Silent Virtues

Silent Virtues addresses six areas of mental functioning namely patience, curiosity, privacy, intimacy, humility, and dignity. Each of the areas is elucidated with the help of clinical, literary, and cultural material. The book introduces a series of novel ideas, including: (i) the distinction between patience as a component of the therapeutic attitude and the exercise of patience as a specific technical intervention; (ii) the description of the five psychopathological syndromes involving curiosity: excessive, deficient, uneven, anachronistic, instinctualized, and false curiosity; (iii) the description of four psychopathological syndromes (failed, florid, fluctuating, and false) involving intimacy; (iv) the discourse on the importance of humility in selecting patients and in deciding upon the longevity of our professional careers; and (v) the description of three forms of dignity (metaphysical, existential, and characterological) and the various ways in which they affect psychoanalytic technique.

Meditation has numerous positive benefits on the human body and mind. It can strengthen our immune systems, reduce pain and stress, improve our sleep, and lessen anxiety and depression. But did you know that meditation can also have a positive effect on our soul? Catholic Meditations on Virtues is a simple, easy method for the daily practice of meditation—even children can do it! Ten minutes per day is all that is needed to enjoy the benefits of meditation, including improvements in health and brain function. But the greatest benefit for Catholics, of course, is spiritual, with each daily meditation endorsed by quotations from the Bible. By meditating on a different virtue each day of the month, or by choosing to meditate on the same virtue for as long as desired, you too can experience these health and spiritual benefits. In this way, you will form a stronger bond with Jesus Christ and bring out your potential spiritual talents.

This book examines the role of military virtues in today's armed forces. Although long-established military virtues, such as honor, courage and loyalty, are what most armed forces today still use as guiding principles in an effort to enhance the moral behavior of soldiers, much depends on whether the military virtues adhered to by these militaries suit a particular mission or military operation. Clearly, the beneficiaries of these military virtues are the soldiers themselves, fellow-soldiers, and military organizations, yet there is little that regulates the behavior of soldiers towards civilian populations. As a result, troops trained for combat in today's missions sometimes experience difficulty in adjusting to the less aggressive ways of working needed to win the hearts and minds of local populations after major combat is over. It can be argued that today's missions call for virtues that are more inclusive than the traditional ones, which are mainly about enhancing military effectiveness, but a convincing case can be made that a lot can already be won by interpreting these traditional virtues in different ways. This volume offers an integrated approach to the main traditional virtues, exploring their possible relevance and proposing new ways of interpretation that are more in line with the military tasks of the 21st century. The book will be of much interest to students of military ethics, philosophy, and war and conflict in general.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 357-358).

Explores the relationship between revelation and reason in medieval Islamic intellectual history. In this original study, Elizabeth R. Alexandrin examines the complex relationships that can be inscribed between medieval Ismā'īlī thought as an intellectual tradition with a devotional practice of reliance on the imām, and as a politico-esoteric system that redefined governance during the Fāṭimid caliphate in the eleventh century. Alexandrin's work is a departure from recent Western scholarship that focuses on similarities among early Islamic traditions. She argues instead that, under the guidance of the Fāṭimid Ismā'īlī chief missionary al-Mu'ayyad fī al-Dīn al-Shīrāzī (d. 1078 CE), the concept of walāyah (divine guidance) became closely associated with religio-political authority, on the one hand, and the perfection of the individual human being, on the other. By signaling and affirming how the Fāṭimid caliph-imām's were the heirs of walāyah and by proposing new definitions of the "seal of God's friends" (khātim al-awliyā' Allāh), al- Mu'ayyad broadened the contexts of making esoteric knowledge public and shifted the apocalyptic frameworks of Islamic messianism.