Seducing Augustine: Bodies, Desires, Confessions

Augustine’s Confessions is a text that seduces. But how often do its readers respond in kind? Here three scholars who share a longstanding fascination with sexuality and Christian discourse attempt to do just that. Where prior interpreters have been inclined either to defend or to criticize Augustine’s views, Virginia Burrus, Mark Jordan, and Karmen MacKendrick set out both to seduce and to be seduced by his text.
Often ambivalent but always passionately engaged, their readings of the Confessions center on four sets of intertwined themes―secrecy and confession, asceticism and eroticism, constraint and freedom, and time and eternity. Rather than expose Augustine’s sexual history, they explore how the Confessions conjoins the erotic with the hidden, the imaginary, and the fictional. Rather than bemoan the repressiveness of his text, they uncover the complex relationship between seductive flesh and persuasive words that pervades all of its books. Rather than struggle to escape the control of the author, they embrace the painful pleasure of willed submission that lies at the erotic heart not only of the Confessions but also of Augustine’s broader understanding of sin and salvation. Rather than mourn the fateful otherworldliness of his theological vision, they plumb the bottomless depths of beauty that Augustine discovers within creation, thereby extending desire precisely by refusing satisfaction.
In unfolding their readings, the authors draw upon other works in Augustine’s corpus while building on prior Augustinian scholarship in their own overlapping fields of history, theology, and philosophy.
They also press well beyond the conventional boundaries of scholarly disciplines, conversing with such wide-ranging theorists of eroticism as Barthes, Baudrillard, Klossowski, Foucault, and Harpham. In the end, they offer not only a fresh interpretation of Augustine’s famous work but also a multivocal literary-philosophical meditation on the seductive elusiveness of desire, bodies, language, and God.

History

Mark Jordan

Karmen MacKendrick

World

Fordham University Press

The Australian Vegetarian Handbook

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Kangaroo Press Pty.Ltd ,Australia

Ocean Voyage

Network Publishing

Jonathan the spider monkey is afraid to climb tall trees, but when David, Jonathan's brother, is in need of rescue, Jonathan recovers the self-confidence he needs to rescue him.

Courage the Monkey

Children's Books

Animals

Decere Publishing

Selling Your Business: A Practical Guide to Getting It Done Right engages business owners with storytelling-narrating readers through a tour of successful and unsuccessful business transactions. Whether it is the unpacking of the life cycle of a deal or helpful Common Pitfalls sections, they illustrate how business owners can achieve the business sale they deserve and avoid the potential blunders that await them. * The authors examine which action will sabotage your efforts to sell your business - revealing too much about your company or playing your cards too close to your chest? * Why do some business sellers close deals with synergistic buyers while others court financial ones?. Fortunately, Mark Jordan, Mark Gould and Rex Slagel have provided answers in Selling Your Business: A Practical Guide to Getting It Done Right. As investment bankers and authors, they are passionate about helping business owners successfully navigate the process of selling a company. Their deep experience in delivering mergers and acquisitions advice at VERCOR uniquely positions them to bring a dose of reality to the process. Jordan, Gould and Slagel examine scores of business sales-carefully deconstructing them-for potential strengths and weaknesses. The trio also scrutinizes missteps of business owners involved in deals that fell apart so you do not make the same mistakes.

Selling Your Business: A Practical Guide to Getting It Done Right

Business & Money

Mark Gould

Rex Slagel

Management & Leadership

Driving Business Value in an Uncertain Economy

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Books by Mark Jordan