The Struggle For Labour S Soul

Contributors, ranging from Chancellor Gordon Brown to the Guardian newspaper's Polly Toybee, discuss the Labour Party's political philosophy and address key topics like globalization, constitutional reform, equality and the 'third way'.

There is so much knowledge of the deeper wisdom out there waiting for us to explore and discover. Don’t be afraid to allow your mind and heart to be open to newer ways of thinking. This guide considers the astrological journey of the Soul symbolized by the story of the labours of Hercules. Both mythological and symbolical in nature, this story reveals the path of the Soul; it is the story of Humanity. This is our story, our path, our experiences, our lessons, our challenges and trials, and our victories. We will be victorious, no matter how long or how many lifetimes we need to garner experience. This story represents the experiences on the path of the Soul as it travels through the signs of the Zodiac. Written from author Astra Ferro’s inner guidance, insights, and studies of esotericism over many years, it aims to help fellow travellers on the path of the Soul to see beyond the written words and discover how each experience through the signs of the Zodiac can bring more understanding about themselves and their Souls’ purposes. Uplifting and intriguing, this spiritual guide examines the journey of the Soul as it incarnates and travels through the twelve signs of the Zodiac.

In 1946, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) undertook Operation Dixie, an initiative to recruit industrial workers in the American South. Elizabeth and Ken Fones-Wolf plumb rarely used archival sources and rich oral histories to explore the CIO's fraught encounter with the evangelical Protestantism and religious culture of southern whites. The authors' nuanced look at working class religion reveals how laborers across the surprisingly wide evangelical spectrum interpreted their lives through their faith. Factors like conscience, community need, and lived experience led individual preachers to become union activists and mill villagers to defy the foreman and minister alike to listen to organizers. As the authors show, however, all sides enlisted belief in the battle. In the end, the inability of northern organizers to overcome the suspicion with which many evangelicals viewed modernity played a key role in Operation Dixie's failure, with repercussions for labor and liberalism that are still being felt today. Identifying the role of the sacred in the struggle for southern economic justice, and placing class as a central aspect in southern religion, Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South provides new understandings of how whites in the region wrestled with the options available to them during a crucial period of change and possibility.

In late twentieth-century England, inequality was rocketing, yet some have suggested that the politics of class was declining in significance, while others argue that class identities lost little power. Neither interpretation is satisfactory: class remained important to 'ordinary' people's narratives about social change and their own identities throughout the period 1968-2000, but in changing ways. Using self-narratives drawn from a wide range of sources - the raw materials of sociological studies, transcripts from oral history projects, Mass Observation, and autobiography - the book examines class identities and narratives of social change between 1968 and 2000, showing that by the end of the period, class was often seen as an historical identity, related to background and heritage, and that many felt strict class boundaries had blurred quite profoundly since 1945. Class snobberies 'went underground', as many people from all backgrounds began to assert that what was important was authenticity, individuality, and ordinariness. In fact, Sutcliffe-Braithwaite argues that it is more useful to understand the cultural changes of these years through the lens of the decline of deference, which transformed people's attitudes towards class, and towards politics. The study also examines the claim that Thatcher and New Labour wrote class out of politics, arguing that this simple - and highly political - narrative misses important points. Thatcher was driven by political ideology and necessity to try to dismiss the importance of class, while the New Labour project was good at listening to voters - particularly swing voters in marginal seats - and echoing back what they were increasingly saying about the blurring of class lines and the importance of ordinariness. But this did not add up to an abandonment of a majoritarian project, as New Labour reoriented their political project to emphasize using the state to empower the individual.

Jim Macken's latest book is a sequel to Between a Death and a Difficult Birth. Both analyse the effects of the cultural shifts of the late 1960s on the labour movement. What is to be Done takes the debate a step further by suggesting solutions to the decline in membership and support for the trade union movement and the ALP.The Faulkner Report of 2010 on the decline in the political fortunes of the ALP calls for root and branch reform of the party. Macken's book looks at possible solutions to the decline in union membership as well. He suggests a return to first principles to govern recruitment and retention of members to both the party and the union movement. He is particularly scathing at the 'top down' government of both institutions.His solutions will not please factional leaders of the unions or the party and, in this regard, he supports the condemnation of factionalism in the Faulkner Report. There is no doubt that this short book will promote heated debate in the ranks of the labour movement but few will be found to disagree with his historic study of developments nor the logic of his case for dramatic change in the structures of the union movement and the ALP.

An inside analysis of modern cultural and political upheavals in China by a fluent Beijing correspondent describes the power struggles currently taking place between the party elite and supporters of democracy, the outcome of which the author predicts will significantly affect China's rise to a world super-power. 125,000 first printing.

In the fields of pastoral care and pastoral theology, there are times when a book signals a paradigm shift. This is one such book. LaMothe develops a political pastoral theology that is used to examine critically political, economic, and societal structures and practices. In the first part of the book, LaMothe argues that care and pastoral care are political concepts, which, along with the notion of justice, can be used as a hermeneutical framework to assess macropolitical and macroeconomic realities. Included in this section is the notion of civil and redemptive discourse, necessary for the survival and flourishing of persons and polis. The last section of the book examines U.S. Empire, capitalism, class, classism, and other pressing political issues using the hermeneutical lens of care.