Being

16-year-old Robert lies anaesthetized. A routine operation has just gone wrong. As Robert slowly wakes, he can hear, he can feel, but he can't scream. The operation isn't over. But life, as Robert knows it, is. He goes on the run, terrified and desperate for answers.

Poetry. Winner of the 2017 Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. Voyeurism and fact go head to head in PORT OF BEING, a debut poetry collection that mines speech from the city streets and the Internet. These are poems set firmly on the threshold of the private and public, the future-haunted and the real, forging the human adrift in a terrain of space junk, drones, and addiction. PORT OF BEING speaks just in time, navigating the worlds of surveillance, migration, and money, only to carve a way into intimacy and connection. "Shazia Hafiz Ramji writes with an intimacy that echoes the unspoken familiar across the ocean to map us--to 'root and hold' us--right now, right here where we live. PORT OF BEING is a collection of keen listening, where words are found, spliced, and always woven with sunshine, pain, and memory that shimmers."--Juliane Okot Bitek "PORT OF BEING by Shazia Hafiz Ramji, is a revelation: one that reveals the surface beneath the surface, and the uncertain in the overdetermined. If the city is a machine of social sublimation, then these poems are the glint of its gears. Ramji demonstrates with devastating energy how form is infrastructure. You could drown in the static of our times, or you could traverse it like an ocean. PORT OF BEING is an ingenious manual, in verse, for how to do the latter."--Wayde Compton "Like a section of ocean caught, cubed, and shot through with the light of our closest star, Shazia Hafiz Ramji's PORT OF BEING moves with and against time and borders. Her poems surveil what's witnessed and what we admit to witnessing, the secrets we tell and those we keep, and the questions: why and for whose benefit? In equal measures, this book is bioluminescent, galactic, humane. Daring and intimate, it holds worlds."--Dani Couture "Like Teju Cole, Shazia Hafiz Ramji presents a city in full intricacy: the expansive possibilities of human connection and the digital silos that separate. Like Solmaz Sharif, she teaches us to look at violence: the quotidian bedrooms, buses, and spaces in which it is experienced, the ideologies that allow for its transmission. PORT OF BEING is urgent and uncomfortable, comforting and necessary."--Benjamin Hertwig "PORT OF BEING confronts us with the global algorithms and state apparatuses docked in our consciousness, and the cyborgs of time and space that mark the shock of bodies rammed through ideologies. Here we find out how to navigate fake news, flags of convenience, and engineered personhood. A brilliant debut collection. Its politics bite back."--Meredith Quartermain "In PORT OF BEING, a desiring, witnessing body moves through Vancouver, speaking our individual human vulnerability to surveillance, technologies of war, and neo-capitalism's brutal structuring of spaces and dreams. In a world where 'Google knows more than our lovers, ' Shazia Hafiz Ramji sees us acutely as ports: as soft animal receptacles for what travels at light speed through fibre optic cables, and as jagged, welcoming horizons, where we might exchange our cargos of experience and offer fellow voyagers tender language. Plug this book directly into your cardiac rhythms."--Sonnet L'Abb

A radical revaluation of how contemporary society perceives death—and an argument for how it can make us happy. “He who would teach men to die would teach them to live,” writes Montaigne in Essais, and in How to Die: A Book about Being Alive, Ray Robertson takes up the challenge. Though contemporary society avoids the subject and often values the mere continuation of existence over its quality, Robertson argues that the active and intentional consideration of death is neither morbid nor frivolous, but instead essential to our ability to fully value life. How to Die is both an absorbing excursion through some of Western literature’s most compelling works on the subject of death as well as an anecdote-driven argument for cultivating a better understanding of death in the belief that, if we do, we’ll know more about what it means to live a meaningful life.

According to Thomas Metzinger, no such things as selves exist in the world: nobody ever had or was a self. All that exists are phenomenal selves, as they appear in conscious experience. The phenomenal self, however, is not a thing but an ongoing process; it is the content of a "transparent self-model." In Being No One, Metzinger, a German philosopher, draws strongly on neuroscientific research to present a representationalist and functional analysis of what a consciously experienced first-person perspective actually is. Building a bridge between the humanities and the empirical sciences of the mind, he develops new conceptual toolkits and metaphors; uses case studies of unusual states of mind such as agnosia, neglect, blindsight, and hallucinations; and offers new sets of multilevel constraints for the concept of consciousness. Metzinger's central question is: How exactly does strong, consciously experienced subjectivity emerge out of objective events in the natural world? His epistemic goal is to determine whether conscious experience, in particular the experience of being someone that results from the emergence of a phenomenal self, can be analyzed on subpersonal levels of description. He also asks if and how our Cartesian intuitions that subjective experiences as such can never be reductively explained are themselves ultimately rooted in the deeper representational structure of our conscious minds.

An enchanting, visually arresting, “extraordinary children’s book for adults...that peers into the depths of the human experience and the meaning of our existence.” (Brainpickings.org).

Brings together articles that influenced the scholarly work of Ralph McInerny.

Have you ever wanted to be stronger, more vibrant, as a believer? Have you ever felt the church is weak when it should be strong? Have you ever felt that rampant evil should be shut down? Do you believe change is possible in the world, in the church… in you?! Joshua experienced a bad start in life—forty years in slavery. He wandered a desert for another forty years. Yet it was in and from these experiences that he discovered the believer’s strength. He escaped slavery and went on to shut evil down and conquer the Promised Land. If we want to conquer the world for God… we must allow God first to conquer us. Being Joshua shows how God uses the circumstances of life to change us into who He wants us to be. In life’s slavery and wanderings, Joshua teaches us how to synapse with God’s Spirit. Joshua teaches us that God is doing something—we are a part of it, but it is bigger than us. Joshua teaches us how to view life within the purposes of God and gain victory over our circumstances and ultimately ourselves. Joshua shows us that the weakest and the strongest believers need to encourage themselves and be strong. He reminds us, pertinent to our times, that we must also encourage each other. Joshua learned this from the Old Testament Scriptures taught in a godly family life, a community of believers, and a personal walk of faith in God. His education was by words and examples in real daily life. This book is written from a pastoral and practical perspective.

This text examines a series of pervasive themes of human existence and the challenges of being and relating. Areas investigated include: the nature and meaning of being different; possessiveness and being possessed; and dimensions of loneliness, mystery and self-disclosure.