The hinge of the world

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Christopher Gill

This is a major study of conceptions of selfhood and personality in Homer, Greek tragedy, and philosophy. The focus is on norms of personality in Greek psychology and ethics. The key thesis is that, to understand Greek thinking of this type, we need to counteract the subjective and individualistic aspects of our own thinking about the self. The book defines an 'objective-participant' conception of personality, symbolized by the idea of the person as an interlocutor in a series of types of psychological and ethical dialogue. The book is shaped as a response to recent work in the philosophy of mind, ethics, and personhood, as well as in classical scholarship. Clear and non-technical, with all Greek translated, the book brings out the continuing importance of ancient Greek thinking for contemporary study of ideas of personality and selfhood.

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John Ortberg

Winner of the 2002 Christianity Today Book Award! You're One Step Away from the Adventure of Your Life. Deep within you lies the same faith and longing that sent Peter walking across the wind-swept Sea of Galilee toward Jesus. In what ways is the Lord telling you, as he did Peter, 'Come'? John Ortberg invites you to consider the incredible potential that awaits you outside your comfort zone. Out on the risky waters of faith, Jesus is waiting to meet you in ways that will change you forever, deepening your character and your trust in God. The experience is terrifying. It's thrilling beyond belief. It's everything you'd expect of someone worthy to be called Lord. The choice is yours to know him as only a water-walker can, aligning yourself with God's purpose for your life in the process. There's just one requirement: If You Want to Walk on Water, You've Got to Get Out of the Boat.

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Pat Gill

Interpreting Ladies explores the defense by the Restoration comedy of manners of an ideal of aristocratic, conservative, English masculinity against the heavily satirized encroachments of French foppishness and the pretensions of the aspiring merchant class. Using Freud's theory of obscene wit, in which obscene jokes become reassuring testimonies of male privilege, as well as more recent theoretical descriptions of the discursive processes of meaning and desire, Gill considers the position of both the female protagonists and the female spectators in Restoration satire. She sketches the historical events and issues that create the link between morality and rhetoric and that serve to connect each to class and status. . Gill posits that the moral indeterminacy and slippage in satiric language is closely linked to male uneasiness about female honesty, and the dramatists' arguments in defense of their satiric treatments of female hypocrisy, duplicity, and sexual desire expose the gap in the moral premise of Restoration comic satire. It is a gap, Gill contends, that has everything to do with women - with female characters and putative female spectators - and it is why she states that "any reading that proposes to account for the equivocal satiric practice of Restoration comedy must therefore of necessity include a feminist critique."

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Theodore Hiebert

The ecological crisis has created new interest in the ideas about nature found in the Bible, which is often depicted as the source of attitudes that have led to the destruction of our environment. The Hebrew Scriptures, for example, are seen as enshrining oppositional views of nature, because it is assumed that the earliest Israelites were living in a hostile desert environment. In this book Theodore Hiebert re-examines these assumptions, and offers a new understanding of the role of nature in biblical thought. Hiebert stresses the importance of reading the Hebrew Scriptures in their ancient Near Eastern context. He concentrates on the Bible's earliest account of origins: the narratives of the Pentateuch, or Torah, usually attributed to a single author, the Yahwist. His analysis incorporates evidence from recent work in archaeology, history, anthropology, and comparative religion concerning the ecologies, economies, and religions of the ancient Levant. Hiebert shows that the Yahwist's formative landscape was actually hill country with a mixed agrarian economy. The view of God and the kinds of religious ritual described in the Yahwist's narratives are closely linked to this agricultural landscape and reflect the challenges of human survival within it. Rather than posing a problem for biblical religion, the world of nature is seen to play a foundational role in the shape and content of that tradition. . Hiebert concludes that the Yahwist's ideology is relevant to contemporary efforts to frame a theology of ecology. Particularly useful to these efforts are the Yahwist's views of reality as unified and non-dualistic, humanity as limited and dependent, nature and humanity as interrelated and of sacred significance, and agriculture as a context for an ecological theology.