Living With Contradictions

This book explores some of the moral and public policy issues that divide Western, especially North American, feminists as the twentieth century ends and the twenty-first century begins. It represents an in-house discussion among feminists and their social ethics.

A modern interpretation the Rule of St. Benedict to infuse Christian spirituality to all aspects of our daily lives These simple and inviting reflections on the Rule of St. Benedict take as their starting point our search for wholeness in a world that is fragmented and increasingly polarized. Many people today struggle to balance the demands of professional and personal lives, and find little satisfaction or peacefulness in either. Yet the ancient wisdom of St. Benedict offers a clear and helpful pathway that leads directly to healing, transformation and new life. Written in de Waal's inimitable style, this book is for old friends of the Rule of St. Benedict and novices alike. Holding up segments of the Rule, de Waal's meditations on Benedict's words illuminate the wisdom of the Rule not only for those of Benedict's time, but for all of us today as well.

Sophie is young and queer and into feminist theory. She decides to study abroad, choosing Paris for no firm reason beyond liking French comics. Feeling a bit lonely and out of place, she’s desperate for community and a sense of belonging. She stumbles into what/who she’s looking for when she meets Zena. An anarchist student-activist committed to veganism and shoplifting, Zena offers Sophie a whole new political ideology that feels electric. Enamored—of Zena, of the idea of living more righteously—Sophie finds herself swept up in a whirlwind friendship that blows her even further from her rural California roots as they embark on a disastrous hitchhiking trip to Amsterdam and Berlin, full of couch surfing, drug tripping, and radical book fairs. Capturing that time in your life where you’re meeting new people and learning about the world—when everything feels vital and urgent—The Contradictions is Sophie Yanow’s fictionalized coming-of-age story. Sophie’s attempts at ideological purity are challenged time and again, putting into question the plausibility of a life of dogma in a world filled with contradictions. Keenly observed, frank, and very funny, The Contradictions speaks to a specific reality while also being incredibly relatable, reminding us that we are all imperfect people in an imperfect world.

Co-authored by Sean Warren and Stephen Bigger, Living Contradiction: A Teacher's Examination of Tension and Disruption in Schools, in Classrooms and in Self charts Warren's journey as an experienced and successful teacher who lost himself in his rigid commitment to upholding standards, and documents his research to find a better way. Values are in vogue in education: they are stated in school policies across the land. They are a list of what the school wants people to think about them and their educational aims that they are caring, effective, and ethical in rooting pedagogy and all educational processes in positive relationships between teachers and pupils. Amidst the reality of classroom life, however, the very best of intentions can be compromised as the insidious influences of power, pressure, and responsibility come to bear. In this candid account, presented in the form of a dual narrative, Warren describes how he adopted a persona infused with control and intolerance as his authoritarian approach to suppressing conflict in the secondary school classroom became increasingly incongruent with his personal values and aspirations as an educator. Then, through undertaking his action research project and engaging in a process of reconceptualisation under co-author Bigger's mentorship,Warren began to explore how he could redefine his classroom leadership and authenticate his teaching practice without compromising standards or authority. Living Contradiction investigates the efficacy of Warren's modified approach and tells the story of how he overcame the incessant demands of tension and disruption by becoming 'confident in uncertainty'. Grappling with both the philosophical and the pragmatic, the authors offer two distinct perspectives in their commentary on Warren's journey supporting their interspersed critical reflections with thought-provoking insights into the methodology and outcomes of Warren's research project. The book is split into five parts and is punctuated throughout with expert surveying of a wide range of related research that challenges the status quo on the effectiveness of punishment and authoritarianism as approaches to behaviour management. Furthermore, in exploring how schooling should be as much about developing motivated citizens as encouraging qualifications, Living Contradiction goes in search of answers to the question that all educationalists must ask: 'What do we want our education system to do for our children?' Suitable for teachers, NQTs, and policy makers, Living Contradiction is a resonatory self-examination of teacher identity and a significant contribution to the debate about how schools and classrooms are run.

What values do Americans hold dear? What happens when real-world situations cause those values to conflict? To better understand the intellectual map of how American society works, Arthur G. Neal and Helen Youngelson-Neal analyze values prominent in American word and deed. These values appear in our nation's formal documents-rights and privileges prominently emphasized in the US Constitution and inscribed on the Statue of Liberty. They have shaped the historical destiny and, indeed, include those values most extensively propagated by the general population. Using these criteria, the authors identify individualism, the pursuit of happiness, freedom, consumerism, materialism, equality of opportunity, technology, mastery of the environment, quality of marriage, and national unity as the core American values. Core values provide the raw materials for the construction of contemporary society as a moral community, wherever that community is located. Such values are clusters of ideas that are central to self-identities; they generate a sense of collective belonging and membership. As such, core values define the existing social order and advance a set of ideas for depicting a desirable future. The analysis presented here helps us understand contemporary conflicts inherent in the American value system and the problems confronted by Americans as they try to live within the limitations and contradictions of value systems.

