Out of the Ordinary

Author: Marc Stears
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674743873
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 249

Book Description
From a major British political thinker and activist, a passionate case that both the left and right have lost their faith in ordinary people and must learn to find it again. This is an age of polarization. It’s us vs. them. The battle lines are clear, and compromise is surrender. As Out of the Ordinary reminds us, we have been here before. From the 1920s to the 1950s, in a world transformed by revolution and war, extreme ideologies of left and right fueled utopian hopes and dystopian fears. In response, Marc Stears writes, a group of British writers, artists, photographers, and filmmakers showed a way out. These men and women, including J. B. Priestley, George Orwell, Barbara Jones, Dylan Thomas, Laurie Lee, and Bill Brandt, had no formal connection to one another. But they each worked to forge a politics that resisted the empty idealisms and totalizing abstractions of their time. Instead they were convinced that people going about their daily lives possess all the insight, virtue, and determination required to build a good society. In poems, novels, essays, films, paintings, and photographs, they gave witness to everyday people’s ability to overcome the supposedly insoluble contradictions between tradition and progress, patriotism and diversity, rights and duties, nationalism and internationalism, conservatism and radicalism. It was this humble vision that animated the great Festival of Britain in 1951 and put everyday citizens at the heart of a new vision of national regeneration. A leading political theorist and a veteran of British politics, Stears writes with unusual passion and clarity about the achievements of these apostles of the ordinary. They helped Britain through an age of crisis. Their ideas might do so again, in the United Kingdom and beyond.

Out of the Ordinary

Author: Michael Dillon/Lobzang Jivaka
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823274810
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 343

Book Description
Now available for the first time—more than 50 years after it was written—is the memoir of Michael Dillon/Lobzang Jivaka (1915–62), the British doctor and Buddhist monastic novice chiefly known to scholars of sex, gender, and sexuality for his pioneering transition from female to male between 1939 and 1949, and for his groundbreaking 1946 book Self: A Study in Ethics and Endocrinology. Here at last is Dillon/Jivaka’s extraordinary life story told in his own words. Out of the Ordinary captures Dillon/Jivaka’s various journeys—to Oxford, into medicine, across the world by ship—within the major narratives of his gender and religious journeys. Moving chronologically, Dillon/Jivaka begins with his childhood in Folkestone, England, where he was raised by his spinster aunts, and tells of his days at Oxford immersed in theology, classics, and rowing. He recounts his hormonal transition while working as an auto mechanic and fire watcher during World War II and his surgical transition under Sir Harold Gillies while Dillon himself attended medical school. He details his worldwide travel as a ship’s surgeon in the British Merchant Navy with extensive commentary on his interactions with colonial and postcolonial subjects, followed by his “outing” by the British press while he was serving aboard The City of Bath. Out of the Ordinary is not only a salient record of an early sex transition but also a unique account of religious conversion in the mid–twentieth century. Dillon/Jivaka chronicles his gradual shift from Anglican Christianity to the esoteric spiritual systems of George Gurdjieff and Peter Ouspensky to Theravada and finally Mahayana Buddhism. He concludes his memoir with the contested circumstances of his Buddhist monastic ordination in India and Tibet. Ultimately, while Dillon/Jivaka died before becoming a monk, his novice ordination was significant: It made him the first white European man to be ordained in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. Out of the Ordinary is a landmark publication that sets free a distinct voice from the history of the transgender movement.

Out of the Ordinary

Author: Joyce Rupp
Publisher: Ave Maria Press
ISBN: 1594713200
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
This perennial bestseller is now available in a tenth-anniversary edition that showcases Joyce Rupp's poems, a new preface by the author, and a new design. Joyce Rupp's characteristic creativity and reverence for the divine are on full display in this collection of prayer resources for birthdays, holidays, holy days, transitions, and many other occasions, helping readers enter more deeply and reflectively into the liturgical and seasonal celebrations of their lives. Ideal for personal use, or as a gift for loved ones celebrating a landmark occasion, Out of the Ordinary: Prayers, Poems, and Reflections for Every Season is an invaluable resource for ministers, spiritual directors, and lay leaders alike, who turn to its prayers, reflections, and rituals for personal and communal occasions both "ordinary" and profound.

Objects

Author: Daniel Z. Korman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198732538
Category : Metaphysics
Languages : en
Pages : 262

Book Description
What sorts of material objects are there? Many philosophers opt for surprising answers to this question that seem deeply at odds with how we ordinarily think about the material world. Some embrace radically eliminative views, on which there are far fewer objects than we ordinarily take there to be, while others go in for radically permissive views on which there are legions of extraordinary objects that somehow escape our notice, despite being highly visible and right before our eyes. In this book, Daniel Z. Korman defends our ordinary, intuitive judgments about which objects there are. The book responds to a wide variety of arguments that have driven people away from the intuitive view: arbitrariness arguments, debunking arguments, overdetermination arguments, arguments from vagueness and material constitution, and the problem of the many. It also criticizes attempts to show that permissive and eliminative views are, despite appearances, entirely compatible with our ordinary beliefs and intuitions.

