Heaven And Its Discontents

Worldviews are the unexamined, pre-theoretical foundations of the approaches with which we understand and navigate the world, and this volume provides the first major study of worldviews in international relations. Advances in twentieth century physics and cosmology questioning anthropocentrism have fostered the articulation of alternative worldviews, rivalling conventional Newtonian humanism and its assumption that the world is constituted by controllable risks. This matters for accepting uncertainties that are an indelible part of many spheres of life including public health, the environment, finance, security and politics – uncertainties that are concealed by the conventional presumption that the world is governed only by risk. The confluence of risk and uncertainty requires an awareness of alternative worldviews, alerts us to possible intersections between humanist Newtonianism and hyper-humanist Post-Newtonianism, and reminds us of the relevance of science, religion and moral values in world politics. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Table of Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1. Heaven and Its Discontents -- 2. Coping with Defeat -- 3. The Creation -- 4. Satan's Inner Conflicts -- 5. Adam and Eve: Before the Fall -- 6. Adam and Eve: The Fall -- 7. Adam and Eve: After the Fall -- 8. God Protects His Image: Before the Fall -- 9. After the Fall: God's Response -- Conclusion -- References -- Index

Many critics agree with C. S. Lewis that ""Satan is the best drawn of Milton's characters"". Satan is certainly a wonderful creation, but Adam and Eve are also complex and well-drawn, and God may be the most complicated character of all. Paradise Lost is above all God's story; it is his discontent, first with Lucifer and then with human beings, that drives the action from the beginning until his anger subsides at the world's end. God and Satan have similarities not only in their pursuit of revenge, but also in their craving for power and glory. The ambitious Satan wants more than he already has, but what accounts for the voracity of God's appetite? Does the fact that each threatens the status of the other help to explain the intensity of their hatred and rage? Is their vindictiveness a response to being threatened, an effort to repair the injury they feel they've sustained? This seems to be the case for Satan, but must not God also have felt deeply hurt to have such a powerful need for vengeance? If so, why is the Almighty so vulnerable? And why is he so hard on Adam and Eve and the rest of humankind? These are the kinds of questions Bernard Paris tries to answer in this book. Paris's purpose is not to focus on Milton's illustrative intentions but to try to understand God, Satan, Adam, and Eve as psychologically motivated characters who are torn by inner conflicts.Most critics treat Milton's characters as coded messages from the author, but their mimetic features interfere with the process of decoding. Instead of looking through the characters to the author, Paris looks at Milton's characters as objects of interest in themselves, as creations inside a creation who escape their thematic roles and are embodiments of his psychological intuitions. This book heightens our appreciation of an ignored aspect of Milton's art and offers new insights into the critical controversies that have surrounded Paradise Lost.

A major book on the subject of heaven, this expanded edition examines the hunger for heaven that is so strong in all of us. Fascinating and upbeat, Heaven, the Heart's Deepest Longing thoroughly explores the psychological and theological dimensions of this search for total joy and for the ultimate reality that grounds it.

This work, edited by Sheila Whiteley and Shara Rambarran, brings together a multidisciplinary group of scholars who address issues such as artistic agency, the relationship between reality and illusion or simulation, and the construction of musical personae, subjectivities, and identities in a virtual world.

Although interest in the painter, poet, and art writer Adrian Stokes (1902&–1972) has been growing in recent years, Art and Its Discontents is the first biographical study of this pivotal figure in British modernism. Focused on Stokes's formative years, the book offers important new insights into his intellectual development, his growing commitment to the arts, and his eventual turn to the art criticism that would win him international renown. Even as Richard Read follows Stokes from his London childhood to his travels in Italy and his psychoanalysis with Melanie Klein, he weaves Stokes's experiences and writings into the great social and cultural issues of his era. Stokes's friendship with Ezra Pound is given its due, but Read balances his exploration of Stokes's modernist ideas with detailed discussion of his profound debt to the teachings of John Ruskin and Walter Pater. Seen in this broad perspective, Stokes emerges as a thinker who bridged Victorian and modernist cultures and renewed the British tradition of aesthetic criticism.

A scientific exploration into humanity’s obsession with the afterlife and quest for immortality from the bestselling author and skeptic Michael Shermer In his most ambitious work yet, Shermer sets out to discover what drives humans’ belief in life after death, focusing on recent scientific attempts to achieve immortality along with utopian attempts to create heaven on earth. For millennia, religions have concocted numerous manifestations of heaven and the afterlife, and though no one has ever returned from such a place to report what it is really like—or that it even exists—today science and technology are being used to try to make it happen in our lifetime. From radical life extension to cryonic suspension to mind uploading, Shermer considers how realistic these attempts are from a proper skeptical perspective. Heavens on Earth concludes with an uplifting paean to purpose and progress and how we can live well in the here-and-now, whether or not there is a hereafter.

(Dover thrift editions).