This book offers a thorough examination of the novels of Irmtraud Morgner (1933-1990), one of the most talented, compelling and overlooked writers within East German feminist and avant-garde circles. Using a combination of theoretical approaches - including Adorno's aesthetic theories and Bakhtinian analyses of dialogism and the carnivalesque - the author traces Morgner's engagement with postmodernist aesthetic strategies back to her efforts, beginning in the early 1970s, to pose questions about effective political practices. Morgner's work sheds new light on the fraught relationship between GDR intellectuals and the state, a hotly debated topic that marks most recent attempts to understand literary culture in the German Democratic Republic. Situating Morgner's fiction at the intersection of postmodern and feminist theory, this study also offers new evidence for viewing literature from the GDR as significantly more complex and aesthetically interesting than has been previously assumed.

Lyrical narratives that chronicle a long marriage, rich with wit, dark irony, and poignancy. In her long-awaited second volume, Mary Stewart Hammond chronicles a long marriage with sharp wit, dark irony, and poignancy. As James Merrill says of Hammond’s poems, they “brim with what the whole world knows.” Entering History opens on a middle-aged couple, modern-day travelers in an ancient setting. The collection follows their relationship through time and place, combining the personal and the historical in stories of the family—siblings, a daughter, and the very different marriage of the poet’s parents. The marriage poems share the intimacy, erotic playfulness, irritations, worries, and angers that are part of an enduring love and a long marriage. In “Portrait of My Husband Reading Henry James,” the poet paints her husband using syntax and language that evoke James’s. In “Venasque,” the wintry village, perched on the edge of a cliff, serves as a metaphor for the existential crisis facing the couple. “Lines composed at Beaufort, South Carolina, a few miles above Parris Island,” about the poet’s brother, moves back and forth between the Civil War and the preparations of troops for today’s wars. In “Jacob and Esau with Sister,” two brothers, in a transaction as old as oral history, highlight its consequences in the twenty-first century. “Anniversary” is a heartbreaking elegy for a third brother who kills himself. Hammond reaches into the past and present of the American family, closing Entering History where it began, with the couple in bed, now older, harkening back to the bed they shared when they were newlyweds. These powerful, beautifully crafted, lyrical narratives give depth to an examination of life—its joys, sorrows, laughter, and tragedies.

The High Holy Days -- Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur -- are for many Jews the highlight of the Jewish year. The liturgy for the Days of Awe are the longest and most complex of the year, leaving a large number of attendees without a complete understanding of the occasion's significance. Entering The High Holy Days provides historical background and interpretation of the ideas, practices, and liturgy and lends them contemporary relevance to today's Jews. Reuven Hammer received his ordination and doctorate in theology from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. He is the former president of the Rabbinical Assembly and head of the Rabbinical Court of the Masorti Movement.

The central task of Being With God is an analysis of the relation between apophaticism, trinitarian theology, and divine-human communion through a critical comparison of the trinitarian theologies of the Eastern Orthodox theologians Vladimir Lossky (1903–58) and John Zizioulas (1931– ), arguably two of the most influential Orthodox theologians of the past century. These two theologians identify as the heart and center of all theological discourse the realism of divine-human communion, which is often understood in terms of the familiar Orthodox concept of theosis, or divinization. The Incarnation, according to Lossky and Zizioulas, is the event of a real divine-human communion that is made accessible to all; God has become human so that all may participate fully in the divine life. Aristotle Papanikolaou shows how an ontology of divine-human communion is at the center of both Lossky's and Zizioulas's theological projects. He also shows how, for both theologians, this core belief is used as a self-identifying marker against "Western" theologies. Papanikolaou maintains, however, that Lossky and Zizioulas hold profoundly different views on how to conceptualize God as the Trinity. Their key difference is over the use of apophaticism in theology in general and especially the relation of apophaticism to the doctrine of the Trinity. For Lossky, apophaticism is the central precondition for a trinitarian theology; for Zizioulas, apophaticism has a much more restricted role in theological discourse, and the God experienced in the eucharist is not the God beyond being but the immanent life of the trinitarian God. Papanikolaou provides readers with a richer understanding of contemporary Orthodox theology through his analysis of the consensus and debate between two leading Orthodox theologians.

Erich Fromm’s body of work, written more than 50 years ago, was prophetic of the contemporary moment: Increasingly, global society is threatened by the many-headed monster of corporate greed, neo-liberalism, nihilism, extreme fundamentalist beliefs, and their resulting effects on the natural world and the lived lives of people. Fromm clearly warned us of the peril of the misuse of technology and the destructive nature of man’s perverse desire to possess, control and/or destroy. Through his theories of having vs. being, the importance of hope as active resistance, and his notion of freedom as the capacity to love self, and others, Fromm encouraged his readers to cultivate biophilic ways of being in the world that will counter and heal the impending necrophilic plunder of man’s hubris. This multi-authored volume sheds new light on Fromm’s forgotten role in the formation of contemporary thought through an engaging variety of reflexive and historical narratives from fields of sociology, clinical psychology, political science, critical theory of religion and education. Key concepts from his body of work are interpreted and expressed in ways that offer hopeful and humane alternatives to the present global conditions of despair, greed and depersonalization.

Information technology is a rapidly changing field in which researchers and devel- ers must continuously set their vision on the next generation of technologies and the systems that they enable. The Next Generation Information Technologies and Systems (NGITS) series of conferences provides a forum for presenting and discussing the latest advances in information technology. NGITS conferences are international events held in Israel; previous conferences have taken place in 1993, 1995, 1997, 1999, 2002, and 2006. In addition to 14 reviewed papers, the conference featured two keynote lectures and an invited talk by notable experts. The selected papers may be classified roughly in five broad areas: • Middleware and Integration • Modeling • Healthcare/Biomedical • Service and Information Management • Applications NGITS 2009 also included a demonstration session and an industrial track focusing on how to make software development more efficient by cutting expenses with techn- ogy and infrastructures. This event is the culmination of efforts by many talented and dedicated individuals.