Extreme Heroism

On his way to face criminal charges in 1984, a man is declared a hero by three other survivors of a commuter airline crash in northern Alberta, Canada. The Canadian press takes special interest in this story of an unlikely hero saving his RCMP escort, the pilot, and a member of parliament. They describe the mans actions with a reverence and respect usually reserved for the holy, saintly and spiritual. These and many other similar incidents are part of a global pattern pleading for our attention. The impetus behind them unites us across the divides of age, gender, race, religion, nationality, and every other boundary. This type of heroism goes largely unnoticed, but it binds humanity together. Extreme Heroism shares a variety of these stories and offers a guide to understanding and applying this response to injustice guided by indiscourageable good will. It provides methods for analyzing our preferred response profile, understanding our response options to injustice, and overcoming the obstacles to employing the innate extreme heroism with which we were born. This study presents an exploration of heroic responses to danger, tragedy, and the injustices of life through a variety of narratives of people taking extreme heroic action.

Some young people today are indifferent about the Christian faith because they don't identify with anyone in Scripture or in their church. Others are excited about the faith and hungry for role models to show them how to pursue their ideals. Extreme Faith, a book created for the Extreme for Jesus line, addresses both needs. Extreme Faith is a collection of fresh, youth-oriented character studies that show readers what a difference young people made in Bible times. This book devotes a chapter to each character profile, telling stories of amazing Bible characters such as Isaac, Esther, and Josiah in detail and showing how today's youth can follow their examples and make a difference in their world. Includes snapshot profiles of modern young people whose lives are extreme for Jesus.

From the men and women associated with the American Revolution and Civil War to the seminal figures in the struggles for civil and women's rights, Americans have been fascinated with icons of great achievement, or at least reputation. But who spins today's narratives about American heroism, and to what end? In Where Have All the Heroes Gone?, Bruce Peabody and Krista Jenkins draw on the concept of the American hero to show an important gap between the views of political and media elites and the attitudes of the mass public. The authors contend that important changes over the past half century, including the increasing scope of new media and people's deepening political distrust, have drawn both politicians and producers of media content to the hero meme. However, popular reaction to this turn to heroism has been largely skeptical. As a result, the conversations and judgments of ordinary Americans, government officials, and media elites are often deeply divergent. Investigating the story of American heroes over the past five decades provides a narrative that can teach us about such issues as political socialization, institutional trust, and political communication.

Using eyewitness accounts, official documents, and rarely seen photos, Sailing Into the Abyss takes a fascinating look at the human drama behind the deadliest sea disaster of the Vietnam War. 8-page photo insert.

Describes recent acts of bravery and heroism performed by Coast Guard personnel.

There is no more contentious and perennial issue in the history of modern Western thought than the vexed relationship between the genesis of an idea and its claim to validity beyond it. Can ideas or values transcend their temporal origins and overcome the sin of their original context, and in so doing earn abiding respect for their intrinsic merit? Or do they inevitably reflect them in ways that undermine their universal aspirations? Are discrete contexts so incommensurable and unique that the smooth passage of ideas from one to the other is impossible? Are we always trapped by the limits of our own cultural standpoints and partial perspectives, or can we somehow escape their constraints and enter into a fruitful dialogue with others? These persistent questions are at the heart of the discipline known as intellectual history, which deals not only with ideas, but also with the men and women who generate, disseminate, and criticize them. The essays in this collection, by one of the most recognized figures in the field, address them through engagement with leading intellectual historians—Hans Blumenberg, Quentin Skinner, Hayden White, Isaiah Berlin, Frank Ankersmit—as well other giants of modern thought—Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Georg Lukács. They touch on a wide variety of related topics, ranging from the heroism of modern life to the ability of photographs to lie. In addition, they explore the fraught connections between philosophy and theory, the truth of history and the truthfulness of historians, and the weaponization of free speech for other purposes.

The term, "intuition," while commonly used by artists has been somewhat marginalized within art theory and criticism. Whether sensed as a gut feeling or a flash of insight, intuition is central to processes of "coming to know" in aesthetic practice and experience. Many artists habitually rely on extra-rational means of understanding, either in the form of everyday instinct or uncanny cognition. A delicate balance, though, exists between clairvoyance and fantasy, foreknowledge and wishful thinking. Technologies of Intuition demonstrates how artistic sensitivity requires disciplined and cultivated perception. Set in continuity with the compelling history of the Spiritualist Movement and emancipatory feminism, this anthology elucidates intuitive agency as a psychic, somatic and social technology in the fine arts and popular culture.

Was the serial killer, Jeffrey Dahmer an evil man responsible for his murders? Or was he an innocent victim of psychiatric illness? Lawrie Reznek addresses these questions and more in his controve rsial investigation of the insanity defence.