"A New Creed" is, by all accounts, a dominant feature of The United Church of Canada. Since its initial writing in 1968, it has come to be a primary symbol of the denomination in the ancient Christian (baptismal) sense of the word and also in the modern. The Search for a Symbol reveals the fascinating and largely untold story of "A New Creed's" origins. It also engages in an unprecedented historical, literary, and theological analysis of the creed's text. This book offers the provocative argument that though "A New Creed" should continue to have a place in the life and liturgy of Canada's largest Protestant church, it does not take full advantage of the possible benefits that can come from healthy practices of creedal confession--namely teaching people about the biblical story of salvation as well as connecting them in relationship with God and one another. For these purposes, the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds are shown to be better confessional options, and readily available ones within The United Church's tradition.

Focusing on theories of verbal symbolism, Tzvetan Todorov here presents a history of semiotics. From an account of the semiotic doctrines embodied in the works of classical rhetoric to an exploration of representative modern concepts of the symbol found in ethnology, psychoanalysis, linguistics, and poetics, Todorov examines the rich tradition of sign theory. In the course of his discussion Todorov treats the works of such writers as Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, Augustine, Condillac, Lessing, Diderot, Goethe, Novalis, the Schlegel brothers, Levy-Bruhl, Freud, Saussure, and Jakobson.

Symbols play an integral role in branding programs. This book explores the visual language of symbols according to their most basic element: form. Over 1,300 symbols from all over the world are here categorized by visual type, divested of all agendas, meanings, and messages that might be associated with them so that the effectiveness of their composition and impact can be assessed without distraction and so that the reader can enjoy them as a pictorial language in their own right. Every symbol is captioned with information on who it was designed for, who designed it, when, and what the symbol stands for. These sections are interspersed with short but detailed case studies featuring classic examples of symbols still in use, and exceptional examples of recently designed symbols. This comprehensive volume is an indispensable resource for designers working on identity systems, and an engaging showcase of this exciting field. Now in a compact format.

The New York Times bestselling author of Tell Me Three Things and What to Say Next delivers a poignant and hopeful novel about resilience and reinvention, first love and lifelong friendship, the legacies of loss, and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive. "A luminous, lovely story about a girl who builds a future from the ashes of her past." --KATHLEEN GLASGOW, New York Times bestselling author of Girl in Pieces Sometimes looking to the past helps you find your future. Abbi Hope Goldstein is like every other teenager, with a few smallish exceptions: her famous alter ego, Baby Hope, is the subject of internet memes, she has asthma, and sometimes people spontaneously burst into tears when they recognize her. Abbi has lived almost her entire life in the shadow of the terrorist attacks of September 11. On that fateful day, she was captured in what became an iconic photograph: in the picture, Abbi (aka "Baby Hope") wears a birthday crown and grasps a red balloon; just behind her, the South Tower of the World Trade Center is collapsing. Now, fifteen years later, Abbi is desperate for anonymity and decides to spend the summer before her seventeenth birthday incognito as a counselor at Knights Day Camp two towns away. She's psyched for eight weeks in the company of four-year-olds, none of whom have ever heard of Baby Hope. Too bad Noah Stern, whose own world was irrevocably shattered on that terrible day, has a similar summer plan. Noah believes his meeting Baby Hope is fate. Abbi is sure it's a disaster. Soon, though, the two team up to ask difficult questions about the history behind the Baby Hope photo. But is either of them ready to hear the answers?

A novel account of the evolution of language and the cognitive capacities on which language depends. In From Signal to Symbol, Ronald Planer and Kim Sterelny propose a novel theory of language: that modern language is the product of a long series of increasingly rich protolanguages evolving over the last two million years. Arguing that language and cognition coevolved, they give a central role to archaeological evidence and attempt to infer cognitive capacities on the basis of that evidence, which they link in turn to communicative capacities. Countering other accounts, which move directly from archaeological traces to language, Planer and Sterelny show that rudimentary forms of many of the elements on which language depends can be found in the great apes and were part of the equipment of the earliest species in our lineage. After outlining the constraints a theory of the evolution of language should satisfy and filling in the details of their model, they take up the evolution of words, composite utterances, and hierarchical structure. They consider the transition from a predominantly gestural to a predominantly vocal form of language and discuss the economic and social factors that led to language. Finally, they evaluate their theory in terms of the constraints previously laid out.