Search results for ""equinox publishing ltd""

Rudolf Otto (1869-1937) is widely recognized as one of the most important contributors to the study of religions at the beginning of the 20th century. His book, The Idea of the Holy, became something of a sensation in its time, and his account of numinous experience as a mysterium tremendum et fascinans had an effect that few other ideas in the study of religions have had. His vocabulary broke through narrow disciplinary bounds and was taken up by people in a variety of disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences. However, since the 1960s, Otto has been increasingly overlooked and neglected. As thinkers and scholars have turned in many other intellectual directions, they have tended to see Otto as representative of a past to be rejected. This volume gathers together essays by scholars from a variety of perspectives - theology, religious studies, intellectual history, and various cultural studies - to address the question of what Otto's legacy for the 21st century might be. The first section of the volume addresses Otto's ideas and their contexts. Part Two turns to the area that Otto, more than any other German theologian or philosopher of religion, opened up: an engagement with the world of religions. Otto's influence, however, has never been confined to systematic religious thought and the study of religions. His ideas have resonated much more widely. Although it is impossible to treat this range of application completely, the essays in Part Three aim to provide a hint of this wider impact, in architecture (Britton), poetry (Furey), politics (Jerryson), and the contemporary world more generally (Lauster). This volume is not an attempt to revivify Otto, nor is it intended as a magisterial statement about Otto's significance today. Rather, it issues an invitation to those with an interest not just in religions but also in cultural phenomena more broadly to take another look at Rudolf Otto and his ideas. Perhaps they will find more than they expect, and something that they can use.

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The fabrication of groups as different, as other, often has significant consequences, including violence and discrimination. This volume focuses on the discourses that construct Islam in the aftermath of traumatic events and thus illustrates how academic analysis of the fabrication of difference can contribute significantly to public discourse. It centers on two critical analyses by accomplished scholars who have written publicly on the constructions of Islam and Muslims as others. Mayanthi Fernando analyzes the rhetoric surrounding French laicite (often translated as secularism) in the aftermath of the attack on Charlie Hebdo in Paris in 2015, highlighting the ways the majority uses the language of laicite to diminish the presence of minorities. Aaron Hughes analyzes how scholars and others construct Islam in response to acts of violence attributed to people who identify with Islam, thus illustrating how critical academic analysis can contribute to the understanding of both the contestation and ideology behind groups such as ISIS. Ten early career scholars apply and extend the questions and approaches of these central essays in short reflections that apply these issues in new ways to other contexts (e.g., India, the United States, early Christianity) and topics (e.g., social issues in politics, religion vs. non-religion, nationalism, scholars in public discourse). The volume concludes with a substantive Afterword that broadens from these specific current events to present an extended analysis of the fabrication of difference and the ways recognizing these processes should influence our scholarship and our engagement with public discourse. In addressing the ways people construct difference and the Other, this volume, therefore, provides one answer to the question of the relevance of these fields in a period of both political challenge and internal critique of the assumption of the universality of academic research.

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Nonviolence is emerging as a topic of great interest in activist, academic and community settings. In particular, nonviolence is being recognized as a necessary component of constructive and sustainable social change. This book considers nonviolence in relationship to specific social, political, ecological and spiritual issues. Through case studies and examinations of social resistance, gender, the arts, and education, it provides specialists and non-specialists with a solid introduction to the importance and relevance of nonviolence in various contexts.Advancing Nonviolence and Social Transformation is organized into five sections. The first section is a set of essays on various historical and contemporary perspectives on nonviolence. The second section consists of essays on philosophical and theoretical explorations of the topic. The third and fourth sections expand the scope of nonviolence into the areas of thought and action, including Indigenous resistance, student protests, human trafficking, intimate partner violence and ecological issues. The final section takes nonviolence into the study of wonder, music, education and hope.The book will be useful to anyone working in the theories and practices of social change.

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This volume revisits the concepts of enchantment and sacralization in light of perspectives which challenge the modern notion that man (alone) is the measure of all things. As Bruno Latour has argued, the battle against superstition entailed shifting power away from God/the gods to humans, thereby disqualifying the agency of all the other objects in the world. Might enchantment and sacralization be understood in other ways than through this battle between almighty gods and almighty humans? Might enchantment be understood to involve processes where power and control are not distributed so clearly and definitely?Like social constructionists, Latour emphasizes that things are constructed; yet, like many other new materialists, such as Jane Bennett, Manuel De Landa and Karen Barad, he emphasizes that this construction is not the result of projecting meaning onto a passive and meaningless world, but a matter of compositional achievements, whereby assemblages of actants co-compose each other and frame, enable and delimit one another's agency.This move recognizes the active and entangled participation of players beyond the humans versus God(s) framework that informed the modernist project. Understanding enchantment and sacralisation as compositionally and relationally constructed does not mean the same as understanding them as constructed by humans alone. What it means is one of the main questions posed in this book. In other words, if enchantment and sacralization are not understood (solely) in terms of projecting anthropocentric meaning onto mute objects, what are some promising alternative approaches - old and new - and what are their implications for how we understand modernity and for method and theory in the study of religion?

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This volume builds on scholarship by scholars of African American religion that emphasizes the centrality of the body in religion and religious experience. The argument is grounded in Anthony Pinn's understanding of religion as an embodied quest for complex subjectivity, or push for more life meaning. But if Pinn's theory gets at what religion is, this volume picks up where he left off by giving careful consideration to religion's forms. It interrogates the embodied nature of the quest for complex subjectivity. Through placing different theories of the body in conversation with specific case studies that reflect the variety of ways in which bodies are entangled and engaged in struggles for life meaning, the authors argue that African American religion takes on various forms, including modes of cultural production as well as mundane, everyday rituals and practices. The volume expands current scholarship on African American religion and embodiment by going beyond an understanding of black religion as the "Black Church" and underscoring the variety of religious experiences, in both marginal religious traditions and in non-traditional forms of religion. The sustained and rigorous attention to theories of the body in this volume allows for a more robust understanding of what the body is and takes scholarship beyond the implicit understandings of the body as solely discursive. Finally, the approach is interdisciplinary. While grounded in Religious Studies, this book puts various theories and methodologies-from the social sciences to philosophy, and from visual studies to literary studies-in conversation with the religious experiences of African Americans.

