Books on the topic 'Contemporary Living Values'

This edited volume provides a multifaceted investigation of the dynamic interrelations between visual arts and urbanization in contemporary Mainland China with a focus on unseen representations and urban interventions brought about by the transformations of the urban space and the various problems associated with it. Through a wide range of illuminating case studies, the authors demonstrate how innovative artistic and creative practices initiated by various stakeholders not only raise critical awareness on socio-political issues of Chinese urbanization but also actively reshape the urban living spaces. The formation of new collaborations, agencies, aesthetics and cultural production sites facilitate diverse forms of cultural activism as they challenge the dominant ways of interpreting social changes and encourage civic participation in the production of alternative meanings in and of the city. Their significance lies in their potential to question current values and power structures as well as to foster new subjectivities for disparate individuals and social groups.

Within the Yarra River catchment area nestles the valley of Steels Creek, a small shallow basin in the lee of Kinglake plateau and the Great Dividing Range. The escarpment walls of the range drop in a series of ridges to the valley and form the south-eastern boundary of the Kinglake National Park. The gentle undulations that flow out from the valley stretch into the productive and picturesque landscape of Victoria’s famous wine growing district, the Yarra Valley. Late on the afternoon of 7 February 2009, the day that came to be known as Black Saturday, the Kinglake plateau carried a massive conflagration down the fringing ranges into the Steels Creek community. Ten people perished and 67 dwellings were razed in the firestorm. In the wake of the fires, the devastated residents of the valley began the long task of grieving, repairing, rebuilding or moving on while redefining themselves and their community. In Living with Fire, historians Tom Griffiths and Christine Hansen trace both the history of fire in the region and the human history of the Steels Creek valley in a series of essays which examine the relationship between people and place. These essays are interspersed with four interludes compiled from material produced by the community. In the immediate aftermath of the fire many people sought to express their grief, shock, sadness and relief in artwork. Some painted or wrote poetry, while others collected the burnt remains of past treasures from which they made new objects. These expressions, supplemented by historical archives and the essays they stand beside, offer a sensory and holistic window into the community’s contemporary and historical experiences. A deeply moving book, Living with Fire brings to life the stories of one community’s experience with fire, offering a way to understand the past, and in doing so, prepare for the future.

Animals seem to be everywhere in contemporary literature, visual art, and performance. But though writers, artists, and performers are now engaging more and more with ideas about animals, and even with actual living animals, their aesthetic practice continues to be interpreted within a primarily human frame of reference—with art itself being understood as an exclusively human endeavor. The critical wager in this book is that the aesthetic impulse itself is profoundly trans-species. Rohman suggests that if we understand artistic and performative impulses themselves as part of our evolutionary inheritance—as that which we borrow, in some sense, from animals and the natural world—the ways we experience, theorize, and value literary, visual, and performance art fundamentally shift. Although other arguments suggest that certain modes of aesthetic expression are closely linked to animality, Rohman argues that the aesthetic is animal, showing how animality and actual animals are at the center of the aesthetic practices of crucial modernist, contemporary, and avant-garde artists. Exploring the implications of the shift from an anthropocentric to a bioaesthetic conception of art, this book turns toward animals as artistic progenitors in a range of case studies that spans print texts, visual art, dance, music, and theatrical performance. Drawing on the ideas of theorists such as Elizabeth Grosz, Jane Bennett, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, Una Chaudhuri, Timothy Morton, and Cary Wolfe, Rohman articulates a deep coincidence of the human and animal elaboration of life forces in aesthetic practices.

This chapter encourages readers to embrace the task of “prophetic preaching”—defined both as preaching that challenges the status quo, and as proclamation that mediates for contemporary believers dimensions of truth-telling and identity formation performed by the prophetic books of the Hebrew Scriptures. The authors begin by debunking several myths related to prophetic preaching, positing that such preaching ultimately offers hope in the midst of a discordant and unjust world. They show how the very prophetic books that are too often avoided in the pulpit offer themes and perspectives that are essential for living as people of God today. Next they address challenges involved in trying to bridge ideational and ethical differences between the social values and theologies of ancient Israel and those of contemporary Christian congregations. Finally, they illustrate how the biblical prophetic literature may be helpful for advancing broader aims of Christian homiletics.

