Beauty As A State Of Being

This book is required reading for everyone who has a mind. The mind is a powerful tool capable of great creativity and invention. But, when used improperly, the mind can also become an instrument of suffering. Beauty as a State of Being shows the reader how to use the mind well, so that peace can reign in the individual life and, by extension, the life of the world. When the mind finds its proper place the heart is revealed and, with the heart, joy. Beauty as a State of Being guides the reader to realms of joy and spiritual illumination, where answers to the great questions of life are also to be found. As the path presented in this book progresses toward the spiritual, the ideas ascend in conceptual and literary beauty, in essays and prose poems that are themselves revelations of the heart.

This book is required reading for everyone who has a mind. The mind is a powerful tool capable of great creativity and invention. But, when used improperly, the mind can also become an instrument of suffering. Beauty as a State of Being shows the reader how to use the mind well, so that peace can reign in the individual life and, by extension, the life of the world. When the mind finds its proper place the heart is revealed and, with the heart, joy. Beauty as a State of Being guides the reader to realms of joy and spiritual illumination, where answers to the great questions of life are also to be found. As the path presented in this book progresses toward the spiritual, the ideas ascend in conceptual and literary beauty, in essays and prose poems that are themselves revelations of the heart.

Is the world one or many? Ji Zhang revisits this ancient philosophical question from the modern perspective of comparative studies. His investigation stages an intellectual exchange between Plato, founder of the Academy, and Ge Hong, who systematized Daoist belief and praxis. Zhang not only captures the tension between rational Platonism and abstruse Daoism, but also creates a bridge between the two.

In Audaciously Alive: Choosing to Live Well on Purpose, Roxanne Harris helps readers see where they are in their own struggle with autoimmune or chronic disease—and the pitfalls, confusion, and torment that goes with it—to find the path back to freedom and true living. After a devastating diagnosis of an autoimmune disease, ankylosing spondylitis, just two weeks after the birth of her fourth child, Roxanne Harris refused to submit to life in a wheelchair and began the fight of her life—to create beauty from the ashes of disease, broken relationships, and the crippling of her body. In Audaciously Alive, she shares her pain, the many trials she faced, and her most audacious moments of standing firm and not giving up. She highlights keys to living well and gives insight and wisdom so that you can better see the traps and speed bumps that could derail you in your own path to recovery. Packed with practical tools, Roxanne will help you turn the freight train of your health and life around and get back on track physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. You no longer have to live in panic, confusion, or fear after a diagnosis. Instead, you can choose to be audacious and live on purpose every day. Say “no” to sickness and the label of disease and choose to live audaciously.

Susan dreams of being an artist. Malcolm wants to move him and his sister out of a bad living situation. Sparks fly when the two teens meet at a fundraiser for Syrian refugees. A Canadian YA romance for fans of The Sun is Also a Star. Susan is the new girl -- she's sharp and driven, and strives to meet her parents' expectations of excellence. Malcolm is the bad boy -- he started raising hell at age fifteen, after his mom died of cancer, and has had a reputation ever since. Susan hasn't told anyone, but she wants to be an artist. Malcolm doesn't know what he wants -- until he meets her. Love is messy and families are messier, but in spite of their burdens, Susan and Malcolm fall for each other. The ways they drift apart and come back together are testaments to family, culture, and being true to who you are.

Writing Across Cultures invites both new and experienced teachers to examine the ways in which their training has—or has not—prepared them for dealing with issues of race, power, and authority in their writing classrooms. The text is packed with more than twenty activities that enable students to examine issues such as white privilege, common dialects, and the normalization of racism in a society where democracy is increasingly under attack. This book provides an innovative framework that helps teachers create safe spaces for students to write and critically engage in hard discussions. Robert Eddy and Amanda Espinosa-Aguilar offer a new framework for teaching that acknowledges the changing demographics of US college classrooms as the field of writing studies moves toward real equity and expanding diversity. Writing Across Cultures utilizes a streamlined cross-racial and interculturally tested method of introducing students to academic writing via sequenced assignments that are not confined by traditional and static approaches. They focus on helping students become engaged members of a new culture—namely, the rapidly changing collegiate discourse community. The book is based on a multi-racial rhetoric that assumes that writing is inherently a social activity. Students benefit most from seeing composing as an act of engaged communication, and this text uses student samples, not professionally authored ones, to demonstrate this framework in action. Writing Across Cultures will be a significant contribution to the field, aiding teachers, students, and administrators in navigating the real challenges and wonderful opportunities of multi-racial learning spaces.

Interrogating Boundaries of the Nonhuman: Literature, Climate Change, and Environmental Crises asks whether literary works that interrogate and alter the terms of human-nonhuman relations can point to new, more sustainable ways forward. Bringing insights from the field of literary animal studies, a diverse and international group of scholars examine literary contributions to the ecological framing of human-nonhuman relationships. Collectively, the contributors to this edited collection contemplate the role of literature in the setting of environmental agendas and in determining humanity’s path forward in the company of nonhuman others.

Have we become beauty-blind? For two decades or more in the humanities, various political arguments have been put forward against beauty: that it distracts us from more important issues; that it is the handmaiden of privilege; and that it masks political interests. In On Beauty and Being Just Elaine Scarry not only defends beauty from the political arguments against it but also argues that beauty does indeed press us toward a greater concern for justice. Taking inspiration from writers and thinkers as diverse as Homer, Plato, Marcel Proust, Simone Weil, and Iris Murdoch as well as her own experiences, Scarry offers up an elegant, passionate manifesto for the revival of beauty in our intellectual work as well as our homes, museums, and classrooms. Scarry argues that our responses to beauty are perceptual events of profound significance for the individual and for society. Presenting us with a rare and exceptional opportunity to witness fairness, beauty assists us in our attention to justice. The beautiful object renders fairness, an abstract concept, concrete by making it directly available to our sensory perceptions. With its direct appeal to the senses, beauty stops us, transfixes us, fills us with a "surfeit of aliveness." In so doing, it takes the individual away from the center of his or her self-preoccupation and thus prompts a distribution of attention outward toward others and, ultimately, she contends, toward ethical fairness. Scarry, author of the landmark The Body in Pain and one of our bravest and most creative thinkers, offers us here philosophical critique written with clarity and conviction as well as a passionate plea that we change the way we think about beauty.