"[This] magnificent critical survey, with its inherent respect for both the 'Westt's mainstream high culture' and the 'radically changing world' of the 1990s, offers a new breakthrough for lay and scholarly readers alike....Allows readers to grasp the big picture of Western culture for the first time." SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE Here are the great minds of Western civilization and their pivotal ideas, from Plato to Hegel, from Augustine to Nietzsche, from Copernicus to Freud. Richard Tarnas performs the near-miracle of describing profound philosophical concepts simply but without simplifying them. Ten years in the making and already hailed as a classic, THE PASSION OF THE WESERN MIND is truly a complete liberal education in a single volume.

Most theology proceeds under the assumption that divine grace works on human beings at the points of our supposed uniqueness among earth's creatures--our freedom, our self-awareness, our language, or our rationality. Inner Animalities turns this assumption on its head. Arguing that much theological anthropology contains a deeply anti-ecological impulse, the book draws creatively on historical and scriptural texts to imagine an account of human life centered in our creaturely commonality. The tendency to deny our own human animality leaves our self-understanding riven with contradictions, disavowals, and repressions. How are human relationships transformed when God draws us into communion through our instincts, our desires, and our bodily needs? Meyer argues that humanity's exceptional status is not the result of divine endorsement, but a delusion of human sin. Where the work of God knits human beings back into creaturely connections, ecological degradation is no longer just a matter of bodily life and death, but a matter of ultimate significance. Bringing a theological perspective to the growing field of Critical Animal Studies, Inner Animalities puts Gregory of Nyssa and Karl Rahner in conversation with Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, Kelly Oliver, and Cary Wolfe. What results is not only a counterintuitive account of human life in relation with nonhuman neighbors, but also a new angle into ecological theology.

Everyone agrees that theology has failed; but the question of how to understand and respond to this failure is complex and contested. Against both the radical orthodox attempt to return to a time before the theology’s failure and the deconstructive theological attempt to open theology up to the hope of a future beyond failure, Rose proposes an account of Christian identity as constituted by, not despite, failure. Understanding failure as central to theology opens up new possibilities for confronting Christianity’s violent and kyriarchal history and abandoning the attempt to discover a pure Christ outside of the grotesque materiality of the church. The Christian mystical tradition begins with Dionysius the Areopagite’s uncomfortable but productive conjunction of Christian theology and Neoplatonism. The tensions generated by this are central to Dionysius’s legacy, visible not only in subsequent theological thought but also in much twentieth century continental philosophy as it seeks to disentangle itself from its Christian ancestry. A Theology of Failure shows how the work of Slavoj Žižek represents an attempt to repeat the original move of Christian mystical theology, bringing together the themes of language, desire, and transcendence not with Neoplatonism but with a materialist account of the world. Tracing these themes through the work of Dionysius and Derrida and through contemporary debates about the gift, violence, and revolution, this book offers a critical theological engagement with Žižek's account of social and political transformation, showing how Žižek's work makes possible a materialist reading of apophatic theology and Christian identity.

Recent progress in the field of wildlife disease ecology demonstrates that infectious disease plays a crucial role in the lives of wild animals. Parasites and pathogens should be especially important for social animals in which high contact among individuals increases the potential for disease spread. As one of the best studied mammalian groups, primates offer a unique opportunity to examine how complex behaviours (including social organization) influence the risk of acquiring infectiousdiseases, and the defences used by animals to avoid infection. This book explores the correlates of disease risk in primates, including not only social and mating behaviour but also diet, habitat use, life history, geography and phylogeny. The authors examine how a core set of host and parasite traits influence patterns of parasitism at three levels of biological organization: among individuals, among populations, and across species. A major goal is to synthesize, for the first time, fourdisparate areas of research: primate behavioural ecology, parasite biology, wildlife epidemiology, and the behavioural and immune defences employed by animals to counter infectious disease. Throughout, the authors provide an overview of the remarkable diversity of infectious agents found in wild primate populations. Additional chapters consider how knowledge of infectious diseases in wild primates can inform efforts focused on primate conservation and human health. More generally, this book identifies infectious disease as an important frontier in our understanding of primate behaviour and ecology. It highlights future challenges for testing the links between host and parasite traits, including hypotheses for the effects of disease on primate social and mating systems.

Joint author, William Hamilton, is an alumnus of Evanston Township High School, class of 1940.