Out of the Ordinary

Author: David Bruce Brownlee
Publisher: Philadelphia Museum (PA)
ISBN: 9780876331484
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 277

Book Description

Out Of The Ordinary

Author: Barbara Walker
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Book Description
This contributed volume explores the functions of belief and supernatural experience within an array of cultures, as well as the stance of academe toward the study of belief and the supernatural. The essays in this volume call into question the idea that supernatural experience is extraordinary. Among the contributors are Shelley Adler, David Hufford, Barre Toelken, and Gillian Bennett.

Out of the Ordinary

Author: Noelle Howey
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312244897
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Book Description
"Out of the Ordinary" is a groundbreaking collection of essays by teen and adult children of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender parents. The essays range from humorous to poignant and provide insight into numerous topics on dealing with a parent's sexuality while figuring out one's own. 100 photos.

Out of the Ordinary

Author: Jon Ronson
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 9780330448321
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Book Description
Jon Ronson’s subjects have included people who believe that goats can be killed by the power of a really hard stare, and people who believe that the world is ruled by twelve-foot lizard-men. In Out of the Ordinary, a collection of his journalism from the Guardian, he turns his attention to irrational beliefs much closer to home, investigating the ways in which we sometimes manage to convince ourselves that all manner of lunacy makes perfect sense – mainstream, domestic, ordinary insanity. Whether he finds himself promising his son that he will be at his side for ever, dressed in a Santa costume, or trying to understand why hundreds of apparently normal people would suddenly start speaking in tongues in a Scout hut in Kidderminster, he demonstrates repeatedly how we all succumb to deeply irrational beliefs that grow to inform our everyday existence. Out of the Ordinary is Jon Ronson at his inimitable best: hilarious, thought-provoking and with an unerring eye for human frailty – not least his own. Praise for The Men Who Stare at Goats: ‘Not only a narcotic road trip through the wackier reaches of Bush’s war effort, but also an unmissable account of some of the insanity that has lately been done in our names’ Observer Praise for Them: Adventures with Extremists: ‘A funny and compulsively readable picaresque adventure through a paranoid shadow world’ Louis Theroux, Guardian

Out of the Ordinary

Author: Derham Groves
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527551423
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 340

Book Description
“Out of the Ordinary is one part unembellished documentation and one part verbi-visual equivalent of a Pro Hart work made with nineteenth-century, paint-loaded canons. It is a cultural history, resource for contemporary designers, imaginarium and luminous almanac of an explorer of the stranger species of creativity – from brick art to letterboxes, junk mail, mail art, television, fashion, food, model trains, Disney’s imagineering, amusement parks, feng-shui, Postmodern architecture, human-scale craftsmanship, forgotten Australian architects in China, famous architects (that, perhaps, should be forgotten save for their bow ties), collectors of Sherlock Holmes memorabilia, outsider artists and clients – and none of these things exactly. Everywhere Derham Groves attends to and finds significance in the minutiae of everyday life, inter-association, and those things that affect us so profoundly but remain just outside the purview of the ‘normal.’ And in these things – objects, art, architecture, environment(s) – he finds stories and teaches his reader how to do the same. Out of the Ordinary is also a motivational text. It begins with bricks, perhaps the most standardized and repeatable units of construction, and reveals how they can be used as vehicles for unfettered creativity and not merely for the creation of containers. Groves shows how art and architecture can emerge and receive nourishment from the garbage of the everyday and creative collisions. Groves also calls, albeit subtly, for a turn away from homogeneity, the standardized, and unimaginative or ‘lazy’ design informed by principles of economy, efficiency, utility and function conceived in abstraction. Rather, Groves celebrates the reanimation and/or rejuvenation of place by the makers of anything out of the ordinary (who don’t necessarily pray to the demiurge of good taste) who have created spaces and things through which the creative imagination shines.” – Dr Andrew Chrystall, School of Communication, Journalism and Marketing, Massey University

Embracing the Ordinary

Author: Michael Foley
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 184983914X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 404

Book Description
'In recession-chastened, soddenly staycationing Britain, Foley may well have devised a new bestseller format: a how-to book offering a way of escape ... [a] lovely book' Guardian It has always been difficult to appreciate everyday life, often devalued as dreary, banal and burdensome, and never more so than in a culture besotted with fantasy, celebrity and glamour. Yet, with characteristic wit and earthiness, Michael Foley - author of the bestselling The Age of Absurdity - draws on the works of writers, thinkers and artists who have celebrated and examined the ordinary life, and encourages us to delight in the complexities of the everyday. With astute observation, Foley brings fresh insights to such things as the banality of everyday speech, the madness and weirdness of snobbery, love and sex, and the strangeness of the everyday environment, such as the office. It is all more fascinating, comical and mysterious than you think. Intelligent, funny and entertaining, Foley shows us how to find contentment and satisfaction by embracing the ordinary things in life. 'A convincing argument for the beauty of the seemingly banal… ' Scotsman