Name der Zeitschrift: Der Islam Jahrgang: 94 Heft: 1 Seiten: 158-191.

This is a review article of two recent, complete translations of the Arabian Nights, in French by André Miquel and Jamel Eddine Bencheikh and in English by Malcolm Lyons, respectively.

In this book, Rasoul Namazi offers the first in-depth study of Leo Strauss' writings on Islamic political thought, a topic that interested Strauss over the course of his career. Namazi's volume focuses on several important studies by Strauss on Islamic thought. He critically analyzes Strauss's notes on Averroes' commentary on Plato's Republic and also proposes an interpretation of Strauss' theologico-political notes on the Arabian Nights. Namazi also interprets Strauss' essay on Alfarabi's enigmatic treatise, The Philosophy of Plato and (...) provides a detailed commentary on his complex essay devoted to Alfarabi's summary of Plato's Laws. Based on previously unpublished material from Strauss' papers, Namazi's volume provides new insights into Strauss' reflections on religion, philosophy, and politics, and their relationship to wisdom, persecution, divine law, and unbelief in the works of key Muslim thinkers. His work presents Strauss as one of the most innovative historians and scholars of Islamic thought of all time. (shrink)

Is discomfort intrinsic to wonder? The author pursues this question by showing how early visitors to the Niagara Falls found that efforts to improve the view eliminated the difficulty that made viewing the falls rewarding in the first place. Visitors’ experiences accord with eighteenth-century accounts that suggest that wonder thrives on difficulty and desire thrives on inaccessibility. This aesthetic effect finds expression in The Arabian Nights and other texts that both represent and enact narrative withholding, and also in (...) the visual form of the arabesque, which beguiles the eye with movement but does not go anywhere. The essay concludes by connecting these insights into aesthetic difficulty to present-day concerns that attempts to bring the humanities to a broader audience may “dumb down” art. I conclude that such concerns miss the point that aesthetic experiences depend upon a tension between legibility and illegibility that artworks continue to generate in new and unforeseen ways. (shrink)

