Download or read book The Mythic Past Biblical Archaeology And The Myth Of Israel written by Thomas L Thompson and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2008-08-05 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Jewish people's historical claims to a small area of land bordering the eastern Mediterranean are not only the foundation for the modern state of Israel, they are also at the very heart of Judeo-Christian belief. Yet in The Mythic Past, Thomas Thompson argues that such claims are grounded in literary myth, not history. Among the author's startling conclusions are these: There never was a "united monarch" of Israel in biblical times -- We can no longer talk about a time of the Patriarchs -- The entire notion of "Israel" and its history is a literary fiction. The Mythic Past provides refreshing new ways to read the Old Testament as the great literature it was meant to be. At the same time, its controversial conclusions about Jewish history are sure to prove incendiary in a worldwide debate about one of the world's seminal texts, and one of its most bitterly contested regions.
Download or read book The Mythic Past Biblical Archaeology And The Myth Of Israel written by Thomas L Thompson and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2008-08-05 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Jewish people's historical claims to a small area of land bordering the eastern Mediterranean are not only the foundation for the modern state of Israel, they are also at the very heart of Judeo-Christian belief. Yet in The Mythic Past, Thomas Thompson argues that such claims are grounded in literary myth, not history. Among the author's startling conclusions are these: There never was a "united monarch" of Israel in biblical times -- We can no longer talk about a time of the Patriarchs -- The entire notion of "Israel" and its history is a literary fiction. The Mythic Past provides refreshing new ways to read the Old Testament as the great literature it was meant to be. At the same time, its controversial conclusions about Jewish history are sure to prove incendiary in a worldwide debate about one of the world's seminal texts, and one of its most bitterly contested regions.
Download or read book How Fascism Works written by Jason Stanley and published by Random House. This book was released on 2018-09-04 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “No single book is as relevant to the present moment.”—Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen “One of the defining books of the decade.”—Elizabeth Hinton, author of From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS’ CHOICE • With a new preface • Fascist politics are running rampant in America today—and spreading around the world. A Yale philosopher identifies the ten pillars of fascist politics, and charts their horrifying rise and deep history. As the child of refugees of World War II Europe and a renowned philosopher and scholar of propaganda, Jason Stanley has a deep understanding of how democratic societies can be vulnerable to fascism: Nations don’t have to be fascist to suffer from fascist politics. In fact, fascism’s roots have been present in the United States for more than a century. Alarmed by the pervasive rise of fascist tactics both at home and around the globe, Stanley focuses here on the structures that unite them, laying out and analyzing the ten pillars of fascist politics—the language and beliefs that separate people into an “us” and a “them.” He knits together reflections on history, philosophy, sociology, and critical race theory with stories from contemporary Hungary, Poland, India, Myanmar, and the United States, among other nations. He makes clear the immense danger of underestimating the cumulative power of these tactics, which include exploiting a mythic version of a nation’s past; propaganda that twists the language of democratic ideals against themselves; anti-intellectualism directed against universities and experts; law and order politics predicated on the assumption that members of minority groups are criminals; and fierce attacks on labor groups and welfare. These mechanisms all build on one another, creating and reinforcing divisions and shaping a society vulnerable to the appeals of authoritarian leadership. By uncovering disturbing patterns that are as prevalent today as ever, Stanley reveals that the stuff of politics—charged by rhetoric and myth—can quickly become policy and reality. Only by recognizing fascists politics, he argues, may we resist its most harmful effects and return to democratic ideals. “With unsettling insight and disturbing clarity, How Fascism Works is an essential guidebook to our current national dilemma of democracy vs. authoritarianism.”—William Jelani Cobb, author of The Substance of Hope
Download or read book Mythic Black Fiction written by Jane Campbell and published by Univ. of Tennessee Press. This book was released on 1989 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Heroes Masked and Mythic written by Christopher Wood and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2021-01-04 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Epic battles, hideous monsters and a host of petty gods--the world of Classical mythology continues to fascinate and inspire. Heroes like Herakles, Achilles and Perseus have influenced Western art and literature for centuries, and today are reinvented in the modern superhero. What does Iron Man have to do with the Homeric hero Odysseus? How does the African warrior Memnon compare with Marvel's Black Panther? Do DC's Wonder Woman and Xena the Warrior Princess reflect the tradition of Amazon women such as Penthesileia? How does the modern superhero's journey echo that of the epic warrior? With fresh insight into ancient Greek texts and historical art, this book examines modern superhero archetypes and iconography in comics and film as the crystallization of the hero's journey in the modern imagination.
