As the first monk in the desert, Antony became an early Christian superstar, eclipsing his many ascetic predecessors. The introduction of asceticism into the wilderness also represented an encounter between Christian and Hellenistic ideas. For centuries Greeks had considered the uncultivated geography intrinsically primordial, a chaotic place where man struggled to remain human. The wilderness represented an eternal ordeal, where man always faced fierce beasts, disorder, and death, but also where simultaneously he could attain boundless wealth, wisdom, and even physical immortality. Through Athanasius of Alexandria's fourth-century biography of Antony, we learn how the Christian appropriation of Greek ideas on geography, bodies and immortality raised asceticism to an entirely new level. Placed in his uncultivated landscape, Antony became a true martyr, an athlete of God, and a holy man able to retrieve the bodily incorruptibility lost in the Fall, which all Christians could look forward to at the end of times. In this way Athanasius employed a traditional Greek worldview to demonstrate the superiority of Christianity over Paganism, which never promised ordinary people anything but an eternal existence as dead and disembodied souls.

Special 2018 Edition From the new Introduction by Janet L. Miller, Teachers College, Columbia University: "Maxine Greene never claimed to be a visionary thinker. But forty years later, her trepidations detailed throughout 1978's Landscapes of Learning now appear unnervingly prescient. Witness and treasure Landscapes as evidence of her matchless abilities to inspire myriad educators and students worldwide." “I would suggest that there must always be a place in teacher education for ‘foundations’ people, whose fundamental concern is with opening new perspectives on the many faces of the human world.” —Maxine Greene The essays in this volume demonstrate clearly that Maxine Greene is herself an example of the kind of “foundations” specialist she hopes to see: someone who can stimulate, inform, and bring new insights to teachers, students, curriculum planners, administrators, policymakers—indeed all those concerned with education in its broadest sense. These essays, a number of them based on lectures presented to various professional organizations, reveals her dedication to learning and teaching, as it reveals her belief in the potential of each individual person. A philosopher whose orientation is largely existential and phenomenological, she seeks to demystify aspects of today’s technological society, to question taken-for-granted notions of social justice and equality, and to elucidate conflicts between youth and age, the poor and the middle class, minorities and Whites, male and female. As a humanist, she calls for self-reflectiveness, wide-awakeness, and personal transformation within the context of each person’s own lived world—each one’s particular landscape of work, experience, and aspiration. Recognizing the multiple realities that compose experience, the many landscapes against which sense-making proceeds, the essays are grouped in four sections: intellectual and moral components of emancipatory education; social issues and their implications for approaches to pedagogy; artistic-aesthetic considerations in the making of curriculum; and the cultural significance of women’s predicaments today. All are richly illuminated by examples; all are written with grace and passion; all will help readers achieve greater self-understanding and critical consciousness. “This is a significant book.”—Phi Delta Kappan “Maxine Greene forces us to consider what we can do even in a limited way and to begin to understand where we have failed.” —Cross Currents

Primordial Landscapes:Iceland Revealed elegantly explores the diverse and raw beauty of Iceland's extraordinary landscapes through striking images by photographer and naturalist Feodor Pitcairn and the inspired words of geophysicist, author and poet Ari Trausti Gudmundsson.This collection illuminates topographical phenomenon shaped and crafted by the most powerful natural forces on earth: rain and glacier melt from thunderous waterfalls and rivers that carve at the earth's surface; arctic snow and ice peppering teh land and sea with striking shapes and patterns, feeding the climate and water cycles; lava flows from active volcanos, that build vast textured landforms where life can begin and take hold. These are the beautiful and extraordinary results of our planet's most fundamental geological processes.

This book traces changing perceptions of Egypt's monastic landscape through an analysis of archaeological and documentary evidence from late antiquity.

Mountains contain a rich and diverse set of remnants left by human societies. They have been inhabited since prehistory and have been transformed by human activity during prehistorical and historical times, and that history defines mountain landscapes as we know them today. Archaeology of Mountain Landscapes contains twenty contributions by forty-one specialists currently researching mountain areas in the Americas, Asia, and Europe. The different case studies address the subject diachronically, ranging from prehistory to modern times, and employ a variety of methodological strategies, including archaeological surveys and excavation, paleoenvironmental studies, and historical and ethnographical research. This volume demonstrates how multidisciplinary archaeological fieldwork is radically changing our vision of mountain landscapes. Viewing mountain landscapes as archaeological documents contributes to our understanding of the history of mountain environments and offers new archaeological datasets to use in the interpretation of human societies. Taken together, the essays collected here offer a comprehensive view of current research and suggest new directions for future study.

Wilson Harris is one of the outstanding literary innovators of the century. His novels date from The Palace of the Peacock to Jonestown . This long-awaited volume matches Harris's career with his critical writings, from 1961 to the present day. Selected Essays of Wilson Harris brings together twenty-one lectures, addresses and essays to make available Harris's full range of writings on subjects including: * the literate imagination * traditions of myth and fable in Central and South America * the North American literary imagination, from Edgar Allen Poe, Herman Melville and Ralph Ellison, to William Faulkner and Jean Rhys * inheritances and legacies of writers of the postcolonial diaspora This comprehensive collection also comes complete with: * an extensive editorial introduction, providing valuable historical and theoretical context for the essays * a map of Guyana * bibliographies of Harris's fiction and non-fiction * appendices on the legends of El Dorado and the Holy Grail.

An argument that the perception of arid lands as wastelands is politically motivated and that these landscapes are variable, biodiverse ecosystems, whose inhabitants must be empowered. Deserts are commonly imagined as barren, defiled, worthless places, wastelands in need of development. This understanding has fueled extensive anti-desertification efforts—a multimillion-dollar global campaign driven by perceptions of a looming crisis. In this book, Diana Davis argues that estimates of desertification have been significantly exaggerated and that deserts and drylands—which constitute about 41% of the earth's landmass—are actually resilient and biodiverse environments in which a great many indigenous people have long lived sustainably. Meanwhile, contemporary arid lands development programs and anti-desertification efforts have met with little success. As Davis explains, these environments are not governed by the equilibrium ecological dynamics that apply in most other regions. Davis shows that our notion of the arid lands as wastelands derives largely from politically motivated Anglo-European colonial assumptions that these regions had been laid waste by “traditional” uses of the land. Unfortunately, such assumptions still frequently inform policy. Drawing on political ecology and environmental history, Davis traces changes in our understanding of deserts, from the benign views of the classical era to Christian associations of the desert with sinful activities to later (neo)colonial assumptions of destruction. She further explains how our thinking about deserts is problematically related to our conceptions of forests and desiccation. Davis concludes that a new understanding of the arid lands as healthy, natural, but variable ecosystems that do not necessarily need improvement or development will facilitate a more sustainable future for the world's magnificent drylands.