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Human Communication across Cultures is a highly interactive textbook and workbook on how human communication takes place. Unlike other textbooks which focus only on sociolinguistics this book employs both sociolinguistics and pragmatics. Sociolinguistics explores how language is used in social interactions. There are differences in the way we speak due to where we live, gender, age, race/ethnicity, religious background and our social class and level of education. Pragmatics shows how we speak differently and understand one another in each situation we encounter. Each section of the book includes a brief introduction, a discussion of the topic, references for further research and an extensive collection of activities designed for both in-class usage and homework assignments. The book features numerous examples from a variety of current world cultures.

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Stag and Stone is a timely and innovative evaluation of the interdisciplinary dialogue between religious studies and archaeology. Investigating the core concepts of materiality, perception, ritual and agency, this volume redefines conceptual categories and argues for the need of ‘critical bewilderment’ as a unique scholarly practice. This study brings together recent developments in religious aesthetics, theoretical archaeology and cultural studies. Taking as its focus ‘troublesome’ objects and places—those deemed ambiguous in purpose and meaning—the case studies presented here contribute new knowledge to a range of areas, including the ontology of matter, agency of images, animal–human studies, and early medieval norse and insular material culture. Stag and Stone offers useful insights to upper level undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers in the areas of heritage and cultural studies, theoretical archaeology, animal studies, religious studies and art history.

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Telepathy, thought transference, unconscious communication. While some important early psychological theorists such as William James, Frederic W. H. Myers and Sigmund Freud all agreed that the phenomenon exists, their theoretical approaches to it were very different. James's and Myers's interpretations of and experimental investigations into telepathy or thought transference were an inextricable part of their psychical researches. Freud's insistence on the reality of thought transference had nothing to do with psychical research or paranormal phenomena, which he largely repudiated. Thought transference for Freud was located in a theory of the unconscious that was radically different from the subliminal mind embraced by James and Myers. Today thought transference is most commonly described as unconscious communication but was largely ignored by subsequent generations of psychoanalysts until most recently. Nonetheless, the recognition of unconscious communication has persisted as a subterranean, quasi-spiritual presence in psychoanalysis to this day. As psychoanalysis becomes more interested in unconscious communication and develops theories of loosely boundaried subjectivities that open up to transcendent dimensions of reality, it begins to assume the features of a religious psychology. Thus, a fuller understanding of how unconscious communication resonates with mystical overtones may be more deeply clarified, articulated and elaborated in contemporary psychoanalysis in an explicit dialogue with psychoanalytically literate scholars of religion. In Legacies of the Occult Marsha Aileen Hewitt argues that some of the leading theorists of unconscious communication represent a 'mystical turn' that is infused with both a spirituality and a revitalized interest in paranormal experience that is far closer to James and Myers than to Freud.

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Semantics: A Cognitive Account of Linguistic Meaning is a comprehensive introduction to the study of the meaning of linguistic expressions in English: words and sentences. In conducting the analysis, it draws on two sources. First, it relies on the assumptions of Cognitive Linguistics, which describes language as being non-modular, symbolic, usage-based, meaningful and creative. Second, it hinges on the assumptions of Cognitive Semantics, which describes meaning as being embodied, motivated, dynamic, encyclopaedic and conceptualised. It explicates these assumptions clearly and applies them to diverse areas of language. Ultimately, it enables students to recognise the complexity of the English linguistic system, and trains them to solve the intricate puzzles characterising its nature.

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This volume provides a composite of contemporary Sufi involvement in politics using a range of approaches and disciplines. It explores the role of Sufi-related parties where they exist or are emerging. It also examines how parties that condemn Sufism have adopted aspects of Sufi organization and practice. Changes in views within the academy on politics and Sufism are discussed. Perspectives on Egypt, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Indonesia are included as are overviews of Sufism's political dimension across various regions.Contributions in the volume seek answer questions such as: Where Sufi related parties exist, what policies do they propose, and how do they differ from those of Islamist parties? How would "law" be understood? What is the relationship between secular and Sufi ideas about the role of religion in society? How do Sufi views about how to structure the state in Muslim majority space differ from alternatives? Are Sufis more likely to support democracy?

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Whether as a historian finding solutions to unresolved problems or as a scientist finding the causes for events and actions, Luther Martin's primary focus has been to get to the roots of the religious impulse in human existence. This collection of essays from scholars of his own generation and from his best students cover the three major strands of his work: the Greco-Roman world, cognitive science approaches to explaining religious phenomena and methodological issues in the academic study of religions. The contributions build on the work of Luther Martin and further the ongoing discussion and debate within these areas of religious studies.

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Divine Covenant explores the Qur’anic concept of divine knowledge through scientific, theoretical paradigms – in particular natural law theory – and their relationship with seven Islamic scholarly disciplines: linguistics, hadith, politics, history, exegesis, jurisprudence, theology. By comparing scholarship within these disciplines with current state-of-the-art, the study shows how the Qur’anic concept of divine Covenant reflects natural law theory, relates to a range of other legal, political, and linguistic Qur’anic concepts, informs the canon’s entire literary structure, and has implications for a new, legal theory of ‘Islamic origins’. The book makes the case that the Islamic disciplines share political economy, institutional framework, and decisive theoretical topics with the Qur’an. The latter include the natural law-related issues of human rights, constitutional separation of powers, and social contract. The book surveys the scholarly deliberations of these topics within the parameters of each discipline and in changing contexts. In addition, consequences of the modern nation-state institutional order for early modern and contemporary Qur’anic studies are mapped. It is argued that the early and medieval Islamic disciplines offer scientifically valuable knowledge because they refer to the same institutional framework as the Qur’an. The disciplines are also important parts of European political history, where they have inspired social contract theory inclusive of diverse religious identities.

