Fire and Light

Fire and Light PDF Author: James MacGregor Burns
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1250024900
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
"With this profound and magnificent book, drawing on his deep reservoir of thought and expertise in the humanities, James MacGregor Burns takes us into the fire's center. As a 21st-century philosopher, he brings to vivid life the incandescent personalities and ideas that embody the best in Western civilization and shows us how understanding them is essential for anyone who would seek to decipher the complex problems and potentialities of the world we will live in tomorrow." --Michael Beschloss, New York Times bestselling author of Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How They Changed America, 1789-1989 "James MacGregor Burns is a national treasure, and Fire and Light is the elegiac capstone to a career devoted to understanding the seminal ideas that made America - for better and for worse - what it is." --Joseph J. Ellis, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winning author Revolutionary Summer Pulitzer Prize-winning and bestselling historian James MacGregor Burns explores the most daring and transformational intellectual movement in history, the European and American Enlightenment In this engaging, provocative history, James MacGregor Burns brilliantly illuminates the two-hundred-year conflagration of the Enlightenment, when audacious questions and astonishing ideas tore across Europe and the New World, transforming thought, overturning governments, and inspiring visionary political experiments. Fire and Light brings to vivid life the galaxy of revolutionary leaders of thought and action who, armed with a new sense of human possibility, driven by a hunger for change, created the modern world. Burns discovers the origins of a distinctive American Enlightenment in men like the Founding Fathers Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, and their early encounters with incendiary European ideas about liberty and equality. It was these thinker-activists who framed the United States as a grand and continuing experiment in Enlightenment principles. Today the same questions Enlightenment thinkers grappled with have taken on new urgency around the world: in the turmoil of the Arab Spring, in the former Soviet Union, and China, as well as in the United States itself. What should a nation be? What should citizens expect from their government? Who should lead and how can leadership be made both effective and accountable? What is happiness, and what can the state contribute to it? Burns's exploration of the ideals and arguments that formed the bedrock of our modern world shines a new light on these ever-important questions.

Fire and Light

Fire and Light PDF Author: James MacGregor Burns
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1250024900
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 432

Get Book

Book Description
"With this profound and magnificent book, drawing on his deep reservoir of thought and expertise in the humanities, James MacGregor Burns takes us into the fire's center. As a 21st-century philosopher, he brings to vivid life the incandescent personalities and ideas that embody the best in Western civilization and shows us how understanding them is essential for anyone who would seek to decipher the complex problems and potentialities of the world we will live in tomorrow." --Michael Beschloss, New York Times bestselling author of Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How They Changed America, 1789-1989 "James MacGregor Burns is a national treasure, and Fire and Light is the elegiac capstone to a career devoted to understanding the seminal ideas that made America - for better and for worse - what it is." --Joseph J. Ellis, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winning author Revolutionary Summer Pulitzer Prize-winning and bestselling historian James MacGregor Burns explores the most daring and transformational intellectual movement in history, the European and American Enlightenment In this engaging, provocative history, James MacGregor Burns brilliantly illuminates the two-hundred-year conflagration of the Enlightenment, when audacious questions and astonishing ideas tore across Europe and the New World, transforming thought, overturning governments, and inspiring visionary political experiments. Fire and Light brings to vivid life the galaxy of revolutionary leaders of thought and action who, armed with a new sense of human possibility, driven by a hunger for change, created the modern world. Burns discovers the origins of a distinctive American Enlightenment in men like the Founding Fathers Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, and their early encounters with incendiary European ideas about liberty and equality. It was these thinker-activists who framed the United States as a grand and continuing experiment in Enlightenment principles. Today the same questions Enlightenment thinkers grappled with have taken on new urgency around the world: in the turmoil of the Arab Spring, in the former Soviet Union, and China, as well as in the United States itself. What should a nation be? What should citizens expect from their government? Who should lead and how can leadership be made both effective and accountable? What is happiness, and what can the state contribute to it? Burns's exploration of the ideals and arguments that formed the bedrock of our modern world shines a new light on these ever-important questions.

