Hardcover with dust jacket. VG/G. Dust jacket is edge worn and scuffed; covered with mylar.

From Shadow To Promise - Old Testament Interpretation from Augustine to the Young Luther

James Samuel Preus

The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press

A Theory of Justice

A work of moral and political philosophy of the twentieth century.

Politics & Social Sciences

Rawls, John

Philosophy

Imagine beetles ejecting defensive sprays as hot as boiling water; female moths holding their mates for ransom; caterpillars disguising themselves as flowers by fastening petals to their bodies; termites emitting a viscous glue to rally fellow soldiers--and you will have entered an insect world once beyond imagining, a world observed and described down to its tiniest astonishing detail by Thomas Eisner. The story of a lifetime of such minute explorations, For Love of Insects celebrates the small creatures that have emerged triumphant on the planet, the beneficiaries of extraordinary evolutionary inventiveness and unparalleled reproductive capacity.
To understand the success of insects is to appreciate our own shortcomings, Eisner tells us, but never has a reckoning been such a pleasure. Recounting exploits and discoveries in his lab at Cornell and in the field in Uruguay, Australia, Panama, Europe, and North America, Eisner time and again demonstrates how inquiry into the survival strategies of an insect leads to clarifications beyond the expected; insects are revealed as masters of achievement, forms of life worthy of study and respect from even the most recalcitrant entomophobe. Filled with descriptions of his ingenious experiments and illustrated with photographs unmatched for their combination of scientific content and delicate beauty, Eisner's book makes readers participants in the grand adventure of discovery on a scale infinitesimally small, and infinitely surprising.

For Love of Insects

Thomas Eisner

Sports & Outdoors

What does it mean to say that we live in a secular age? Almost everyone would agree that we--in the West, at least--largely do. And clearly the place of religion in our societies has changed profoundly in the last few centuries. In what will be a defining book for our time, Charles Taylor takes up the question of what these changes mean--of what, precisely, happens when a society in which it is virtually impossible not to believe in God becomes one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is only one human possibility among others.
Taylor, long one of our most insightful thinkers on such questions, offers a historical perspective. He examines the development in "Western Christendom" of those aspects of modernity which we call secular. What he describes is in fact not a single, continuous transformation, but a series of new departures, in which earlier forms of religious life have been dissolved or destabilized and new ones have been created. As we see here, today's secular world is characterized not by an absence of religion--although in some societies religious belief and practice have markedly declined--but rather by the continuing multiplication of new options, religious, spiritual, and anti-religious, which individuals and groups seize on in order to make sense of their lives and give shape to their spiritual aspirations.
What this means for the world--including the new forms of collective religious life it encourages, with their tendency to a mass mobilization that breeds violence--is what Charles Taylor grapples with, in a book as timely as it is timeless.

A Secular Age

Taylor, Charles

Psychiatry, Psychology, Modern Psychiatry, Social Studies, Guide Book

The Harvard guide to modern psychiatry (Belknap Press)

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Nicholi, Armand M. Jr. (ed.

Psychology & Counseling

Nature's Nation

History

Miller, Perry

Americas

Helen Vendler widens her exploration of lyric poetry with a new assessment of the six great odes of John Keats and in the process gives us, implicitly, a reading of Keats's whole career. She proposes that these poems, usually read separately, are imperfectly seen unless seen together--that they form a sequence in which Keats pursued a strict and profound inquiry into questions of language, philosophy, and aesthetics. 
 Vendler describes a Keats far more intellectually intent on creating an aesthetic, and on investigating poetic means, than we have yet seen, a Keats inquiring into the proper objects of worship for man, the process of soul making, the female Muse, the function of aesthetic reverie, and the ontological nature of the work of art. We see him questioning the admissibility of ancient mythology in a post Enlightenment art, the hierarchy of the arts, the role of the passions in art, and the rival claims of abstraction and representation. In formal terms, he investigates in the odes the appropriateness of various lyric structures. And in debating the value to poetry of the languages of personification, mythology, philosophical discourse, and trompe l'oeil description, Keats more and more clearly distinguishes the social role of lyric from those of painting, philosophy, or myth. 
 Like Vendler's previous work on Yeats, Stevens, and Herbert, this finely conceived volume suggests that lyric poetry is best understood when many forms of inquirythematic, linguistic, historical, psychological, and structural-are brought to bear on it at once.

The Odes of John Keats

Literature & Fiction

Vendler, Helen

History & Criticism

On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand BY JEROME BRUNER

On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand

Education & Teaching

Jerome S. Bruner

Schools & Teaching

This book" Mr. Bailyn writes, "depicts the fortunes of a conservative in a time of radical upheaval and deals with problems of public disorder and ideological commitment" It is at the same time a dramatic account of the origins of the American Revolution from the viewpoint, not of the winners who became the Founding Fathers, but of the losers, the Loyalists. By portraying the ordeal of the last civilian royal governor of Massachusetts, Mr. Bailyn explains "what the human reality was against which the victors struggled" and in doing so makes the story of the Revolution fuller and more comprehensible.

The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson

Biographies & Memoirs

Bailyn, Bernard

Historical

In his introduction to this compelling study, Mr. Noonan writes that Power to Dissolve "looks to the role of the law within a religion founded on commandments of love; it looks to the place of love in an institution molded by law. Jurisprudentially, it is the examination of a legal system, arguably the oldest and certainly the most universal in the world. Theologically, it is an investigation of the contents of Christian marriage." 
Six principal case studies dramatically illustrate the legal process through which Catholic petitioners have sought papal annulment of their marriages. Spanning the years from 1653 to the present, ranging geographically from the Old World to the New, involving such dissimilar characters as Charles, Duke of Lorraine, and his Duchess Nicole, Governor Parkhurst of Maine, and the Rospigliosi of Rome, they resulted in a series of often surprising decisions which help illuminate the history and meaning of marriage in Western society, while suggesting lines of future development. 
Power to Dissolve has three themes: the theory of marriage as it is fashioned by the interplay of theology and society; the policy of the Roman Curia as it balances the demands of theory and the needs of administration; and the impact of theory and policy on individual persons. In focus, it is a book about the persons in whom the law lives - the married couples themselves, their lovers, their lawyers, and their judges. 
This intriguing analysis is strengthened by the author's ability to obtain access to the files of the Roman Rota, the records of the Congregation of the Council, and the contents of the Secret Archives of the Vatican. His intensive examination of this information and other such raw material of litigation as the briefs of the parties' own advocates and interoffice correspondence within the Curia itself has enabled him to form this cogent account of a legal system at work.

Power to Dissolve: Lawyers and Marriages in the Courts of the Roman Curia

Religion & Spirituality

John T. Noonan, Jr.

Christian Books & Bibles

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