Empathy For The Devil

Do we have anything in common with the bad guys of the Bible? In this fictionalized narrative, JR. Forasteros reintroduces us to some of the most villainous characters in Scripture, with figures such as Cain, Jezebel, King Herod, Sampson and Delilah, and even Satan serving as cautionary tales of sin and temptation. Take a fresh look at the scoundrels of Scripture with this vivid mix of story and biblical exposition.

"What drives someone to commit an act of terrible violence? Drawing from her thirty years' experience in working with people who have committed serious offenses, Dr. Gwen Adshead provides fresh and surprising insights into violence and the mind. Through a collaboration with coauthor Eileen Horne, Dr. Adshead brings her extraordinary career to life in a series of unflinching portraits. In eleven vivid narratives based on decades of providing therapy to people in prisons and secure hospitals, an internationally renowned forensic psychiatrist and psychotherapist demonstrates the remarkable human capacity for radical empathy, change, and redemption."--Provided by publisher.

In this three part book Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll, Hyde yet again plunges into sex, psychedelics, hurricanes and heroes on a quest for the truth at all costs, exploring issues of paedophilia, plant medicine, and community through narrative.

Examining the core skills necessary for effecting change in problematic substance users, this important new book explores practical ways of establishing or improving social practice. It steps beyond clinical, theoretical, and moral undertones to the reality of working with substance misuse. Empathy for the Devil provides positive and reflective support for both experienced and novice workers - or those affected by others' use. It suggests ways ahead for social workers stuck in seemingly perennial impasses, as they strive with their colleagues to address multi-faceted and entrenched problems. Increasingly, social policy now demands evidence-based practice, putting ever greater pressure on professionals from all disciplines to grasp the core ideas and skills drawn from research findings. But this research is often too arid and abstract, and can make the lay person feel even more under-skilled. Empathy for the Devil bridges this chasm, bringing together a wide range of proven skills in supporting people through change in an open and accessible way. It illuminates the key ideas, skills, and techniques in addiction work. Additionally, it lucidly explains the latest findings in effective practice, illustrating them with case examples, and provides optional self-reflective exercises and activities to aid learning and training. For everyone working with people whose lives are affected by drugs or alcohol, Empathy for the Devil provides new ideas and perspectives to address old and intractable problems.

An investigation into the nature of violence, terror, and trauma through conversations with a notorious war criminal by Jessica Stern, one of the world's foremost experts on terrorism. Between October 2014 and November 2016, global terrorism expert Jessica Stern held a series of conversations in a prison cell in The Hague with Radovan Karadzic, a Bosnian Serb former politician who had been indicted for genocide and other war crimes during the Bosnian War and who became an inspiration for white nationalists. Though Stern was used to interviewing terrorists in the field in an effort to understand their hidden motives, the conversations she had with Karadzic would profoundly alter her understanding of the mechanics of fear, the motivations of violence, and the psychology of those who perpetrate mass atrocities at a state level and who—like the terrorists she had previously studied—target noncombatants, in violation of ethical norms and international law. How do leaders persuade ordinary people to kill their neighbors? What is the “ecosystem” that creates and nurtures genocidal leaders? Could anything about their personal histories, personalities, or exposure to historical trauma shed light on the formation of a war criminal’s identity in opposition to a targeted Other? In My War Criminal, Jessica Stern brings to bear her incisive analysis and her own deeply considered reactions to her interactions with Karadzic, a brilliant and often shockingly charming psychiatrist and poet who spent twelve years in hiding, disguising himself as an energy healer, while also offering a deeply insightful and sometimes chilling account of the complex and even seductive powers of a magnetic leader—and what can happen when you spend many, many hours with that person.

Kent Anderson's stunning debut novel is a modern classic, a harrowing, authentic picture of one American soldier's experience of the Vietnam War--"unlike anything else in war literature" (Los Angeles Review of Books). Hanson joins the Green Berets fresh out of college. Carrying a volume of Yeats's poems in his uniform pocket, he has no idea of what he's about to face in Vietnam--from the enemy, from his fellow soldiers, or within himself. In vivid, nightmarish, and finely etched prose, Kent Anderson takes us through Hanson's two tours of duty and a bitter, ill-fated return to civilian life in-between, capturing the day-to-day process of war like no writer before or since.

Empathy has for a long time, at least since the eighteenth century, been seen as centrally important in relation to our capacity to gain a grasp of the content of other people's minds, and predict and explain what they will think, feel, and do; and in relation to our capacity to respond to others ethically. In addition, empathy is seen as having a central role in aesthetics, in the understanding of our engagement with works of art and with fictional characters. A fuller understanding of empathy is now offered by the interaction of research in science and the humanities. Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives draws together nineteen original chapters by leading researchers across several disciplines, together with an extensive Introduction by the editors. The individual chapters reveal how important it is, in a wide range of fields of enquiry, to bring to bear an understanding of the role of empathy in its various guises. This volume offers the ideal starting-point for the exploration of this intriguing aspect of human life.

This is the first book to bring together Western and Chinese perspectives on both moral and intellectual virtues. Editors Chienkuo Mi, Michael Slote, and Ernest Sosa have assembled some of the world’s leading epistemologists and ethicists—located in the U.S., Europe, and Asia—to explore in a global context what they are calling, "the virtue turn." The 15 chapters have never been published previously and by covering topics that bridge epistemology and moral philosophy suggest a widespread philosophical turn away from Kantian and Utilitarian issues and towards character- and agent-based concerns. A goal of this volume is to show students and researchers alike that the (re-)turn toward virtue underway in the Western tradition is being followed by a similar (re-)turn toward virtue in Chinese philosophy.