An Intelligent Person's Guide to Atheism

Author: Daniel Harbour
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
ISBN: 9780715632291
Category : Atheism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
A controversial study that argues for the value of atheism in modern society. The debate about atheism has staled since the time of Bertrand Russell. In this work, Daniel Harbour returns to its core issues - the existence of God, the values of faith, the role of religion in society - and casts them in an entirely new light. The real question, he argues, is how we should consider our urge to understand the world. Only then can we ask ourselves whether atheism or theism forms part of a coherent worldview. This new debate between atheism and theism forces us into an investigation of philosophy, science, history, ethics and aesthetics, and a desire for intellectual integrity and commitment to truth. It is far removed from the usual listing of the errors of theism. Not can atheism be equated with denialism. It holds real and practical implications for the place of religion and the obligations of atheists in our society.

An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Education

Author: Tony Little
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472913124
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Book Description
'A hugely reassuring, common-sense guide no parent of teenage boys should be without.' - Sunday Times In his bestselling An Intelligent Person's Guide to Education, Tony Little, former Head Master of Eton College, asks the fundamental questions about how we should make our schools and schoolchildren fit for the modern world. This book will enlighten teachers, students and anxious parents alike, providing advice from the author's many years as a teacher, headmaster and governor in both independent schools and academies, in answer to the key issues concerning education. Tony Little explains the research behind how teenagers' brains function and how they act accordingly, discusses how to deal with sex, drugs and poor discipline, reassesses the meaning of 'character' in a child's education, and provides his own list of books every bright 16-year-old should read. In addition, he offers tips for parents on dealing with adolescents and communicating with their child's school. Drawing on a lifetime's work in schools, An Intelligent Person's Guide to Education is a refreshing, rational and original take on the most important stage in a child's development. An entertaining and essential book for teachers, parents and students interested in how education should serve our young people, now and in future.

An Intelligent Person's Guide to Religion

Author: John Haldane
Publisher: Overlook Press
ISBN: 9781585677221
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
We live, allegedly, in a postmodern age in which we have cast aside the narrative fantasies of the pre-modern era. If postmodernism represents the final abandonment of all grand theories, where does religion stand? If religion is a particularly unbelievable form of explanation, why does it power still affect social and political change? Here, like the skeptics of our age, the author asks, What has theology ever had to say that was of the slightest use to anyone? He argues that religion without God is like a car without an engine, and draws on many aspects of human culture to offer a defense of religion that is not only credible but necessary in an age when postmodernism itself has been exposed as a cruel illusion.

The Making of a Confederate

Author: William L. Barney
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198042892
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 262

Book Description
Despite the advances of the civil rights movement, many white southerners cling to the faded glory of a romanticized Confederate past. In The Making of a Confederate, William L. Barney focuses on the life of one man, Walter Lenoir of North Carolina, to examine the origins of southern white identity alongside its myriad ambiguities and complexities. Born into a wealthy slaveholding family, Lenoir abhorred the institution, opposed secession, and planned to leave his family to move to Minnesota, in the free North. But when the war erupted in 1860, Lenoir found another escape route--he joined the Confederate army, an experience that would radically transform his ideals. After the war, Lenoir, like many others, embraced the cult of the Lost Cause, refashioning his memory and beliefs in an attempt to make sense of the war, its causes, and its consequences. While some Southerners sank into depression, aligned with the victors, or fiercely opposed the new order, Lenoir withdrew to his acreage in the North Carolina mountains. There, he pursued his own vision of the South's future, one that called for greater self-sufficiency and a more efficient use of the land. For Lenoir and many fellow Confederates, the war never really ended. As he tells this compelling story, Barney offers new insights into the ways that (selective) memory informs history; through Lenoir's life, readers learn how individual choices can transform abstract historical processes into concrete actions.

I Drink Therefore I Am

Author: Roger Scruton
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1408194694
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Book Description
Here Scruton explains the connection between good wine and serious thought with a heady mix of humour and philosophy. We are familiar with the medical opinion that a daily glass of wine is good for the health and also the rival opinion that any more than a glass or two will set us on the road to ruin. Whether or not good for the body, Scruton argues, wine, drunk in the right frame of mind, is definitely good for the soul. And there is no better accompaniment to wine than philosophy. By thinking with wine, you can learn not only to drink in thoughts but to think in draughts. This good-humoured book offers an antidote to the pretentious clap-trap that is written about wine today and a profound apology for the drink on which civilisation has been founded. In vino veritas.

Understanding Music

Author: Roger Scruton
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1847065066
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 506

Book Description
Essays over het snijvlak tussen compositieleer, analyse, betekenisgeving en de relatie tussen taal en muziek.

Modern Culture

Author: Roger Scruton
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1408193507
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 215

Book Description
What do we mean by 'culture'? This word, purloined by journalists to denote every kind of collective habit, lies at the centre of contemporary debates about the past and future of society. In this thought-provoking book, Roger Scruton argues for the religious origin of culture in all its forms, and mounts a defence of the 'high culture' of our civilization against its radical and 'deconstructionist' critics. He offers a theory of pop culture, a panegyric to Baudelaire, a few reasons why Wagner is just as great as his critics fear him to be, and a raspberry to Cool Britannia. A must for all people who are fed up to their tightly clenched front teeth with Derrida, Foucault, Oasis and Richard Rogers.

Gentle Regrets

Author: Roger Scruton
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472927850
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 307

Book Description
Roger Scruton is Britain's best known intellectual dissident, who has defended English traditions and English identity against an official culture of denigration. Although his writings on philosophical aesthetics have shown him to be a leading authority in the field, his defence of political conservatism has marked him out in academic circles as public enemy number one. Whether it is Scruton's opinions that get up the nose of his critics, or the wit and erudition with which he expresses them, there is no doubt that their noses are vastly distended by his presence, and constantly on the verge of a collective sneeze. Contrary to orthodox opinion, however, Roger Scruton is a human being, and Gentle Regrets contains the proof of it - a quiet, witty but also serious and moving account of the ways in which life brought him to think what he thinks, and to be what he is. His moving vignettes of his childhood and later influences illuminate this book. Love him or hate him, he will engage you in an argument that is both intellectually stimulating and informed by humour.

An Intelligent Person's Guide to Judaism

Author: Shmuel Boteach
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
ISBN: 9781585678082
Category : Judaism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Does it mean nothing at all that we are spiritual beings? What does one of the world's oldest religions have to say? Convinced that Judaism possesses a core of wisdom that appeals to everyone, Shmuley Boteach ferociously argues against Jews seeking piety in abstractions, in rationalizing injustice, in explaining the Holocaust away as a punishment for assimilation. He pleads for recognition that Judaism is not about death or suffering, but is about seeking optimism and spirituality. In a modern world riddled with angst, this enlightening and provocative book poses a new outlook on Judaism and spiritual life today. --

An Intelligent Person's Guide to Post-war Britain

Author: Alan Sked
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Book Description
The aim of this book is to explode the myth that the United Kingdom is now a tired and run-down country still dreaming of, if not living in, its class-ridden imperial past. It departs from the view that the country's history should be a cause for shame, and that in order to reverse its well-merited decline it has to adopt such extreme solutions as those of Chapter 88, devolution or rule from Brussels.