Humanity’s Beauty and Risk

Humanity’s Beauty and Risk
Author: Ahmed Fathi Shalabi
Publisher: FriesenPress
Total Pages: 182
Release: 2023-09-28
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1039193684

We experience beauty and risk on a daily basis: in what we see, what we feel, how we accept and judge others, and why we are human. Beauty and risk both challenge and frustrate us to think, learn, listen, and question ourselves. Humanity’s Beauty and Risk is an exploration of that challenge. One part poetry and two parts philosophy, this text explores the stages of human development: Infancy’s Dictums, Toddler’s Structure, Childhood’s Truth, Adolescence’s Love, Adult’s Maturity, and the Higher Self. Readers are guided to be fully present, aware of where they are and what they are doing, and to question what they think they know about these two captivating states. This mental exercise can be practised on a daily basis, making us more aware of how and why we experience, feel, and accept beauty and risk in our lives. When we reflect on those experiences, we think about what makes us different—and what makes us human.


The Precipice

The Precipice
Author: Toby Ord
Publisher: Hachette Books
Total Pages: 480
Release: 2020-03-24
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 031648489X

This urgent and eye-opening book makes the case that protecting humanity's future is the central challenge of our time. If all goes well, human history is just beginning. Our species could survive for billions of years - enough time to end disease, poverty, and injustice, and to flourish in ways unimaginable today. But this vast future is at risk. With the advent of nuclear weapons, humanity entered a new age, where we face existential catastrophes - those from which we could never come back. Since then, these dangers have only multiplied, from climate change to engineered pathogens and artificial intelligence. If we do not act fast to reach a place of safety, it will soon be too late. Drawing on over a decade of research, The Precipice explores the cutting-edge science behind the risks we face. It puts them in the context of the greater story of humanity: showing how ending these risks is among the most pressing moral issues of our time. And it points the way forward, to the actions and strategies that can safeguard humanity. An Oxford philosopher committed to putting ideas into action, Toby Ord has advised the US National Intelligence Council, the UK Prime Minister's Office, and the World Bank on the biggest questions facing humanity. In The Precipice, he offers a startling reassessment of human history, the future we are failing to protect, and the steps we must take to ensure that our generation is not the last. "A book that seems made for the present moment." —New Yorker


Creation and Humanity

Creation and Humanity
Author: Ian A. McFarland
Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
Total Pages: 496
Release: 2009-01-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0664231357

This major sourcebook provides significant primary readings from the history of Christian theology on the topics of creation and humanity. Beginning with an extended introduction, McFarland fleshes out the topics of creation and humanity in sections such as "God as Creator," "The Human Creature," "Evil and Sin," and "Providence," and provides a brief introduction to each selection that demonstrates its importance and establishes its historical context. This collection will be of special value in classrooms, allowing students to experience firsthand some major works that shaped efforts to forge a sound Christian understanding of creation and humanity.


The Human Capacity for Transformational Change

The Human Capacity for Transformational Change
Author: Valerie A. Brown
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2014-02-24
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1136263527

Pressures for transformational change have become a regular feature of most fields of human endeavour. Master-thinkers and visionaries alike have reframed existing divisions as connecting relationships, bringing together as dynamic systems the supposed opposites of parts and wholes, stability and change, individuals and society, and rational and creative thinking. This reframing of opposites as interconnected wholes has led to realisation of the power of a collective mind. This book offers ways and means of creating the synergies that are crucial in influencing a desired transformational change towards a just and sustainable future. It describes how and why our current decision-making on any complex issue is marked by clashes between the different interests involved. More optimistically, the book pursues a mode of thinking that brings together government, specialised and community interests at the local, regional and personal scales in a collective transformation process. Practical examples signal the emergence of a new knowledge tradition that promises to be as powerful as the scientific enlightenment. Written in accessible language, this book will be insightful reading for anyone struggling with transformational change, especially researchers, students and professionals in the fields of administration, governance, environmental management, international development, politics, public health, public law, sociology, and community development


The Beauty of Humanity Movement

The Beauty of Humanity Movement
Author: Camilla Gibb
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 229
Release: 2011-03-17
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1101476125

The acclaimed author of Sweetness in the Belly journeys to Vietnam in this rich and tantalizing new novel. Raised in the United States but Vietnamese by birth, Maggie has come to Hanoi seeking clues to the fate of her father, a dissident artist who disappeared during the war. Her search brings her to Old Man Hu'ng's pho stall. The old man once had a shop frequented by revolutionary artists, but now Tu', a hustling young entrepreneur, is his most faithful customer. Maggie, Hu'ng, and Tu' come together during a highly charged season that will mark them forever. Exploring the indelible legacies of war and art, as well as love's power to renew, The Beauty of Humanity Movement is a stellar achievement by a globally renowned literary light.