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The sky forms fifty percent of our visual world and has a voice across cultures. This complex sky-voice contains great diversity and is informed by human images, dreams, and aspirations. The inherent nature of this sky-voice is transmitted from one generation to another through text, image, oral tradition, physical mapping, and painted description. This volume is written by some of the most noted scholars in their fields of British history, history of art, social anthropology, Greek horoscopes and narratology, globe cartography, comets and Irish mythology, western astronomy, Australian aboriginal sky astronomy and mythology, and cultural astronomy and astrology. These scholars acknowledge the presence of such a voice, in the sky's movement mirrored in the archoeastronomy of British prehistory, the apocalyptic myths of comets and meteors, the sky cartography reflected in European globes and frescoes, the Australian aboriginal sky myths, the issue of disappearing dark skies, and in contemporary reflections on the sky. It recognises that sky imagery has persisted in similar forms since its potential roots in the Palaeolithic period.These eleven essays offer critical engagement in understanding the sky in human imagination and culture and contribute to the new fields of cultural astronomy and skyscapes, the role and importance of the sky in the interpretation of cultures, emerging within the academy.

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The sky forms fifty percent of our visual world and has a voice across cultures. This complex sky-voice contains great diversity and is informed by human images, dreams, and aspirations. The inherent nature of this sky-voice is transmitted from one generation to another through text, image, oral tradition, physical mapping, and painted description. This volume is written by some of the most noted scholars in their fields of British history, history of art, social anthropology, Greek horoscopes and narratology, globe cartography, comets and Irish mythology, western astronomy, Australian aboriginal sky astronomy and mythology, and cultural astronomy and astrology. These scholars acknowledge the presence of such a voice, in the sky's movement mirrored in the archoeastronomy of British prehistory, the apocalyptic myths of comets and meteors, the sky cartography reflected in European globes and frescoes, the Australian aboriginal sky myths, the issue of disappearing dark skies, and in contemporary reflections on the sky. It recognises that sky imagery has persisted in similar forms since its potential roots in the Palaeolithic period.These eleven essays offer critical engagement in understanding the sky in human imagination and culture and contribute to the new fields of cultural astronomy and skyscapes, the role and importance of the sky in the interpretation of cultures, emerging within the academy.

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Creativity and Writing Pedagogy offers a unique view of creative practices and pedagogy in writing from the perspective of writing teachers, creativity researchers and scholars, and writers themselves. The volume, collected and edited by a poet and a scholar who are both involved in the teaching of writing, seeks to bridge between the creative writing and the academic writing communities in building a case for creativity as central to all writing programs and showcasing creative practices in writing. With this goal in mind, the book combines a practical emphasis on creativity in writing pedagogy and curriculum with research and reflections on writing practices. The collection should be of interest to all writers and teachers of writing who want to expand their knowledge of creativity and creative practices in writing and the teaching of writing.

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The second edition of this highly regarded textbook is designed to introduce students at the tertiary level to both Systemic Functional Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis. It develops critical analytical skills by rooting analysis in SFL methodology so that students can learn to analyze a range of discourse types. Each chapter builds a methodological foundation for the development of critical discourse analytical skills. SFL provides novice analysts with a rich set of resources for CDA and equips them to better reflect on what language is doing and why. The Power of Language offers explanations along with a range of sample analyses to illustrate theory and provide applications of the methodologies introduced in each chapter. Students not only learn by studying a number of analyses but carry out their own analytical work on other samples, thus gaining experience. Each chapter also includes examples of analyses by well know researchers so that novice analysts become familiar with various approaches to analysis.This new edition has been thoroughly updated throughout and features an expanded first chapter on language and international conflict, a new second chapter focusing on language and political fear, an expanded chapter on multimodal communication and an entirely new chapter on language and social media. Other chapters have been updated with new sample analyses and activities.

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The world of religious experience is changing much faster than the discipline which claims to study it. Religious studies still uses Christianity as its measure, still frames the world through the model of five world religions, still largely avoids analysis of key issues around power, poverty, violence, pollution, science, and social conflict, and still looks to highlight differences rather than commonalities. Methods for the Study of Religious Change aims to redefine the study of religion as the study of worldviews, of ideas which are active in shaping the world. It argues that the study of religion should focus on people's worldview-making capacities and should contribute to the critical analysis of global problems and the promotion of cultural and spiritual respect across religions. Survey chapters on theory and method outline this new approach while case-study chapters illustrate these ideas with innovative ethnographies of ritual, experience, language, morals and identity.

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Keith Jarrett is one of the great pianists of our times. Before achieving worldwide fame for his solo improvisations, he had already collaborated with Art Blakey, Charles Lloyd and Miles Davis. His ‘Köln Concert’ album (1975) has now sold around four million copies and become the most successful solo recording in jazz history. His interpretations of the music of Bach, Händel, Bartók or Shostakovich, have also received much attention in later years. Jarrett is considered difficult and inaccessible, and has often abandoned the stage during his concerts due to restless audiences or disturbing photographers. Few writers have come as close to Keith Jarrett as Wolfgang Sandner, who has not only closely followed Jarrett’s remarkable career from the 1960s, but has also had the opportunity to visit him in his home in the United States. For this biography, which is full of detailed musical analysis and cross-references to other artistic genres, Sandner has collected new information about Jarrett’s family background, much of which is thanks to the translator, Keith Jarrett’s youngest brother Chris. The book explores Jarrett’s work with other musicians, in particular the members of his American and European Quartets and his Standards Trio, it charts the development of his solo concerts, and it also investigates his work in the classical sphere, as well as the highly original music he has created in his own home studio. It also covers his associations with his various record labels and producers, notably his unparalleled relationship with ECM and its founder Manfred Eicher. This English edition is a significantly extended and updated version of the German original.

