Thursday, January 29, 2015

The Norton Anthology of World Religions





 The Norton Anthology of World Religions

by Jack Miles

“To see others with a measure of openness, empathy, and good will ... In that capacity lies the foundation of human sympathy and cultural wisdom.”JACK MILES, from the Preface
  
I just listened to Terry Gross interviewing Jack Miles in Fresh Air. I recommend everyone to listen to this interview.
 
"This magisterial Norton Anthology, edited by world-renowned scholars under the direction of Pulitzer Prize winner Jack Miles, offers a portable library of more than 1,000 primary texts from the world’s major religions: Hinduism, Buddhism, and Daoism (Volume 1); Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Volume 2). The anthology brings together foundational works—the Bhagavad Gita, the Daodejing, the Bible, the Qur'an—with the writings of scholars, seekers, believers, and skeptics whose voices over centuries have kept these religions vital. To help readers encounter strikingly unfamiliar texts with pleasure, this Norton Anthology provides accessible introductions, head notes, annotations, pronouncing glossaries, maps, illustrations, and chronologies. It also includes a dazzling general introduction by Jack Miles that questions whether religion can be defined and illuminates how world religions came to be acknowledged and studied, absorbed and altered, understood and misunderstood.
For readers of any religion or none, The Norton Anthology of World Religions opens new worlds that, as Miles writes, invite us all "to see others with a measure of openness, empathy, and good will…In that capacity lies the foundation of human sympathy and cultural wisdom."
48 pages of color illustrations"


Jack Miles (Ph.D. Harvard) is Distinguished Professor of English and Religious Studies with the University of California at Irvine and Senior Fellow for Religious Affairs with the Pacific Council on International Policy. He spent 1960–70 as a Jesuit seminarian, studying at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem before enrolling at Harvard University, where he completed a Ph.D. in Near Eastern languages in 1971. His book GOD: A Biography won a Pulitzer Prize in 1996, and Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God led to his being named a MacArthur Fellow for 2003-07.
 

Wednesday, January 28, 2015

Time Regained



"In 1999, filmmaker Raoul Ruiz, took on what might be the hardest literary adaptation of all time (with the possible exceptions of the Bible or the phone book) when he filmed Time Regained, the final volume of Proust's In Search of Lost Time. The film is an elegant success, poetic throughout, and for today's episode of Cinema Poetry, I give you its final scene. The first person you see is Marcel, the narrator and Proust's self in the story. The child is also Marcel. This should be all you really need to know; there are no spoilers, and the rest is mysterious and wonderful whether you've seen the film or not. Enjoy how Ruiz adapted his style to Proust's prose, from the muted cinematography, the long takes, and the wonderful use ofmusic, to the reflexivity and the free mixing of realism and surrealism, memory, fantasy, and reality. Catherine Deneuve, Emmanuelle Beart, John Malkovich, and suspiciously shifting sets may not be present in this clip, but they should be reason enough to watch the rest of the movie."


"The final installment of Marcel Proust's multi-volume Rememberance of Things Past. Time memory and the blending of reality and fiction combine to create an unforgettable cinematic experience as proust looks back on his life from his deathbed."

Demis Roussos




Greek singer Demis Roussos, who sold more than 60 million albums worldwide, has died aged 68, the Hygeia Hospital in Athens has confirmed to the BBC.
He was best known for his solo hits in the 1970s and 80s, including Foreverand Ever, Goodbye and Quand je t'aime.