The eleventh-century Byzantine compiler Cedrenus includes a unique story in the midst of his otherwise traditional and hagiographic material on the emperor Constantine. Mentioning the outbreak of war between the Roman and Persian empires, he describes the cause of the breakdown of peace somewhat as follows. A certain Metrodorus, who was of Persian origin, went to visit the Brahmins in India to study philosophy and won the reputation of being a holy man through his asceticism. He also built water mills (...) and baths, unknown to the Indians till that time. Having acquired this reputation, he entered the temples and took away many precious stones and pearls. He also received gifts from the king of the Indians. On his return to Byzantium he gave them to the emperor Constantine as being gifts of his own. When Constantine expressed his astonishment, Metrodorus said he had sent other gifts by the land route but that they had been detained by the Persians. Constantine then wrote a strong protest to Sapor demanding the gifts but received no reply; thus the peace was broken. This remarkable conte, more appropriate to the Arabian Nights than to sober history, is generally supposed to be referred to in a passage in Ammianus. Towards the end of a long section commenting on the personality and achievements of Julian, Ammianus turns briefly to the question of the ultimate responsibility for the Persian War which ended so disastrously for Julian and the Roman Empire: et quoniam eum obtrectatoribus novos bellorum tumultus ad perniciem rei communis insimulant concitasse, sciant docente veritate perspicue, non Iulianum sed Constantinum ardores Parthicos succendisse, cum Metrodori mendaciis avidius acquiescit, ut dudum rettulimus plane. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:_Russell_ journal (home office): E:CPBRRUSSJOURTYPE2402\INDEXISS.242 : 2005-05-19 13:34
ibliographies, rchival nventories, ndexes INDEX TO RUSSELL’S THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY R H Summerfields, The Glade Escrick, York  , .. @.. he edition of the richly allusioned The Impact of Science on Society Tindexed here is that of George Allen and Unwin, published in London in . The pagination of Simon and Schuster’s edition (New York, ) is (...) different and spans pages – instead of the first British edition’s –. The very first edition of the book (New York: Columbia U. P., ) contained two paragraphs comparing Catholicism and Communism that were overlooked for the British and all subsequent editions. Russell regarded them as important, and Sir Stanley Unwin wrote him that they would be incorporated in the next printing. The next printing was not until , and the paragraphs were again overlooked. They belong just before the paragraph on page  beginning “Every fanatical creed” in Chapter , “Science and Values”. These paragraphs are not indexed.—Ed. I meet many people who think that the evils of Communism can be combated by Catholicism. This seems to me a dangerous error. What are the evils of Communism as it has developed? First, adherence to a rigid and static system of doctrine, of which part is doubtful and part demonstrably false. Second, persecution as a means of enforcing orthodoxy. Third, a belief that salvation is only to be found within the Church and that the True Faith must be spread throughout the world, by force if necessary. (These are the beliefs of Communists.) Fourth, that the priesthood, which alone has the right to interpret the Scriptures, has enormous power, physical east of the Iron Curtain and spiritual over the faithful in partibus. Fifth, that this power is used to secure an undue share of wealth for the priesthood at the expense of the rest of the population. Sixth, that bigotry, and the hostility that it engenders, is a potent source of war. Every one of these evils was exhibited by the Catholic Church when it had power and would probably be exhibited again if it recovered the position it had in the Middle Ages. It is therefore irrational to suppose that much would be gained if, in the defeat of Communism, Catholicism were enthroned in its place. (Pp. –) russell: the Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies n.s.  (winter –): – The Bertrand Russell Research Centre, McMaster U.  - _Russell_ journal (home office): E:CPBRRUSSJOURTYPE2402\INDEXISS.242 : 2005-05-19 13:34    Abraham  absolute monarchy  Adler, Alfred  adventure, impulse to ,  vs. rashness  aeroplanes  Africa cotton market  North, and Romans  age, average, in West – agriculture effects of  in history of man  integration into larger economy – wasteful of natural resources – see also soil conservation air power and governments  Alexander the Great and superstition  ambassadors, independence of  America see United States anaesthetics  anarchy  Anaxagoras ,  animals, and man  anthropology  apathy  Arab-Israeli conflict – Arabian Nights slaves of lamp in  Arabs and scientific technique  Archimedes , ,  Argentina agriculture  Arians  Aristotle  and causation – movement of heavenly bodies  armed forces and civil authorities  international, as concentration of power ,  perceptions of own/other nations’  in Russia –,  artillery  arts: authors and artists independence of –, –,  ascetic mentality  Asia: population and prosperity  astrology – astronomers Greek  prospects for life on earth  astronomical events indicating disaster  Atlantic Pact  atom bomb , , ,  atomic energy –, ,  Attica, history  Attlee, Clement  Augustine, Saint scientific argument against astrology – Auschwitz  Australia aborigines ,  agriculture  federal government  Austria: war with Prussia  Authority and the Individual (BR)  authority vs. observation –,  autonomy of physical world , – Aztecs and cannibalism  and infanticide  Babylonians and eclipses  Bacon, Francis and witchcraft  bacteriological war  Baltic–White Sea canal  barbarians, and late Roman Empire ,  Barbarossa (Frederick I)  , independence of  Bede, the Venerable on comets  belief(s) on basis of authority, as unscientific – science as determinant  in superstition  uncivilized peoples  benefits of scientific technique – _Russell_ journal (home office): E:CPBRRUSSJOURTYPE2402\INDEXISS.242 : 2005-05-19 13:34 Index to Impact of Science on Society  Bentham , ,  Bergson, Henri  Bible, false statements in  see also individual books of biological conditions of stability (of society) –, – biology technique(s) from – birth control and population , , – birth rate, low ,  Black Death , – Blimps, Col., Romans as  breeding, scientific – Bright, John  Britain, happiness in  British Empire... 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This article considers how poetry features in Pasolini’s cinema. It argues that the manner in which Pasolini films poetry provides insight into his theory of an affinity between poetry and film, and into more general judgements concerning social reality. The article begins with an analysis of the final sequence of Salò (1975) where I argue that Ezra Pound’s poetry provides a soundtrack for the spectacle of torture in which the film’s libertines engage. Following this, I consider Pasolini’s 1965 text “The (...) Cinema of Poetry” and use this text as a way of reading the role played by a copy of Rimbaud’s collected poems in Teorema ( Theorem, 1968). I then move to consider the relationship between oral recitation and text in Il decameron ( The Decameron, 1971) and Il fiore della mille e una notte ( The Arabian Nights, 1974). In doing this, I argue that one can observe a shift across these films whereby poetry and orality move from being a foundational moment for reciprocal community to being a vehicle for an ambiguous and violent fate. The article then considers the conspicuous presence of reading and writing within Salò before ending with a consideration of one scene towards the end of the film in which Pasolini appears to invest a recitation of the Gospel with a disruptive force that is otherwise lacking in his final film. (shrink)

