Suchergebnisse

Introduction: The reverse Underground Railroad -- Sanctuary city -- Black hearts -- Midnight land -- In-laws and outlaws -- The beaten way -- The body in the wagon -- The halfway house -- The lifeboat -- A living witness -- Hunting wolves -- Kidnappers all -- Conclusion: The first law of nature.

Suicide and the state of the union -- The sorrows of young readers -- Saving sinking strangers -- Wounds in the belly of the state -- The threshold of heaven -- The problem of slave resistance

Suicide is a quintessentially individual act, yet one with unexpectedly broad social implications. Though seen today as a private phenomenon, in the uncertain aftermath of the American Revolution this personal act seemed to many to be a public threat that held no less than the fate of the fledgling Republic in its grip. Salacious novelists and eager newspapermen broadcast images of a young nation rapidly destroying itself. Parents, physicians, ministers, and magistrates debated the meaning of self-destruction and whether it could (or should) be prevented. Jailers and justice officials rushed to thwart condemned prisoners who made halters from bedsheets, while abolitionists used slave suicides as testimony to both the ravages of the peculiar institution and the humanity of its victims. Struggling to create a viable political community out of extraordinary national turmoil, these interest groups invoked self-murder as a means to confront the most consequential questions facing the newly united states: What is the appropriate balance between individual liberty and social order? Who owns the self? And how far should the control of the state (or the church, or a husband, or a master) extend over the individual?With visceral prose and an abundance of evocative primary sources, Richard Bell lays bare the ways in which self-destruction in early America was perceived as a transgressive challenge to embodied authority, a portent of both danger and possibility. His unique study of suicide between the Revolution and Reconstruction uncovers what was at stake--personally and politically--in the nation's fraught first decades.

1.Understanding another culture --Understanding others and ourselves --A procedure from an aesthetic point of view --"Found in translation" --2.Foundations of modern African philosophy --Ethnophilosophy and the "negritude" movement --Critical, scientific philosophy --Sage philosophy --3.Liberation and postcolonial African philosophy --African humanism and socialism --Postcolonial African thought --The question of "race" --4.African moral philosophy 1 : community and justice --Persons, individualism, and communalism --Suffering and injustice --Poverty and human development --5.African moral philosophy 2 : truth and reconciliation --Linking communalism, Ubuntu, and restorative justice --Understanding the grammar of justice after apartheid --"Not all storytelling heals" : criticisms of the TRC process --Justice and political transformation --6.Narrative in African philosophy : orality and icons --The philosophical significance of oral narratives --Rational dialogue, democracy, and the village palaver --Finding pictures and fictitious narratives "surprising" --Iconic forms and the aesthetic consciousness revisited --7.Some concluding remarks.

In May 1849 Wagner fled Dresden after the failure of the uprising of which he was a leader. His last creative work in Dresden was prose sketches for an opera Jesus of Nazareth, the result of his study of the Graeco-Roman world and the New Testament together with some knowledge of biblical criticism. Although he portrays Jesus as a social revolutionary in that he attacks the Pharisees, oppression and injustice, he is by no means a political messiah; indeed Wagner emphases his sacrificial death which results in the giving of the Holy Spirit. Key theological themes of the work which I explore include Jesus' messiahship, law and freedom, and the significance of his death.