Light On Enlightenment

Light On Enlightenment PDF Author: Christopher Titmuss
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1446459543
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 145

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Book Description
Many in the West today are familiar with the benefits offered by meditation and mindfulness, and keen to understand more about Buddhism. Written by a former journalist and Buddhist monk, Light on Enlightenment is an accessible guide to the Buddhist teachings, offering insight and inspiration for daily life, as well as a lucid guide on the path to enlightenment. Christopher Titmuss draws upon the experiences of real people to show how Buddhist teachings are relevant to the problems of Western society, and can exert a valuable influence on science, psychotherapy, green issues, our lifestyles and communities. Light on Enlightenment opens up for all of us the possibility of inner transformation and regaining control over our lives.

Dark Side of the Light

Dark Side of the Light PDF Author: Louis Sala-Molins
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 081664389X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
Enlightenment thinkers such as Rousseau and Montesquieu are best known for their humanist theories and liberating influence on Western civilization. But as renowned French intellectual Louis Sala-Molins shows, Enlightenment discourses and scholars were also complicit in the Atlantic slave trade, becoming instruments of oppression and inequality. Translated into English for the first time, Dark Side of the Light scrutinizes Condorcet’s Reflections on Negro Slavery and the works of Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Diderot side by side with the Code Noir (the royal document that codified the rules of French Caribbean slavery) in order to uncover attempts to uphold the humanist project of the Enlightenment while simultaneously justifying slavery. Wielding the pen of both the ironist and the moralist, Sala-Molins demonstrates the flawed nature of these attempts and the reasons given for this denial of rights, from the imperatives of public order to the incomplete humanity of the slave (and thus the need for his progressive humanization through slavery), to the economic prosperity that depended on his labor. At the same time, Sala-Molins uses the techniques of literature to give equal weight to the perspective of the “barefooted, the starving, and the slaves” through expository prose and scenes between slave and philosopher, giving moral agency and flesh-and-blood dimensions to issues most often treated as abstractions. Both an urgent critique and a measured analysis, Dark Side of the Light reveals the moral paradoxes of Enlightenment philosophies and their world-changing consequences. Louis Sala-Molins is a moral and political philosopher and emeritus professor at the University of Toulouse. He is the author of many books, including Le Code Noir, ou Le calvaire de Canaan and L’Afrique aux Amériques. John Conteh-Morgan is associate professor of French and Francophone, African-American, and African studies at Ohio State University. He is the author of Theatre and Drama in Francophone Africa: A Critical Introduction.

Maimonides' Empire of Light

Maimonides' Empire of Light PDF Author: Ralph Lerner
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226473130
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
Much of the writing of and about the twelfth-century rabbi, philosopher, and theologian Moses Maimonides is addressed to an elite audience of philosophers and intellectuals. Here, Ralph Lerner's exploration of Maimonides' popular writings reveals that the education of the common man was one of the great teacher's chief concerns. Lerner describes the brilliant and sometimes wily ways in which Maimonides sought to break through the despair and superstition that gripped the Jewish people's minds, without sacrificing the dignity and core of his message. These writings—presented here in uncommonly accurate, mostly new translations—also reveal that Maimonides was willing to risk the scorn of his contemporaries to enlighten both his own and future generations. By addressing the writings of Maimonides' disciples, including Shem Tov ben Joseph Ibn Falaquera in the mid-thirteenth century and Joseph Albo in the fifteenth century, Lerner shows how this technique was passed on. In striking contrast to the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, Maimonides' enlightenment is premised on the inequality of understandings and other differences between the elite and the common people. Instead of scorning the past, Lerner shows, Maimonides' enlightenment invests it with a new and ennobling dignity. A valuable reference for students of political philosophy and Jewish studies, Lerner's elegantly written book also brings to life the richness and relevance of medieval Jewish thought for all those interested in the Jewish tradition.

