Portals Passages Pathways

In the Land of Magnanthia was awarded Best Fantasy eBook in the 2015 Independent Publisher Book Awards and is the beginning of a sword and sorcery fantasy adventure series for teens and young adults. Have you ever wondered, "Why am I here?" For Fourteen-year-old Simon Whittaker the answer is awaiting on the other side of a magic portal...but so is the darkest, primal evil. Book 1 in the teen and young adult fantasy adventure series Portals, Passages & Pathways Embark on a magical journey to the beautiful land of Magnanthia, the home to fantasy beasts and creatures of all kinds, spell-casting wizards and warlocks, and the ultimate war between good and evil. Follow two teenagers as they go up against the hardships with coming of age, struggle to find redemption, and fight to discover a way off the roadway of eternal death and onto the pathway to everlasting life! When the portal to another world cracks open just outside a small town in Minnesota, it sets off a series of events forever changing the lives of Jak and Simon. Simon is set on the path to save the world, while Jak is on a path to tear it apart. What pathway are YOU on?

An architect and theologian argues that procession is the essential ritual element for which we need to shape our church architecture. This is a theological challenge as well: to enable the assembly to make the journey from font to table to world.

The question of aesthetics as a theoretical framework for thinking about modern leadership issues in educational settings is an emergent area of inquiry that is receiving considerable attention. There is a growing sense that the mechanistic approach to leadership, which has been widely encouraged over the last ten years, is sterile and that a more philosophical approach is now required. This approach is covered here, taking into account the importance of aesthetics on all aspects of the administrative and leadership world: the ways ideas and ideals are created, how their expression is conveyed, the impact they have on interpersonal relationships and the organisational environment that carries and reinforces them and the moral boundaries or limits that can be established or exceeded. While presenting a significant departure from conventional studies in the field, the international contributors reflect a continuity of thought on administrative and leadership authority, from the writings of Plato through to current theory.

In this era of mandated high stakes and standardized testing, teachers and schools officials find themselves struggling to meet the demands for improved student achievement. At the same time, they are also expected to teach all subjects as required by national and state curriculum standards.

An indispensable study of the music of Altai-Sayan peoples Based on more than twenty years of collaborative research, Carole Pegg’s long-awaited participatory ethnography explores how Indigenous nomadic peoples of Russia’s southern Siberian republics (Altai, Khakassia, Tyva) sound multiphonies of place in a post-Soviet global world. Inspired by the mountain-steppe ecology and pathways of nomadism, soundscapes created in performative ritual events cross political and multiple-world boundaries in a shamanic-animist universe, enabling human and spirit actor interactions in a series of sensuous worlds. As with the “throat-singing” for which Indigenous Altai-Sayan peoples are famous, senses of place involve sonic relations, rootedness, movement, and plurality. Pegg echoes their drone-partials musical and ontological models in an innovative theoretical entwinement. Three strands form the book’s multivocal drone, the partials of which sound in each chapter: ontological sonicality and musicality that enables emplacement and movement; the importance of shamanism-animism--at the core of Indigenous spiritual practices--for personhood and community; and the agency of sonic performances. Sounding place, Pegg demonstrates, is essential to the identities, ways of life, and very senses of being of Indigenous Altai-Sayan peoples.

Get expert insight and practical guidance to master the latest techniques, including minimally invasive techniques for instability, rotator cuff pathology, and arthritis. Now in a case-based format: each author describes the case, addresses alternative approaches and controversies, and offers evidence and experience to support the recommended approach.

Flat Aesthetics seeks to secure a more granular and ontologically demotic handle on the contemporary in American literature. While contemporaneity can be viewed as “our” period, Christian Moraru approaches the contemporary as some-thing made by things themselves. The making of the contemporary is variously restaged by the body of fictional prose under scrutiny here. Thus, this corpus itself participates in the making of contemporaneity. In dialogue with object-oriented ontology and various new materialisms, Moraru contends that the contemporary does not preexist objects or the novels featuring them; it is not their background but an outcome of things' self-presentation. As objects, beings, or existents present themselves in the present, in our “now,” they foster thing-configurations that together compose the form of, and essentially make, the contemporary - the present's cultural-material signature, as Moraru calls it. To decipher this signature, Flat Aesthetics provides a cross-sectional reading of postmillennial American fiction. Discussed are solely post-2000 works by writers who have also established themselves over the past two decades or so, from Nicole Krauss, Michael Chabon, and Ben Lerner to Colson Whitehead and Emily St. John Mandel. Their output, Moraru claims, bears witness to the onset of a “flat” aesthetics in American letters after September 11, 2001. Organized into five parts, the books canvases objectual constellations of contemporaneity shaped by material dynamics of language, museality and display, spatiality, zombification and thing-rhetoric, and post-anthropocentric kinship.