The World to Come: A Novel PDF Download

Author: Dara Horn
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393066878
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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"Nothing short of amazing." —Entertainment Weekly A million-dollar Chagall is stolen from a museum during a singles' cocktail hour. The unlikely thief, former child prodigy Benjamin Ziskind, is convinced that the painting once hung in his parents' living room. This work of art opens a door through which we discover his family's startling history—from an orphanage in Soviet Russia where Chagall taught to suburban New Jersey and the jungles of Vietnam.

Author: Jim Shepard
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 1524731803
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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"These ten stories ring with voices belonging to--among others--English Arctic explorers in one of history's most nightmarish expeditions, a young contemporary American negotiating the shockingly underreported hazards of our crude-oil trains, eighteenth-century French balloonists inventing manned flight, and two mid-nineteenth-century housewives trying to forge a connection despite their isolation on the frontier of settlement. In each case the personal is the political as these characters face everything from the emotional pitfalls of everyday life to historic catastrophes on a global scale"--

Author: Norman Cohn
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300090888
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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All over the world people look forward to a perfect future, when the forces of good will be finally victorious over the forces of evil. Once this was a radically new way of imagining the destiny of the world and of mankind. How did it originate, and what kind of world-view preceded it? In this engrossing book, the author of the classic work The Pursuit of the Millennium takes us on a journey of exploration, through the world-views of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and India, through the innovations of Iranian and Jewish prophets and sages, to the earliest Christian imaginings of heaven on earth. Until around 1500 B.C., it was generally believed that once the world had been set in order by the gods, it was in essence immutable. However, it was always a troubled world. By means of flood and drought, famine and plague, defeat in war, and death itself, demonic forces threatened and impaired it. Various combat myths told how a divine warrior kept the forces of chaos at bay and enabled the world to survive. Sometime between 1500 and 1200 B.C., the Iranian prophet Zoroaster broke from that static yet anxious world-view, reinterpreting the Iranian version of the combat myth. For Zoroaster, the world was moving, through incessant conflict, toward a conflictless state--"cosmos without chaos." The time would come when, in a prodigious battle, the supreme god would utterly defeat the forces of chaos and their human allies and eliminate them forever, and so bring an absolutely good world into being. Cohn reveals how this vision of the future was taken over by certain Jewish groups, notably the Jesus sect, with incalculable consequences. Deeply informed yet highly readable, this magisterial book illumines a major turning-point in the history of human consciousness. It will be mandatory reading for all who appreciated The Pursuit of the Millennium.

Author: Isaac Watts
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 516

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Author: Laurent Cohen-Tanugi
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231517904
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 169

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Contrary to an optimistic vision of a world "flattened" by the virtues of globalization, the sustainability and positive outcomes of economic and political homogenization are far from guaranteed. For better and for worse, globalization has become the most powerful force shaping the world's geopolitical landscape, whether it has meant integration or fragmentation, peace or war. The future partly depends on how new economic giants such as China, India, and others make use of their power. It also depends on how well Western democracies can preserve their tenuous hold on leadership, cohesion, and the pursuit of the common good. Offering the most comprehensive analysis of world politics to date, Laurent Cohen-Tanugi takes on globalization's cheerleaders and detractors, who, in their narrow focus, have failed to recognize the full extent to which globalization has become a geopolitical phenomenon. Offering an interpretative framework for thought and action, Cohen-Tanugi suggests how we should approach our new "multipolar" world a world that is anything but the balanced and harmonious system many welcomed as a desirable alternative to the "American Empire." Cohen-Tanugi's point is not that the major trends of economic globalization, technological revolution, regional integration, and democratic progress are no longer at work. His argument is that economic globalization exists in a complex dialectic with the traditional geopolitics it has, ironically, helped to revive. This tension has created an ambivalent world that requires democracies to operate in two realms: the realm of economic integration and multilateralism or peaceful, astrategic, "postmodern" internationalism and the more traditional, even regressive realm of confrontation between national and regional strategies of power fought against a background of terrorism, civil wars, and nuclear proliferation.

Author: Glenn Packiam
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
ISBN: 0830849327
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Christians sing because we are people of hope. Yet our hope is unlike other kinds of hope. We are not optimists; nor are we escapists. Christian hope is uniquely shaped by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead and by the promise of our own future resurrection. How is that hope both expressed and experienced in contemporary worship? In this volume in the Dynamics of Christian Worship series, pastor, theologian, and songwriter Glenn Packiam explores what Christians sing about when they sing about hope and what kind of hope they experience when they worship together. Through his analysis and reflection, we find that Christian worship is crucial to both the proclamation and the formation of Christian hope. The Dynamics of Christian Worship series draws from a wide range of worshiping contexts and denominational backgrounds to unpack the many dynamics of Christian worship—including prayer, reading the Bible, preaching, baptism, the Lord’s Supper, music, visual art, architecture, and more—to deepen both the theology and practice of Christian worship for the life of the church.

Author: Joseph Bathanti
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 1611174546
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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In a weaving together of contradictory realms—past and present, rustbelt city and rural/urban South, old-world Catholicism and backwoods Protestantism—Joseph Bathanti draws readers into the 1970s as protagonist George Dolce faces major upheaval in The Life of the World to Come. George aspires to leave his blue collar, Catholic neighborhood of East Liberty in Pittsburgh. He is on the cusp of graduation from college and headed for law school when he becomes entangled in a local gambling ring. After his father gets laid off at the steel mill, George dramatically increases his wagering to help his parents with finances. What’s more, he allows his boss at his real job and love interest’s father, a pharmacist named Phil Rosechild, to place bets through him with the gambling ring’s volatile kingpin. As his parents’ financial situation deteriorates, George delves deeper into gambling, and he even goes so far as to set up Phil by using the pharmacist’s unschooled and ever-growing betting practices to his own end—cheating the father of the woman he loves. When Phil welches on a large bet that George has placed for him, George finds himself in life-threatening trouble and must abandon his law school dreams. He robs the pharmacy, steals the delivery car, and flees south. After his stolen car breaks down in Queen, North Carolina, he meets a young, mysterious woman known as Crow. The two form a bond and eventually take to the road in an attempt to reconcile their harrowing, often surreal destiny and to escape George’s inevitable punishment.

Author: Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 145296159X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 139

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Can social theories forge new paths into an uncertain future? The future has become increasingly difficult to imagine. We might be able to predict a few events, but imagining how looming disasters will coincide is simultaneously necessary and impossible. Drawing on speculative fiction and social theory, Theory for the World to Come is the beginning of a conversation about theories that move beyond nihilistic conceptions of the capitalism-caused Anthropocene and toward generative bodies of thought that provoke creative ways of thinking about the world ahead. Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer draws on such authors as Kim Stanley Robinson and Octavia Butler, and engages with afrofuturism, indigenous speculative fiction, and films from the 1970s and ’80s to help think differently about the future and its possibilities. Forerunners: Ideas First Short books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead

Author: Carol Zaleski
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN:
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 120

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In three brief chapters, Zaleski offers an extended meditation on the encounter with death, the hope for life beyond death, and the vision of last things as distilled in the testimony of near-death experience and the Christian tradition.

Author: Kage Baker
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780765354327
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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In this newest novel of the Company series, a time-traveling botanist is stranded 150,000 years in the past. Grieving for the lover she lost twice, Mendoza meets a reincarnation of her love again.