Pagan S Paradise

Hard working photographer Joanna McCall is in need of a major life makeover since her unreliable, high society boyfriend publicly dumped her. When an international children's charity asks her to photograph underprivileged Central American kids, she eagerly signs on. While expecting a walk on the wild side, she gets her nose bloodied and her camera stolen within hours of her arrival. The surprising event makes her more determined than ever to see the project through. She can do this - but her rescuer, undercover agent Jack Stratford is not so sure. He secretly knows a revolution's about to explode onto the streets of San Rafael and he wants the gutsy redhead safely out of the country ASAP. He has work to do and she's a distraction he can't afford. Joanna insists she can handle herself, but when an earthquake, a loony Elvis impersonator and a stint in jail become part of her adventures in paradise, Jack manages to help every time. She's falling hard and fast for this hero-to-the-rescue. And when did Joanna stop being a problem and start being the woman of Jack's dreams? As Jack and Joanna grow closer so does the revolution. (This is a stand-alone follow up book to TROUBLE IN PARADISE)

The Paradise, which Dante called the sublime canticle, is perhaps the most ambitious book of The Divine Comedy. In this climactic segment, Dante's pilgrim reaches Paradise and encounters the Divine Will. The poet's mystical interpretation of the religious life is a complex and exquisite conclusion to his magnificent trilogy. Mark Musa's powerful and sensitive translation preserves the intricacy of the work while rendering it in clear, rhythmic English. His extensive notes and introductions to each canto make accessible to all readers the diverse and often abstruse ingredients of Dante's unparalleled vision of the Absolute: elements of Ptolemaic astronomy, medieval astrology and science, theological dogma, and the poet's own personal experiences.

An in-depth study of the large mosaic pavement in the East Church at Qasr el-Lebia in Cyrenaica, Libya. Consisting of fifty panels, each panel with a different image, it has frequently been dismissed as random with no overarching scheme. This book argues that the remarkably rich and complex mosaic should be understood as a coherent whole.

An ambitious history of how medieval writers came to terms with paganism From the turn of the fifth century to the beginning of the eighteenth, Christian writers were fascinated and troubled by the "Problem of Paganism," which this book identifies and examines for the first time. How could the wisdom and virtue of the great thinkers of antiquity be reconciled with the fact that they were pagans and, many thought, damned? Related questions were raised by encounters with contemporary pagans in northern Europe, Mongolia, and, later, America and China. Pagans and Philosophers explores how writers—philosophers and theologians, but also poets such as Dante, Chaucer, and Langland, and travelers such as Las Casas and Ricci—tackled the Problem of Paganism. Augustine and Boethius set its terms, while Peter Abelard and John of Salisbury were important early advocates of pagan wisdom and virtue. University theologians such as Aquinas, Scotus, Ockham, and Bradwardine, and later thinkers such as Ficino, Valla, More, Bayle, and Leibniz, explored the difficulty in depth. Meanwhile, Albert the Great inspired Boethius of Dacia and others to create a relativist conception of scientific knowledge that allowed Christian teachers to remain faithful Aristotelians. At the same time, early anthropologists such as John of Piano Carpini, John Mandeville, and Montaigne developed other sorts of relativism in response to the issue. A sweeping and original account of an important but neglected chapter in Western intellectual history, Pagans and Philosophers provides a new perspective on nothing less than the entire period between the classical and the modern world.