Download or read book The Irony of Power written by Dorothy Jean Weaver and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2017-06-21 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume engages the Gospel of Matthew in full awareness of its inherently political character. Weaver situates Matthew's version of the "good news of the kingdom" squarely within the "real world" of first-century Palestine and its occupying power, the Roman Empire. The essays here focus prominently and collectively on the issues of power and violence that not only pervade the historically occupied Jewish community of first-century Palestine, but also are clearly visible throughout Matthew's narrative account. A "lower-level" reading of the Matthean text offers a bleak portrait of the overwhelming power and violence exerted by the Roman occupying authorities and their upper-echelon Jewish collaborators against the wider Jewish community of first-century Palestine. But an "upper-level"/"God's-eye" reading of Matthew's narrative consistently reveals the fundamental irony at the heart of the New Testament as a whole, of the Jesus story broadly conceived, and of Matthew's narrative account in specific. This irony overturns all humanly recognized definitions of "power" and demonstrates the astonishing "politics of God," which defeats evident power through apparent powerlessness and overcomes violence through nonviolent initiatives.
Download or read book The Irony of Power written by Dorothy Jean Weaver and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2017-06-21 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume engages the Gospel of Matthew in full awareness of its inherently political character. Weaver situates Matthew's version of the "good news of the kingdom" squarely within the "real world" of first-century Palestine and its occupying power, the Roman Empire. The essays here focus prominently and collectively on the issues of power and violence that not only pervade the historically occupied Jewish community of first-century Palestine, but also are clearly visible throughout Matthew's narrative account. A "lower-level" reading of the Matthean text offers a bleak portrait of the overwhelming power and violence exerted by the Roman occupying authorities and their upper-echelon Jewish collaborators against the wider Jewish community of first-century Palestine. But an "upper-level"/"God's-eye" reading of Matthew's narrative consistently reveals the fundamental irony at the heart of the New Testament as a whole, of the Jesus story broadly conceived, and of Matthew's narrative account in specific. This irony overturns all humanly recognized definitions of "power" and demonstrates the astonishing "politics of God," which defeats evident power through apparent powerlessness and overcomes violence through nonviolent initiatives.
Download or read book The Irony of American History written by Reinhold Niebuhr and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-01-22 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[Niebuhr] is one of my favorite philosophers. I take away [from his works] the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away . . . the sense we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard.”—President Barack Obama Forged during the tumultuous but triumphant postwar years when America came of age as a world power, The Irony of American History is more relevant now than ever before. Cited by politicians as diverse as Hillary Clinton and John McCain, Niebuhr’s masterpiece on the incongruity between personal ideals and political reality is both an indictment of American moral complacency and a warning against the arrogance of virtue. Impassioned, eloquent, and deeply perceptive, Niebuhr’s wisdom will cause readers to rethink their assumptions about right and wrong, war and peace. “The supreme American theologian of the twentieth century.”—Arthur Schlesinger Jr., New York Times “Niebuhr is important for the left today precisely because he warned about America’s tendency—including the left’s tendency—to do bad things in the name of idealism. His thought offers a much better understanding of where the Bush administration went wrong in Iraq.”—Kevin Mattson, The Good Society “Irony provides the master key to understanding the myths and delusions that underpin American statecraft. . . . The most important book ever written on US foreign policy.”—Andrew J. Bacevich, from the Introduction
Download or read book The Force of Irony written by Gabriel Torres and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-08-25 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 'Casa Chata Award' for the Best Book of 1994 (Spanish edition)In charting the paradoxical effects of power and knowledge on the everyday life of subordinate people, this book offers a major rethinking of domination and the agricultural labor process. Challenging the belief that ethnography is theoretically weak, the author provides a fresh perspective on rural workers' responses to the development of transnational production systems and the transformations of agrarian structures brought about by the complex interactions of global and local forces. In questioning ingrained assumptions about worker consciousness, the author exposes the naivete of past approaches and the role of power and hegemony in the micro-politics of human relations. This book is obligatory reading for anyone interested in current debates about "resistance," development, and the future of rural societies.
Download or read book The Firebird and the Fox written by Jeffrey Brooks and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-24 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A century of Russian artistic genius, including literature, art, music and dance, within the dynamic cultural ecosystem that shaped it.
Download or read book US Power and the Internet in International Relations written by M. Carr and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-08 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite the pervasiveness of the Internet and its importance to a wide range of state functions, we still have little understanding of its implications in the context of International Relations. Combining the Philosophy of Technology with IR theories of power, this study explores state power in the information age.
Download or read book Kierkegaard on Politics written by Barry Stocker and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-11-22 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This investigation of Kierkegaard as a political thinker with regard to the Danish context, and to his place in the history of political thought, deals with the more direct discussion of politics in Kierkegaard, and the ways in which political ideas are embedded in his literary, aesthetic, ethical, philosophical ,and religious thought.
