The Adult Learner: Strategies for Success (A Fifty-Minute Series Book)

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This book reveals powerful strategies for making the most of lifelong learning opportunities.

The Mountain Is High Unless You Take the Elevator : Success Strategies for Adult Learners

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The Mountain Is High Unless You Take the Elevator : Success Strategies for Adult Learners
Laurence N. Smith
Manufacturer: Wadsworth Publishing Company
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 053413176X

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Finance and Financiers in European History, 1880-1960

Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: 2735104036

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Whether in the form of Christmas trees in town squares or prayer in school, fierce disputes over the separation of church and state have long bedeviled this country. Both decried and celebrated, this principle is considered by many, for right or wrong, a defining aspect of American national identity.

Nearly all discussions regarding the role of religion in American life build on two dominant assumptions: first, the separation of church and state is a constitutional principle that promotes democracy and equally protects the religious freedom of all Americans, especially religious outgroups; and second, this principle emerges as a uniquely American contribution to political theory.

In Please Don't Wish Me a Merry Christmas, Stephen M. Feldman challenges both these assumptions. He argues that the separation of church and state primarily manifests and reinforces Christian domination in American society. Furthermore, Feldman reveals that the separation of church and state did not first arise in the United States. Rather, it has slowly evolved as a political and religious development through western history, beginning with the initial appearance of Christianity as it contentiously separated from Judaism.

In tracing the historical roots of the separation of church and state within the Western world, Feldman begins with the Roman Empire and names Augustine as the first political theorist to suggest the idea. Feldman next examines how the roles of church and state variously merged and divided throughout history, during the Crusades, the Italian Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, the British Civil War and Restoration, the early North American colonies, nineteenth-century America, and up to the present day. In challenging the dominant story of the separation of church and state, Feldman interprets the development of Christian social power vis--vis the state and religious minorities, particularly the prototypical religious outgroup, Jews.

Customer Reviews:

Brilliant Ideas in a Repetitive Shell.......2005-08-08

Stephen M. Feldman needs to find a synonym for "carnal Jews".

He uses this description of how Christians have perceived Jews across history over and over and over again. One could make a good drinking game out of it--though you'd pass out before you got a quarter of the way through the book.

But stylistic quibbles aside, Professor Feldman has contributed a important work to the legal canon. The book is worth reading for its historical overview of Judeo-Christian relations over the ages. Indeed, one might argue that this is the best and most important part. However, the leftist critique of modern Church/State jurisprudence is devestating in its accuracy. Feldman notes how despite the ongoing trend of Christian Victimization stories, legal norms still fundamentally are biased in favor of Christianity and against other religions. While the separation of church and state serves to keep much of the most overt Christian messages out of government, it does nothing to either a) protect against private religious discrimination and harassment or b) give remedies to religious minorities for whom "neutral" rules prevent the exercise of their religion (see Employment Division of Oregon v. Smith).

The argument isn't perfect. It is hard to see a viable alternative to our current system--there is no feasible way to prevent a minority from feeling like a minority without imposing draconian restraints on majority expression. It also comes off as a bit too cynical (and I'm a bit cynical myself)--as one person put it, we're better off in a polity debating whether or not to put a Creche on the Courthouse than in one debating whether to schedule another pogrom, even if we win the latter battle and lose the former.

But overall, the book is a sophisticated and incisive critique of a liberal sacred cow--and a valued addition to Critical Theory from a Jewish perspective.

