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In 1980, two men sit down to record a conversation. They have much in common: both are passionate, articulate thinkers. But their differences are just as striking: Giovanni Testori is a well-known writer-and an openly gay man. Luigi Giussani is a Catholic priest who has attracted so many students with his striking way of re-proposing the Christian message that he's unwittingly started a movement (which came to be known as Communion and Liberation). Testori, who has recently returned to the Catholic faith, begins with a provocative suggestion: modern people have lost contact with the existential and religious experience of birth, of an origin in love-the love of one's parents and the love of God. From here, the dialogue ranges widely, taking on the root causes of modern despair and alienation, the link between suffering and hope, the significance of memory, and what it means to encounter the presence of God in one another. Profound but accessible, The Meaning of Birth is a resonant and bracing exploration of life's most fundamental questions.
Uses the disciplines of psychology, anthropology, sociology and psychiatry to explain what makes people act the way they do.
From New York Times bestselling author and pastor Timothy Keller, a book celebrating and exploring the spiritual meaning of birth and baptism Significant events such as birth, marriage, and death are milestones in our lives in which we experience our greatest happiness and our deepest grief. And so it is profoundly important to understand how to approach and experience these occasions with grace, endurance, and joy. In On Birth, Timothy Keller--theologian and bestselling author--helps us understand both physical and spiritual birth, as well as how baptism connects the two. With wisdom, joy, and compassion, Keller draws on forty-five years as a pastor and a parent to consider what it means to receive a new birth as well as to be reborn. The perfect gift for someone who is about to become a parent or is searching for the true meaning of Christianity, On Birth is a short, powerful book that illuminates God's vision of life.
In 1980, two men sit down to record a conversation. They have much in common: both are passionate, articulate thinkers. But their differences are just as striking: Giovanni Testori is a well-known writer-and an openly gay man. Luigi Giussani is a Catholic priest who has attracted so many students with his striking way of re-proposing the Christian message that he's unwittingly started a movement (which came to be known as Communion and Liberation). Testori, who has recently returned to the Catholic faith, begins with a provocative suggestion: modern people have lost contact with the existential and religious experience of birth, of an origin in love-the love of one's parents and the love of God. From here, the dialogue ranges widely, taking on the root causes of modern despair and alienation, the link between suffering and hope, the significance of memory, and what it means to encounter the presence of God in one another. Profound but accessible, The Meaning of Birth is a resonant and bracing exploration of life's most fundamental questions.
Why do so many American women allow themselves to become enmeshed in the standardized routines of technocratic childbirth--routines that can be insensitive, unnecessary, and even unhealthy? Anthropologist Robbie Davis-Floyd first addressed these questions in the 1992 edition. Her new preface to this 2003 edition of a book that has been read, applauded, and loved by women all over the world, makes it clear that the issues surrounding childbirth remain as controversial as ever.
Blessed Events explores how women who give birth at home use religion to make sense of their births and in turn draw on their birthing experiences to bring meaning to their lives and families. Pamela Klassen introduces a surprisingly diverse group of women, in their own words, while also setting their birth stories within wider social, political, and economic contexts. In doing so, she emerges with a study that disrupts conventional views of both childbirth and religion by blurring assumed divisions between conservative and feminist women and by taking childbirth seriously as a religious act. Most American women who have a choice give birth in a hospital and request pain medication. Yet enough women choose and advocate unmedicated home birth--and do so for carefully articulated reasons, social resistance among them--to constitute a movement. Klassen investigates why women whose religious affiliations range from Old Order Amish to Reform Judaism to goddess-centered spirituality defy majority opinion, the medical establishment, and sometimes the law to have their babies at home. In considering their interpretations--including their critiques of the dominant medical model of childbirth and their views on labor pain--she examines the kinds of agency afforded to or denied women as they derive religious meanings from childbirth. Throughout, she identifies tensions and affinities between feminist and traditionalist appraisals of the symbolic meaning of birth and the power of women. What does home birth--a woman-centered movement working to return birth to women's control--mean in practice for women's gender and religious identities? Is this supreme valuing of procreation and motherhood constraining, or does it open up new realms of cultural and social power for women? By asking these questions while remaining cognizant of religion's significance, Blessed Events challenges both feminist and traditionalist accounts of childbearing while broadening our understanding of how religion is ''lived'' in contemporary America.
The epoch of representation is as old as the West. Indeed, representation is the West, understood as what at once designates and expands its own limits. But what comes after the West? What comes after representation's disclosure of its own limit? The central problem posed in these essays, collected from over a decade of work, is how in the wake of Western ontologies to conceive the coming, the birth that characterizes being. We are now at the limit of representation, where objects as we experience them have been show to be merely objects of representation--or rather, of presentation, since there is nothing to (re)present. The first part of this book, "Existence," asks how, today, one can give sense of meaning to existence as such, arguing that existence itself, as it comes nude into the world, must now be our "sense." In examining what this birth to presence might be, we should not ask what presence "is"; rather we should conceive presence as presence to someone, including to presence itself. This birth is not the constitution of an identity, but the endless departure of an identity from, and from within, its other, or others. Its coming is not desire but jouissance, the joy of averring oneself to be continually in the state of being born--a rejoicing of birth, a birth of rejoicing. The second section, "Poetry," asks: What art exposes this? In writing, in the voice, in painting? And what if art is exposed to it? How does it inscribe (or rather, "exscribe," in a term the book develops) the coming existence as such? The author's trajectory in this book crosses those of Hegel, Schlegel, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger, in their comments on art and politics, existence and corporeality, everyday life and its modes of existence and ecstasy. An analysis that dares this crossing involves all the varied accounts of existence, political as well as philosophical, and all the realms of poverty.
What does the Bible really say about the birth of Jesus? How did the celebration of Christmas become associated with things like Santa Claus and decorated trees? In The True Meaning of Christmas: The Birth of Jesus and the Origins of the Season, biblical scholar Michael Patrick Barber offers an inspiring look at the Bible''s accounts of Jesus'' birth and the development of the Christmas season. Along the way, he answers numerous questions, including: • How is the Christmas story related to ancient Jewish expectations? • Why is Jesus said to be laid in a "manger"? • Who are the Magi? • What is the mysterious Christmas star? • How did December 25th become the date of Christmas? • How did Saint Nicholas become "Santa Claus"? As Barber explains, though some of the answers to these questions may be surprising, only by understanding the message at the heart of Christmas can we fully enter into the joy it promises.
For thousands of years women have given birth among people they know in a place they know well. Knowledge is shared between the participants and birth is a social event. In this new, revised edition of her classic book, Sheila Kitzinger explores the universal experience of pregnancy and birth. She looks closely at the place of birth, what is done to help women in childbirth and examines the bond traditionally formed between mothers and midwives.