THIS CHAPTER SETS the foundation necessary for appreciating Urfalli Suryani religious emotionality through essential elements in the local musical experience. It draws on the history of the Syrian Orthodox Church, on Syriac liturgy and theology, and on living Lenten practices rooted in early asceticism, to underscore survival. The chapter locates the Syriac chant of Edessa not only historically in relation to early Christianity but also in the contemporary context of Aleppo and its social space. Through the example of a chant that accompanies daily bowing, the narrative situates living practice simultaneously in the church’s early roots and in its contemporary urban surrounding. Here, the body, and its (in)significance, will emerge as essential to local forms of knowledge, value, and musicality in Hayy al-Suryan, to which the next chapters will turn.

The London family and household were shaped by many interacting factors in the period 1550–1640: the growth of the metropolitan population through migration, the prevalence of apprenticeship and domestic service, comparatively late marriage, the practice of wet-nursing, and high infant and child mortality. Widowhood and remarriage were common, leading to blended families and step-relationships. The rising cost of living, especially property values, encouraged the subdivision of houses, individual mobility, and temporary lodging arrangements. But in many respects family and household, embedded in networks of neighbourly sociability and support, were resilient and able to accommodate change. Plentiful contemporary evidence testifies to the warmth and enduring nature of relationships within and beyond their bounds, and family and household remained a keystone of early modern London society.

<p><span>The collective volume <em>Existence and the One</em> contains a series of academic reflections on contemporary living in an inclusive international dialogue, open to otherness that demands to be accepted and understood under universal recognition of the value of human being and of its surrounding environment. This volume is the successful outcome of a five-year international research in humanistic and philosophical field with important tendencies towards a deep social criticism in metaphysical and theoretical terms. Strongly focused on a profound analysis of the anthropocene man’s consciousness in dialogue with the great metaphysics of the past, this collection has produced an anthropological re-examination of human being that raises questions of existential importance in the interdisciplinary and transcultural context.</span></p>

Sense and Sadness is a story of the living practice of Syriac chant in Aleppo, Syria. To understand and explain this oral tradition, the book puts forward the concept of the emotional economy of music aesthetics, an economy in which the emotional and the aesthetic interrelate in mutually indicative ways. The book is based on observing chant practice in the Syrian Orthodox Church in contemporary contexts in the Middle East and beyond, while keeping as its nexus of analysis the Edessan chant of St. George’s Church of Hayy al-Suryan and focusing on Passion Week. It examines written sources on the music of Syriac chant in light of ethnographic analysis, thus combining various modes of knowledge on this problematic subject. This historically informed reading of an early Christian liturgical tradition reveals contemporary modes of significance in the dynamic social and political surroundings of a community that endures exile after exile. The book thus places the music, and its subject(s), in a global context the only stable element of which is uncertainty. The first of the book’s four parts addresses issues of contextuality, such as geographic and temporal situationality, along with musical complexity in conceptions of modality. The second and third parts address overlapping modes of knowledge and value, respectively, in the musical ecclesiastical enterprise. The final part brings together the book’s subthemes. Spirituality, ethnic religiosity, authority, and value-based forms of identification and sociality are brought to bear on analyzing ḥasho: the mode, emotion, and time of commemorating divine suffering and human sadness.