A disturbing new view of church and state.......2004-07-08

This is not a book about Christmas. Instead, it is a radical re-evaluation of the separation of church and state. Feldman, professor of law and political science at the University of Tulsa, opens with a personal account of his effort to end Christmas ob-servances at the public school his daughter attended. (Feldman is Jewish.) It failed, as such efforts by non-Christians usually do. What ever happened to the separation of church and state? The rest of the book is Feldman's an-swer, and it is lacerating.
"[T]he dominant story of the separation of church and state is woefully simplistic and seri-ously misleading," Feldman declares (p. 8). He charges that church-state separation is neither as uniquely American nor as benign to religious minorities as commonly supposed. Since separa-tion is a tale told by the Christian majority, we should not be surprised when it turns out to benefit that majority most of all: "[C]onstitutional discourse furnishes a façade of governmental neutrality and indi-vidual religious freedom, but behind that legitimating façade, Christian cul-tural imperialism pulses through the social body of America" (p. 272).
If this rhetoric sounds postmodern, it is. Feldman declares himself a postmodernist, at least concerning historical, social and textual analysis. (Does he consider science a unique and valid way of knowing? He doesn't say, and in any case that sort of postmodernism is irrelevant to his topic.) Early on, Feldman serves up four pages of dense Foucaultian rhetoric, describing his book as a "critical social narrative" primarily concerned with interpreting power relationships. There-after he lessens the postmodern jargon and launches a cogent, accessible -- though surely contro-versial -- analysis of church-state separation.
I closed the book convinced that Feldman is onto something. There were just too many times when, peering through the lens of his interpretations, I watched seemingly contradic-tory elements in today's church-state environment start to make new, if terrible, kinds of sense.
Feldman organizes his material historically. He finds the earliest roots of church-state sepa-ration in the New Testament proscription against coercing the conversion of Jews. (A meaning-ful commitment to Christ had to be voluntary.) Christians responded by dividing their world in two. The secular, or carnal, realm belonged to the Jews, while the heavenly realm was reserved for Chris-tians. This division would also become a well-spring of anti-Semitism throughout the two mil-lennia that followed. (Feldman's zeal in presenting examples of this sometimes verges on the tiresome.) The next element was the idea of religious toleration, which emerged after the Thirty Years War, "not be-cause of a principled theological or political commitment to toleration, but rather because harsh experience had re-vealed that neither side ... could crush the other" (p. 73). In time Jews, too, could enjoy the benefits of toleration, but only as, at best, the "incidental beneficiaries of ... Christian stalemates" (p. 98).
Feldman traces the beginnings of American church-state separation to the Puritans, whose idea of "freedom of conscience" was both limited and rooted in Christianity: Conscience was meant to be "free" only in order to accept Christ. Things were no better during the American Revolution: If "Madison could have seen America from a Jewish viewpoint (highly unlikely)," he would have recognized that "America was hegemonically Protestant" (p. 160). Indeed, by the 19th century, Protestantism was the de facto national religion. Legal establishment was unneces-sary.
When Jewish and Roman Catholic immigration swelled in the late 19th and early 20th cen-tury, Protestantism needed new responses. To Feldman the Social Gospel, Progressive, and Common School movements all sought to preserve Protestantism by imposing Anglo-Saxon val-ues (and if possible, Protestantism itself) on immigrants. American Jews met this pressure by be-coming ardent supporters of church-state separation. On Feldman's view, that was a costly error: "[W]hen seeking religious liberty and equality in America, Jews needed to argue for freedom of conscience and the separation of church and state, even though those con-cepts were Christian (especially Protestant) and thus foreign to any previous Jewish world view" (p. 229).
We turn to today's perplexing church-state environment. Feldman tells us acer-bically: "[O]nly Christians ever win free exercise cases" (p. 246). Wait, says the skeptic. What about Engel vs. Vitale, brought by a Jewish plaintiff? What about Murray vs. Curlett, the school-prayer case that made Madalyn Murray O'Hair's reputation? What about Wallace vs. Jaffree, where atheist Ish-mael Jaffree overturned Alabama's moment-of-silence law? What about Lee vs. Weisman, in which a Jewish family blocked a rabbi from offer-ing a public high school graduation prayer? Don't be too quick to count these cases as victories, Feldman warns: They reinforce a model of freedom of conscience and religion itself that is inescapably Protestant.
Feldman's book indicts church-state separation as Christians (and, truth be told, seculars from Christian backgrounds) have portrayed it. It's chilling to imagine that separation may have served outgroups so shabbily.
One expects Feldman to close with a call for the radical redefinition of church-state juris-prudence, but he does not. In a footnote, he confesses that he'd prefer to see the Supreme Court uphold privileges for religious outgroups that it denies to the majority creed, but knows that will never happen. (In my own book The Trouble With Christmas, I called no less forlornly for courts simply to demonstrate as much hostility toward Christianity as they displayed toward minority faiths.) Bittersweetly, all Feldman can recommend by way of ac-tion is "one small political act": "next year, when someone wishes you a 'Merry Christmas,' just say, 'Please don't! Don't wish me a Merry Christmas.'"
Given current trends to erode legal protection for religious minorities -- trends which Feld-man's analysis prepares us to understand in new ways -- that may be the best we can hope for.

