Red Enlightenment

Red Enlightenment PDF Author: Graham Jones
Publisher: Watkins Media Limited
ISBN: 1914420209
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Why we need a materialist spirituality for the secular left, and how to build one. The left commonly rejects religion and spirituality as counter-revolutionary forces, citing Marx’s famous dictum that "religion is the opium of the people." Yet forms of spirituality have motivated struggles throughout history, ranging from medieval peasant uprisings and colonial slave revolts, to South American liberation theology and the US civil rights movement. And in a world where religion is growing, and political movements are ridden with conflict, burnout, and failure, what can the left learn from religion? Red Enlightenment argues not only for a deepened understanding of religious matters, but calls for the secular left to develop its own spiritual perspectives. It proposes a materialist spirituality built from socialist and scientific sources, finding points of contact with the global history of philosophy and religion. From cybernetics to liberation theology, from ancient Indian and Chinese philosophy to Marxist dialectical materialism, from traditional religious practices to contemporary art, music, and film, Red Enlightenment sets out a plausible secular spirituality, a new socialist praxis, and a utopian vision.

Red Enlightenment

Red Enlightenment PDF Author: Graham Jones
Publisher: Watkins Media Limited
ISBN: 1914420209
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Get Book Here

Book Description
Why we need a materialist spirituality for the secular left, and how to build one. The left commonly rejects religion and spirituality as counter-revolutionary forces, citing Marx’s famous dictum that "religion is the opium of the people." Yet forms of spirituality have motivated struggles throughout history, ranging from medieval peasant uprisings and colonial slave revolts, to South American liberation theology and the US civil rights movement. And in a world where religion is growing, and political movements are ridden with conflict, burnout, and failure, what can the left learn from religion? Red Enlightenment argues not only for a deepened understanding of religious matters, but calls for the secular left to develop its own spiritual perspectives. It proposes a materialist spirituality built from socialist and scientific sources, finding points of contact with the global history of philosophy and religion. From cybernetics to liberation theology, from ancient Indian and Chinese philosophy to Marxist dialectical materialism, from traditional religious practices to contemporary art, music, and film, Red Enlightenment sets out a plausible secular spirituality, a new socialist praxis, and a utopian vision.

The Shock Doctrine of the Left

The Shock Doctrine of the Left PDF Author: Graham Jones
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 150952858X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 140

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Book Description
Shocks, from natural disasters to military catastrophes, have long been exploited by the state to impose privatization, cuts and rampant free markets. This book argues that the left can use such moments of chaos to achieve emancipation. Graham Jones illustrates how everyone can help to exploit these shocks and bring about a new world of compassion and care. He examines how combining mutually reinforcing strategies of ‘smashing, building, healing and taming’ can become the basis of a unified left. His vivid personal experience underpins a compelling, practical vision for activism, from the scale of the individual body to the global social movement. This bold book is a toolkit for revolution for activists and radical millennials everywhere.

Fictions of Enlightenment

Fictions of Enlightenment PDF Author: Qiancheng Li
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824825973
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Fictions of Enlightenment is the first book to examine the fascinating and intricate relationship between Buddhism and the development of Chinese vernacular fiction. Qiancheng Li brings Buddhist models to bear on the vision, structure, and narrative form of three classics of late imperial literature—Journey to the West, Tower of Myriad Mirrors, and Dream of the Red Chamber—arguing that by fashioning their plots after the narratives of certain Mahāyāna sutras, the novelists transformed Buddhist concepts into narrative structures. Within the traditional Chinese novel Li even defines a new genre: the fiction of enlightenment.

