Permanent Obscurity

Author of plays, love-lyrics, essays and, among other works, The Civil War, the Davideis and the Pindarique Odes, Abraham Cowley made a deep impression on seventeenth-century letters, attested by his extravagant funeral and his burial next to Chaucer and Spenser in Westminster Abbey. Ejected from Cambridge for his politics, he found refuge in royalist Oxford before seeing long service as secretary to Queen Henrietta Maria, and as a Crown agent, on the continent. In the mid-1650s he returned to England, was imprisoned and made an accommodation with the Cromwellian regime. This volume of essays provides the modern critical attention Cowley’s life and writings merit.

Volume contains: 132 NY APP 49 (Berry v. Amer. Central Ins. Co.) 132 NY APP 167 (Vroman v. Rogers) 132 NY APP 556 (Coursey v. Morton) 134 NY APP 67 (Taylor v. Saxe) 134 NY APP 168 (Carter v. N.Y. E. R.R. Co. & M. Rwy. Co.)

How many times have you thought about your own baptism? If you are one of the many who have been brought up in a church that includes infants, you probably don't even remember the waters running down. In our hurried world, not many stop to question a sacrament performed so long ago. Yet biblically, the sign was meant to signify your personal relationship with the God of the universe. What could be more important than this? At present, we face the reality that the way baptism is practiced has no choice but to portray crucial elements of the cross-covenant. Does this arrangement merely offer us salvation, or does it signify our actual participation in the redemptive work of Christ? Down through the centuries, whole denominations have divided sharply over the issue, a situation that still remains with us. But for those caught under the waters, a burning question lingers-where in all of this do I stand with God? On a personal level, if you were unaware of the proceedings on that special day, one might be very surprised to learn how Old Testament circumcision answers this most important question. From its historical origins, spiritual realities, and harsh consequences, the practice of infant baptism must be revealed for what it is--and is not. This book serves as a powerful resource for both layman and clergy to take a much deeper glimpse into the nature of covenant relationships. Once inside, the reader will come to understand all that has happened to both the Church and the Gospel message ever since infant membership became a cultural norm. A comprehensive effort in returning jurisdiction over the baptismal waters back to the priesthood of Christ, this works will possess lasting value for anyone who wants to stand upright and true before the King.

In the history of world religions, as a Sikh it is my belief that there is no other book on world religions that clarifies the areas of revelations and also their limitations in their manifestation on the variety of life and how they justify to establish a real history according to the new concepts of the writer. The fear of death, jealousy, and prejudice are very natural to such religions that lack the blessings of a prophet. With comparison to a complete revelation upon this globe as the Sikh Gurus and their continuous manifestations in life with unselfish kindness and sublimity of martyrdom in variety of horrible trials through our Gurus and Khalsa, which is illumined by the word in book and word in flesh of Gurus, no other religion can compete with it. The greater holy wars of Sikh Gurus and Khalsa are unsurpassable in holy wrath and immeasurable mercy in the history of world religions with comparison to especially the greater holy wars of Islam. Dr. Gurtarn Singh Sidhu

Originally published in 1981, this book examines why and how textual difficulty became a norm of modernist literature and questions how we can begin to account for the forms of obscurity and difficulty which developed in the late 19th Century and which became so important to modernism. The author argues that the decline of realism entailed the growth of ‘symptomatic’ or ‘subtextual’ reading which tended to treat fiction as compromised autobiography. This kind of reading left the author dangerously isolated and exposed in the midst of a newly sophisticated public. Within this general cultural perspective, the book traces the private anxieties that led George Meredith, Joseph Conrad and Henry James to conceal themselves within their complex and resistant fictions. It discusses opacity in the texts themselves – embarrassment and shame in Meredith; ‘engimas’ in Conrad; and the fear of vulgarity and knowledge in Henry James.