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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] .
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.
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.
This book provides traffic safety researchers and practitioners with an international and multi-disciplinary compendium of theoretical and methodological concepts relevant to the research and application of Traffic Safety Culture aiming towards a vision of zero traffic fatalities.
The portrait of a time and a place -Montana in the 1930's -- is depicted through the McCaskill family's personal struggles.
"Birthing the West: Mothers and Midwives in the Rockies and Plains shows how women and mothers constructed citizens, and how public health entities usurped that role, with varied long-term impacts on women, men, families, community, and American identity"--
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Everybody tells you to live for a cause larger than yourself, but how exactly do you do it? The author of The Road to Character explores what it takes to lead a meaningful life in a self-centered world. “Deeply moving, frequently eloquent and extraordinarily incisive.”—The Washington Post Every so often, you meet people who radiate joy—who seem to know why they were put on this earth, who glow with a kind of inner light. Life, for these people, has often followed what we might think of as a two-mountain shape. They get out of school, they start a career, and they begin climbing the mountain they thought they were meant to climb. Their goals on this first mountain are the ones our culture endorses: to be a success, to make your mark, to experience personal happiness. But when they get to the top of that mountain, something happens. They look around and find the view . . . unsatisfying. They realize: This wasn’t my mountain after all. There’s another, bigger mountain out there that is actually my mountain. And so they embark on a new journey. On the second mountain, life moves from self-centered to other-centered. They want the things that are truly worth wanting, not the things other people tell them to want. They embrace a life of interdependence, not independence. They surrender to a life of commitment. In The Second Mountain, David Brooks explores the four commitments that define a life of meaning and purpose: to a spouse and family, to a vocation, to a philosophy or faith, and to a community. Our personal fulfillment depends on how well we choose and execute these commitments. Brooks looks at a range of people who have lived joyous, committed lives, and who have embraced the necessity and beauty of dependence. He gathers their wisdom on how to choose a partner, how to pick a vocation, how to live out a philosophy, and how we can begin to integrate our commitments into one overriding purpose. In short, this book is meant to help us all lead more meaningful lives. But it’s also a provocative social commentary. We live in a society, Brooks argues, that celebrates freedom, that tells us to be true to ourselves, at the expense of surrendering to a cause, rooting ourselves in a neighborhood, binding ourselves to others by social solidarity and love. We have taken individualism to the extreme—and in the process we have torn the social fabric in a thousand different ways. The path to repair is through making deeper commitments. In The Second Mountain, Brooks shows what can happen when we put commitment-making at the center of our lives.
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.
Come along with David Hinton on a series of walks through the wild beauty of Hunger Mountain, near his home in Vermont—excursions informed by the worldview he’s imbibed from his many years translating the classics of Chinese poetry and philosophy. His broad-ranging discussion offers insight on everything from the mountain landscape to the origins of consciousness and the Cosmos, from geology to Chinese landscape painting, from parenting to pictographic oracle-bone script, to a family chutney recipe. It’s a spiritual ecology that is profoundly ancient and at the same time resoundingly contemporary. Your view of the landscape—and of your place in it—may never be the same.
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.