This article proposes a periodisation of the narrative work of Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986). Two meta-literary notions guide the first period: that of an absolute text and that of a text governed by chance, in which the former is linked to the Kabbalah and the latter to Gnosticism. The next period, which is the focal topic of this study, is governed by the notion of figure in the biblical sense of the term. Borges introduces this notion in his 1949 essay (...) "The Mirror Of Enigmas" that summons texts by Léon Bloy, Thomas de Quincey and Novalis. Through these influences, Borges sketches a figurative poetics whose apocalyptic character situates the work thus produced in the indecision between the eschatology and the scatology. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Introduction to the Special Theme Religious Experience and PsychopathologyMohammed Abouelleil Rashed, MD, PhDIn the first verse of the seventeenth sura of the Qur’an, Al-Isra’,1 we learn about Prophet Mohammed’s night-time journey to Al-Quds (Jerusalem):Glory to Him who made His servant travel by night from the sacred place of worship [in Mecca] to the furthest place of worship [in Al-Quds], whose surroundings We have blessed, to show him some of (...) Our signs.The year was 621 AD. The Prophet was transported by a fabled creature known as Al-Buraq—a name that derives from the Arabic word for lightning—that was able to cover the distance of a month-long journey in a matter of hours. Accompanied by the Angel Jibreel, the second part of the journey, Al-Mi’raj,2 involved an ascension to the Heavens. Along the way, the Prophet met several past Messengers until, now all alone, he received communications from Allah and, according to some accounts, encountered the Divine manifestation.When he returned to Mecca the following morning and recounted his miraculous journey, he met with a familiar range of responses. Abu Bakr Al-Siddiq, who was to become the first Caliph following the Prophet’s death, immediately believed him and never doubted the veracity of his account. Members of the Quraish tribe, a polytheistic tribe then dominant in the Arabian Peninsula and hostile to the Prophet, denounced his account outright, mocking him for its apparent impossibility or accusing him of madness. Others agreed that the Prophet had undergone the experiences he described but reasoned that this was a spiritual journey and not a physical one of literal bodily transportation. Later Christian critics went further by reducing the experience to the manifestations of epilepsy and insanity, or by questioning its Divine origin and attributing it to spirits and satanic entities.It really did matter how the Prophet’s experiences were understood and received: the stakes could not be higher. Here was the Prophet in the 11th year of a mission that called for a renewal of the message of monotheism. If true, this journey to the three holy sites of Islam (Mecca, Medina, Al-Quds) and to the Heavens was further evidence of his Prophethood and one of his miracles. His [End Page 195] critics and his followers had their own answer to the question on everyone’s mind: did the Prophet really undergo these experiences, whether in a spiritual or physical sense, or was it an expression of a pathological disturbance?________The year is 1997 AD. Mike Jackson and Bill Fulford publish a paper entitled Spiritual Experience & Psychopathology. The paper engages the exact question that troubled the Prophet’s critics and allies 1,376 years earlier. The question is now framed as a distinction between spiritual and pathological varieties of psychotic phenomena. And even though the stakes do not rise to the level of Prophethood—we have banished Prophets a long time ago—they are high enough:Spiritual experiences, whether welcome or unwelcome, and whether or not they are psychotic in form, have nothing (directly) to do with medicine.... It would be quite wrong, then, to “treat” spiritual psychotic experiences with neuroleptic drugs, just as it is quite wrong to “treat” political dissidents as though they were ill.(Jackson & Fulford, 1997, p. 42)Jackson and Fulford were not the first to invoke the distinction as a problem to be examined. In modern times, this is usually traced to William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), where he drew attention to the overlap between religious experiences and psychosis. James, like Jackon and Fulford a century later, noted the phenomenological similarities among these two ‘types’ of experience: voices, visions, an ineffable sense of significance to otherwise mundane events, and the loss of agency to external forces and powers.The 1997 paper stimulated much debate, responses, and rebuttals. In the process, at least four approaches for drawing the distinction have emerged: by appealing to the outcome of the experience; by appealing to theological criteria; by examining the organization of the experience; and by paying attention to the process of meaning-making in its cultural context. On the... (shrink)