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The values of liberalism, pluralism, and democratic governance are under sustained attack from right-wing Christian fundamentalists, white ethnonationalists, and economic populists. At the same time, liberal democracies are failing at cultivating and transmitting the values, wisdom, and virtues that are the perquisites for individual and collective flourishing. Liberal democracies seem increasingly unable to negotiate diverse visions of the good life rooted in regional, ethnic, racial, religious, generational, and socioeconomic differences. Aspiring autocrats and social media organizations exploit these divisions to enhance their power or profit, resulting in increased tribalization and affective polarization. Solving these problems requires a renewed understanding of human flourishing and the wisdom and virtues that make it possible. The House We Live In explores the commonalities underlying three classical approaches to virtue ethics--Aristotelean, Buddhist, and Confucian--to develop a flourishing-based ethics capable of addressing the problems of liberal democracies. The book examines the moral and intellectual virtues that promote flourishing, the diversity of ways in which we may flourish, and the factors all flourishing lives share. It shows how a flourishing-based ethics can serve as a corrective to the historical Western over-emphasis on individualism at the expense of community. Finally, it addresses problems in domestic and foreign policy and the difficulties in talking to each other across the political divide from a flourishing-based perspective. The book is a reaffirmation of pluralism, the liberal democratic tradition, and the necessity of a pragmatic approach to living together despite seemingly incommensurable differences.

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This second book in the ‘Middle Way Philosophy’ series develops five general principles that are distinctive to the universal Middle Way as a practical response to absolutization. These begin with the consistent acknowledgement of human uncertainty (scepticism), and follow through with openness to alternative possibilities (provisionality), the importance of judging things as a matter of degree (incrementality), the clear rejection of polarised absolute claims (agnosticism) and the cultivation of cognitive and emotional states that will help us resolve conflict (integration). These are discussed not only in theory, but with links to the wide range of established human practices that can help us to follow them. Like all of Robert M. Ellis’s work, this book is highly inter-disciplinary, drawing on philosophical argument, psychological models and values that prioritize practical application.

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In Raf' al-Malam 'an al-A'imma al-A'lam Ibn Taymiyya pursues the argument as to why a mujtahid might depart from directly acting upon textual evidences. This forms the basis of his discussion regarding the causes underlying disagreements found among Muslim scholars in general and their holding differing legal opinions and proffering divergent arguments in support of those opinions. In this work, Ibn Taymiyya calls for tolerance and understanding of the conclusions arrived at by eminent Muslim scholars. Additionally, he insists that even if a scholar was to err in their judgement, it should not be assumed that they intentionally ignored textual evidence as there could be various reasons for what others consider to be a departure from textual evidences. Hence, according to Ibn Taymiyya, such scholars should not be seen as blameworthy and liable to punishment but rather they should be revered as scholars who exercised their right of ijtihad. Thus, even if such a scholar was thought to have erred, there would most certainly be a methodological reason behind such a departure, rather than an intentional contradiction of the relevant textual evidences. Additionally, Ibn Taymiyya asserts that liability for the punishment depends on the existence of certain conditions and the non-existence of impediments and he affirms that reaching certainty in this regard is almost impossible as this is clearly a very complex and complicated process. In this work it is evident that Ibn Taymiyya benefited from various traditions of learning in which he excelled, including jurisprudence, Hadith and philosophy and hence produced a remarkable work which has proved relevant from the time it was authored about eight centuries ago until our present day. This work contains the Arabic text Raf' al-Malam 'an al-A'imma al A'lam and its translation.

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John Cassian (360-435 CE) started his monastic career in Bethlehem. He later traveled to the Egyptian desert, living there as a monk, meeting the venerated Desert Fathers, and learning from them for about fifteen years. Much later, he would go to the region of Gaul to help establish a monastery there by writing monastic manuals, the Institutes and the Conferences. These seminal writings represent the first known attempt to bring the idealized monastic traditions from Egypt, long understood to be the cradle of monasticism, to the West. In his Institutes, Cassian comments that “a monk ought by all means to flee from women and bishops” (Inst. 11.18). An odd comment from a monk, apparently casting bishops as adversaries rather than models for the Christian life. This book argues that Cassian, in both the Institutes and the Conferences, advocated for a separation between monastics and the institutional Church. In Cassian’s writings and the larger corpus of monastic writings from his era, monks never referred to early Church fathers such as Irenaeus or Tertullian as authorities; instead, they cited quotes and stories exclusively from earlier, venerated monks. In that sense, monastic discourse such as Cassian’s formed a closed discursive system, consciously excluding the hierarchical institutional Church. Furthermore, Cassian argues for a separate monastic authority based not on apostolic succession but on apostolic praxis, the notion that monastic practices such as prayer and asceticism can be traced back to the primitive church. This study of Cassian’s writings is supplemented with Michel Foucault’s analysis of the creation of subjects to examine Cassian’s formation of a specifically Egyptian form of monastic subjectivity for his audience, the monks of Gaul. Foucault’s concepts of disciplinary power and pastoral power are also employed to demonstrate the effect Cassian’s rhetoric would have upon his direct audience, as well as many other monks throughout history.

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The Rosary and the Microphone explores U2 as a politically engaged band that manifests a particular brand of Christianity through the band's mediation in a global context and for a global audience. Through the primarily semiotic study of U2's various mediations, this book maps the band's strategies for negotiating its place in the world as a global band--and mediated brand--and as a proponent of a kind of cosmopolitanism, or global care. U2's brand is heavily informed by Bono's own personal religious formation. This religious viewpoint is expressed in a global concern--a Christian cosmopolitanism--that looks outward and draws others to do the same.