Download or read book Mythic Past written by Thomas L. Thompson and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Prophet of Zongo Street written by Mohammed Naseehu Ali and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2005-07-26 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Prophet of Zongo Street is a dazzling collection of stories that calls to mind Ben Okri and Chinua Achebe. Mohammed Naseehu Ali, the tradition's acclaimed new practitioner, offers up ten powerful and beautifully rendered tales. Set primarily on the fictitious Zongo Street -- a close-knit community of wonderfully quirky characters who hold tight to superstition, religion, and family -- these stories are anchored by the uproarious, the embarrassing, the poignant, and the rawest moments of life.
Download or read book The Mythic Path written by David Feinstein and published by Elite Books. This book was released on 2006-11-01 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beneath our conscious minds, our personal mythology directs our actions and organizes your experiences. Psychologists Feinstein and Krippner explain how our current rate of social change is outpacing our culture's capacity to renew its traditions and guiding mythsand offer a twelve-week course for each of us to understand and transform our personal mythology. In the process, we move from past influences to taking charge of our own future.
Download or read book Journeys to the Mythical Past written by Zecharia Sitchin and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2009-06-25 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The paperback release of the second volume of Sitchin’s autobiographical account of the investigations and discoveries that led to The Earth Chronicles series • Zecharia Sitchin tells how his life was at risk inside the Great Pyramid and reveals the existence of a secret chamber • Reports on Vatican encounters, the Iceman of the Alps, the Antikythera computer, the temples and Ruts of Malta--and offers a solution to the enigma of the Nazca lines • 18,000 copies sold in hardcover since September 2007 In Journeys to the Mythical Past the renowned researcher of antiquity Zecharia Sitchin reveals, for the first time, the existence of a secret chamber in Egypt’s Great Pyramid, and he tells his own story of an indefatigable dedication to finding the truth that almost cost him his life--accidentally or otherwise--when uncovering secrets of the Giza pyramids and Sphinx. Exposing hidden artifacts that contradict establishment assumptions or that baffle scientists, Sitchin’s firsthand accounts of his explorations take the reader into the inner workings of the Vatican, the enigma of a futuristic computer from millennia ago, and the secret handiwork of a Divine Architect at Stonehenge, at Malta, and at a site in the Americas. Looking deep into antiquity, Sitchin offers astounding evidence that links the Nazca lines and a baffling adjoining site to the Departure from Earth of the Anunnaki, the ancient gods who, he believes, vowed to Return.
Download or read book The Quest for the Historical Israel written by Israel Finkelstein and published by Society of Biblical Lit. This book was released on 2007-10-24 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An engaging series of essays, originally given at the International Institute for Secular Humanistic Judaism. The aim of the colloquium was to make available the results of recent archaeological work to a wider interested public, and specifically to bring science to bear on the early history of the Jewish people.
Download or read book The Israelites in History and Tradition written by Niels Peter Lemche and published by Westminster John Knox Press. This book was released on 1998-01-01 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Niels Peter Lemche focuses on the way Israelites understood themselves at different points in history--before, within, and after the monarchy. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding Israel's rich history. Volumes in the Library of Ancient Israel draw on multiple disciplines--such as archaeology, anthropology, sociology, linguistics, and literary criticism--to illuminate the everyday realities and social subtleties these ancient cultures experienced. This series employs sophisticated methods resulting in original contributions that depict the reality of the people behind the Hebrew Bible and interprets these insights for a wide variety of readers.
Download or read book Butcher s Crossing written by John Williams and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2011-03-30 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now a major motion picture starring Nicolas Cage and directed by Gabe Polsky. In his National Book Award–winning novel Augustus, John Williams uncovered the secrets of ancient Rome. With Butcher’s Crossing, his fiercely intelligent, beautifully written western, Williams dismantles the myths of modern America. It is the 1870s, and Will Andrews, fired up by Emerson to seek “an original relation to nature,” drops out of Harvard and heads west. He washes up in Butcher’s Crossing, a small Kansas town on the outskirts of nowhere. Butcher’s Crossing is full of restless men looking for ways to make money and ways to waste it. Before long Andrews strikes up a friendship with one of them, a man who regales Andrews with tales of immense herds of buffalo, ready for the taking, hidden away in a beautiful valley deep in the Colorado Rockies. He convinces Andrews to join in an expedition to track the animals down. The journey out is grueling, but at the end is a place of paradisal richness. Once there, however, the three men abandon themselves to an orgy of slaughter, so caught up in killing buffalo that they lose all sense of time. Winter soon overtakes them: they are snowed in. Next spring, half-insane with cabin fever, cold, and hunger, they stagger back to Butcher’s Crossing to find a world as irremediably changed as they have been.
