A candid, often humorous look at how to find truth in music, movies, television, and other aspects of pop culture. Includes photos, artwork, and sidebars.

From the glittering tinsel of Hollywood to the advertising slogan you can't get out of your head, we are surrounded by popular culture. In A Matrix of Meanings Craig Detweiler and Barry Taylor analyze aspects of popular culture and ask, What are they doing? What do they represent? and What do they say about the world in which we live? Rather than deciding whether Bono deserves our admiration, the authors examine the phenomenon of celebrity idolization. Instead of deciding whether Nike's "Just do it" campaign is morally questionable, they ask what its success reflects about our society. A Matrix of Meanings is a hip, entertaining guide to the maze of popular culture. Plentiful photos, artwork, and humorous sidebars make for delightful reading. Readers who distrust popular culture as well as those who love it will find useful insight into developing a Christian worldview in a secular culture.

In the past fifty years, scholars of human development have been moving from studying change in humans within sharply defined periods, to seeing many more of these phenomenon as more profitably studied over time and in relation to other processes. The Handbook of Life-Span Development, Volume 1: Cognition, Biology, and Methods presents the study of human development conducted by the best scholars in the 21st century. Social workers, counselors and public health workers will receive coverage of of the biological and cognitive aspects of human change across the lifespan.

This discussion responds to the work of Langdon Winner, Albert Borgmann, Charles Taylor, Martin Heidegger, David Abram, and others."--BOOK JACKET.

This is the first extended discussion of preferred interpretation in language understanding, integrating much of the best research in linguistic pragmatics from the last two decades. When we speak, we mean more than we say. In this book Stephen C. Levinson explains some general processes that underlie presumptions in communication. This is the first extended discussion of preferred interpretation in language understanding, integrating much of the best research in linguistic pragmatics from the last two decades. Levinson outlines a theory of presumptive meanings, or preferred interpretations, governing the use of language, building on the idea of implicature developed by the philosopher H.P. Grice. Some of the indirect information carried by speech is presumed by default because it is carried by general principles, rather than inferred from specific assumptions about intention and context. Levinson examines this class of general pragmatic inferences in detail, showing how they apply to a wide range of linguistic constructions. This approach has radical consequences for how we think about language and communication.

The Grand Narrative of Christianity that the Bible created is dead, and the Bible is silent. Does the Bible have anything relevant to say to our modern circumstances? We ask, where did God come from? What happened to God? God’s Autopsy reinterprets soul and God as historical-psychological phenomena related to the cultural structure of consciousness, the invisible shared context of thought, which has changed dramatically over the past three millennia. This book offers a new way to understand the trajectory of Western civilization by making the implicit foundation of Western consciousness—soul—visible and conscious. Our modern Western consciousness is radically different from that of antiquity when the Bible emerged. Jung’s psychological-philosophical insight that whenever we speak about the psyche it is the psyche speaking about itself, leads to the realization that today consciousness has come home to itself. Beginning with preliterate polytheism, the emergence of the transcendent god Yahweh and Christ, which led directly to the Enlightenment, objective soul continues to unfold itself. How did late modernity become a topsy-turvy, quantum, virtual, digital, impersonal, and abstract world that appears to be running away from us? The answer is unexpectedly and shockingly in the Bible itself.