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An Optimality Theoretic grammar arises from the comparison of candidates over a set of constraints, oriented toward obtaining certain of those candidates as optimal. The typology of a specified system collects its grammars, encompassing all total domination orders among the posited constraints. Considerable progress has been made in understanding the internal structure of Optimality Theoretic grammars but, in this book, we move up a level from grammar to typology, probing the structure that emerges from the most basic commitments of the theory. Comparison is once again central: a constraint viewed at the typological level rates entire grammars against each other. From this perspective, the constraint goes beyond its familiar role as an engine of comparison based on quantitative penalties and instead takes the form of a more abstract order and equivalence structure. This “Equivalence-augmented Privileged Order” (EPO) can be presented as a kind of enriched Hasse diagram. The collection of the EPOs, one for each constraint, forms the MOAT, the “Mother of All Tableaux”. The EPOs of a typology’s unique MOAT are respected in every violation tableau associated with it. With the MOAT concept in place, it becomes possible to understand exactly which sets of disjoint grammars constitute valid typologies. This finding provides the conditions under which grammars of a given typology can merge to produce another, simpler typology and thereby abstract away informatively from various differences between them. Geometrically, the MOAT concept enables us to show, following the insights of Jason Riggle, that the grammars of a typology neatly partition its representation on the permutohedron into connected, spherically convex regions. Discussion proceeds along both concrete and abstract lines, facilitating access for readers across a wide range of interests.

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In the Eurowest pain is discursively framed as something that elides discourse and therefore is outside language. In this framing, pain, as outside language, is given asocial and ahistorical status understood to be beyond human construction. Indeed, played out in systems of belief and practice, pain acts as a medium for reciprocal relations with the metaphysical other since it too is understood as originating and sharing a part in the ‘authentic’ or ‘real’ from which the metaphysical, and therefore truth, is understood to emerge. Understood as part of this domain, pain is linked to truth and therefore understood to be a means to truth; hence the use of torture to secure the truth. With this kind of discursive framing, this book works to make apparent the rhetorical play of pain demonstrating its social and political imperatives.

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The influence of Ibn 'Arabi, the 12th century Andalusian mystic philosopher extended beyond the Muslim world from Spain, to China, to Indonesia. Interest in Ibn 'Arabi in the west has grown over the last century. "Ibn Arabi and the Contemporary West" examines 'Arabi's teachings through the work of the Beshara Trust and the Muhyiddin Ibn 'Arabi Society. The study investigates how the Beshara School has used Ibn 'Arabi's teachings in assisting a range of students from around the world towards personal, spiritual development and how the Muhyiddin Ibn 'Arabi Society has evolved into an international organisation with increasing influence in both the West and the Muslim world.

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For ten years between 1965 and 1975, James Brown was the most popular and cutting-edge of any black artist. As one journalist put it, "before Brown, there was music with a beat. After Brown music had found a groove." The drawing out of this "groove," leveraged on "the one," - or the first and third beats of a 4/4 bar, - would provide the key to much of Brown's subsequent musical success and instil within popular music an unprecedented drive that would characterize not only the funk style, but also provide the rhythmic blueprint for dance music up to the present day. This book explores how funk emerged in the mid-1960s at the very apex of the civil rights movement and shows how this music mirrored the broader changes taking place within the African-American community at a crucial political time and continues to this day to underpin remix culture. It traces the extent of the Brown legacy, musically, culturally and otherwise articulating decisive links between Brown's work and the DJ culture that embraced it so emphatically that Brown is now considered to be the most widely sampled African-American recording artist in history; indeed, we seem to have reached a point where many of Brown's refrains - the screams, the horn stabs, the "funky drummer" breakbeats - have been sampled so often as to have seemingly become part of the public domain. Traversing the past forty years of popular music, the book explores how the ubiquitous presence of Brown's groove, the affective and transformative capacities of a grunt or a well-timed "Good God" or punctuating scream take over where language fails and compel even the most sedate listener to take to the floor.

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A Multimodal Analysis of Picture Books for Children goes beyond the relation between the representation of reality and language alone; instead, it aims to analyze the intersemiosis between verbal and visual elements in a sample of nine picture books. The chapters included in this book take the most relevant systemic-functional and visual social semiotic theories a step further from previous studies and apply them to the genre of children's tales. Within the frameworks of Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics and Kress and van Leeuwen's Visual Social Semiotics, the aim is to identify the verbal and visual strategies available to the writer and illustrator (i) to convey representational meanings, (ii) to set up interpersonal relationships within the tale itself, as well as external relationships between writer and reader and, finally, (iii) to create coherent tales. This is achieved by analyzing and identifying the ideational, interpersonal and textual choices available to the writer to make meaning in picture books, and comparing them with the corresponding representational, interactive and compositional choices made by the illustrator. The analysis reveals how the verbal and visual modalities contribute to each other's meaning and makes the potential of combining verbal and non-verbal language in picture books evident.

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Much of the "new wave" of contrastive linguistics has focused on aspects of the grammatical system, examining phonological, morphological, lexical and syntactic similarities and differences across two or more languages. As with many other areas of linguistics, there exists a renewed interest in discourse perspectives in the study of languages in contrast, and much of that work uses corpora and corpus linguistics techniques to study language. This volume provides examples of cutting-edge research in contrastive analyses of different languages. The papers have been organized around four themes: studies of discourse markers; information structure; registers and genres; and phraseology. The languages included (Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Swedish) cover a range of European languages, showing not only diversity in their grammatical structures, but also subtle differences that are the focus of many of the papers. The techniques used, from concordancing and careful annotation to painstaking qualitative analysis, showcase the variety of approaches to the study of languages in contrast and include contributions from discourse, corpus and functional perspectives.

