In 21st century America, personhood is under daily assault, sometimes with dire consequences. Scientist, ethicist, and ordained minister Craig C. Malbon encourages the reader to consider such assaults on personhood endured by victims of abortion, ageism, Alzheimer’s disease, drug addiction, mental and physical disabilities, gender, gender orientation, racism, sexual preference, identity politics, and our will-to-power over the “other.” In exploring personhood status, Malbon poses difficult questions for us. Is personhood assigned as all-or-nothing, or is it a sliding scale based upon criteria arbitrarily aimed at our vulnerabilities? Does the voiceless embryo and fetus have advocates who can speak to the moral question of abortion? Is the personhood of an economically insecure pregnant woman degraded to the point where lack of access to early termination of pregnancy results in “coercive childbearing?” Does being a member of the LGBTQI+ community target one for assaults on personhood, to the extreme of being killed? In delving into the biology and psychology of assaults of “self” upon the “other,” Malbon sees powerful linkages of everyday assaults on personhood to darker, profound “original sins” that are foundational to the rise of the American empire, i.e., assaults on the indigenous Native Americans and assaults derivative to the institution of slavery upon Africans, African Americans, and their descendants.

As much a model for future research as a study of the status of the fetus, this book offers an examination of one of the most divisive and complex issues of American life."--BOOK JACKET.

Find Your Way to Freedom Today! If you were abused or neglected as a child, chances are that you have been your whole life, whether you are a man, a woman, or a teen. Child abuse so mangles the personality that the victim unconsciously attracts abusers throughout the life cycle. Lies about yourself were planted deep in your mind by the abuse, and you still believe them. Until you understand exactly what the abuse did to you, you cannot get free. "Soul Rape: Recovering Personhood After Abuse" provides an effective 7-step program for use by victims, their therapists, and for group work. In this book, survivors and professionals will discover: How celebrities become addicts Why twelve-step programs don't work and can be extremely harmful What a faith-based 7-step program for abuse recovery can do for you How addressing abuse solves cycle of addiction Why mental illness is a reaction to somebody else's craziness How group work can transform victims into survivors Why "bootleg" churches are starving souls and endangering America PLUS A Test to Find DANGEROUS STUDENTS before it's too late Therapists acclaim for "Soul Rape" ""Soul Rape" is a tour de force of the tortured landscape of child abuse and its pernicious long-term outcomes. Numerous case studies expertly intertwine with theoretical insights to produce the equivalent of a comprehensive and unconventional treatment modality. This book is an important contribution toward the edification of victims and institutions alike." --Sam Vaknin, PhD, author "Malignant Self-Love" "This book should be compulsory reading for anyone dealing with abused children or abused adults, or adult survivors of childhood abuse: physicians, psychologists, and other therapists, teachers, protective workers, and so on. And the language is so clear and nontechnical that it will be of enormous benefit to the survivors of trauma themselves, and even to parents who want to ensure the safety and wellbeing of their children." --Robert Rich, PhD, M.A.P.S, A.A.S.H. Learn more at www.RecoveringFromAbuse.com From Loving Healing Press www.LovingHealing.com

LONGLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD LONGLISTED FOR THE RSL ONDAATJE PRIZE LONGLISTED FOR THE WALTER SCOTT PRIZE FOR HISTORICAL FICTION LONGLISTED FOR THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE "An amazing achievement. . . A compulsively readable novel, so canny and weird and surfeited with the reality of human capacity and ingenuity that I am stymied for comparison. Dickens and David Lynch? Defoe meets Margaret Atwood? Judge for yourself." —Gregory Maguire, New York Times-bestselling author of Wicked The wry, macabre, unforgettable tale of an ambitious orphan in Revolutionary Paris, befriended by royalty and radicals, who transforms herself into the legendary Madame Tussaud. In 1761, a tiny, odd-looking girl named Marie is born in a village in Switzerland. After the death of her parents, she is apprenticed to an eccentric wax sculptor and whisked off to the seamy streets of Paris, where they meet a domineering widow and her quiet, pale son. Together, they convert an abandoned monkey house into an exhibition hall for wax heads, and the spectacle becomes a sensation. As word of her artistic talent spreads, Marie is called to Versailles, where she tutors a princess and saves Marie Antoinette in childbirth. But outside the palace walls, Paris is roiling: The revolutionary mob is demanding heads, and . . . at the wax museum, heads are what they do. In the tradition of Gregory Maguire's Wicked and Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus, Edward Carey's Little is a darkly endearing cavalcade of a novel—a story of art, class, determination, and how we hold on to what we love.

Plants are people too? No, but in this work of philosophical botany Matthew Hall challenges readers to reconsider the moral standing of plants, arguing that they are other-than-human persons. Plants constitute the bulk of our visible biomass, underpin all natural ecosystems, and make life on Earth possible. Yet plants are considered passive and insensitive beings rightly placed outside moral consideration. As the human assault on nature continues, more ethical behavior toward plants is needed. Hall surveys Western, Eastern, Pagan, and Indigenous thought as well as modern science for attitudes toward plants, noting the particular resources for plant personhood and those modes of thought which most exclude plants. The most hierarchical systems typically put plants at the bottom, but Hall finds much to support a more positive view of plants. Indeed, some indigenous animisms actually recognize plants as relational, intelligent beings who are the appropriate recipeints of care and respect. New scientific findings encourage this perspective, revealing that plants possess many of the capacities of sentience and mentality traditionally denied them.

This inter-disciplinary collection explores bullying and the abuse of power in a range of settings in which they make themselves known, including schools; workplaces and institutions of higher education from a range of perspectives, including psychology, sociology, philosophy and ethics.

The "natural law" worldview developed over the course of almost two thousand years beginning with Plato and Aristotle and culminating with St. Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. This tradition holds that the world is ordered, intelligible and good, that there are objective moral truths which we can know and that human beings can achieve true happiness only by following our inborn nature, which draws us toward our own perfection. Most accounts of the natural law are based on a God-centered understanding of the world. After the Natural Law traces this tradition from Plato and Aristotle to Thomas Aquinas and then describes how and why modern philosophers such as Descartes, Locke and Hobbes began to chip away at this foundation. The book argues that natural law is a necessary foundation for our most important moral and political values – freedom, human rights, equality, responsibility and human dignity, among others. Without a theory of natural law, these values lose their coherence: we literally cannot make sense of them given the assumptions of modern philosophy. Part I of the book traces the development of natural law theory from Plato and Aristotle through the crowning achievement of Thomas Aquinas. Part II explores how modern philosophers have systematically chipped away at the only coherent foundation for these values. As a result, our most important moral and political ideals today are incoherent. Modern political and moral thinkers have been led either to dilute the meaning of such terms as freedom or the moral good – or abandon these ideas altogether. Thus, modern philosophy and political thought are leading us either toward anarchy or totalitarianism. The conclusion, entitled "Why God Matters", shows how even the philosophical assumptions of the natural law depend on a personal God.