Download or read book Irony s Edge written by Linda Hutcheon and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-09-02 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The edge of irony, says Linda Hutcheon, is always a social and political edge. Irony depends upon interpretation; it happens in the tricky, unpredictable space between expression and understanding. Irony's Edge is a fascinating, compulsively readable study of the myriad forms and the effects of irony. It sets out, for the first time, a sustained, clear analysis of the theory and the political contexts of irony, using a wide range of references from contemporary culture. Examples extend from Madonna to Wagner, from a clever quip in conversation to a contentious exhibition in a museum. Irony's Edge outlines and then challenges all the major existing theories of irony, providing the most comprehensive and critically challengin theory of irony to date.
Download or read book The 48 Laws of Power written by Robert Greene and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2023-10-31 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Amoral, cunning, ruthless, and instructive, this multi-million-copy New York Times bestseller is the definitive manual for anyone interested in gaining, observing, or defending against ultimate control – from the author of The Laws of Human Nature. In the book that People magazine proclaimed “beguiling” and “fascinating,” Robert Greene and Joost Elffers have distilled three thousand years of the history of power into 48 essential laws by drawing from the philosophies of Machiavelli, Sun Tzu, and Carl Von Clausewitz and also from the lives of figures ranging from Henry Kissinger to P.T. Barnum. Some laws teach the need for prudence (“Law 1: Never Outshine the Master”), others teach the value of confidence (“Law 28: Enter Action with Boldness”), and many recommend absolute self-preservation (“Law 15: Crush Your Enemy Totally”). Every law, though, has one thing in common: an interest in total domination. In a bold and arresting two-color package, The 48 Laws of Power is ideal whether your aim is conquest, self-defense, or simply to understand the rules of the game.
Download or read book A Rhetoric of Irony written by Wayne C. Booth and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1974 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Perhaps no other critical label has been made to cover more ground than "irony," and in our time irony has come to have so many meanings that by itself it means almost nothing. In this work, Wayne C. Booth cuts through the resulting confusions by analyzing how we manage to share quite specific ironies—and why we often fail when we try to do so. How does a reader or listener recognize the kind of statement which requires him to reject its "clear" and "obvious" meaning? And how does any reader know where to stop, once he has embarked on the hazardous and exhilarating path of rejecting "what the words say" and reconstructing "what the author means"? In the first and longer part of his work, Booth deals with the workings of what he calls "stable irony," irony with a clear rhetorical intent. He then turns to intended instabilities—ironies that resist interpretation and finally lead to the "infinite absolute negativities" that have obsessed criticism since the Romantic period. Professor Booth is always ironically aware that no one can fathom the unfathomable. But by looking closely at unstable ironists like Samuel Becket, he shows that at least some of our commonplaces about meaninglessness require revision. Finally, he explores—with the help of Plato—the wry paradoxes that threaten any uncompromising assertion that all assertion can be undermined by the spirit of irony.
Download or read book Irony and the Discourse of Modernity written by Ernst Behler and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2014-07-01 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Behler discusses the current state of thought on modernity and postmodernity, detailing the intellectual problems to be faced and examining the positions of such central figures in the debate as Lyotard, Habermas, Rorty, and Derrida. He finds that beyond the “limits of communication,” further discussion must be carried out through irony. The historical rise of the concept of modernity is examined through discussions of the querelle des anciens et des modernes as a break with classical tradition, and on the theoretical writings of de Stael, the English romantics, and the great German romantics Schlegel, Hegel, and Nietzsche. The growth of the concept of irony from a formal rhetorical term to a mode of indirectness that comes to characterize thought and discourse generally is then examined from Plato and Socrates to Nietzsche, who avoided the term “irony” but used it in his cetnral concept of the mask.
Download or read book No One Man Should Have All That Power written by Amos Barshad and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2019-04-09 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this exploration of shadowy, behind-the-scenes operators, “each portrait provides an incisive dissection of the acquisition and maintenance of power” (The Nation). Journalist Amos Barshad has long been fascinated by the powerful. But not by elected officials or natural leaders—he’s interested in the dark figures who wield power from the shadows. And, as Barshad shows in No One Man Should Have All That Power, these master manipulators are not confined to political backrooms. They can be found anywhere—from Hollywood to drug cartels, recording studios, or the NFL. In this wide-ranging, insightful exploration of the phenomenon, Barshad takes readers into the lives of more than a dozen notorious figures, starting with Grigori Rasputin himself. The Russian mystic drank, danced, and healed his way into a position of power behind the last of the tsars. Based on interviews with well-known personalities like Scooter Braun (Justin Bieber’s manager), Alex Guerrero (Tom Brady’s trainer), and Sam Nunberg (Trump’s former aide) and original reporting on figures like Nicaragua’s powerful first lady Rosario Murillo and the Tijuana cartel boss known as “Narcomami,” Barshad investigates a variety of modern-day Raputins. He explores how they got there, how they wielded control, and what lessons we can take from them, including how to spot Rasputins in the wild.