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The notion of Choice provides a constant underlying theme to work in Systemic Functional Linguistics, whether this is concerned with in-depth description of the system of lexicogrammatical options available within specific languages or with the analysis of the semiotic and/or social implications of the choices taken within specific texts. Yet to date little has been published exploring the applicability of choice across various contexts. This book addresses this gap in the literature by presenting a selection of writings from internationally renowned authors that develop the analytical perspective of choice across wide-ranging contexts and in some cases in languages other than English. The book demonstrates the value of Systemic Functional Linguistics as an "applicable" linguistics, which is a core tool in broader fields such as pedagogy, literary studies and critical discourse analysis.

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Ireland and Buddhism have a long history. Shaped by colonialism, contested borders, religious wars, empire and massive diasporas, Irish people have encountered Asian Buddhism in many ways over 14 centuries. From the thrill of travellers' tales in far-off lands to a religious alternative to Christianity, from the potential of anti-colonial solidarity to fears of "going native", and from recent immigration to the secular spread of Buddhist meditation, Buddhism has meant many different things to people in Ireland. Knowledge of Buddhist Asia reached Ireland by the 7th century, with the first personal contact in the 14th - a tale remembered for 500 years. The first Irish Buddhists appeared in the political and cultural crisis of the 19th century, in Dublin and the rural West, but also in Burma and Japan. Over the next hundred years, Buddhism competed with esoteric movements to become the alternative to mainstream religion. Since the 1960s, Buddhism has exploded to become Ireland's third-largest religion. Buddhism and Ireland is the first history of its subject, a rich and exciting story of extraordinary individuals and the journey of ideas across Europe and Asia.

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This book focuses on certain local powers in Old Babylonian Mesopotamia (ca. 2000 - 1595 B.C.), namely the chief of the city (rabianum), the elders, the "city," and the assembly. This is a novel approach to Old Babylonian history that allows us to understand the constituency, activities, and sphere of influence of local institutions of authority, and the way they coped with state officials and royal policies. Focusing on local powers changes the traditional manner of looking at the state. This is so because far from being a monolithic entity that unilaterally made decisions concerning people, water, land, and other resources, the state had to deal with local institutions that were not always willing to accept royal decisions passively. The state was often unable to penetrate deeply into traditional social and economic practices that were controlled by local leaders, as is most apparent in the conflict of jurisdiction related to land distribution. However, the state did surreptitiously co-opt local leaders into the royal domain. The methodology and conclusions of this case study of local authorities in Old Babylonian Mesopotamia will also be useful for those studying other ancient states and complex societies.

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The last two decades have seen a good deal of work in educational linguistics, which has created a deeper understanding of how language works in different varieties of discourse and what a teacher needs to know for engaging successfully in language education. In this sense, the focus has been largely on instructional discourse - i.e., what is to be taught. The chapters of this book attempt to widen the field by focussing on who is being taught. After all, the true active element in the processes of education is the learner. Children have already acquired specific ways of learning, long before they enter the classroom, and in pluralistic societies learning styles vary systematically across communities. This book argues on the one hand the need to attend to the different voices in the classroom, and on the other to encourage an attitude of enquiry which creates awareness of the power of discourse in maintaining and/or changing societies.

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Explorations in Functional Syntax develops a practical framework for analysing the syntactic structure of a text from a functional perspective. It outlines a model in which the syntactic analysis, on a single dimension, mirrors more explicitly the multidimensional meaning structure of the text. The syntactic framework thus takes account of semantic concepts such as participants and things, processes, features and qualities, and circumstances, all of which constitute elements of ideas. But it also deals with the cohesive links which connect ideas and with personal comments, etc. which may be interspersed in amongst them. Though set firmly in the mould of systemic functional grammar, the book focuses on lexicogrammar -grammatical units and relations, structural elements, configurations and complexities; social context and the semantic stratum are sketched out only as integral background. In elaborating a unitary syntactic framework which is functionally orientated so as to reflect the meaning structure of a text, the book represents a significant departure from the 'standard' mode of handling lexicogrammar in systemic linguistics. Important differences have been introduced with regard, firstly, to the nature of units on the rank scale and their relationships to structural complexes and, secondly, to the range and scope of elements of clause structure. The book is well illustrated with examples of the descriptive framework in action throughout the text and in a summary end chapter.

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M.K. Samuelson, realising that there was no collection of Sussex recipes, set about making her own. This was first published in 1937 but World War II prevented a reprint. Southover reprinted it in 2005 in response to the renewed interest in regional food. The author was lucky to own a large collection of cookery books herself and luckier that in those days, many local families still kept family recipe books. Many of the mouth-watering dishes in this collection go back to the early 18th century and even earlier. In addition to the recipes the book includes an introduction by contemporary food writer and broadcaster Hattie Ellis as well as a note by Catherine Mant, grandaughter of the author and former Assistant Editor of "The Good Food Guide".

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By the end of the ninth century the Prophet Muhammad had emerged as an incomparable exemplar shared by all Muslim communities. Prophecy and Power offers a rigorous comparative study of both the Prophet Muhammad and the Qur'an. The book ranges across various issues: the comparative study of 'prophecy'; Qur'anic comparison as a modality of change; the Prophet as exemplar and foil; and an experiment in comparison between Muhammad and Alinesitouie.

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Japanese Buddhist Pilgrimage explores the ritual practice of "circulatory pilgrimages" - the visiting of many temples in a numbered sequence. Every year, hundreds of thousands of pilgrims travel such temple routes, seeking peace of mind, health and wellbeing for themselves and others as the benefits of such meritorious endeavour. This form of pilgrimage appears to be unique to Japan. The practice began centuries ago and involved visiting 33 temples devoted to the Bodhisattva Kannon, spread widely over western Japan. Soon afterwards the equally famous pilgrimage to 88 temples on Japan's fourth island of Shikoku came into prominence. This is the first comprehensive study of all the major and many of the minor routes, The book also examines how the practice of circulatory pilgrimage developed among the shrines and temples for the Seven Gods of Good Fortune, and beyond them to the rather different world of Shinto. The varying significance of the different pilgrimages is also explored. In addition to all the information about the routes, the book includes numerous illustrations and examples of the short Buddhist texts chanted by the pilgrims on their rounds.

