Scientists as Prophets

Scientists as Prophets PDF Author: Lynda Walsh
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199857113
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
In Scientists as Prophets, Lynda Walsh argues that our science advisors manufacture certainty for us in the face of the unknown. Through a series of cases reaching from the Delphic oracle to seventeenth-century London to Climategate, Walsh elucidates many of the problems with our current science-advising system.

Scientists as Prophets

Scientists as Prophets PDF Author: Lynda Walsh
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199857113
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
In Scientists as Prophets, Lynda Walsh argues that our science advisors manufacture certainty for us in the face of the unknown. Through a series of cases reaching from the Delphic oracle to seventeenth-century London to Climategate, Walsh elucidates many of the problems with our current science-advising system.

The Wizard and the Prophet

The Wizard and the Prophet PDF Author: Charles C. Mann
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307961702
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 640

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Book Description
From the best-selling, award-winning author of 1491 and 1493--an incisive portrait of the two little-known twentieth-century scientists, Norman Borlaug and William Vogt, whose diametrically opposed views shaped our ideas about the environment, laying the groundwork for how people in the twenty-first century will choose to live in tomorrow's world. In forty years, Earth's population will reach ten billion. Can our world support that? What kind of world will it be? Those answering these questions generally fall into two deeply divided groups--Wizards and Prophets, as Charles Mann calls them in this balanced, authoritative, nonpolemical new book. The Prophets, he explains, follow William Vogt, a founding environmentalist who believed that in using more than our planet has to give, our prosperity will lead us to ruin. Cut back! was his mantra. Otherwise everyone will lose! The Wizards are the heirs of Norman Borlaug, whose research, in effect, wrangled the world in service to our species to produce modern high-yield crops that then saved millions from starvation. Innovate! was Borlaug's cry. Only in that way can everyone win! Mann delves into these diverging viewpoints to assess the four great challenges humanity faces--food, water, energy, climate change--grounding each in historical context and weighing the options for the future. With our civilization on the line, the author's insightful analysis is an essential addition to the urgent conversation about how our children will fare on an increasingly crowded Earth.

Scientists as Prophets

Scientists as Prophets PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780199345410
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
In this work, Lynda Walsh argues that our science advisors manufacture certainty for us in the face of the unknown. Through a series of cases reaching from the Delphic oracle to 17th-century London to Climategate, Walsh elucidates many of the problems with our current science-advising system

Prophets and Protons

Prophets and Protons PDF Author: Benjamin E. Zeller
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814797210
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
By the twentieth century, science had become so important that religious traditions had to respond to it. Emerging religions, still led by a living founder to guide them, responded with a clarity and focus that illuminates other larger, more established religions’ understandings of science. The Hare Krishnas, the Unification Church, and Heaven’s Gate each found distinct ways to incorporate major findings of modern American science, understanding it as central to their wider theological and social agendas. In tracing the development of these new religious movements’ viewpoints on science during each movement’s founding period, we can discern how their views on science were crafted over time. These NRMs shed light on how religious groups—new, old, alternative, or mainstream—could respond to the tremendous growth of power and prestige of science in late twentieth-century America. In this engrossing book, Zeller carefully shows that religious groups had several methods of creatively responding to science, and that the often-assumed conflict-based model of “science vs. religion” must be replaced by a more nuanced understanding of how religions operate in our modern scientific world.

Prophets Facing Backward

Prophets Facing Backward PDF Author: Meera Nanda
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 9780813533582
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
The leading voices in science studies have argued that modern science reflects dominant social interests of Western society. Following this logic, postmodern scholars have urged postcolonial societies to develop their own "alternative sciences" as a step towards "mental decolonization". These ideas have found a warm welcome among Hindu nationalists who came to power in India in the early 1990s. In this passionate and highly original study, Indian-born author Meera Nanda reveals how these well-meaning but ultimately misguided ideas are enabling Hindu ideologues to propagate religious myths in the guise of science and secularism. At the heart of Hindu supremacist ideology, Nanda argues, lies a postmodernist assumption: that each society has its own norms of reasonableness, logic, rules of evidence, and conception of truth, and that there is no non-arbitrary, culture-independent way to choose among these alternatives. What is being celebrated as "difference" by postmodernists, however, has more often than not been the source of mental bondage and authoritarianism in non-Western cultures. The "Vedic sciences" currently endorsed in Indian schools, colleges, and the mass media promotes the same elements of orthodox Hinduism that have for centuries deprived the vast majority of Indian people of their full humanity. By denouncing science and secularization, the left was unwittingly contributing to what Nanda calls "reactionary modernism." In contrast, Nanda points to the Dalit, or untouchable, movement as a true example of an "alternative science" that has embraced reason and modern science to challenge traditional notions of hierarchy.