Making the World Safe

Making the World Safe PDF Author: Julia F. Irwin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199990085
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
In Making the World Safe, historian Julia Irwin offers an insightful account of the American Red Cross, from its founding in 1881 by Clara Barton to its rise as the government's official voluntary aid agency. Equally important, Irwin shows that the story of the Red Cross is simultaneously a story of how Americans first began to see foreign aid as a key element in their relations with the world. As the American Century dawned, more and more Americans saw the need to engage in world affairs and to make the world a safer place--not by military action but through humanitarian aid. It was a time perfectly suited for the rise of the ARC. Irwin shows how the early and vigorous support of William H. Taft--who was honorary president of the ARC even as he served as President of the United States--gave the Red Cross invaluable connections with the federal government, eventually making it the official agency to administer aid both at home and abroad. Irwin describes how, during World War I, the ARC grew at an explosive rate and extended its relief work for European civilians into a humanitarian undertaking of massive proportions, an effort that was also a major propaganda coup. Irwin also shows how in the interwar years, the ARC's mission meshed well with presidential diplomatic styles, and how, with the coming of World War II, the ARC once again grew exponentially, becoming a powerful part of government efforts to bring aid to war-torn parts of the world. The belief in the value of foreign aid remains a central pillar of U.S. foreign relations. Making the World Safe reveals how this belief took hold in America and the role of the American Red Cross in promoting it.

Red River and the Tree of Enlightenment

Red River and the Tree of Enlightenment PDF Author: Mary Randall
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 150358979X
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 189

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Book Description
Do you think Bobbys adventures are over? Think again; not a chance! Get ready for the grand finale of all adventures as you become spellbound in Siberia, The Land that never Sleeps. Little dudes and dudettes hang on to your Lucky Baseball Caps, once again, as you take a leap of faith with Bobby and his pals into the vast and mysterious Siberian wilderness. What happens when you come face to face with a Goligoom? Lets find out, this is a terrific ride, a ride that you will never forget! Its so Rad!

The Gentlemen's Book Of Enlightenment

The Gentlemen's Book Of Enlightenment PDF Author: Oheen Imara
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 120

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Book Description
What if one day you discover everything you have ever believed about world and relationships was a lie? Imagine everything you have ever been taught concerning women and how to engage them was fabricated? What if you discovered your family, the media, the film industry, the music industry, women, as well as the government were greatly invested in your miseducation? The Gentlemen's Book Of Enlightenment seeks to explore these questions and reveal a truth that has been hidden in plain sight. Men were bred to be utilities and are disposable. Weather through war, taxes, marriage, children, divorce, alimony, or child support men are forced to sacrifice their happiness and live a life of servitude in many if not all these areas. The reality is men are not valued as people. Men receive value based on what they can provide. This book is a guide to help men avoid the pitfalls of a society who has laid various traps in the minefield we call life. Join us on this journey as we discover the truth in chapters like "Love Vs. Respect", "What Does She Have To Offer You", and "You Will Never Make Her Happy". This book seeks to enlighten men and help start their journey to true happiness and walk away from system that only wants to keep them in bondage.

The Enlightenment

The Enlightenment PDF Author: Ritchie Robertson
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062410679
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1008

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Book Description
A magisterial history that recasts the Enlightenment as a period not solely consumed with rationale and reason, but rather as a pursuit of practical means to achieve greater human happiness. One of the formative periods of European and world history, the Enlightenment is the fountainhead of modern secular Western values: religious tolerance, freedom of thought, speech and the press, of rationality and evidence-based argument. Yet why, over three hundred years after it began, is the Enlightenment so profoundly misunderstood as controversial, the expression of soulless calculation? The answer may be that, to an extraordinary extent, we have accepted the account of the Enlightenment given by its conservative enemies: that enlightenment necessarily implied hostility to religion or support for an unfettered free market, or that this was “the best of all possible worlds”. Ritchie Robertson goes back into the “long eighteenth century,” from approximately 1680 to 1790, to reveal what this much-debated period was really about. Robertson returns to the era’s original texts to show that above all, the Enlightenment was really about increasing human happiness – in this world rather than the next – by promoting scientific inquiry and reasoned argument. In so doing Robertson chronicles the campaigns mounted by some Enlightened figures against evils like capital punishment, judicial torture, serfdom and witchcraft trials, featuring the experiences of major figures like Voltaire and Diderot alongside ordinary people who lived through this extraordinary moment. In answering the question 'What is Enlightenment?' in 1784, Kant famously urged men and women above all to “have the courage to use your own intellect”. Robertson shows how the thinkers of the Enlightenment did just that, seeking a well-rounded understanding of humanity in which reason was balanced with emotion and sensibility. Drawing on philosophy, theology, historiography and literature across the major western European languages, The Enlightenment is a master-class in big picture history about the foundational epoch of modern times.