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Japanese Buddhist Pilgrimage explores the ritual practice of "circulatory pilgrimages" - the visiting of many temples in a numbered sequence. Every year, hundreds of thousands of pilgrims travel such temple routes, seeking peace of mind, health and wellbeing for themselves and others as the benefits of such meritorious endeavour. This form of pilgrimage appears to be unique to Japan. The practice began centuries ago and involved visiting 33 temples devoted to the Bodhisattva Kannon, spread widely over western Japan. Soon afterwards the equally famous pilgrimage to 88 temples on Japan's fourth island of Shikoku came into prominence. This is the first comprehensive study of all the major and many of the minor routes, The book also examines how the practice of circulatory pilgrimage developed among the shrines and temples for the Seven Gods of Good Fortune, and beyond them to the rather different world of Shinto. The varying significance of the different pilgrimages is also explored. In addition to all the information about the routes, the book includes numerous illustrations and examples of the short Buddhist texts chanted by the pilgrims on their rounds.

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Exploring College Writing: Reading, Writing and Researching across the Curriculum is a rhetoric for first-year and sophomore composition courses that uses a constructivist, ethnographic approach to introducing students to academic reading, writing, and researching. This text will be especially useful to composition instructors who wish to provide students with both a general overview of academic discourse and an introduction to the purposes, audiences, and genres of writing across disciplines. This textbook works from the premise that the best way to initiate students to academic discourse is to have them explore academic literacies using an ethnographic, fieldwork approach to their own institution. Students are cast in the role of researchers, exploring their own experiences as college writers and investigating writing in General Education and in their prospective majors. The book provides instructors and students sequences of engaging and exploratory Writing to LearnA" and Learn by DoingA" activities and formal, extended writing projects that ask students to interview professors, analyze writing assignments, and reflect on their own reading, writing, and researching processes and histories. These writing projects connect to students' interests, experiences, and goals and provide them with a sense of purpose and audience for writing.

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This volume brings together current research and practical innovations in the field of foreign language teaching. The contributions are all by well-known experts in the area. More specifically, the volume aims to give some comprehensive and updated coverage of theory, research and practice in two of the most challenging issues in today's English language teaching scenarios: the development of L2 vocabulary knowledge and the contribution of new corpus-based evidence to language teaching. The first section of the volume presents a comprehensive overview of relevant issues in the field of L2 vocabulary acquisition, where surveys of the state of the art in the area combine with empirical studies which approach the topic from the field of applied linguistics (teaching techniques, material writing), as well as from complementary disciplines such as semantics, phraseology and lexicography. The second section of the book delves into the pedagogical applications of current research in the field of corpus-based studies. The papers collected here explore the potential of new corpus evidence for the development of foreign language learners' competence. The final section bridges the gap between theory and practice by bringing together an intensely practical collection of papers offering useful advice on how to deal with vocabulary and/or corpora in the foreign language classroom that are derived from teaching and research conducted at the University of Granada (Spain) under the acronym ADELEX (Assessing and Developing Lexis through New Technologies). Though some papers involve reference to other languages such as French and Spanish, this is essentially a study of corpus and lexical theory as applied to contemporary English. The volume is backed up by an independent, dedicated website maintained by the editors. While web-based activities and vocabulary tests complement the printed material for the entire volume, Section 3 From theory to practiceA", provides systematic support.

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At some point in our past, human beings evolved the incredibly complex natural language systems which we all take for granted but without which we would not be able to communicate in the ways we do with each other, have civilizations, be able to contemplate the future and to change it. In the last hundred years we have begun to understand how these communication systems work. We know much about how we make speech sounds, organise them into words, the words into sentences and how the words and sentences we produce mean what they do. The subject within whose confines these discoveries have been made is linguistics. The knowledge we now have is passed on by teachers of linguistics many of whom are gifted and committed. Yet we know little about how they see their commitments to their subject. This book is the first to give teachers of linguistics the chance to reflect on their professional practice as teachers and thus to share their enthusiasms, their strategies and their personal approaches to their subject.

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Solving linguistic problems not infrequently reduces to carrying out tasks that are computationally complex and therefore requires automation. In such situations, the difference between having and not having computational tools to handle the tasks is not a matter of economy of time and effort, but may amount to the difference between finding and not finding a solution at all. The book is an introduction to machine-aided linguistic discovery, a novel research area, arguing for the fruitfulness of the computational approach by presenting a basic conceptual apparatus and several intelligent discovery programmes. One of the systems models the fundamental Saussurian notion of system, and thus, for the first time, after almost a century after the introduction of this concept and structuralism in general, linguists are capable to handle adequately this recurring computationally complex task. Another system models the problem of searching for Greenbergian language universals and is capable of stating its discoveries in an intelligible form, viz. a comprehensive English language text, thus constituting the first computer program to generate a whole scientific article. Yet another system detects potential inconsistencies in genetic language classifications. The programmes are applied with noteworthy results to substantial problems from diverse linguistic disciplines such as structural semantics, phonology, typology and historical linguistics.