Download or read book The Irony of Barack Obama written by R. Ward Holder and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-09 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on the political theology of Reinhold Niebuhr, described by Barack Obama as 'one of my favourite philosophers', this book assesses the challenges facing the President during his first term. It evaluates his success in adhering to Niebuhr's path of 'Christian realism' when faced with the pragmatic demands of domestic and foreign affairs. In 2008 Candidate Obama used the ideas of 'Hope' and 'Change' to inspire voters and secure the presidency. Obama promised change not only regarding America's policies, but even more fundamentally in the nation's political culture. Holder and Josephson describe the foundations of President Obama's Christian faith and the extent to which it has shaped his approach to politics. Their book explores Obama's journey of faith in the context of a broadly Augustinian understanding of faith and politics, examines the tensions between Christian realism and pragmatic progressivism, explains why a Christian realist interpretation is essential to understanding Obama's presidency, and applies this model of understanding to considerations of foreign and domestic policy. By combining this theological and political analysis the book offers a special opportunity to reflect on the relationship between Christian faith and statesmanship, reflections that are missing from current popular discussions of the Obama presidency. Through consideration of Niebuhr's models of the prophet and the statesman, and the more popular alternative of the political evangelist, Holder and Josephson are better able to explain the president's successes and his failures, and to unveil the Augustinian limits of the political life.
Download or read book The Irony of Free Speech written by Owen Fiss and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-01 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How free is the speech of someone who can't be heard? Not very--and this, Owen Fiss suggests, is where the First Amendment comes in. In this book, a marvel of conciseness and eloquence, Fiss reframes the debate over free speech to reflect the First Amendment's role in ensuring public debate that is, in Justice William Brennan's words, truly uninhibited, robust, and wide-open. Hate speech, pornography, campaign spending, funding for the arts: the heated, often overheated, struggle over these issues generally pits liberty, as embodied in the First Amendment, against equality, as in the Fourteenth. Fiss presents a democratic view of the First Amendment that transcends this opposition. If equal participation is a precondition of free and open public debate, then the First Amendment encompasses the values of both equality and liberty. By examining the silencing effects of speech--its power to overwhelm and intimidate the underfunded, underrepresented, or disadvantaged voice--Fiss shows how restrictions on political expenditures, hate speech, and pornography can be defended in terms of the First Amendment, not despite it. Similarly, when the state requires the media to air voices of opposition, or funds art that presents controversial or challenging points of view, it is doing its constitutional part to protect democratic self-rule from the aggregations of private power that threaten it. Where most liberal accounts cast the state as the enemy of freedom and the First Amendment as a restraint, this one reminds us that the state can also be the friend of freedom, protecting and fostering speech that might otherwise die unheard, depriving our democracy of the full range and richness of its expression.
Download or read book Daily Afflictions written by Andrew Boyd and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2002 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Revolutionizing a bestselling genre, this thinking man's parody hijacks the format of "daily affirmations" by offering "daily afflictions" to give readers inspiration, practical advice, and food for thought.
Download or read book Irony and Meaning in the Hebrew Bible written by Carolyn J. Sharp and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2008-12-23 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Was God being ironic in commanding Eve not to eat fruit from the tree of wisdom? Carolyn J. Sharp suggests that many stories in the Hebrew Scriptures may be ironically intended. Deftly interweaving literary theory and exegesis, Sharp illumines the power of the unspoken in a wide variety of texts from the Pentateuch, the Prophets, and the Writings. She argues that reading with irony in mind creates a charged and open rhetorical space in the texts that allows character, narration, and authorial voice to develop in unexpected ways. Main themes explored here include the ironizing of foreign rulers, the prostitute as icon of the ironic gaze, indeterminacy and dramatic irony in prophetic performance, and irony in ancient Israel's wisdom traditions. Sharp devotes special attention to how irony destabilizes dominant ways in which the Bible is read today, especially when it touches on questions of conflict, gender, and the Other.
Download or read book The Concept of Irony written by Robert L. Perkins and published by Mercer University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The International Kierkegaard Commentary-For the first time in English the world community of scholars systematically assembled and presented the results of recent research in the vast literature of Søren Kierkegaard. Based on the definitive English edition of Kierkegaard's works by Princeton University Press, this series of commentaries addresses all the published texts of the influential Danish philosopher and theologian. This is volume 2 in a series of commentaries based upon the definitive translations of Kierkegaard's writings published by Princeton University Press, 1980ff.