The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge

The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge PDF Author: Peter B. Kaufman
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 1644210606
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
How do we create a universe of truthful and verifiable information, available to everyone? In The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge, MIT Open Learning’s Peter B. Kaufman describes the powerful forces that have purposely crippled our efforts to share knowledge widely and freely. Popes and their inquisitors, emperors and their hangmen, commissars and their secret police—throughout history, all have sought to stanch the free flow of information. Kaufman writes of times when the Bible could not be translated—you’d be burned for trying; when dictionaries and encyclopedias were forbidden; when literature and science and history books were trashed and pulped—sometimes along with their authors; and when efforts to develop public television and radio networks were quashed by private industry. In the 21st century, the enemies of free thought have taken on new and different guises—giant corporate behemoths, sprawling national security agencies, gutted regulatory commissions. Bereft of any real moral compass or sense of social responsibility, their work to surveil and control us are no less nefarious than their 16th- and 18th- and 20th- century predecessors. They are all part of what Kaufman calls the Monsterverse. The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge maps out the opportunities to mobilize for the fight ahead of us. With the Internet and other means of media production and distribution—video especially—at hand, knowledge institutions like universities, libraries, museums, and archives have a special responsibility now to counter misinformation, disinformation, and fake news—and especially efforts to control the free flow of information. A film and video producer and former book publisher, Kaufman begins to draft a new social contract for our networked video age. He draws his inspiration from those who fought tooth and nail against earlier incarnations of the Monsterverse—including William Tyndale in the 16th century; Denis Diderot in the 18th; untold numbers of Soviet and Central and East European dissidents in the 20th—many of whom paid the ultimate price. Their successors? Advocates of free knowledge like Aaron Swartz, of free software like Richard Stallman, of an enlightened public television and radio network like James Killian, of a freer Internet like Tim Berners-Lee, of fuller rights and freedoms like Edward Snowden. All have been striving to secure for us a better world, marked by the right balance between state, society, and private gain. The concluding section of the book, its largest piece, builds on their work, drawing up a progressive agenda for how today’s free thinkers can band together now to fight and win. With everything shut and everyone going online, The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge is a rousing call to action that expands the definition of what it means to be a citizen in the 21st century.

A Death on Diamond Mountain

A Death on Diamond Mountain PDF Author: Scott Carney
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 069818629X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
An investigative reporter explores an infamous case where an obsessive and unorthodox search for enlightenment went terribly wrong. When thirty-eight-year-old Ian Thorson died from dehydration and dysentery on a remote Arizona mountaintop in 2012, The New York Times reported the story under the headline: "Mysterious Buddhist Retreat in the Desert Ends in a Grisly Death." Scott Carney, a journalist and anthropologist who lived in India for six years, was struck by how Thorson’s death echoed other incidents that reflected the little-talked-about connection between intensive meditation and mental instability. Using these tragedies as a springboard, Carney explores how those who go to extremes to achieve divine revelations—and undertake it in illusory ways—can tangle with madness. He also delves into the unorthodox interpretation of Tibetan Buddhism that attracted Thorson and the bizarre teachings of its chief evangelists: Thorson’s wife, Lama Christie McNally, and her previous husband, Geshe Michael Roach, the supreme spiritual leader of Diamond Mountain University, where Thorson died. Carney unravels how the cultlike practices of McNally and Roach and the questionable circumstances surrounding Thorson’s death illuminate a uniquely American tendency to mix and match eastern religious traditions like LEGO pieces in a quest to reach an enlightened, perfected state, no matter the cost. Aided by Thorson’s private papers, along with cutting-edge neurological research that reveals the profound impact of intensive meditation on the brain and stories of miracles and black magic, sexualized rituals, and tantric rites from former Diamond Mountain acolytes, A Death on Diamond Mountain is a gripping work of investigative journalism that reveals how the path to enlightenment can be riddled with danger.

The Red Sea Is Your Blood

The Red Sea Is Your Blood PDF Author: Alvin Boyd Kuhn
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781258951399
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 62

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Book Description
This is a new release of the original 1960 edition.