Il contributo sostiene che una versione lunga e composita del Viaggio notturno del profeta e della sua ascensione, attribuita a Ibn ‘Abbas attraverso una figura più tarda conosciuta come al-Bakri, è diventata molto popolare e largamente diffusa nel tredicesimo secolo. Qui si propone una traduzione del viaggio celeste di Muhammad a partire da un importante manoscritto inedito di Istanbul copiato nella penisola araba verso la fine del tredicesimo secolo. Questa traduzione si propone come strumento per gli studiosi interessati alla tradizione (...) islamica delle ascensioni celesti e per chi si occupa delle possibile influenze musulmane sull’opera di Dante. Nonostante non si dimostri che Dante avesse avuto accesso diretto a questa fonte nel momento in cui componeva la divina commedia, ci sono prove sufficienti che le versioni di questo racconto fossero diffuse in diverse parti del Mediterraneo, prima e durante la vita di Dante. L’autore fa propria la recente ipotesi interpretativa di Bencheikh che sottolinea il ruolo fondamentale della versione di Bakri del Mi’râj per la composizione dell’ormai noto Libro della Scala, tradotto in latino e lingua francese antico in al-Andalus nella seconda metà del tredicesimo secolo.This article argues that a long and composite version of the narrative of Muhammad's night journey and ascension, one often ascribed to Ibn 'Abbas via a later figure known as al-Bakri, became especially popular and widely distributed in the thirteenth-century CE. It offers a translation of the Tour of Paradise section from a particularly important unpublished Istanbul manuscript preserving this version, copied in the Arabian peninsula near the end of the thirteenth-century. This translation could serve as a resource to scholars who are interested in the history of Islamic ascension narratives, and interested in the question of possible Muslim influences on Dante's Divine Comedy. While the author of this article does not argue that Dante must have been aware of this particular manuscript as he composed his masterwork, he claims that there is enough evidence to suggest that versions of this narrative circulated in different parts of the Mediterranean before and during Dante's lifetime. He supports the earlier conjecture by Bencheikh that the Bakri versions were likely foundational to the composition of the now famous "Book of Muhammad's Ladder" that was translated into Latin and Old French in al-Andalus / Spain in the second half of the thirteenth-century. (shrink)

In the beginning was the night. All light, shapes, language, and subjective consciousness, as well as the world and art depicting them, emerged from this formless chaos. In fantasy, we seek to return to this original darkness. Particularly in literature, visual representations, and film, the night resiliently resurfaces from the margins of the knowable, acting as a stage and state of mind in which exceptional perceptions, discoveries, and decisions play out. Elisabeth Bronfen investigates the nocturnal spaces in which extraordinary events (...) unfold, and casts a critical eye into the darkness that enables the irrational exploration of desire, transformation, ecstasy, transgression, spiritual illumination, and moral choice. She begins with an analysis of classical myths depicting the creation of the world and then moves through night scenes in Shakespeare and Milton, Gothic novels and novellas, Hegel's romantic philosophy, and Freud's psychoanalysis. Bronfen also demonstrates how modern works of literature and film, particularly film noir, can convey that piece of night the modern subject carries within. From Mozart's "Queen of the Night" to Virginia Woolf 's oscillation between day and night, life and death, and chaos and aesthetic form, Bronfen renders something visible, conceivable, and comprehensible from the dark realms of the unknown. (shrink)

Arabian Drugs in Early Medieval Mediterranean Medicine. By Zohar Amar and Efraim Lev. Edinburgh Studies in Classical Islamic History and Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017. Pp. xiv + 290, ills. $125, £80.

Saturday Night Live (SNL) has no obligation to avoid political bias, but it provides a valuable service when it reaches beyond its core audience, as arguably it has when effectively lampooning Sarah Palin and Donald Trump. There is no obligation for comedians to pass the Ideological Turing Test, but it is possible. “The Bubble” passes the Ideological Turing Test. Everyone thinks political bubbles are bad, but no one thinks they are in one. In fact, there is nothing wrong with SNL (...) exhibiting a political bias. Joe Piscopo has supported Donald Trump and voiced displeasure with Trump's portrayal on SNL, but Piscopo remains a Democrat. If SNL attempted to integrate conservative cast members and writers, the result might have more integrity but find fewer viewers. If SNL put out the word that they were looking for conservatives, there would probably be no shortage of applications and audition tapes. (shrink)

Engages the myriad dimensions of Night in order to explore the human experience of the after-dark."--Provided by publisher.

