We live at a time in history where information is literally at our fingertips and social media gives us instant access to anyone and anything. How do we sort out the facts? How can we recognize truth and respond appropriately to those around us? “Sagacity” is a quirky little old-fashioned word that is packed with meaning. It’s like a giant gumball that seems to get bigger the longer you chew on it. In this book, the author breaks down the word into five definitions: • Quickness of Perception • Soundness in Judgement • Foresight into a Situation • Operating in Astuteness and Sharpness • Having Insight, Wisdom, Profoundness, Thoughtfulness, and Discernment Along with each definition, Stanley gives practical insight and strategies to become sagacious. Each chapter ends by highlighting two historical figures-one from the Bible and one from another point in history-who embody each particular aspect of sagacity. The reader will be encouraged and inspired by sagacious individuals such as the prophet Jeremiah, John the Baptist, Corrie ten Boom and Sacagawea. Growing sagacity is vital to unscrambling the vast array of messages and sound bites we are bombarded with each day. The reader will gain insight and be challenged to cultivate a sagacious life that treats others with grace and glorifies God.

Eight different stories from the elderly capture the heart and mind as Max Fuhrmann, Ph.D. clinical psychologist, steps from behind the professional mask to impart what he has learned from his elderly psychotherapy clients. Despite his extensive training and experience in this field, he is not prepared for how these individuals change and grow before his eyes. You will be moved and made to realize that seniors have a great deal of wisdom and coping skills. After reading this book, you may not be so quick as to feel the need to make decisions for an elderly parent or grandparent. Rather, you may want to ask their advice for you. If you are a senior, you will be made to reconsider your tendency to expect less of yourself, now that you are a sagacious elder.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1874.

The Wenzi is a Chinese philosophical text that enjoyed considerable prestige in the centuries following its creation, over two-thousand years ago. When questions regarding its authenticity arose, the text was branded a forgery and consigned to near oblivion. The discovery of an age-old Wenzi manuscript, inked on strips of bamboo, refueled interest in the text. In this combined study of the bamboo manuscript and the received text, Van Els argues that they belong to two distinct text traditions as he studies the date, authorship, and philosophy of each tradition, as well as the reception history of the received text. This study sheds light on text production and reception in Chinese history, with its changing views on authorship, originality, authenticity, and forgery, both past and present.

No thinker has reflected more deeply on the role of religion in human life than Søren Kierkegaard, who produced in little more than a decade an astonishing number of works devoted to an analysis of the kind of personality, character, and spiritual qualities needed to become an authentic human being or self. Understanding religion to consist essentially as an inward, passionate, personal relation to God or the eternal, Kierkegaard depicts the art of living religiously as a self through the creation of a kaleidoscope of poetic figures who exemplify the constituents of selfhood or the lack thereof. The present study seeks to bring Kierkegaard into conversation with contemporary empirical psychology and virtue ethics, highlighting spiritual dimensions of human existence in his thought that are inaccessible to empirical measurement, as well as challenging on religious grounds the claim that he is a virtue ethicist in continuity with the classical and medieval virtue tradition.

Sage Philosophy is an anthology of three main parts: Part one contains papers by Odera Oruka clearing the way and arguing about his research over the last decade on indigenous sages in Kenya. Part Two introduces verbatim interviews with a given number of those sages, while Part Three consists of published papers by scholars who are critics or commentators on the Oruka project. The author has spent the last decade in Kenya carrying out his research. It is the general stand of the book that the sages turn out to be thinkers or philosophers in no trivial sense, despite their lack of modern formal education. This study is a critique for all those scholars who hitherto have found no practice of critical philosophy in traditional Africa.