Bound To Be Free

"Bound to Be Free" explores the scriptural concepts of church ("ekklesia"), freedom ("eleutheria"), and truthful speech ("parrhesia"), showing not only that the proper meanings of three concepts interpenetrate one another but also that rending them asunder lies at the root of Christian division today. According to Reinhard Hutter, the crucial interrelationship of these three concepts has long been obscured by ongoing church division. Separated from each other, many Christians assume that freedom can be maintained and truthful speech preserved only at the cost of unity. Others assume that Christian unity can be attained only if freedom and truthful speech are narrowly circumscribed in their proper exercise. Christian division issues from the all too familiar individualistic accounts of church, freedom, and speech that have haunted modernity and clouded the proclamation of the gospel. This book shows that here, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is imperative that Christians attend to this crucial interrelationship and its source in the God of the gospel. Hutter discusses the meaning, role, and importance of each concept in turn, engaging along the way a wide range of classical and contemporary voices in theology, philosophy, and culture that reveal in different ways how church, freedom, and truthful speech support one another."Bound to Be Free" is a groundbreaking work that challenges common approaches to ecumenism and points a fruitful new course ahead.

The story of Ben Weir's sixteen month imprisonment in Beirut and of his wife's efforts to secure his release.

Freedom is one of the most cherished ideals of Western culture. Yet that ideal is threatened from without and within in alarming ways in our increasingly polarised world. Could it be that at the heart of our secular vision of freedom there is a fatal flaw, which means it can never square the circle of personal liberty and social cohesion that we all long for? In this accessible, significant and deeply thoughtful book, Graham Tomlin argues that the Christian vision of freedom offers a way to think about liberty that can bring together both personal fulfilment and the health of community life in a way that secular versions have failed to do.

Shaun Nichols offers a naturalistic, psychological account of the origins of the problem of free will. He argues that our belief in indeterminist choice is grounded in faulty inference and therefore unjustified, goes on to suggest that there is no single answer to whether free will exists, and promotes a pragmatic approach to prescriptive issues.

This work is intended to explain and demystify the world of sadomasochism (SM). It is neither a political statement nor scientific research. It is a discussion of SM, what it means to its practitioners, how it is practised, and the structure of its subculture in contemporary American society. Like all sexual behaviour, SM is more than it seems, encompassing a spectrum of physiological and psychological mechanisms. By its reliance only on observed behaviour, the outsider's view has consistently led to misconceptions and false interpretations of SM behaviour. This book moves beyond the superficial and the misleading, focusing on the actual SM experience by fully integrating the external view of the academic with the internal view of the practitioner.

Lovers of the printed book, arise! Thirty of today’s top writers are here to tell you you’re not alone. In Bound to Last,an amazing array of authors comes to the passionate defense of the printed book with spirited, never-before-published essays celebrating the hardcover or paperback they hold most dear—not necessarily because of its contents, but because of its significance as a one-of-a-kind, irreplaceable object. Whether focusing on the circumstances behind how a particular book was acquired, or how it has become forever “bound up” with a specific person, time, or place, each piece collected here confirms—poignantly, delightfully, irrefutably—that every book tells a story far beyond the one found within its pages. In addition to a foreword by Ray Bradbury, Bound to Last features original contributions by:Chris Abani, Rabih Alameddine, Anthony Doerr, Louis Ferrante, Nick Flynn, Karen Joy Fowler, Julia Glass, Karen Green, David Hajdu, Terrence Holt, Jim Knipfel, Shahriar Mandanipour, Sarah Manguso, Sean Manning, Joyce Maynard, Philipp Meyer, Jonathan Miles, Sigrid Nunez, Ed Park, Victoria Patterson, Francine Prose, Michael Ruhlman, Elissa Schappell, Christine Schutt, Jim Shepard, Susan Straight, J. Courtney Sullivan, Anthony Swofford, Danielle Trussoni, and Xu Xiaobin

Bound to be Free: The Liberating Power of Prison Yoga illustrates how yoga can be and is being used in prisons as a powerful method of prisoner reform and rehabilitation. The book is grounded in the Integral Yoga teachings of Sri Swami Satchidananda, who was a renowned yoga master, a spiritual guide to thousands of people worldwide, and one of the first yoga teachers to bring the timeless teachings of yoga into U.S. prisons. Through talks that Swami Satchidananda gave in several prisons, from interviews with other yoga teachers who have taught and are teaching in prisons, with a look at some highly successful prison yoga programs that are being carried out in the United States and abroad, and with personal stories of prisoners whose study and practice of yoga has brought peace and self-transformation, Bound to be Free offers a wide-ranging view of the benefits of yoga to incarcerated populations and demonstrates how those benefits impact society in general.

Winner of the Stone Book Award, Museum of African American History Winner of the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize Winner of the Littleton-Griswold Prize Winner of the Mary Nickliss Prize Winner of the Willie Lee Rose Prize Americans have long viewed marriage between a white man and a white woman as a sacred union. But marriages between African Americans have seldom been treated with the same reverence. This discriminatory legacy traces back to centuries of slavery, when the overwhelming majority of black married couples were bound in servitude as well as wedlock, but it does not end there. Bound in Wedlock is the first comprehensive history of African American marriage in the nineteenth century. Drawing from plantation records, legal documents, and personal family papers, it reveals the many creative ways enslaved couples found to upend white Christian ideas of marriage. “A remarkable book... Hunter has harvested stories of human resilience from the cruelest of soils... An impeccably crafted testament to the African-Americans whose ingenuity, steadfast love and hard-nosed determination protected black family life under the most trying of circumstances.” —Wall Street Journal “In this brilliantly researched book, Hunter examines the experiences of slave marriages as well as the marriages of free blacks.” —Vibe “A groundbreaking history... Illuminates the complex and flexible character of black intimacy and kinship and the precariousness of marriage in the context of racial and economic inequality. It is a brilliant book.” —Saidiya Hartman, author of Lose Your Mother