In the beginning was the night. All light, shapes, language, and subjective consciousness, as well as the world and art depicting them, emerged from this formless chaos. In fantasy, we seek to return to this original darkness. Particularly in literature, visual representations, and film, the night resiliently resurfaces from the margins of the knowable, acting as a stage and state of mind in which exceptional perceptions, discoveries, and decisions play out. Elisabeth Bronfen investigates the nocturnal spaces in which extraordinary events (...) unfold, and casts a critical eye into the darkness that enables the irrational exploration of desire, transformation, ecstasy, transgression, spiritual illumination, and moral choice. She begins with an analysis of classical myths depicting the creation of the world and then moves through night scenes in Shakespeare and Milton, Gothic novels and novellas, Hegel's romantic philosophy, and Freud's psychoanalysis. Bronfen also demonstrates how modern works of literature and film, particularly film noir, can convey that piece of night the modern subject carries within. From Mozart's "Queen of the Night" to Virginia Woolf 's oscillation between day and night, life and death, and chaos and aesthetic form, Bronfen renders something visible, conceivable, and comprehensible from the dark realms of the unknown. (shrink)

Supernatural fans often associate Season 3's popular “Jus in Bello” episode with the world's quintessential zombie movie, George Romero's Night of the Living Dead. Romero's zombie films, beginning with Night, fill the survival space with multiple, diverse survivalists who are forced to work through personal differences stemming from jealousy and petty annoyance to racism and bigotry, issues of morality, theology, and other social and cultural differences. Indeed, the setting is the first link to Romero's Night, whose cramped Pennsylvanian farmhouse is (...) little different than the poorly fortified police station holding Sam and Dean. The demons congregate listlessly around the jail. This is an obvious visual homage to the isolated Pennsylvanian farmhouse in Night. The work of the demons in “Jus in Bello” like the zombies in Night and Dawn, is ceaseless and instinctual. (shrink)

This essay offers a new reading of Marx's chapter on ‘the working day’ in Capital Volume One by exploring the textual theme of night-time work. Even as Marx emphasises how the lengthening workday enables the super-exploitation of producers’ wage labour, his depictions of nocturnal experiences highlight more forcefully the destruction of workers’ reproductive resources, capacities and relationships. Night comes to represent the contracted time, condensed space, petrified relational bonds and thwarted desires for human reproduction in a free, fulsome sense that (...) includes reinvigorating oneself, caring for others and enjoying experiences apart from work or care. Night's role as a privileged signifier and catalyst of these changes comes through in key passages about women, children and vampires, and in theoretically meaningful variances between Marx's German paraphrasing of English sources and those original texts, which replace Marx's phrases in English translations of Capital. Contemplating Marx's ambivalent reflections on legal-political action to limit workday hours, I argue for making struggles over social reproduction in a capacious sense central to working-class politics today. I demonstrate the power of this Marxian analytic by considering the compression of social-reproductive time among today's microworkers, who fuel the digital economy by performing platform-based ‘tasks’ at all hours for very low wages. (shrink)

. Night driving is one of the major factors which affects traffic safety. Although detecting oncoming vehicles at night time is a challenging task, it may improve traffic safety. If the oncoming vehicle is recognised in good time, this will motivate drivers to keep their eyes on the road. The purpose of this paper is to present an approach to detect vehicles at night based on the employment of a single onboard camera. This system is based on detecting vehicle headlights (...) by recognising their shapes via an SVM classifier which was trained for this purpose. A pairing algorithm was designed to pair vehicle headlights to ensure that the two headlights belong to the same vehicle. A multi-object tracking algorithm was invoked to track the vehicle throughout the time the vehicle is in the scene. The system was trained with 503 single objects and tested using 144 587 single objects which were extracted from 1410 frames collected from 15 videos and 27 moving vehicles. It was found that the accuracy of recognition was 97.9% and the vehicle recognition rate was 96.3% which indicates clearly the high robustness attained by this system. (shrink)

