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Author: Jacques Ellul
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1606089757
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 319
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Book Description
Jacques Ellul--much less solemn in mood than usual--here cracks open political and sociological commonplaces, destructively and wittily demonstrating how our unthinking acceptance of them encourages hypocrisy, smugness, and mental inertia. Among the stereotypes of thought and speech thus exploded are such phrases as "You can't act without getting your hands dirty," "Work is freedom," "We must follow the current of history," and "Women find their freedom (dignity) in work." A certain number of these old saws preside over our daily life. They permit us to understand one another and to swim in the ordinary current of society. They are accepted as so certain that we almost never question them. They serve at once as sufficient explanations for everything and as "clinchers" in too many arguments. Ellul explores the ways in which such clichs mislead us and prevent us from having independent thoughts--and in fact keep us from facing the problems to which they are theoretically addressed. They are the "new commonplaces." Just as the nineteenth century brought forth many such commonplaces (they are enshrined in Leon Bloy's Exgse and Flaubert's Dictionnaire des ides reues), so our century has been busy creating its own. What Ellul has done is to stand still long enough to look at them carefully, attack them with cool reason, and leave them nakedly exposed. In this remarkable document, Ellul's caustic fearlessness is at the service of truths that often are cruel, but always are lucid and impassioned. He represents the voice of intelligence, and while doing so is often hilarious and always therapeutic about matters of first importance.
Author: Jacques Ellul
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1606089757
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 319
Get Book Here
Book Description
Jacques Ellul--much less solemn in mood than usual--here cracks open political and sociological commonplaces, destructively and wittily demonstrating how our unthinking acceptance of them encourages hypocrisy, smugness, and mental inertia. Among the stereotypes of thought and speech thus exploded are such phrases as "You can't act without getting your hands dirty," "Work is freedom," "We must follow the current of history," and "Women find their freedom (dignity) in work." A certain number of these old saws preside over our daily life. They permit us to understand one another and to swim in the ordinary current of society. They are accepted as so certain that we almost never question them. They serve at once as sufficient explanations for everything and as "clinchers" in too many arguments. Ellul explores the ways in which such clichs mislead us and prevent us from having independent thoughts--and in fact keep us from facing the problems to which they are theoretically addressed. They are the "new commonplaces." Just as the nineteenth century brought forth many such commonplaces (they are enshrined in Leon Bloy's Exgse and Flaubert's Dictionnaire des ides reues), so our century has been busy creating its own. What Ellul has done is to stand still long enough to look at them carefully, attack them with cool reason, and leave them nakedly exposed. In this remarkable document, Ellul's caustic fearlessness is at the service of truths that often are cruel, but always are lucid and impassioned. He represents the voice of intelligence, and while doing so is often hilarious and always therapeutic about matters of first importance.
Author: Ann Moss
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368
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Book Description
The commonplace-book mapped and resourced Renaissance culture's moral thinking, its accepted strategies of argumentation, its rhetoric, and its deployment of knowledge. In this ground-breaking study Ann Moss investigates the commonplace-book's medieval antecedents, its methodology and use as promulgated by its humanist advocates, its varieties as exemplified in its printed manifestations, and the reasons for its gradual decline in the seventeenth century.
Author: Douglas S. Kelbaugh
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295997516
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 240
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Book Description
Repairing the American Metropolis is based on Douglas Kelbaugh’s Common Place: Toward Neighborhood and Regional Design, first published in 1997. It is more timely and significant than ever, with new text, charts, and images on architecture, sprawl, and New Urbanism, a movement that he helped pioneer. Theory and policies have been revised, refined, updated, and developed as compelling ways to plan and design the built environment. This is an indispensable book for architects, urban designers and planners, landscape architects, architecture and urban planning students and scholars, government officials, developers, environmentalists, and citizens interested in understanding and shaping the American metropolis.
