Y
Published: November 2023

In a programmatic essay published in 1985, Bernadette Brooten called for an approach to the history of early Christian women that seeks to bring women to the center. Instead of concentrating primarily on male attitudes toward women as has been done in the past, the focus should shift to reconstructing the lives of the women themselves. Every effort should be made to hear their voices, to witness their behavior. In essence, early Christian women need to be brought back to life. Perhaps nowhere have Brooten’s insights yielded more promising results than in the reconstruction of women in the Pauline mission.
Paul On Women and Gender
Authors: Castelli Elizabeth A
Published: November 2023

One of the more remarkable survivals from early Christianity is the collection of letters written by a first-century hellenized Jewish man turned Christian missionary and leader, the “apostle” Paul. The seven letters whose authorship is undisputed by scholars–Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon–offer historians an unparalleled body of literature produced by a first-century Christian hand. These same letters offer contemporary readers of the text a complex and often confounding set of interpretive challenges. No challenge is more trenchant than the one raised by the claims made about women and gender in these texts, as Virginia Woolf’s provocative characterization makes clear.
Organization: getting to the point
Authors: Bailey Edward P
Published: November 2023

Now, the main point doesn’t have to be the first sentence (though it can be much of the time). I’m just saying that the main point should be up front—before your reasons instead of after.
Layout: Adding Visual Impact
Authors: Bailey Edward P
Published: November 2023

What is layout, anyway? On its simplest level, it is whatever goes into the “look” of the page: something that appears open and inviting probably has good layout; something that appears cluttered and uninviting probably has bad layout.
A model for writing
Authors: Bailey Edward P
Published: November 2023

This chapter presents a model you can use for much of your business writing-a “template” that will hold the ideas in many documents. These documents can be short (like memos) or long (like reports or even books).
Blueprint
Authors: Bailey Edward P
Published: November 2023

As a reader, you now know the structure of the document you’ve just begun to read: you know it has three parts, you know what they are, and you know the order they should appear in.
Typefaces
Authors: Bailey Edward P
Published: November 2023

We have incredible power over the look of our documents­ more power than entire print shops of a decade ago. The trick is to use that power effectively for conveying the message. The goal of this chapter is to show you how.
Headings
Authors: Bailey Edward P
Published: November 2023

Good headings can make a terrific difference in most of your documents! At a glance, your reader can see that your documents look organized.
The writing process
Authors: Bailey Edward P
Published: November 2023

So far this book has been totally concerned with the product of your writing: your document should have a clear style, start with the bottom line, and use good layout.
Supervising writers
Authors: Bailey Edward P
Published: November 2023

I know that not everybody who reads this book is a supervisor (or project leader). Some people are and many hope to be. So if you are now, this chapter is for you. And if you’re not one yet? Well, this chapter is what I would tell your boss.
Designing a successful presentation
Authors: Bailey Edward P
Published: November 2023

Most presentations succeed or fail long before you ever stand up to deliver them. Now let’s turn to the second half of this book: giving presentations in plain English. As with writing in plain English, you should find that speaking in plain English is clearer for your audience and easier on you, too. With a few simple techniques, you can be on your way to being a more effective speaker.
Using examples
Authors: Bailey Edward P
Published: November 2023

“The last chapter gave you a good structure for a presentation-now let’s talk about content. I can’t help you much with your particular topic, but I can point out where the content of presentations usually goes wrong: it’s too abstract.
Remembering what to say
Authors: Bailey Edward P
Published: November 2023

Nothing. At that point, it’s too late. But you can do some­ thing to avoid being in that situation (other than declining invitations to speak). You can design a way of remembering the content of your presentation so going blank almost never happens. And if it does-which is unlikely-you’ll have something to help you get going again.
Choosing visual aids
Authors: Bailey Edward P
Published: November 2023

Some older books on speechmaking cautioned against visual aids: “Don’t rely on them too much,” they’d say. “Don’t use them as crutches.” But the standard for those books was the immobile speaker standing behind a lectern, de­ claiming to the audience for 30 minutes.
Designing visual aids -further tips
Authors: Bailey Edward P
Published: November 2023

A common mistake people make is designing good individual visual aids but not a good set of visual aids. Each may look nice, but together they don’t have a uniform appearance.
Involving your audience and using humor
Authors: Bailey Edward P
Published: November 2023

Too many presentations seem to have an invisible separator between speakers and audiences. It’s like a glass wall: the speakers stay on their side and do the talking; the audiences stay on their side and do the listening. (Theater people call that the “fourth wall.”) Good speakers usually try to eliminate that wall. One way is to let the audience participate during the presentation­ people love to be part of the action. Another is to get them to laugh so they will feel greater rapport with the speaker. Either way breaks down the artificial separation that usu­ ally does more harm than good.
Rehearsing
Authors: Bailey Edward P
Published: November 2023

People who design cars wouldn’t dream of trying to sell them without testing them first. People who design air­ planes wouldn’t think of putting passengers on them with­ out testing them first. People acting in plays wouldn’t appear on opening night without a number of rehearsals.