Night eating syndrome is currently classified as an Other Specified Feeding or Eating Disorder under the Diagnostic Statistical Manual−5. This systematic review aims to consolidate the studies that describe the sociodemographic, clinical and psychological features of NES in a population of patients with eating disorders, obesity, or those undergoing bariatric surgery, and were published after the publication of the DSM-5. A further aim was to compare, where possible, NES with BED on the aforementioned variables. Lastly, we aimed to appraise the (...) quality of the studies being included in the review. We conducted a systematic search on three databases which resulted in the selection of 22 studies for the review. We included the articles that studied patients with NES and their sociodemographic, clinical and psychological features in a clinical population, through a quantitative study design. Articles were excluded if the NES patients included in the study had a comorbid psychological disorder, and/or the sample was collected from a university/non-clinical population, and/or the study design was qualitative, and/or NES features were compared with any other disorder, except BED. Our study found that no conclusions about the link between any sociodemographic feature and an NES diagnosis could be made. Further, NES patients presented with elevated ED pathology and higher occurrence of depressive symptoms than controls. Contrary to the literature suggesting that NES and Binge Eating Disorder patients often report overlapping features, questioning the validity of NES as an ED diagnosis, we found that BED can be differentiated from NES by the higher occurrence of emotional eating, body related concerns and abnormal eating episodes. The review also suggested an overlap between NES and Sleep-Related Eating Disorder. We recommend that it is essential to study NES as an independent disorder to further develop its diagnostic criteria and treatment options, thereby, increasing the quality of life of the patients suffering from this syndrome. (shrink)

From Emily Litella to Grumpy Old Man, from Joe Blow to Drunk Uncle, Saturday Night Live has long employed guest characters as “citizen journalists” on its famous Weekend Update segment. These characters have provided a comic take on everyday issues impacting the life of citizens in the public sphere. Two of the first philosophers who take up the modern problems of participatory democracy in the public sphere are John Dewey (1859–1952) and Walter Lippmann (1889–1974). “Weekend Update” provides us with a (...) foundation to understand what Dewey and Lippmann argued about news, democracy, and the formation of public opinion. Dewey's creative response to the problems of the public in democracy was not to rely on experts, but to rely on the arts and artists to help communicate important issues in the public sphere and foster more public participation. (shrink)

None of us will escape the experience of personal loss, illness, aging, or mortality. Yet, psychoanalysis seems to shy away from a discussion of these core human experiences. Existential vulnerability is painful and we all avoid this awareness in different ways. However, when analysts fail to explore the topic of mortality, their own and their patients, they may foreclose an important exploration and short-change patient and therapist. _Entering Night Country_ focuses on the existential condition, and explores how it penetrates professional (...) lives, analytic work, and theoretical formulations. Each chapter explores this topic, shifting the lens from analytic process, to include theoretical assumptions, and professional communities. _Stephanie Brody_ shows how the analytic process is a journey, no less profound than the epic journeys depicted in the classic literature of Homer and repeated in the patient’s own heroic and painful stories. Weaving literary references into the clinical experience of psychoanalysis, Brody reveals the transformative power of the analytic process for the patient and for the analyst. By relating the ancient past to our current struggles, psychoanalyst and patient together are guided to a destination, a life of meaning in the universe of possibilities. Clinical vignettes and personal reflections intersect with motifs from the epic poems and fantasy fiction, where the despair of loss and trauma do not extinguish the wish for change and the search for intimacy. __Entering Night Country__ highlights the common themes that arise for patient and analyst as any person entering an unknown territory. It is intended for psychoanalysts, psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapists, and mental health clinicians. It will also be accessible to those outside the clinical profession, even to individuals who have little understanding of psychoanalysis. (shrink)