Download or read book Mythic Frontiers written by Daniel R. Maher and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2019-03-04 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Maher explores the development of the Frontier Complex as he deconstructs the frontier myth in the context of manifest destiny, American exceptionalism, and white male privilege. A very significant contribution to our understanding of how and why heritage sites reinforce privilege.”— Frederick H. Smith, author of The Archaeology of Alcohol and Drinking “Peels back the layer of dime westerns and True Grit films to show how their mythologies are made material. You’ll never experience a ‘heritage site’ the same way again.”—Christine Bold, author of The Frontier Club: Popular Westerns and Cultural Power, 1880–1924 The history of the Wild West has long been fictionalized in novels, films, and television shows. Catering to these popular representations, towns across America have created tourist sites connecting such tales with historical monuments. Yet these attractions stray from known histories in favor of the embellished past visitors expect to see and serve to craft a cultural memory that reinforces contemporary ideologies. In Mythic Frontiers, Daniel Maher illustrates how aggrandized versions of the past, especially those of the “American frontier,” have been used to turn a profit. These imagined historical sites have effectively silenced the violent, oppressive, colonizing forces of manifest destiny and elevated principal architects of it to mythic heights. Examining the frontier complex in Fort Smith, Arkansas—where visitors are greeted at a restored brothel and the reconstructed courtroom and gallows of “Hanging Judge” Isaac Parker feature prominently—Maher warns that creating a popular tourist narrative and disconnecting cultural heritage tourism from history minimizes the devastating consequences of imperialism, racism, and sexism and relegitimizes the privilege bestowed upon white men.
Download or read book The Empty Men written by Gregory Mobley and published by Anchor Bible. This book was released on 2005 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mobley also offers reflections on the Iron Age theology of these narratives, with their emphasis on poetic justice, and on the mythic dimensions of landscape in these stories."--Jacket.
Download or read book The Messiah Myth written by Thomas L. Thompson and published by . This book was released on 2009-04-20 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the eighteenth century, scholars and historians studying the texts of the Bible have attempted to distill historical facts and biography from the mythology and miracles described there. That trend continues into the present day, as scholars such as those of the "Jesus Seminar" dissect the Gospels and other early Christian writings to separate the "Jesus of history" from the "Christ of faith." But with The Messiah Myth, noted Biblical scholar Thomas L. Thompson argues that the quest for the historical Jesus is beside the point, since the Jesus of the Gospels never existed.Like King David before him, says Thompson, the Jesus of the Bible is an amalgamation of themes from Near Eastern mythology and traditions of kingship and divinity. The theme of a messiah-a divinely appointed king who restores the world to perfection-is typical of Egyptian and Babylonian royal ideology dating back to the Bronze Age. In Thompson's view, the contemporary audience for whom the Old and New Testament were written would naturally have interpreted David and Jesus not as historical figures, but as metaphors embodying long-established messianic traditions. Challenging widely held assumptions about the sources of the Bible and the quest for the historical Jesus, The Messiah Myth is sure to spark interest and heated debate.
Download or read book Fascist Mythologies written by Federico Finchelstein and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2022-07-05 with total page 95 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For fascism, myth was reality—or was realer than the real. Fascist notions of the leader, the nation, power, and violence were steeped in mythic imagery and the fantasy of transcending history. A mythologized primordial past would inspire the heroic overthrow of a debased present to achieve a violently redeemed future. What is distinctive about fascist mythology, and how does this aspect of fascism help explain its perils in the past and present? Federico Finchelstein draws on a striking combination of thinkers—Jorge Luis Borges, Sigmund Freud, and Carl Schmitt—to consider fascism as a form of political mythmaking. He shows that Borges’s literary and critical work and Freud’s psychoanalytic writing both emphasize the mythical and unconscious dimensions of fascist politics. Finchelstein considers their ideas of the self, violence, and the sacred as well as the relationship between the victims of fascist violence and the ideological myths of its perpetrators. He draws on Freud and Borges to analyze the work of a variety of Latin American and European fascist intellectuals, with particular attention to Schmitt’s political theology. Contrasting their approaches to the logic of unreason, Finchelstein probes the limits of the dichotomy between myth and reason and shows the centrality of this opposition to understanding the ideology of fascism. At a moment when forces redolent of fascism cast a shadow over world affairs, this book provides a timely historical and critical analysis of the dangers of myth in modern politics.
Download or read book The Memoirs of God written by Mark S. Smith and published by Fortress Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This insightful work examines the variety of ways that collective memory, oral tradition, history, and history writing intersect. Integral to all this are the ways in which ancient Israel was shaped by the monarchy, the Babylonian exile, and the dispersions of Judeans and the ways in which Israel conceptualized and interacted with the divine-Yahweh as well as other deities.
