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Author: Robert Wheeler Publisher: Xlibris Corporation ISBN: 1453580611 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 199
Book Description
History and psychology indicate that people have inherent needs for stimulation and challenge, meaning and goals, social support, moral authority, explanation of existence, and the possibility of transcendence. Whether these needs result from physical evolution or intelligent design, they produce a concern about ultimate cause, meaning, and purpose for existence known as the “ontological imperative.” Since understanding ultimate concerns is beyond physical science, elusive, and mysterious, people tend to attribute explanation to a metaphysical realm resulting in spirituality. Mountains symbolize obstacles in meeting the needs, and experiences in climbing mountains provide a vehicle both actually and figuratively for exploring associated mechanisms and impacts. Pursuit of the ontological imperative stimulates the attitude of spirituality that becomes conceptualized into personal religious systems forming beliefs that can be shared with others. Shared religions acquire dogma, structure, ritual, faith, and worship that then become institutional religions. As science develops, physical explanations supplant metaphysical explanations that many times conflict with religion. Faith in established belief competes with science producing a “great dilemma.” A “great paradox” is that both are needed despite the conflict. The first chapter relates a personal experience climbing Mount Fuji that nearly ended in disaster, with the question of why people do such things. Chapter 2 is a brief summary of research supporting the human need of stimulation and challenge. Subsequent chapters alternate between mountain climbing experiences and brief summaries of research about why people continue to pursue difficult tasks, progressing from stimulation & challenge to goal accomplishment; emotions & awe; consciousness & cognition involving brain, mind, spirit, and soul; search for ultimate reality involving ontological imperative, spirituality, personal religion, and institutional religion; and finally to pragmatic reality involving science-religion dilemma and need-for-both paradox. This bottom-up approach leads to the final chapter’s proposal for ameliorating conflict and dilemma caused by some religious beliefs: by accepting the great paradox and pursuing a seemingly unattainable goal; recognizing personal characteristics of spirituality exemplified in the five-factor model of personality; abopting an attitude of “nognosticism” whereby the limitations of present knowledge are acknowledged; and accepting “ecumenical humanism” whereby alternate beliefs are tolerated. Such an approach might be classified as “pragmatic pluralism.” A basic theme is that for life to be meaningful and manageable, people need a sense of purpose and coherence that is best met by having a belief about the unknown and doubt of its validity. Contact author at [email protected] .
Author: Robert Wheeler Publisher: Xlibris Corporation ISBN: 1453580611 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 199
Book Description
History and psychology indicate that people have inherent needs for stimulation and challenge, meaning and goals, social support, moral authority, explanation of existence, and the possibility of transcendence. Whether these needs result from physical evolution or intelligent design, they produce a concern about ultimate cause, meaning, and purpose for existence known as the “ontological imperative.” Since understanding ultimate concerns is beyond physical science, elusive, and mysterious, people tend to attribute explanation to a metaphysical realm resulting in spirituality. Mountains symbolize obstacles in meeting the needs, and experiences in climbing mountains provide a vehicle both actually and figuratively for exploring associated mechanisms and impacts. Pursuit of the ontological imperative stimulates the attitude of spirituality that becomes conceptualized into personal religious systems forming beliefs that can be shared with others. Shared religions acquire dogma, structure, ritual, faith, and worship that then become institutional religions. As science develops, physical explanations supplant metaphysical explanations that many times conflict with religion. Faith in established belief competes with science producing a “great dilemma.” A “great paradox” is that both are needed despite the conflict. The first chapter relates a personal experience climbing Mount Fuji that nearly ended in disaster, with the question of why people do such things. Chapter 2 is a brief summary of research supporting the human need of stimulation and challenge. Subsequent chapters alternate between mountain climbing experiences and brief summaries of research about why people continue to pursue difficult tasks, progressing from stimulation & challenge to goal accomplishment; emotions & awe; consciousness & cognition involving brain, mind, spirit, and soul; search for ultimate reality involving ontological imperative, spirituality, personal religion, and institutional religion; and finally to pragmatic reality involving science-religion dilemma and need-for-both paradox. This bottom-up approach leads to the final chapter’s proposal for ameliorating conflict and dilemma caused by some religious beliefs: by accepting the great paradox and pursuing a seemingly unattainable goal; recognizing personal characteristics of spirituality exemplified in the five-factor model of personality; abopting an attitude of “nognosticism” whereby the limitations of present knowledge are acknowledged; and accepting “ecumenical humanism” whereby alternate beliefs are tolerated. Such an approach might be classified as “pragmatic pluralism.” A basic theme is that for life to be meaningful and manageable, people need a sense of purpose and coherence that is best met by having a belief about the unknown and doubt of its validity. Contact author at [email protected] .