It's unnerving, isn't it? When our faith feels ungrounded, untethered... unreal. When our certainty is adrift, as though an undercurrent has pulled us away from shore into the deep, into the darkness. This is disillusionment. This is spiritual pain. And if this is you, please know that you are not alone. (And you are not as far away from safety as you may feel or fear.) Though faith shines best in full sun, it grows depth in the dark. The night (...) is not your enemy. In fact, the night is necessary. In The Night Is Normal, revered author, speaker, and mentor Dr. Alicia Britt Chole offers a groundbreaking perspective that reveals spiritual disillusionment as an unexpected friend. Within these sacred pages, you'll explore how night-faith develops within your soul something far more satisfying than understanding and far more powerful than peace. Whether you're disillusioned with God, yourself, or others, Alicia offers practical and soul-full tools to help you navigate the night and find your way to a livable and love-saturated hope. Your night will not last forever. Within it, there is priceless treasure (that's simply too weighty to be sourced in sunshine). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Night ShiftCalvin R. GrossI don't like working at night anymore. Too much goes wrong when you're alone.I'm sitting at my desk in the middle of the cardiac intensive care unit, and it's far later than I'd like to be awake—two or three in the morning. Things are calm, almost pleasant. I can hear the occasional alarm going off—an imperfectly positioned blood pressure cuff, a pulse oximeter with a poor (...) waveform, a ventilator with secretions in it. The night's initial frenzied work is done; my new admissions are tucked away, and my overnight to-dos are completed. Now it's just time to sit and wait. I could sleep, but despite the calm, I'm too afraid to leave the unit to rest. The fellow has gone to bed hours ago, and now it's just me. Sure, I'm surrounded by experienced nurses who know their work well, but somehow, I'm the one in charge. A brand-new second-year resident, the only doctor there. I'm no intern, that's for sure, but I've never led a code before, and I've only ever placed one central line without supervision. As second years go, I'm as fresh as they come.The daytime, you see, is far different than nights. There's a large (and even bloated) team of two attendings, two fellows, two pharmacists, and more importantly, multiple other residents. When you don't know what to do for a patient, there's always someone there to bounce ideas off of. When something difficult or surprising happens, there are peers and mentors to process with. At night, it's the opposite—no peers, no mentors, only a group of experienced nurses, whose circle is closed to me, the outsider. I long to be a part of that large and bloated daytime team."Can you come into 23? I think his pupils are a different size."I'm startled out of my thoughts. 23 … All I can remember from sign-out that evening is that he's young, close to my age, and supposedly stable. I look at my notes, a catalogue of tragedies: early onset heart failure, multiple prior suicide attempts, intubated because of pulmonary edema, and a left-ventricular assist device (LVAD) that's malfunctioning. I walk over to the room and look at the nurse at the other side of the bed. She's in the early phases of her career too—less than a year on the job—but she's still more experienced than me. I take a flashlight, open his eyelids, and look at the pupils. Sure enough, one of them is much larger than the other. When I shine the light into each eye, the large one doesn't change. When I turn his head from side to side, his eyes stay fixed. We look [End Page 83] at each other, she and I. We both know something terrible is happening."Should we maybe wake the fellow up?" she asks tentatively.I nod my head in agreement, glad to have been offered a suggestion. It's the right thing to do. I walk to the fellow's call room, knock on the door, and wake him up. He's set to work 24 hours and would like nothing more than to keep resting. He sleepily comes with me to the bedside, looks at the pupils as well, and says, "With the sedation on, your exam isn't going to be the most accurate. We should start by scanning his head, and then go from there. Wake me back up if you need me, but I know you've got this one."I don't think that I deserve the confidence he has in me. I walk back to my desk, open the patient's chart, and place the order for an urgent CT scan. The machinery of the hospital starts to rumble as the imaging schedulers find a spot in the queue for the scan, the patient's nurse and respiratory therapist disconnect and reconnect cables and tubes, the technicalities of the scan are ironed out, and he is... (shrink)

This detailed 1990 book describes the light and dark adaptation of receptoral and post-receptoral mechanisms from a number of perspectives. The authors emphasise the importance of the study of achromatopsia, a rare congenital condition in which the visual mechanisms that mediate day vision are absent whilst those that mediate night vision remain intact.

Starry Nights: Critical Structural Realism in Anthropology offers nothing less than a reinventing of the discipline of anthropology. In these six essays – four published here for the first time – Stephen Reyna critiques the postmodern tenets of anthropology, while devising a new strategy for conducting research. Combative and clear, Starry Nights provides an important critique of mainstream anthropology as represented by Geertz and the postmodern legacy, and envisions a mode of anthropological research that addresses social, cultural and (...) biological questions with techniques that are theoretically rigorous and practically useful. (shrink)

Although Theodor W. Adorno is best known for his association with the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, he began his career as a composer and successful music critic. _Night Music_ presents the first complete English translations of two collections of texts compiled by German philosopher and musicologist Adorno—_Moments musicaux_, containing essays written between 1928 and 1962, and _Theory of New Music_, a group of texts written between 1929 and 1955. In _Moments musicaux_, Adorno echoes Schubert’s eponymous cycle, with its emphasis (...) on aphorism, and offers lyrical reflections on music of the past and his own time. The essays include extended aesthetic analyses that demonstrate Adorno’s aim to apply high philosophical standards to the study of music. _Theory of New Music_, as its title indicates, presents Adorno’s thoughts and theories on the composition, reception, and analysis of the music that was being written around him. His extensive philosophical writing ultimately prevented him from pursuing the compositional career he had once envisaged, but his view of the modern music of the time is not simply that of a theorist, but clearly also that of a composer. Though his advocacy of the Second Viennese School, comprising composer Arnold Schoenberg and his pupils, is well known, many of his writings in this field have remained obscure. Collected in their entirety for the first time in English, the insightful texts in _Night Music _show the breadth of Adorno’s musical understanding and reveal an overlooked side to this significant thinker. (shrink)

