Sustainability education

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R.W. Connell

When it was first published over a decade ago, R.W. Connell's ground-breaking text on the nature and construction of masculine identity rapidly became a classic. In Masculinities Connell argues that there is not one masculinity, but many different masculinities, each associated with different positions of power. In a world gender order that continues to privilege men over women, but also raises difficult issues for men and boys, her account is more relevant than ever before. In this new edition, Connell discusses the development of masculinity studies in the ten years since the book's initial publication. She explores global gender relations, new theories, and practical uses of masculinity research. She also addresses the politics of masculinities, and the implications of masculinity research for understanding current world issues. Against the backdrop of an increasingly divided world, dominated by neo-conservative politics, Connell's account highlights a series of compelling questions about the future of human society. Masculinities has been translated into many languages and in 2004 it was voted one of the ten most influential books in Australian sociology. This second edition will be essential reading for students taking courses in gender studies, and a valuable reference for readers across the humanities and social sciences. the fundamental study on masculinity as a formative factor of modern social inequality, and also one of the most important books in the social sciences in recent years' Professor Ilse Lenz, Ruhr University, Bochum

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George E. Vaillant

In our current era of holy terror, passionate faith has come to seem like a present danger. Writers such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens have been happy to throw the baby out with the bathwater and declare that the danger is in religion itself. God, Hitchens writes, is not great.But man, according to George E. Vaillant, M.D., is great. In Spiritual Evolution, Dr. Vaillant lays out a brilliant defense not of organized religion but of man's inherent spirituality. Our spirituality, he shows, resides in our uniquely human brain design and in our innate capacity for emotions like love, hope, joy, forgiveness, and compassion, which are selected for by evolution and located in a different part of the brain than dogmatic religious belief. Evolution has made us spiritual creatures over time, he argues, and we are destined to become even more so. Spiritual Evolution makes the scientific case for spirituality as a positive force in human evolution, and he predicts for our species an even more loving future.Vaillant traces this positive force in three different kinds of "evolution": the natural selection of genes over millennia, of course, but also the cultural evolution within recorded history of ideas about the value of human life, and the development of spirituality within the lifetime of each individual. For thirty-five years, Dr. Vaillant directed Harvard's famous longitudinal study of adult development, which has followed hundreds of men over seven decades of life. The study has yielded important insights into human spirituality, and Dr. Vaillant has drawn on these and on a range of psychological research, behavioral studies, and neuroscience, and on history, anecdote, and quotation to produce a book that is at once a work of scientific argument and a lyrical meditation on what it means to be human. Spiritual Evolution is a life's work, and it will restore our belief in faith as an essential human striving.

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Carol Orsborn

Sometimes you carry a problem around for ages and think there is no resolution for it. If you can clear one day to approach the problem in the innovative and ultimately satisfying method put forth in Carol Orsborn's book, you may well find success. Be warned, though, where the experience takes you may not be where you thought it would. Giving your problem a full day of your attention is showing your respect for the problem's place in your life and for your own willingness to clear it from your future, which is a form of self respect. Good luck!

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M. Chris Mason

"The wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan were lost before they began, not on the battlefields, where the United States won every tactical engagement, but at the strategic level of war. In each case, the U.S. Government attempted to create a Western-style democracy in countries which were decades at least away from being nations with the sociopolitical capital necessary to sustain democracy and, most importantly, accept it as a legitimate source of governance. The expensive indigenous armies created in the image of the U.S. Army lacked both the motivation to fight for illegitimate governments in Saigon, Baghdad, and Kabul and a cause that they believed was worth dying for, while their enemies in the field clearly did not. This book examines the Afghan National Security Forces in historical and political contexts, explains why they will fail at the tactical, operational and strategic levels of war, why they cannot and will not succeed in holding the southern half of the country, and what will happen in Afghanistan year-by-year from 2015 to 2019. Finally, it examines what the critical lessons unlearned of these conflicts are for U.S. military leaders, why these fundamental political lessons seem to remain unlearned, and how the strategic mistakes of the past can be avoided in the future"--Publisher's web site.