Author: Robert Macfarlane Publisher: Granta ISBN: 1847081576 Category : Nature Languages : en Pages : 324
Book Description
WINNER OF THE GUARDIAN FIRST BOOK AWARD Once we thought monsters lived there. In the Enlightenment we scaled them to commune with the sublime. Soon, we were racing to conquer their summits in the name of national pride. In this ground-breaking, classic work, Robert Macfarlane takes us up into the mountains: to experience their shattering beauty, the fear and risk of adventure, and to explore the strange impulses that have for centuries lead us to the world's highest places.
Author: Brett L. Walker Publisher: University of Washington Press ISBN: 0295743042 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 281
Book Description
While in the ICU with a near-fatal case of pneumonia, Brett Walker was asked, “Do you have a family history of illness?”—a standard and deceptively simple question that for Walker, a professional historian, took on additional meaning and spurred him to investigate his family’s medical past. In this deeply personal narrative, he constructs a history of his body to understand his diagnosis with a serious immunological disorder, weaving together his dying grandfather’s sneaking a cigarette in a shed on the family’s Montana farm, blood fractionation experiments in Europe during World War II, and nineteenth-century cholera outbreaks that ravaged small American towns as his ancestors were making their way west. A Family History of Illness is a gritty historical memoir that examines the body’s immune system and microbial composition as well as the biological and cultural origins of memory and history, offering a startling, fresh way to view the role of history in understanding our physical selves. In his own search, Walker soon realizes that this broader scope is more valuable than a strictly medical family history. He finds that family legacies shape us both physically and symbolically, forming the root of our identity and values, and he urges us to renew our interest in the past or risk misunderstanding ourselves and the world around us.
Author: Sean Moore Ireton Publisher: Studies in German Literature L ISBN: 1640140476 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 361
Book Description
The first scholarly English translations of thirteen vital texts that elucidate the central role mountains have played across nearly five centuries of Germanophone cultural history.
Author: Jennifer J. Hill Publisher: U of Nebraska Press ISBN: 1496231074 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 336
Book Description
Reading the West Longlist for Nonfiction Childbirth defines families, communities, and nations. In Birthing the West, Jennifer J. Hill fills the silences around historical reproduction with copious new evidence and an enticing narrative, describing a process of settlement in the American West that depended on the nurturing connections of reproductive caregivers and the authority of mothers over birth. Economic and cultural development depended on childbirth. Hill's expanded vision suggests that the mantra of cattle drives and military campaigns leaves out essential events and falls far short of an accurate representation of American expansion. The picture that emerges in Birthing the West presents a more complete understanding of the American West: no less moving or engaging than the typical stories of extraction and exploration but concurrently intriguing and complex. Birthing the West unearths the woman-centric practice of childbirth across Montana, the Dakotas, and Wyoming, a region known as a death zone for pregnant women and their infants. As public health entities struggled to establish authority over its isolated inhabitants, they collaborated with physicians, eroding the power and control of mothers and midwives. The transition from home to hospital and from midwife to doctor created a dramatic shift in the intimately personal act of birth.