The Beauty and Fascination of Science

The Beauty and Fascination of Science
Author: Anatoly L. Buchachenko
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 195
Release: 2020-07-14
Genre: Science
ISBN: 9811525927

In this book, Professor Anatoly Buchachenko gives a brief and informative description of the most striking achievements and discoveries made in the major natural sciences at the turn of the century – in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The author has a rare ability to describe scientific discoveries so that these achievements and their significance are understandable not only by professionals and scientists of all specialities, but for any reader interested in modern science, its role in the existence of mankind, and its impact on human society. Originally published in Russian, Professor Buchachenko’s book describes the interaction of natural sciences with social ones—philosophy and history—as well as the part played by the human factor in the development of science, especially the role of the great scientists.


X-Risk

X-Risk
Author: Thomas Moynihan
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 481
Release: 2020-10-20
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1913029824

How humanity came to contemplate its possible extinction. From forecasts of disastrous climate change to prophecies of evil AI superintelligences and the impending perils of genome editing, our species is increasingly concerned with the prospects of its own extinction. With humanity's future on this planet seeming more insecure by the day, in the twenty-first century, existential risk has become the object of a growing field of serious scientific inquiry. But, as Thomas Moynihan shows in X-Risk, this preoccupation is not exclusive to the post-atomic age of global warming and synthetic biology. Our growing concern with human extinction itself has a history. Tracing this untold story, Moynihan revisits the pioneers who first contemplated the possibility of human extinction and stages the historical drama of this momentous discovery. He shows how, far from being a secular reprise of religious prophecies of apocalypse, existential risk is a thoroughly modern idea, made possible by the burgeoning sciences and philosophical tumult of the Enlightenment era. In recollecting how we first came to care for our extinction, Moynihan reveals how today's attempts to measure and mitigate existential threats are the continuation of a project initiated over two centuries ago, which concerns the very vocation of the human as a rational, responsible, and future-oriented being.


Faster Than Light

Faster Than Light
Author: Marilyn Nelson
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 175
Release: 2012-11-12
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0807147354

Conjuring numerous voices and characters across oceans and centuries, Faster Than Light explores widely disparate experiences through the lens of traditional poetic forms. This volume contains a selection of Marilyn Nelson's new and uncollected poems as well as work from each of her lyric histories of eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century African American individuals and communities. Poems include the stories of historical figures like Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old boy lynched in 1955, and the inhabitants of Seneca Village, an African American community razed in 1857 for the creation of Central Park. "Bivouac in a Storm" tells the story of a group of young soldiers, later known as the Tuskegee Airmen, as they trained near Biloxi, Mississippi, "marching in summer heat / thick as blackstrap molasses, under trees / haunted by whippings." Later pieces range from the poet's travels in Africa, Europe, and Polynesia, to poems written in collaboration with Father Jacques de Foiard Brown, a former Benedictine monk and the subject of Nelson's playful fictional fantasy sequence, "Adventure-Monk!" Both personal and historical, these poems remain grounded in everyday details but reach toward spiritual and moral truths.


Humanity and Ukraine

Humanity and Ukraine
Author: Oksana Koshulko
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 199
Release: 2024-09-16
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1666960535

Humanity and Ukraine: Resistance through Language, Culture, and Taking up of Armsis dedicated to a nation under siege, the Ukrainian heroes, who stood up to fight for the freedom and independence of Ukraine and to resist the Russian occupiers when the rest of the world believed in the embedded myth that the Russian army was the 'second army in the world.' This recounts the legendary courageous fighting and resistance by the Ukrainian military and civilians against the Russian invaders waging war on Ukraine. The book analyses the long history of Ukraine, starting with Kyivan Rus, when the Russian invaders tried to steal and rewrite Ukrainian history, through to the current situation of threat to Ukrainian culture and educational institutions, including museums, archives, and libraries. All of this continue to be under systematic and ruthless enemy fire and are subjected to looting and destruction by the occupiers. Ukrainians continue to act to create archival exhibitions, to resist and above all to fight. The book also analyses the plight of Ukrainian war refugees in host countries, of the Crimean Tatars in Russian occupied Crimea and the prospects for Ukraine as a thriving country within Europe and the world after the Ukrainian victory.