A Study Guide for Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz's "Vicarious Love," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

Luísa Coelho, born in Angola, has Portuguese nationality. She holds a B.A. in Germanic Philology from the Classic University of Lisbon, an M.A, in Political Philosophy from the Portuguese Catholic University, and a Ph.D. in Portuguese Studies from the University of Utrecht, Holland. She did postdoctoral work in Post-Colonial Studies in the South Atlantic (Portugal-Angola-Brazil) at the University of Bologna, Italy. She has taught in several countries, including Holland, Austria, France, Brazil, and Angola. Since 2010 she has been teaching Portuguese language, culture, and literature at the Freie Universität and Humboldt Universität in Berlin, Germany. Maria do Carmo Eggers de Vasconcelos and Philip Eggers hold Ph.Ds in English and are professors of English at the Borough of Manhattan Community College of the City University of New York. Dr. de Vasconcelos was born in Portugal, grew up in Lourenço Marques (now Maputo), Mozambique, and spent time in Luanda, London, Munich, Paris, Jakarta, Denpasar, and other cities. Along with degrees from the National Conservatory of Lisbon and from the Classic University of Lisbon, where she also completed postgraduate studies in American Culture and Literature, she received certificates in language, literature, art, and philosophy from various other European universities. In New York City, she also trained in conflict resolution, completed studies in gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality, and earned a Ph.D. from the City University of New York Graduate Center. Previously, with Dr. Dolores Deluise, she translated the novella Monique by Luísa Coelho into English from the Portuguese. Dr. Eggers, a native of Indiana, received his B.A. from Columbia College and his M.A. and Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. For eighteen years he was the elected chairperson of the English Department at the Borough of Manhattan Community College. Dr. de Vasconcelos and Dr. Eggers teach a variety of writing and literature courses, including world literature, post-colonial literature, the short story, modern poetry, autobiography and many others. They have published articles, scholarly books, textbooks, and translations. Together they are proficient in a number of European languages. Their careers and destiny brought them together; they are married and enjoy working together and exploring the U.S.A., other countries and cultures.

The title of Charles Taliaferro’s book is derived from poems and stories in which a person in peril or on a quest must follow a cord or string in order to find the way to happiness, safety, or home. In one of the most famous of such tales, the ancient Greek hero Theseus follows the string given him by Ariadne to mark his way in and out of the Minotaur’s labyrinth. William Blake's poem “Jerusalem” uses the metaphor of a golden string, which, if followed, will lead one to heaven itself. Taliaferro extends Blake’s metaphor to illustrate the ways we can link what we see, feel, and do with deep spiritual realities. Taliaferro offers a foundational case for the recognition of the experience of the eternal God of Christianity, in which God is understood as the fount of all goodness and the subject and object of our best love, revealed through scripture, tradition, philosophical reflection, and encountered in everyday events. He addresses philosophical obstacles to the recognition of such experiences, especially objections from the “new atheists,” and explores the values involved in thinking and experiencing God as eternal. These include the belief that the eternal goodness of God subordinates temporal goods, such as the pursuit of fame and earthly glory; that God is the essence of life; and that the eternal God hallows domestic goods, blessing the everyday goods of ordinary life. An exploration of the moral and spiritual riches of the Christian tradition as an alternative to materialism and naturalism, The Golden Cord brings an originality and depth to the debate in accessible and engaging prose.

The author explores the relationship between contemplative and apostolic aspects of religious life in accounts by and about religious women in the Spanish Indies during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

A Vintage Shorts “Short Story Month” Selection Pranab Chakraborty was a fellow Bengali from Calcutta who had washed up on the shores of Central Square. Soon he was one of the family. From the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, a staggeringly beautiful and precise story about a Bengali family in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the impossibilities of love, and the unanticipated pleasures and complications of life in America. “Hell-Heaven” is Jhumpa Lahiri’s ode to the intimate secrets of closest kin, from the acclaimed collection Unaccustomed Earth. An eBook short.

Many consider empathy to be the basis of moral action. However, the ability to empathize with others is also a prerequisite for deliberate acts of humiliation and cruelty. In The Dark Sides of Empathy, Fritz Breithaupt contends that people often commit atrocities not out of a failure of empathy but rather as a direct consequence of over-identification and a desire to increase empathy. Even well-meaning compassion can have many unintended consequences, such as intensifying conflicts or exploiting others. Empathy plays a central part in a variety of highly problematic behaviors. From mere callousness to terrorism, exploitation to sadism, and emotional vampirism to stalking, empathy all too often motivates and promotes malicious acts. After tracing the development of empathy as an idea in German philosophy, Breithaupt looks at a wide-ranging series of case studies—from Stockholm syndrome to Angela Merkel's refugee policy and from novels of the romantic era to helicopter parents and murderous cheerleader moms—to uncover how narcissism, sadism, and dangerous celebrity obsessions alike find their roots in the quality that, arguably, most makes us human.