Author: Shohaku Okumura Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 1614293120 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 320
Book Description
An indispensable map of a classic Zen text. “Mountains and waters are the expression of old buddhas.” So begins “Sansuikyo,” or “Mountains and Waters Sutra,” a masterpiece of poetry and insight from Eihei Dogen, the thirteenth-century founder of the Soto school of Zen. Shohaku Okumura—renowned for his translations of and magisterial teachings on Dogen—guides the reader through the rich layers of metaphor and meaning in “Sansuikyo,” which is often thought to be the most beautiful essay in Dogen’s monumental Shobogenzo. His wise and friendly voice shows us the questions Dogen poses and helps us realize what the answers could be. What does it mean for mountains to walk? How are mountains an expression of Buddha’s truth, and how can we learn to hear the deep teachings of river waters? Throughout this luminous volume, we learn how we can live in harmony with nature in respect and gratitude—and awaken to our true nature.
Author: Henry D. Shapiro Publisher: UNC Press Books ISBN: 1469617242 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 399
Book Description
Appalachia on Our Mind is not a history of Appalachia. It is rather a history of the American idea of Appalachia. The author argues that the emergence of this idea has little to do with the realities of mountain life but was the result of a need to reconcile the "otherness" of Appalachia, as decribed by local-color writers, tourists, and home missionaries, with assumptions about the nature of America and American civilization. Between 1870 and 1900, it became clear that the existence of the "strange land and peculiar people" of the southern mountains challenged dominant notions about the basic homogeneity of the American people and the progress of the United States toward achiving a uniform national civilization. Some people attempted to explain Appalachian otherness as normal and natural -- no exception to the rule of progress. Others attempted the practical integration of Appalachia into America through philanthropic work. In the twentieth century, however, still other people began questioning their assumptions about the characteristics of American civilization itself, ultimately defining Appalachia as a region in a nation of regions and the mountaineers as a people in a nation of peoples. In his skillful examination of the "invention" of the idea of Appalachia and its impact on American thought and action during the early twentieth century, Mr. Shapiro analyzes the following: the "discovery" of Appalachia as a field for fiction by the local-color writers and as a field for benevolent work by the home missionaries of the northern Protestant churches; the emergence of the "problem" of Appalachia and attempts to solve it through explanation and social action; the articulation of a regionalist definition of Appalachia and the establishment of instituions that reinforced that definition; the impact of that regionalistic definition of Appalachia on the conduct of systematic benevolence, expecially in the context of the debate over child-labor restriction and the transformation of philanthropy into community work; and the attempt to discover the bases for an indigenous mountain culture in handicrafts, folksong, and folkdance.
Author: Anthony W. Wood Publisher: U of Nebraska Press ISBN: 1496227719 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 404
Book Description
2022 Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize Finalist Toward the end of the nineteenth century, many African Americans moved westward as Greater Reconstruction came to a close. Though, along with Euro-Americans, Black settlers appropriated the land of Native Americans, sometimes even contributing to ongoing violence against Indigenous people, this migration often defied the goals of settler states in the American West. In Black Montana Anthony W. Wood explores the entanglements of race, settler colonialism, and the emergence of state and regional identity in the American West during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By producing conditions of social, cultural, and economic precarity that undermined Black Montanans' networks of kinship, community, and financial security, the state of Montana, in its capacity as a settler colony, worked to exclude the Black community that began to form inside its borders after Reconstruction. Black Montana depicts the history of Montana's Black community from 1877 until the 1930s, a period in western American history that represents a significant moment and unique geography in the life of the U.S. settler-colonial project.
Author: Robert Wheeler
Author: Robert Wheeler
Author: Robert Macfarlane
Author: Brett L. Walker
Author: Ivan Doig
Author: Haily Meyers
Author: Sean Moore Ireton
Author: Jennifer J. Hill
Author: Shohaku Okumura
Author: Henry D. Shapiro
Author: Anthony W. Wood