“Richard Greenberg turns life upside down and sideways. Read­ing the provocative Rules for Others to Live By is like having dinner with a friend whose point of view shakes up and invari­ably runs counter to conventional thinking. He’s a debunker of the pretensions of daily life.” —Delia Ephron, author of Sister Mother Husband Dog and Siracusa Between stressing about his theater friends and reconciling his complicated feel­ings about an inconsistently wonderful New York City, Tony Award–winning playwright and Pulitzer finalist Richard Greenberg also maintains a reputation for being something of a hermit. He takes the time to privately process the absurdity of the world outside, and the result is this hysterically funny and daringly thoughtful collection of original essays. In Rules for Others to Live By, he shares lessons from his highly successful writing career, observations from two long decades of residence on a three-block stretch of Man­hattan, and musings from a complicated and occasionally taxing social life. Firmly sympa­thetic to the struggles of the more bizarre and unstable among us, Greenberg tackles a range of topics—from the difficulties of friendship to the art of writing, the pain of heartbreak to the curiously unpredictable weather of his neighborhood, and the moderate hypo­chondria that comes with age, as well as the more serious health crises that unfortunately also come with age. In essays that are at turns quietly subversive and thoroughly hopeful and life-affirming, Greenberg’s distinct and hilarious voice articulates our own mild obsessions and the idiosyncrasies that we can only hope will go unnoticed in a crowd.

"In this remarkable volume, Marcus McKeown offers a wonderfully simple look at the complexities of life, using explanations so complex that they render each topic simple to master. This is a veritable handbook for life itself" Neale Donald Walsch, Author of Conversations With God "A user-friendly guided tour of apparent life limits and what it takes to transcend them into peace and thriving" Foster Gamble, Co-Creator THRIVE Movie The Contradictions of Life offers a powerful insight into knowing and understanding that every difficult situation we face comes with a solution and a way through. It speaks of the simplicity that is available to each of us every day and how we can access a level of consciousness so profound that once grasped life transforms in every way. This is no ordinary self help book, it has been crafted from a true, raw and authentic path of loss and discovery and it promises to become a beacon of light for anyone who is searching for more than just words of hope. The author, Marcus McKeown has opened his life to allowing the magic of transformation become a daily experience, and from this place of being he teaches all those who are interested some of the tricks to becoming free in every sense of the word. As you read through each page you will given insight that allows you merge the practical things of life with the not so practical and you will soon realize what it takes to begin living from a place of authenticity, responsibility, peace and abundance. The Contradictions of Life promises to ground and empower you in such a way that nothing will remain the same. This book teaches a perception that creates reality and it teaches the reader how to experience being the creator of everything that happens in their life.

An enraging, necessary look at the private prison system, and a convincing clarion call for prison reform.” —NPR.org New York Times Book Review 10 Best Books of 2018 * One of President Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2018 * Winner of the 2019 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize * Winner of the Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism * Winner of the 2019 RFK Book and Journalism Award * A New York Times Notable Book A ground-breaking and brave inside reckoning with the nexus of prison and profit in America: in one Louisiana prison and over the course of our country's history. In 2014, Shane Bauer was hired for $9 an hour to work as an entry-level prison guard at a private prison in Winnfield, Louisiana. An award-winning investigative journalist, he used his real name; there was no meaningful background check. Four months later, his employment came to an abrupt end. But he had seen enough, and in short order he wrote an exposé about his experiences that won a National Magazine Award and became the most-read feature in the history of the magazine Mother Jones. Still, there was much more that he needed to say. In American Prison, Bauer weaves a much deeper reckoning with his experiences together with a thoroughly researched history of for-profit prisons in America from their origins in the decades before the Civil War. For, as he soon realized, we can't understand the cruelty of our current system and its place in the larger story of mass incarceration without understanding where it came from. Private prisons became entrenched in the South as part of a systemic effort to keep the African-American labor force in place in the aftermath of slavery, and the echoes of these shameful origins are with us still. The private prison system is deliberately unaccountable to public scrutiny. Private prisons are not incentivized to tend to the health of their inmates, or to feed them well, or to attract and retain a highly-trained prison staff. Though Bauer befriends some of his colleagues and sympathizes with their plight, the chronic dysfunction of their lives only adds to the prison's sense of chaos. To his horror, Bauer finds himself becoming crueler and more aggressive the longer he works in the prison, and he is far from alone. A blistering indictment of the private prison system, and the powerful forces that drive it, American Prison is a necessary human document about the true face of justice in America.