Becoming Masters of Light

Becoming Masters of Light PDF Author: Darrin Owens
Publisher: ARE Press
ISBN: 0876047045
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 126

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Book Description
Darrin’s latest book addresses the coming and going of 2012. What has this shift meant for our planet? We are now in the New Golden Age of Enlightenment. What’s next? As a psychic intuitive and spiritual teacher, Darrin stretches us beyond mere reading and acquiring of spiritual knowledge for knowledge’s sake and into the action of finding wisdom through the application of our knowledge, then ultimately becoming builders and masters of light.

Light Comes Through

Light Comes Through PDF Author: Dzigar Kongtrul
Publisher: Shambhala Publications
ISBN: 0834824663
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 145

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Book Description
Fresh and direct Buddhist teachings on how our natural wish to be happy is the best tool we have for true spiritual growth Buddhahood, says Dzigar Kongtrül, is nothing but an unobstructed experience of the nature of mind, boundlessly spacious and limitlessly compassionate. The trick is that in order to see the mind accurately, we must use the particular aspect of mind he calls natural intelligence. Natural intelligence enables us to discriminate between what helps or hinders us. But most of all, it’s the part of us that searches for happiness and meaning. In Light Comes Through, he shows us how to skillfully use our wish for happiness as a tool in awakening to the joyous wisdom of mind. “This is a wonderful fresh look at the amazing potential of our human mind.” —Pema Chödrön, author of When Things Fall Apart

Transmission of Light (Denkoroku)

Transmission of Light (Denkoroku) PDF Author: Zen M. Keizan
Publisher: North Point Press
ISBN: 9780865474338
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
Short tales about how different generations of Zen masters reached enlightenment show the reader how to arrive at satori

Live in the Light

Live in the Light PDF Author:
Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing
ISBN: 9780740739774
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 132

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Book Description
Everyone needs a special place to jot down all of their personal thoughts and reflections and what better place than a prompted journal from world-renown illustrator, Mary Engelbreit? A follow-up to her first prompted journal, Inquire Within, Live in the Light, will capture the hearts and minds of all of Marys fans with her warm and inviting images coupled with inspirational quotes that will entice fans to write down some of their inner most feelings. The hidden spiral binding helps the journal lay flat making it even easier to write in!

Into the Light

Into the Light PDF Author: Jerry Sargeant
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780992921903
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
'Into the Light' - Raising the Global Vibration is a channelled exploration of the path to enlightenment and the future of global consciousness offering answers to some of the most fundamental spiritual questions we have today. Jerry will share with you his vision of a new earth and how we can raise the vibration on this planet by re-connecting with the authentic essence of all life. The passion and inspiration will shine through and your vibration will lift as you unlock a part of you that is full of strength, power, purity and energy. People across the world are experiencing a spiritual shift as part of an evolutionary growth in global consciousness. Now, more than ever people are yearning for the answers such as why am I here? What is the meaning of life and what lies beyond? 'Into the Light' will give the answers you're looking for and so much more; covering past life regression, the make-up of the universe, the key to inner peace, the truth about extra-terrestrials, the afterlife and a first-hand narrative of Jerry's own spiritual awakening. An exciting, interesting and enlightening journey told through the channelled words of the Angel-Gabriel by author Jerry Sargeant.

Atisha's Lamp for the Path to Enlightenment

Atisha's Lamp for the Path to Enlightenment PDF Author: Atisha
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 1559390824
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Atisha's most celebrated text sets forth the entire Buddhist path Atisha, the eleventh-century Indian Buddhist scholar and saint, came to Tibet at the invitation of the king of Western Tibet, Lha Lama Yeshe Wo, and his nephew, Jangchub Wo. His coming initiated the period of the second transmission of Buddhism to Tibet, formative for the Sakya Kagyu and Gelug traditions of Tibetan Buddhism. Atisha's most celebrated text, Lamp for the Path to Enlightenment, sets forth the entire Buddhist path within the framework of three levels of motivation on the part of the practitioner. Atisha's text thus became the source of the lamrim tradition, or graduated stages of the path to enlightenment, an approach to spiritual practice incorporated within all schools of Tibetan Buddhism.