Sacred Play

Explores the significance of levity and humor in South Asian religious traditions.

The living and learning that happen through play offers each child their best chance for health, happiness, and success in education and living both now and in the future. There is no hurry for school learning. Study after study shows that leaving formal cognitively-based learning until after the brain has laid down firm foundations gives our children a head start when it comes to higher learning.

It is 1859, and under the leadership of progressive Czar Alexander II, Russia is rushing pell-mell from the 11th century to the 19th. Serfdom has been abolished, and something approaching parliamentary democracy has been installed. Arkady, a fresh college graduate, proceeds with his friend Bazarov, a charismatic nihilist, to the estate of his father, a down-at-the-heels gentleman farmer. It appears as though dad and the housekeeper have just had a child, and dad is deeply in love - although their difference in class makes marriage impossible to contemplate. Arkady, enraptured with the new thought he learned at college, is eager to impact the New Russia, though he has no idea how. Bazarov, who has burnished his fashionable cynicism to a near-blinding sheen, has resolved to say or think nothing which is not 'useful.' It is surprising, still, how talkative he is. As we learn only at the end of the first Act, Arkady's uncle Pavel, a Europeanized dandy, has begun to stalk Bazarov's mistress, Anna - because he was in love with Anna's late mother.

This book argues that the liturgical reforms initiated by the second Vatican Council may have seriously undermined contemporary Roman Catholic worship. Drawing on important work by Durkheim, Bauman, Foucault, Turner, Duffy, Flanagan and Pickstock, David Torevell focuses on the most crucial element of Catholic worship - the experience of the sacred - and examines how it has been eroded since pre-modern times, largely due to the marginalisation of ritual expression, and its consequences. A devastating critique of the loss of the sacred in worship, this striking interdisciplinary study is a call for revitalisation of Roman Catholic liturgy through a 'reform of the reform' and the reclamation of the importance of the body in ritual expression.

""Disenchantment" is a key term in the self-understanding of modernity. But what exactly do we mean when we use this concept? What was its original meaning when Max Weber introduced it? And can the conventional meaning or Max Weber's view really be defended, given the present state of knowledge about the history of religion? This book is an attempt to divest this concept of its enduring enchantment. The first chapters of the book deal with the three empirical disciplines history, psychology and sociology of religion to develop an understanding of religion that then lays the groundwork for what is presented in chapter 4, namely the most thorough study of Weber's views on disenchantment that has ever been undertaken. It turns out that Weber's use was highly ambiguous and that his grand narrative leading from the prophets of ancient Judaism to the crisis of meaning on the eve of the First World War collapses when we recognize this ambiguity. This makes it possible to construct an alternative that takes into account the dynamics of ever new sacralizations, their normative evaluation in the light of the values of a universalist morality and the dangers of the misuse of religion in connection with the formation of power. This book constitutes a challenge - for believers and non-believers alike"--

The most prominent woman in Renaissance Florence, Lucrezia Tornabuoni de' Medici (1425-1482) lived during her city's golden age. Wife of Piero de' Medici and mother of Lorenzo the Magnificent, Tornabuoni exerted considerable influence on Florence's political and social affairs. She was also, as this volume illustrates, a gifted and prolific poet. This is the first major collection in any language of her extensive body of religious poems. Ranging from gentle lyrics on the Nativity to moving dialogues between a crucified Christ and the weeping sinner who kneels before him, the nine laudi (poems of praise) included here are among the few such poems known to have been written by a woman. Tornabuoni's five storie sacre, narrative poems based on the lives of biblical figures-three of whom, Judith, Susanna, and Esther, are Old Testament heroines-are virtually unique in their range and expressiveness. Together with Jane Tylus's substantial introduction, these poems offer us both a fascinating portrait of a highly educated and creative woman and a lively sense of cultural and social life in Renaissance Florence.