Book Description

This digital document is an article from Journal of Church and State, published by J.M. Dawson Studies in Church and State on January 1, 1998. The length of the article is 855 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Please Don't Wish Me a Merry Christmas: A Critical History of the Separation of Church and State.
Author: Paul R. Weber
Publication: Journal of Church and State (Refereed)
Date: January 1, 1998
Publisher: J.M. Dawson Studies in Church and State
Volume: 40 Issue: n1 Page: 212-213

Article Type: Book Review

Distributed by Thomson Gale

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This book is a product of the international VIDE (Virus Identification Data Exchange) project, which uses the DELTA (Description Language for Taxonomy) database system to collect diagnostic information on all plant viruses. Information on over 500 characters has been sought for each virus and stored in the VIDE database. Over two-thirds of these characters record the susceptibility, or otherwise, of a range of commonly used test plant species; the remainder represent the great range of other characters used for virus identification. Information on the known host range of each virus is also presented. The book, available as a two-volume set, covers approximately 1,000 viruses, which represents the entire database of plant viruses from around the world.

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Geosimulation is hailed as ‘the next big thing’ in geographic modelling for urban studies. This book presents readers with an overview of this new and innovative field by introducing the spatial modelling environment and describing the latest research and development using cellular automata and multi-agent systems. Extensive case studies and working code is available from an associated website which demonstrate the technicalities of geosimulation, and provide readers with the tools to carry out their own modelling and testing.

The first book to treat urban geosimulation explicitly, integrating socio-economic and environmental modelling approaches
Provides the reader with a sound theoretical base in the science of geosimulation as well as applied material on the construction of geosimulation models
Cross-references to an author-maintained associated website with downloadable working code for readers to apply the models presented in the book

Visit the Author's Website for further information on Geosimulation, Geographic Automata Systems and Geographic Automata Software

http://www.geosimulationbook.com

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This book focuses on mesh (grid) enhancement techniques — specifically, the use of selected elliptic methods for both structured and unstructured meshes associated with computational physics applications. Mesh enhancement is the process in which an existing mesh is modified to better meet the requirements of the physics application. To provide the reader with sufficient background information, seven of the nine chapters contain a summary of the numerical simulation process, basic background on mesh terminology and generation approaches, computational geometry, discretization of differential equations, methods of solving linear and nonlinear algebraic systems, geometry of surfaces in Euclidean space, and general elliptic methods for mesh enhancement. Furthermore, these chapters use the concept of harmonic coordinates to develop a unifying framework, the Laplace-Beltrami system, which is the governing principle of the book. The final two chapters apply this scheme! , along with other selected elliptic methods, to various structured and unstructured example problems.

Customer Reviews:

Classic Jewish writings on the the supernatural and metaphysical.......2007-09-15

This is an extraordinary set of tales for all who love works of fantasy and fairy tales as well as those interested in Jewish folklore and tradition.
They range from beautiful fairy tales such as Three Wedding Canopies by the genius YL Peretz, the wise stories of Rabbi Nachman of Bratislav (Whose writing inspired Franz Kafka), the master of writing on the occult and supernatural S Ansky, to more cynical and satirical pieces such as The Mare by Mendele Moykher-Sforim.
The Golem is a translation from the original manuscript written by Yudl Rosenberg in 1909.
It was a response to the terrible blood libels which had gained credence in the 1890s and was leading to greater attacks on Jews. Rosenberg relies on age-old Hassidic hagiography and folklore to create this folk tale of Rabbi Liva and his creation through kabbalah of the Golem, a manlike creature made from dust and ashes, that Rabbi Liva uses to perform great miracles and to save the innocent and punish the evil.
He uses the Golem to frustrate the evil designs of the spiteful and malicious anti-Semite Father Tadeus. A young Jewish girl is kidnapped and forcibly converted to Christianity before being rescued by the Golem, and forgeries of the blood libel are disproved through the Golem's deeds and the evildoers aiming to frame the Jews unmasked.
The tragedy of a brother (who was swapped at birth) and sister marrying each other, is averted, amidst much supernatural and metaphysical phenomena.
This is a tale of Jewish folklore, fantasy and kabbalah and is both glorious and intriguing.
It is also a commentary, on the fate of the Jews through the ages.
There is During the Middle Ages a Jew passes away, and is buried, with kaddish spoken for him.
When his soul's deeds are weighed the good deeds and the bad deeds are completely balanced and since the sins do not outweigh the virtues the soul would not go to hell, and since the virtues did not outweigh the sins the soul would not go to heaven.
It was determined that he would fly about in the middle until G-D remembered him and took pity on him and summoned him with His Grace.

