We All Crave An Authentic Experience Of Intimacy. Though our hearts crave intimacy, though our minds understand our deep need for it, the self-revelation it requires is often too daunting a task. Complete and unrestrained sharing of self exposes the deepest human fear of being rejected for being ourselves. InThe Seven Levels of Intimacy,Matthew Kelly both acknowledges and calms our fears, while teaching us how to move beyond them to experience the power of true intimacy.Matthew reveals that each relationship is built upon a pattern of interaction. In the beginning stages, we rely on casual interactions, gaining familiarity by focusing on superficialities and facts. We grow closer and begin to share our opinions, learning to accept each other and embrace the growing relationship despite the difference in our experiences and viewpoints. Once our differences and opinions are shared and accepted, we feel safe enough to reveal our hopes, dreams, and feelings, developing trust. With this trust, we open ourselves and are able to share our legitimate needs, becoming liberated from carrying the burden of our real needs alone. At last, we are deeply intimate and both willing and able to reveal our deepest fears. We are beyond judgment and feel trust and acceptance. By moving through and building upon each level of intimacy, we find comfort and gain trust in our partners and ourselves until, by developing and deepening our intimacy within each level, we are able to fully open ourselves, finally opening to the possibility of truly being loved. It is through mastering the seven levels of intimacy that we will break through to fully experiencing love, commitment, trust, and happiness.The Seven Levels of Intimacyis a brilliant and practical guide to creating and sustaining intimacy, whether you are looking for a deeper sense of connection with your spouse, looking for more fulfillment in your relationship with your boyfriend or girlfriend, trying to improve your relationships with your children, or simply wondering what you should be looking for in a partner.With profound insight and the use of powerful, everyday examples, Matthew Kelly explains how we can nurture the intimacy in our relationships.The Seven Levels of Intimacyredefines how we view our interactions with others. This new understanding leads us to successfully create the strong connections, deep joy, and lasting bonds that we all long for.

“Subjectivism and Interpretative Methodology in Theory and Practice” uses the subjectivist approach originated in Max Weber’s interpretation method, Alfred Schutz’s phenomenology, and Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s sociology of knowledge to understand economic and social phenomena. This method brings human agency back into the forefront of analysis, adding new insights not only in economics and management, but also in sociology, politics, psychology and organizational behavior.

We explore the learning process and behavior of an individual with unrealistically high expectations (“overconfidence”) when outcomes also depend on an external fundamental that affects the optimal action. Moving beyond existing results in the literature, we show that the agent's beliefs regarding the fundamental converge under weak conditions. Furthermore, we identify a broad class of situations in which “learning” about the fundamental is self-defeating: it leads the individual systematically away from the correct belief and toward lower performance. Due to his overconfidence, the agent--even if initially correct--becomes too pessimistic about the fundamental. As he adjusts his behavior in response, he lowers outcomes and hence becomes even more pessimistic about the fundamental, perpetuating the misdirected learning. The greater isthe loss from choosing a suboptimal action, the further the agent's action ends up from optimal. We partially characterize environments in which self-defeating learning occurs, and show that the decisionmaker learns to take the optimal action if and only if a specific non-identifiability condition is satisfied. In contrast to an overconfident agent, an underconfident agent's misdirected learning is self-limiting and therefore not very harmful. We argue that the decision situations in question are common in economic settings, including delegation, organizational, effort, and public-policy choices.

5 minutesthe time it takes to brush your teeth, fry an egg, or pay the electric bill. In any given twenty-four-hour period, we all have 288 chances to take five minutes and just stopto think, to feel, allow ourselves time to breathe, grab hold of a thought or a word or a feeling, and capture a moment. 288 Chances is a collection of writings, each with a foundation that began in five short minutes. Open, honest, thoughtful words written from the heart, words that will hopefully engage the mind and the spirit as they relate to the simple, everyday feelings and emotions that we all experience over a lifetime. Love, Loss, Trust, Expectation. Just a few of the hopes and fears, joys and disappointments that might otherwise go unspoken, unshared, until we take the time to write them down. Could you set aside five minutes a day to challenge yourself? Challenge yourself to take one random word and write for five quick minutes, without thought to grammar or punctuationfirst connecting the bare bones, and then going back and adding some flesh and muscle, so your words might inspire, entertain, encourage, or comfort someone who might need to hear them today. Everyday life is full of ordinary moments that should inspire us all to be extraordinary. Sharing these moments with others connects us. Take five. And write it down. For more on this book and the author, please visit 288chances.blogspot.com.

Nineteenth-century Armenia was a zone of competition between the Persian, Ottoman, and the Russian Empires. Yet over the course of the century a new generation of Armenian journalists, scholars, and writers worked to transform their geographically, socially, and linguistically fragmented communities threatened by regional isolation and dissent, into a patriotic and nationally conscious population. Lisa Khachaturian seeks to explain how this profoundly divided society managed to achieve a common cultural bond. The national project that captivated nineteenth-century Eastern Armenian intellectuals was a daunting task, especially since their efforts were directed in the Caucasus--a territory known for its volatile history, its ethnic heterogeneity, and its linguistic complexity. Although this cultural and social maelstrom was both aggravated and tempered by the new Russian arena of economic growth, urban development, and heightened technology and communication, diversity was hardly a recent phenomenon in the region; it had been an endemic part of Caucasian history for centuries. Armenians were no exception to this. While the Georgians, bound to their landed nobility, generally lived within kingdoms, the Armenians experienced centuries of forced resettlement, migration, and centuries of habitation among other peoples. Some Armenians had settled in faraway countries, but many remained in scattered colonies within the boundaries of historic Armenia. This is a study of the formation of modern Armenian national consciousness under Imperial Russian rule. The Tsarist acquisition of Armenian-populated territory and consequent efforts to integrate this territory into the empire imposed sufficient unity to provide a basis for a nascent national movement. The particular influences of Russian imperial rule met the Eastern Armenian communities to create a new environment for a modern national revival. This book reviews how nineteenth-century Armenian intellectuals discussed and conceived of the nation through the formation of the Armenian press. This is a rare blend of national culture and communication networking.