The Wizard and the Prophet

The Wizard and the Prophet PDF Author: Charles Mann
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0345802845
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 642

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Book Description
From the best-selling, award-winning author of 1491 and 1493--an incisive portrait of the two little-known twentieth-century scientists, Norman Borlaug and William Vogt, whose diametrically opposed views shaped our ideas about the environment, laying the groundwork for how people in the twenty-first century will choose to live in tomorrow's world. In forty years, Earth's population will reach ten billion. Can our world support that? What kind of world will it be? Those answering these questions generally fall into two deeply divided groups--Wizards and Prophets, as Charles Mann calls them in this balanced, authoritative, nonpolemical new book. The Prophets, he explains, follow William Vogt, a founding environmentalist who believed that in using more than our planet has to give, our prosperity will lead us to ruin. Cut back! was his mantra. Otherwise everyone will lose! The Wizards are the heirs of Norman Borlaug, whose research, in effect, wrangled the world in service to our species to produce modern high-yield crops that then saved millions from starvation. Innovate! was Borlaug's cry. Only in that way can everyone win! Mann delves into these diverging viewpoints to assess the four great challenges humanity faces--food, water, energy, climate change--grounding each in historical context and weighing the options for the future. With our civilization on the line, the author's insightful analysis is an essential addition to the urgent conversation about how our children will fare on an increasingly crowded Earth.

The Prophets

The Prophets PDF Author: Robert Jones, Jr.
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0593085701
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
Best Book of the Year NPR • The Washington Post • Boston Globe • TIME • USA Today • Entertainment Weekly • Real Simple • Parade • Buzzfeed • Electric Literature • LitHub • BookRiot • PopSugar • Goop • Library Journal • BookBub • KCRW • Finalist for the National Book Award • One of the New York Times Notable Books of the Year • One of the New York Times Best Historical Fiction of the Year • Instant New York Times Bestseller A singular and stunning debut novel about the forbidden union between two enslaved young men on a Deep South plantation, the refuge they find in each other, and a betrayal that threatens their existence. Isaiah was Samuel's and Samuel was Isaiah's. That was the way it was since the beginning, and the way it was to be until the end. In the barn they tended to the animals, but also to each other, transforming the hollowed-out shed into a place of human refuge, a source of intimacy and hope in a world ruled by vicious masters. But when an older man—a fellow slave—seeks to gain favor by preaching the master's gospel on the plantation, the enslaved begin to turn on their own. Isaiah and Samuel's love, which was once so simple, is seen as sinful and a clear danger to the plantation's harmony. With a lyricism reminiscent of Toni Morrison, Robert Jones, Jr., fiercely summons the voices of slaver and enslaved alike, from Isaiah and Samuel to the calculating slave master to the long line of women that surround them, women who have carried the soul of the plantation on their shoulders. As tensions build and the weight of centuries—of ancestors and future generations to come—culminates in a climactic reckoning, The Prophets fearlessly reveals the pain and suffering of inheritance, but is also shot through with hope, beauty, and truth, portraying the enormous, heroic power of love.

Prophets and Prophecy

Prophets and Prophecy PDF Author: William Henry Green
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Bible
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description


The Prophet and the Astronomer

The Prophet and the Astronomer PDF Author: Marcelo Gleiser
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393324310
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
Explores the shared quest of ancient prophets and today's astronomers to explain the strange phenomena of our skies-from the apocalypse foretold in Revelations to modern science's ongoing identification of multiple cataclysmic threats, including the impact of comets and asteroids on earthly life, the likelihood of future collisions, the meaning of solar eclipses and the death of stars, the implications of black holes for time travel, and the ultimate fate of the universe and time.

Prophets Before the Exile

Prophets Before the Exile PDF Author: Christopher R. Smith
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
ISBN: 0830858148
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 137

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Book Description
The latest installment in Christopher R. Smith's innovative Understanding the Books of the Bible series brings you and your group into a direct encounter with the words of the poets and outcasts who were entrusted with the message of divine reproof for a community falling headlong into a exile.