Saturday Night Live (SNL) has become a staple of each political season. In this chapter, the authors show how late night comedy programs such as SNL have joined traditional TV news programs as authorities of delimination for defining the boundaries of political truth in historical epoch. SNL is different from other comedy programs such as the The Daily Show because of its focus on parody. SNL featured many sketches focused on the election, which also contributed to the production of the (...) truth. As an authority of delimination for political truth, SNL emphasized the sexist double standard to which Hillary Clinton was held. In short, SNL will continue to play a role in the production of political truth and knowledge. Michel Foucault famously argued that truth and knowledge are neither static nor objective. Foucault shows that different historical epochs and different geographical locations have different frameworks of verification for something to be considered true. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis piece theorizes the myriad strange possibilities of “the inexistent night” – that is, a minor temporal-existential break in the after-dark that nevertheless enables both disastrous and euphoric transformations to take hold. To illustrate this subtle turn, the focus rests upon a close analysis of a text by the twentieth-century, avant-garde, Japanese writer Yasunari Kawabata titled House of the Sleeping Beauties. This is a minimalist tale of enigmatic encounters in which characters embody different cyclical moods relating night to anonymity, solitude, (...) and impermanence. In the final stride, an entire conceptual edifice of the inexistent unfolds – amid radical disorientations of identity, desire, movement, and sensation – combining the architectonics of ghostliness with the atmospherics of shadow to suggest a more cryptic world beyond all existential centers. (shrink)

To enter the many experiential chambers of Night--space, silence, cruelty, secrecy--and thereby confront a vision of the end of worlds.

I examine the kindred phenomena of shadows and night in order to reveal their significance for better understanding our lifeworld and the elemental environment. I first describe how light is primary to ecological perception and how it conditions our conceptions of space, truth, and beauty. Light and darkness are involved in a dialectical relationship rather than conceived as polar opposites. Borne of the interplay of both realms, shadows have been disparaged historically and deserve to be reconsidered for their aesthetic appearance (...) and their relevance to an ecology and anthropology of perception. Night, in turn, is often marked by a negative ontology that points toward the possibility of a kind of elemental a priori, but it is important to characterize darkness in terms of its subtle shades and filtering by way of the creative matrix of the human imagination. Seeing the night in novel and unexpected ways, especially via the insights and descriptions of phenomenologists, poets, and artists, enables us to grasp the depth and atmosphere of the surrounding world and to light up our geographical perspectives, our philosophical visions, and our environmental awareness. (shrink)

Benefits to females of short-term mating have recently been identified, and it has been suggested that women have evolved adaptations for this strategy. One piece of evidence supporting such a female adaptation would be that women find the experience of a one-night stand as affectively positive as men. Individuals (N = 1,743) who had experienced a one-night stand were asked to rate aspects of their “morning after” feelings (six positive and six negative). Women were significantly more negative and less positive (...) than men. Although women did not especially view these relationships as a prelude to long-term relationships, they felt greater regret than men about having been “used.” Extra-pair copulations were rated more negatively, but not less positively, than singles’ experiences. There was no interaction between gender and mated status on positivity or negativity. Although, in terms of subsequent affective response, women do not seem well adapted to casual sexual encounters, it may be important to distinguish impelling sexual motivation preceding intercourse from later evaluations of the event. Menstrual cycle changes may also be important in altering the strength and target of sexual motivation. (shrink)

Amal is a 27-year-old woman who has recently been diagnosed with a rare and aggressive type of thyroid cancer.1 She is also 12 weeks into her third pregnancy. Since her diagnosis, Amal and her husband have met with her oncologist multiple times to discuss several treatment options. Amal's oncologist recommends surgical resection of the tumor and radioactive iodine therapy, but that would require termination of the pregnancy, as iodine is contraindicated for pregnant women. Alternatively, Amal may elect to postpone treatment (...) until after her delivery; however, that could result in the growth and spread of the tumor. The oncologist encourages Amal and her husband to take some time to decide. They make plans to meet... (shrink)

Helvétius and the philosophy of happiness.--The player's illusion.--The beyond.--The question of free will.--The insurrection of the vertebrates.--The pessimism of Leopardi.--The colors of life.--The art of seeing.--The rivers of France.--The fall of days.--Insinuations.--Footprints on the sand.