Against An Infinite Horizon

In this companion volume to his award-winning book Forgotten Among the Lilies, Ronald Rolheiser, the columnist from The Catholic Herald, looks with compassion and wit beyond the horizon of our times, and offers advice on such subjects as marriage, family life and the presence of God, loneliness and sexuality, death and birth, social justice and humility, God's unconditional love, language and prayer.

Rolheiser points readers to the proximity of God in the seeming insignificance of life. He sheds new light on issues such as marriage and family life and the presence of God, loneliness and sexuality, language and prayer, and most of all, the all-encompassing, unconditional love of God.

Collects all six issues of INFINITE HORIZON plus bonus materials! The Eisner nominated series inspired by The Odyssey is finally completed and collected. The Soldier With No Name survived years of war only to be stranded halfway across the globe when the conflict ended. Getting home means going through the hell: Escaping shipwrecks, beating a vicious opponent wearing a cycloptic combat armor...and resisting the siren's call of a predatory society. Containing bonus material by artist PHIL NOTO.

This monograph deals with various classes of deterministic continuous time optimal control problems wh ich are defined over unbounded time intervala. For these problems, the performance criterion is described by an improper integral and it is possible that, when evaluated at a given admissible element, this criterion is unbounded. To cope with this divergence new optimality concepts; referred to here as "overtaking", "weakly overtaking", "agreeable plans", etc. ; have been proposed. The motivation for studying these problems arisee primarily from the economic and biological aciences where models of this nature arise quite naturally since no natural bound can be placed on the time horizon when one considers the evolution of the state of a given economy or species. The reeponsibility for the introduction of this interesting class of problems rests with the economiste who first studied them in the modeling of capital accumulation processes. Perhaps the earliest of these was F. Ramsey who, in his seminal work on a theory of saving in 1928, considered a dynamic optimization model defined on an infinite time horizon. Briefly, this problem can be described as a "Lagrange problem with unbounded time interval". The advent of modern control theory, particularly the formulation of the famoue Maximum Principle of Pontryagin, has had a considerable impact on the treatment of these models as well as optimization theory in general.

Moral thinking today finds itself stranded between the particular and the universal. Alasdair MacIntyre's work on narrative, discussed here along with that of Stanley Hauerwas and H. T. Engelhardt, aims to undo the perceived damage done by the Enlightenment by returning to narrative and abandoning the illusion of a disembodied reason that claims to be able to give a coherent explanation for everything. It is precisely this - a theory that holds good for all cases - that John Rawls proposed, drawing on the heritage of Emmanuel Kant. Who is right? Must universality be abandoned? Must we only think about morality in terms that are relative, bound by space and time? Alexander Lucie-Smith attempts to answer these questions by examining the nature of narrative itself as well as the particular narratives of Rawls and St Augustine. Bound and rooted as they are in history and personal experience, narratives nevertheless strain at the limits imposed on them. It is Lucie-Smith's contention that each narrative that points to a lived morality exists against the background of an infinite horizon, and thus it is that the particular and the rooted can also make us aware of the universal and unchanging.

​​​​In this book the authors take a rigorous look at the infinite-horizon discrete-time optimal control theory from the viewpoint of Pontryagin’s principles. Several Pontryagin principles are described which govern systems and various criteria which define the notions of optimality, along with a detailed analysis of how each Pontryagin principle relate to each other. The Pontryagin principle is examined in a stochastic setting and results are given which generalize Pontryagin’s principles to multi-criteria problems. ​Infinite-Horizon Optimal Control in the Discrete-Time Framework is aimed toward researchers and PhD students in various scientific fields such as mathematics, applied mathematics, economics, management, sustainable development (such as, of fisheries and of forests), and Bio-medical sciences who are drawn to infinite-horizon discrete-time optimal control problems.

From "The Birth of Tragedy" to his experimental "physiology of art", Nietzsche examines the aesthetic, erotic and sacred dimensions of rapture, hinting at how an ecstatic philosophy is realized in his elusive doctrine of Eternal Return. Jill Marsden pursues the implications of this legacy.

Ronald Rolheiser makes sense of what is frequently a misunderstood word: spirituality. In posing the question "What is spirituality?" Father Rolheiser gets quickly to the heart of common difficulties with the subject, and shows through compelling anecdotes and personal examples how to channel that restlessness, that deep desire, into a healthy spirituality. This book is for those searching to understand what Christian spirituality means and how to apply it to their own lives. Rolheiser explains the nonnegotiables--the importance of community worship, the imperatives surrounding social action, the centrality of the Incarnation, the sustenance of the spiritual life--and how spirituality necessarily impacts every aspect of human experience. At the core of this readable, deeply revealing book is an explanation of God and the Church in a world that more often than not doubts the credibility of both.