But it was also ruled that if he could bring three valuable gifts to the Saints, during his wanderings, he would be admitted to Heaven.

The soul witnessed three incidents of attacks on Jews and brought back three gifts

A rich Jewish merchant is murdered by bandits and the spirit carries to heaven a speck of soil from Palestine, signifying the eternal link between the Jews and the Land of Israel.
A beautiful young Jewish girl is sentenced to be executed by being dragged through the streets by a wild horse, for leaving the ghetto and walking the streets of the Christian town during a Christian holiday.
She asks for pins to sew the hem of her dress to her legs, sticking the pins deep into her flesh, so that her body would not be exposed when she is dragged through the streets.
The spirit pulls a bleeding pin out of the condemmned girl's leg and flew up to heaven to give it as a gift to the angels.

A Jews is executed in a prison, but refuses to die without his skullcap.
The spirit takes the bloody skullcap as a gift to the saints in heaven.

The tale here details some sardonic treatment of society and materialism, as well as indictment by Peretz of mediocrity and and pettiness.

The message is more metaphysical than social, but also tells something of the situation of the Jewish people and their eternal ideals and faith.
Herein lies the hope.

Peretz is an intellectual hero of mine because he rejected cultural universalism, seeing the world as composed of different nations, each with its own character.
Each nation is special and unique in it's own way.
That is my philosophy.
He saw his role as writing to express 'Jewish ideals...routed in Jewish culture and Jewish history'.
His writings, often of fantasy and metaphysical phenomena always reflect Jewish ideals and Jewish experiences through the ages.
There is also the beautiful fairy tale with a Jewish flavour, The Three Wedding Canopies, where Peretz writes an excellent commentary of history and human affairs:
"Nations and chiildren have a keen eye, that is to say, they can recognize at first glance things that the wisest sages fail to see. Their very first impression tells them who is truly good, honest and pious, and who is wearing a mask on his facve-and has hell in his heart".
Then there is the story of the rabbi who turned into a werewolf, and the rich tale of sad longing and hope The Messiah of the House of Epraim by Moshe Kulbak.
What these works have in common is classic writing, a Jewish perspective and a focus on the supernatural and metaphysical.

For anyone who loves Tanith Lee or the Brothers Grimm.......2000-06-08

The stars of this compilation include the anonymous writers of a 14th century classic, Ansky (of Dybbuk fame), Rabbi Nachman of Bretslav and The Neder(sic). THere are even two representatives of the Haskala or Enlightenment (who were vicious towards observant Judaism in general and Chasidic Judiasm in particular, but still used the symbolism)

Most of these stories are told in the classic fairy tale vein, popularized by the Brothers Grimm. Some are satiric, some are symbolic with symbolism that eludes the reader, some make no sense whatsoever and some are classics. Rabbi Nachman's tales are the most esoteric, while Ansky's stories are the most entertaining and accessible.

Beautifully written tales, translated with an excellent ear to detail and great commentaries (although there does seem to be some pc handwringing over the sexism of some of the tales, but it's not too annoying.)

Buy it. Buy this book now. Then buy other works by the writers contained in the book. This compilation is a great addition to fantasy folk literature. If you are a fantasy reader,you will welcome the relief from unicorns saving the kingdom from the Tolkein imitators. If you aren't a fantasy fan, you will just love this book for its own merits.

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