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This book presents an integrated approach to the education of children that teaches them how to see and describe their world - both the natural world around them and their own culture and identity - through linking the media of art and language, considered as parallel creative-expressive processes of arting (representation in visual images) and writing (representation in words). The goal is transformative education based on the combined power and synergy of arting and writing processes to raise the educational experience to a higher level of exploration, personalized learning, and empowerment. Two complete multi-lesson units illustrate arting-and-writing activities centered on local ecology and culture and on students' own lives and interests. The Hawaiian context exemplifies the approach and how it can be adapted for use in elementary and middle-school classes in other contexts to integrate learning in students' home language and culture with mainstream English language and culture, and to explore students' cultural identity as connected to family and place. The book is inspirational in content, suggesting an approach to educating children that will be enjoyable to teach and will engage learners and help them realize their full potential. It is also visually inspirational, richly illustrated in color with examples of student work and the work of artists and teachers, including that of the authors themselves.

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This book presents an integrated approach to the education of children that teaches them how to see and describe their world - both the natural world around them and their own culture and identity - through linking the media of art and language, considered as parallel creative-expressive processes of arting (representation in visual images) and writing (representation in words). The goal is transformative education based on the combined power and synergy of arting and writing processes to raise the educational experience to a higher level of exploration, personalized learning, and empowerment. Two complete multi-lesson units illustrate arting-and-writing activities centered on local ecology and culture and on students' own lives and interests. The Hawaiian context exemplifies the approach and how it can be adapted for use in elementary and middle-school classes in other contexts to integrate learning in students' home language and culture with mainstream English language and culture, and to explore students' cultural identity as connected to family and place. The book is inspirational in content, suggesting an approach to educating children that will be enjoyable to teach and will engage learners and help them realize their full potential. It is also visually inspirational, richly illustrated in color with examples of student work and the work of artists and teachers, including that of the authors themselves.

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"Origin and Evolution of Languages" has a strong interdisciplinary flavour designed to highlight the true complexity of the debates in the field. Many of the models and theories conjectured can only receive their validation from a convergence of arguments developed across disciplines. The book underscores this dimension by including contribution from disciplines that have been wary, traditionally, of extending beyond their borders: linguistics (different branches thereof), philosophy, history and prehistory, archaeology, anthropology, genetics and computer-modelling. The presentation is intended to encompass both the agreements and disjunctures characteristic of the field and insisted on laying open propositions that clearly differ from, possibly even enter into contradiction with one another.While several teams of researchers active in the fields of genetics, linguistics, anthropology and archaeology have come up with new proposals in favor of the 'New Synthesis', many competing hypotheses and models continue to be explored in areal linguistics, language contact, wave-like diffusion. On the anthropological scene, criticisms of the monogenetic model have set up new debates and counter-arguments. Approaching the issue of the origin and evolution of human languages within a Darwinian paradigm remains problematic. On the archaeological scene, not all reconstructions are proving compatible with current models for the circulation of techniques, myths and cultures.On the linguistic scene, raising again the issue of the origin/evolution of humankind and of languages in an evolutionary, cognitive, social and cultural perspective or in terms of generational transmission and acquisition, may induce a reconsideration of linguistic theories in search of universals as well as most theories of change and variation. All contributors are world-renowned experts in their domain.

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Reflective practice is now seen as a major component of many language teacher education and professional development programs worldwide. One method that has been suggested for language teachers to reflect on their work is by writing regularly about their practice. Reflective Writing for Language Teachers shows language teachers how they can use writing as a way to subject their beliefs and practices to critical reflection and offers them a means of using this type of reflective practice for professional development purposes. When language teachers write about various facets of their work over a period of time, and then read over their entries looking for patterns, that is, seeing their own thoughts, they may uncover aspects of their practice that they had not realized before beginning to write reflectively. Reflective writing develops language teachers' understanding of their practice and also leads to a clarification of the values and assumptions that underlie those practices. Reflective Writing for Language Teachers explores the impact of regular writing as a reflective tool for teachers of English as a second language, other language teachers, and classroom English or language arts teachers. The book begins with a discussion on professional development and then outlines what reflective practice involves. It also addresses such issues as self-reflection, self-discovery through narrative reflective writing, the reflective journal, reflecting on the first and the later years of teaching, reflecting with the aid of teacher development groups, and reflecting for action.

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The first year of teaching has been characterized as a type of "reality shock" for many language teachers. This may be because the ideals that novice teachers formed during teacher training/education are often replaced by the reality of school life where much of their energy has shifted to learning how to adapt and survive in a new school culture. Although the first year of teaching has been well documented in general education research, not many detailed studies outlining the experiences of language teachers in their first year of teaching have been documented in the language education literature.This is surprising because as some scholars have suggested, in order to establish an effective knowledge-base for second/foreign language teacher education, language teacher educators must have some understanding of schools and schooling and the social and cultural contexts in which learning how to teach takes place. The purpose of this collection is to discuss the challenges and influences novice language teachers face when teaching in their first years. The volume outlines several detailed case studies of the experiences second/foreign language teachers during their first year of teaching in such diverse contexts as the USA, Canada, Singapore, Cambodia, the UK, Italy, southern Europe, Hong Kong, and Japan.

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This book is a general introduction to the English spoken in Ireland, its most characteristic features, and its historical development. It provides a practical introduction to the topic of Irish English (also known as Hiberno-English), the variety of English that arose in Ireland as a consequence of contact between the Irish and the English languages. As well as looking at the specific examples where substratum from Irish can be observed, the book analyzes other features unique to Irish English, from different perspectives (taking into account, for example, the pragmatic implications of certain syntactic structures in current spoken Irish English). It offers the reader a comprehensive coverage of the history and most salient features of this variety of English, while discussing key concepts such as bilingualism and language shift. The material is presented in a simple and accessible manner. It encourages the reader to discuss and think critically about some of the topics and to use the last section of each chapter as a basis for further investigation. "An Introduction to Irish English" contains exercises and practical activities with each chapter, as well as suggestions for further reading. It deals with both real data and fictional representations of this variety and it includes excerpts from Literature, media and film scripts, as well as other contexts, including everyday conversation, political debates, newspapers, e-mail, blogs, etc.

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