The Oxbow Revelation

25 days in a life . . . It's 1975 and high school student Paul Roberts has recently left his church. He struggles to find a morality based upon something more than common belief or personal opinion. Then he becomes engaged in a series of conversations with a co-worker. Soon they have embarked upon a journey that neither had imagined possible. "...The Oxbow Revelation reads like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance crossed with East of Eden, with shades of American Graffiti as its backdrop." "... A serious, mysterious and sometimes sexy book about finding morality." Interwoven with humorous episodes of cruising the main drag and poignant stories of first love, Paul and his co-worker consider how the practical application of philosophical realism can guide human values. Originally poised to ignore the fact that their descriptions of realism also mirror the attributes of God, their examples keep echoing other religious stories, East and West. The mystery compounds until they can even understand the "virgin birth" through the eyes of realism. "Religious philosophy for the common man. You can focus on reason, ignoring every religious reference within the book, and the self-evident values remain. But don't ignore too much; this is cutting-edge religious scholarship." "...an opening salvo for a new religious realism." A compelling look at religion beyond belief.

The Laozi, Daodejing (also published as The Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching) is a new translation and commentary for 2015 and beyond. Unlike many other translations, this book's commentary invites the reader into the interpretive process. It provides the reader with a look into the visuals that make up key Chinese characters in order to assist the reader in understanding its practical philosophy of Realism. The 2500 year old Chinese text is not about rights and wrongs, nor is it about trying to change the world so that it suits you. It is about how we regard value and how this sense of value may, in turn, inform ourselves. It is about how adapting our selves to the world as it exists may make the world a better place in which all can live. It might best be regarded as self-help philosophy.

We live in a world dominated by belief. We hear, are taught, convinced and converted. We affirm, worship, praise and preach. We argue, persecute and kill for belief. And all of this can happen without a hint of faith in sight. Our failure to understand the difference between faith and belief has always been with us. Problems with belief are not limited to religion; belief affects everything from politics to personal relationships. Here we consider a philosophy of realism. Within realism, we find that not only is faith opposed to belief, faith is a tool of reason whether we are religious or not. Remarkably, the evidence suggests that many popular religious ideas and "myths" began as psychological lessons in realism. Because what we view is so dependent upon how we view, we learn how realism can influence our psychology, inform our values, and reveal a path forward that avoids the pitfalls of belief.

Steve Sando founded Rancho Gordo with the simple idea that saving our New World foods is a critical pursuit, and his passion for heirloom beans has made his business a huge success. Sando’s beans are sought after by famous chefs like Thomas Keller (Vallarta is his favorite), and he’s frequently profiled in publications such as Bon Appetit, Saveur, and the New York Times. In The Rancho Gordo Heirloom Bean Grower's Guide, Sando invites the gardener and home cook to share his passion, profiling the fifty best beans to grow, cook, and save. From the silky flavor of Good Mother Stallard to the buttery Runner Cannellinis, the most delicious varieties are presented in these pages along with growing tips, flavor notes, stories of their heritage, and beautiful photographs that showcase the unique beauty of each bean. In reintroducing the best of the New World heirloom beans, Sando has created a sensation, and food-lovers everywhere will relish transforming this humble staple into a celebrated delicacy.

In Revelations of Ideology, G. Anthony Keddie critically investigates the social motivations and implications of apocalyptic class rhetoric in late Second Temple Judaism, including the Jesus movement.

Chinua Achebe ("The art of fiction”) famously observed that until lions have their own historians “the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” In this volume chronicling the complex imperial and colonial entanglements of the Kpando region in eastern Ghana over recent centuries, the lions have found their proverbial historian. Drawing on an array of sources—archaeological, oral historical and documentary—Wazi Apoh brings locally nuanced perspective to the complex social political economic entanglements among Akpini, German and British actors. His illumination of previously silenced histories provides a rich platform from which to provoke us to imagine and act on the possibilities for restorative repatriation in the present. Its novel combination of historical study with analysis of ongoing dialogues over repatriation is a unique contribution to African studies.

Opening a dialogue between ecocriticism and transatlantic studies, this collection shows how the two fields inform, complement, and complicate each other. The editors situate the volume in its critical contexts by providing a detailed literary and historical overview of nineteenth-century transatlantic socioenvironmental issues involving such topics as the contemporary fur and timber trades, colonialism and agricultural "improvement," literary discourses on conservation, and the consequences of industrial capitalism, urbanization, and urban environmental activism. The chapters move from the broad to the particular, offering insights into Romanticism’s transatlantic discourses on nature and culture, examining British Victorian representations of nature in light of their reception by American writers and readers, providing in-depth analyses of literary forms such as the adventure novel, travel narratives, and theological and scientific writings, and bringing transatlantic and ecocritical perspectives to bear on classic works of nineteenth-century American literature. By opening a critical dialogue between these two vital areas of scholarship, Transatlantic Literary Ecologies demonstrates some of the key ways in which Western environmental consciousness and associated literary practices arose in the context of transatlantic literary and cultural exchanges during the long nineteenth century.

"Based on widely scattered sources - personal papers and correspondence; Clark's unpublished stories and poems; and interviews with family members, friends, and others - Benson focuses on Clark's intellectual and literary life as a writer, teacher, and westerner, balancing his account of the experiences, people, and settings of Clark's life with an examination of Clark's complex psyche and the crippling perfectionism that virtually ended his career. He also offers an assessment of Clark's place in Western writing."--Jacket.