Environmental ethics is an academic subfield of philosophy concerned with normative and evaluative propositions about the world of nature and, perhaps more generally, the moral fabric of relations between human beings and the world we occupy. This Handbook contains forty-five newly commissioned essays written by leading experts and emerging voices. The essays range over a broad variety of issues, concepts, and perspectives that are both central to and characteristic of the field, thus providing an authoritative but accessible account of the history, analysis, and prospect of ideas that are essential to contemporary environmental ethics. The Handbook includes sections on the broad social contexts in which we find ourselves (e.g., chapters on history, science, economics, governance, and the Anthropocene), on what ought to count morally and why (e.g., chapters on humanity, animals, living individuals, ecological collectives, and wild nature), on the nature and meaning of environmental values (e.g., truth and goodness, practical reasons, hermeneutics, phenomenology, and aesthetics), on theoretical understandings of how we should act (e.g., on consequentialism, duty and obligation, character, caring relationships, and the sacred), on key concepts (e.g., responsibility, justice, gender, rights, ecological space, risk and precaution, citizenship, future generations, and sustainability), on specific areas of environmental concern (e.g., pollution, population, energy, food, water, mass extinction, technology and ecosystem management), on climate change considered as the defining environmental problem of our time (e.g., chapters on mitigation, adaptation, diplomacy, and geoengineering), and on social change (e.g., pragmatism, conflict, sacrifice, and action).

The purpose of this book is show how research on families can be used to offer inspiration, suggestions, and guidance to intercultural families choosing to school their children in the regular Japanese school system. Each chapter is written by a parent or parents who are themselves researchers and thus bring their skills to the task of writing about issues which have affected their families, and are likely to affect other families in similar ways. There are also suggestions for other non-Japanese parents coping with similar issues. The book is divided into three sections: The first, “Finding our own way”, deals with children’s and parents’ struggles with identity and inclusion in Japanese schools and society. The second, “Dealing with the Japanese school system”, offers narratives and advice on such topics as coping with homework and dealing with more than one school system, as well as what government-accredited Japanese overseas schools have to offer. The third section, “Coping with challenges”, examines the experiences of families where children are “different” because they have physical or intellectual challenges, or live with foster or adoptive families. The book concludes with a narrative about a family who made the decision to remove their children from the Japanese system entirely and send them abroad for schooling. The authors of the chapters in this book are all current or former university faculty, living in different areas of Japan. Some, who live in highly-populated urban areas, have had ample opportunities to locate educational options for their children, while others, living in rural communities, have had to struggle to advocate for their children’s inclusion in mainstream classes. Their stories are all compelling and their advice is certain to be helpful to those planning to or already raising children in Japan. This book will also be of value to researchers and educators, particularly those with an interest in bilingualism, intercultural families, and cross-cultural issues, along with anyone wishing to learn more about contemporary Japanese society.

This book gives a concise, readable introduction to the relationship between Islam and dialogue. Drawing on the Qur’an, the Sunna and Islamic history it demonstrates that dialogue is an integral part of the very fabric of Islam, dispelling popular misconceptions. Contemporary realities make intercultural dialogue a pressing human concern. Globalisation is swiftly turning the world into a global village, with groups of different cultures increasingly living in close proximity. Personal experience and the media make us aware both of the potential richness of such situations and of the scope for discrimination, enclavisation, mutual resentment and extremism. Dialogue is frequently cited as a means through which diverse societies can address intergroup tension and draw effectively on the great resource of diverse perspectives in addressing shared problems such as economic disaster and environmental crisis. In considering personal engagement with dialogue a committed Muslim will inevitably ask, “What does Islam have to say about dialogue?” In this book, accessible to Muslims and non-Muslims alike, Ahmet Kurucan and Mustafa K. Erol provide a concise introduction to the question, exploring relevant material in the Qur’an and the Sunna and examples of the application of these sources in Islamic history. In a helpful question and answer format and a readable style, they demonstrate that dialogue is a part of the fabric of Islam, required by the God-given innate disposition of human beings, and by fundamental Islamic principles of conduct derived from mainstream, long-established understanding of the commands of the Qur’an and Sunna. The authors also address elements of Islamic sources and traditional interpretation sometimes taken as contradicting the case for dialogue in Islam, such as verses of the Qur’an warning against friendships with ‘Jews and Christians’, or speaking of killing unbelievers, the traditional view that apostasy merits the death penalty, and certain interpretations of the concept of jihad. They thereby dispel popular misconceptions of Islam’s teachings, revealing the religion’s essential commitment to good neighbourliness, peace and fairness. By examining the meaning of dialogue they also reveal that it in no way requires participants to compromise their own beliefs and values.