Author: Roberta Israeloff
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1475834152
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 235
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Book Description
In What Went Right: Lessons from Both Sides of the Teacher’s Desk co-authors Roberta Israeloff and George McDermott resume a conversation they began in 1967—when she was in eleventh grade at Syosset (N.Y.) High School and he was her English teacher. In 2014, after finding each other on Facebook, they began an email correspondence—as contemporaries, rather than student and teacher—and quickly discovered that neither had ever stopped thinking about that school and the many ways it influenced them. As they shared their impressions of how and why public education has changed since then, they realized that a single academic year can have a deeper and longer-lasting impact than they had ever imagined. Personal and probing, evocative and wide-ranging, the letters that compose this book ask and attempt to answer some timeless—and timely—questions: What makes a teacher or a class memorable? How can the teacher-student relationship be supported and strengthened? What does being “educated” truly mean? And, perhaps most important, what role can free public education play in sustaining our democracy?
Author: David Lovekin
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 166674414X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 254
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Book Description
This study examines the French thinker Jacques Ellul (1912–1994) and his historical, biblical, and social analyses of how technology manipulates and impoverishes modern thought, culture, and language. In the spirit of Georg Hegel and Ernst Cassirer, Ellul explores how technology begins in myths, stories, and religion, advances to tools, and then develops into data, algorithms, and abstract systems which are detached from human bodies and communities. Efficiency then becomes an absolute in all areas of human life, and the mentality of technique becomes lost in its creations. These modern symbols, posing as ultimate human goods and values, are denigrated by technique, leaving humanity awash in clichés, in groundless social media, and in blathering slogans that sustain the illusion that politics and culture have now become.
Author: Gregory Edward Reynolds
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1579106382
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 527
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Book Description
Author: David W. Gill
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1532649061
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 317
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Book Description
Are all governments—east and west, Muslim and secular, authoritarian and constitutional, Republican and Democratic—fundamentally the same, all of them under the extraordinary, growing power of “technique” and bureaucracy? Is all politics, then, just an illusory affair of lies, deception, propaganda, partisan passions, and chaos on the surface of government and party? In his vast and penetrating writings, Bordeaux sociologist Jacques Ellul (1912–1994) points in those directions. Political Illusion and Reality is a collection of twenty-three essays on Ellul’s political thought. Veteran as well as younger Ellul scholars, political leaders, activists, and pastors, discuss aspects of Ellul’s thought as they relate to their own fields of study and political experience. Beginning with his 1936 essay “Fascism, Son of Liberalism,” translated and published here in English for the first time, Ellul and these authors will provoke readers to think some new thoughts about politics and government, and think more deeply about the main issues we face in our politically divided and troubled times.
Author: Franz A. Foltz
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1532636253
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 201
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Book Description
Franz and Frederick Foltz examine how modern technology creates an environment that significantly affects Christianity by reducing the mysteries of faith to manageable techniques. The body of their work analyzes the effects of technology on the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love, the triad that believers have used for a common narrative to understand and express their thoughts and experiences. They begin by looking at how recent developments have brought us into a post-truth era by removing words from their context in nature, time, place, and community. Popular theologies such as the power of positive thinking, the laws of creation, the plan for salvation, and the prosperity gospel reflect this change by gearing all for efficiently getting what we want and ignoring tradition. The authors then examine each of the virtues separately, finding that faith has become a risk management tool that depends on confidence in systems rather than personal relationships, hope is defined as the expectation that our present desires shall be granted rather than a vision of the future, and love has become an intimacy that provides escape from the real world and community rather than a self-denying care for them. Finally, the authors take a look at some appropriate responses.
Author: Ronald R. Ray
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1666753580
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 211
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Book Description
Ethics of Christian Freedom and Discipleship is written for teachers and students of Christian ethics within the English-speaking world. It demonstrates the basis of Christian ethics in Christian theology. Twenty-nine years ago, before leaving the Nigerian theological college where the author had been teaching, Between Two Worlds: An Ethic of Christian Freedom was privately printed. In Kenya, at what became St. Paul’s University, the author primarily used copies of this book for eleven years of teaching Christian ethics. Ethics of Christian Freedom and Discipleship manifests continuity with the author’s earlier book, but is a distinctly different work.
Author: Richard Stivers
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1532686250
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 204
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Book Description
Richard Stivers' concern is with the social construction of evil, that is, with how modern societies, in a partly unconscious way, create evil as a category of the sacred and how symbols, myths, and rituals of evil are related to this. He is interested, moreover, in how modern societies provoke individuals to commit evil actions. This fascinating and stimulating book is the first attempt to work out in detail how the concepts of the sacred, symbol, myth, and ritual form a cultural configuration in modern technological societies, and not just in traditional societies.
