In Life in Common Tzvetan Todorov explores the construction of the self and offers new perspectives on current debates about otherness. Through the seventeenth century, solitude was considered the human condition in the Western philosophical tradition. The self was not dependent on others to perceive itself as complete. Todorov sees a reversal of this thinking beginning with the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the eighteenth century. For the first time the self was defined as incomplete without the other, and the gaze no longer served only to satisfy personal vanity but constituted the fundamental requisite for human identity. ø Todorov traces the far-reaching implications of Rousseau's new vision of the self and society through the political, philosophical, and psychoanalytical theories of Adam Smith, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Georges Bataille, Melanie Klein, and others, and the relevant literary works of Karl Philipp Moritz, the Marquis de Sade, and Marcel Proust. In an original study of the bond between parent and child, Todorov develops a compelling vision of the self as social.

As David deSilva has experienced the ancient wisdom of the Book of Common Prayer, he's been formed spiritually in deep and lasting ways. In these pages, he offers you a brand new way to use the Book of Common Prayer, exploring how Christians can be spiritually formed by the sacraments of baptism, Eucharist, marriage and last rites.

"Sweet Spot." Ever swung a baseball bat or paddled a Ping-Pong ball? If so, you know the oh-so-nice feel of the sweet spot. Life in the sweet spot rolls like the downhill side of a downwind bike ride. But you don't have to swing a bat or a club to know this. What engineers give sports equipment, God gave you. A zone, a region, a life precinct in which you were made to dwell. He tailored the curves of your life to fit an empty space in his jigsaw puzzle. And life makes sweet sense when you find your spot. But if you're like 70 percent of working adults, you haven't found it. You don't find meaning in your work, or you don't believe your talents are used. What can you do? You're suffering from the common life, and you desperately need a cure. Best-selling author Max Lucado has found it. In Cure for the Common Life, he offers practical tools for exploring and identifying your own uniqueness, motivation to put your strengths to work, and the perfect prescription for finding and living in your sweet spot for the rest of your life.

This book presents a lost tradition of inner work, the way of the householder, which was believed by the Brotherhood of Common Life to have been the teaching of the Apostles. It focuses on the emergence, amidst the decay of medieval culture, of "the mixed life," this reconciliation of action and contemplation, as the essential link between Catholic spirituality and Protestantism. The transmission of this work to lay persons seeking the interior dimensions of their lives without withdrawing from the world is presented. The hitherto monastic spiritual exercises for strengthening attention are discussed in depth. The traditional and vital Christian knowledge of the human condition, which the Brothers and Sisters verified for themselves, is emphasized, especially the crucial significance of the force of attention in the recollection of oneself and God. The importance of strengthening attentive awareness is everywhere alluded to in the sources, but virtually ignored in current accounts of the Christian heritage. The book traces a transmission of spiritual exercises supported by a strongpsychological base that is strangely familiar to the climate of today's search for meaning.

In Christ and the Common Life Luke Bretherton provides an introduction to historical and contemporary theological reflection on politics and opens up a compelling vision for a Christian commitment to democracy. In dialogue with Scripture and various traditions, Bretherton examines the dynamic relationship between who we are in relation to God and who we are as moral and political animals. He addresses fundamental political questions about poverty and injustice, forming a common life with strangers, and handling power constructively. And through his analysis of debates concerning, among other things, race, class, economics, the environ­ment, and interfaith relations, he develops an innovative political theology of democracy as a way through which Christians can speak and act faithfully within our current context. Read as a whole, or as stand-alone chapters, the book guides readers through the political landscape and identifies the primary vocabulary, ideas, and schools of thought that shape Christian reflection on politics in the West. Ideal for the classroom, Christ and the Common Life equips students to understand politics and its positive and negative role in fostering neighbor love.

Common Life looks at the various meanings of common, especially its senses of familiar and widely known; belong or relating to the community at large; and its twinned notions of simple and rudimentary and vulgar and profane. The book's perspective is religious, and is grounded in the epigraph from the Psalms: "Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him." The "waiting" that is required has to do with three things: first, our desire, as Charles Wright puts it, "to believe in belief" rather than believe; secondly, the need for a setting aside of the self, an abandonment of "every attempt to make something of oneself, even...a righteous person" in the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer; and thirdly, the "waiting" must be as Eliot wrote in the Four Quartets a waiting "without hope for hope would be hope of the wrong thing." If we learn to wait in these ways, the final section of the book suggests that we have the chance of opening ourselves to all that is graceful within life's common bounds.

What follows attempts to synthesize Husserl's social ethics and to integrate the themes of this topic into his larger philosophical concerns. Chapter I proceeds with the hypothesis that Husser! believed that all of life could be examined and lived by the transcendental phenomenologist, and therefore action was not something which one did isolated from one's commitment to being philosophical within the noetic-noematic field. Therefore besides attempting to be clear about the meaning of the reduction it relates the reduction to ethical life. Chapter II shows that the agent, properly understood, i. e. , the person, is a moral theme, indeed, reflection on the person involves an ethical reduction which leads into the essentials of moral categoriality, the topic of Chapter IV. Chapter III mediates the transcendental ego, individual person, and the social matrix by showing how the common life comes about and what the constitutive processes and ingredients of this life are. It also shows how the foundations of this life are imbued with themes which adumbrate moral categoriality discussed in Chapter IV. The final Chapters, V and VI, articulate the communitarian ideal, "the godly person of a higher order," emergent in Chapters II, III and IV, in terms of social-political and theological specifications of what this "godly" life looks like.