The first of three books in an exciting new series, The Book of Harry Potter Trifles, Trivias and Particularities is designed to delight and challenge Potter fans of all ages. Its nine quests, each built around a different aspect of wizardry: Hogwarts and Academia, Potions and Spells, Magical Menagerie, and others —contain questions in three skill levels: Salamander, Phoenix, and Dragon. These magical creatures increase in size, just as the questions increase in difficulty. All are associated with the element of fire, which is said to govern leadership, enthusiasm, and competitiveness, making it an ideal theme for question difficulty. An answer key at the end of each quest allows readers to check their answers by question number, with the source of the answer cited according to book and chapter number. Scattered throughout, hints and intriguing trivia tidbits, including little-known historical facts referenced in the Potter series, keep readers informed, engaged, and entertained.

In this wide-ranging and timely volume, fourteen scholars address the important question, How should we talk about religion, whether our own or the religion of others?

Writing from a diversity of perspectives and academic disciplines—philosophy, classics, medieval studies, history, anthropology, economics, political science, and art history, among others—the contributors illuminate issues at the heart of the most significant cultural, social, and political debates of our day. What emerges is not a univocal answer to the question posed in the title. Instead, by demonstrating how religion is talked about in the languages of very different academic disciplines, the essayists creatively address issues that no one should ignore: fundamentalism; the role of religion in American democracy; the tension between secular liberalism and religious rhetoric; monotheism versus pluralism; and the relationship between poverty and liberation theology.

In addition, the contributors confront such fundamental topics as the sufficiency of "reason" for a full life; the adequacy of our methods of describing and analyzing religion; the degree to which any serious confrontation with the religious experiences of others will challenge our own; and whether there can be a pluralism that does not dissolve into universal relativism. CONTRIBUTORS: Luis E. Bacigalupo, Clifford Ando, Sabine MacCormack, R. Scott Appleby, Bilinda Straight, Patrick J. Deneen, Wayne C. Booth (1921–2005), Eugene Garver, Javier Iguíñiz Echeverría, Ruth Abbey, Sol Serrano, Carol Bier, Jeffrey J. Kripal, Ebrahim Moosa.

Ethnography is much more than a collection of research techniques. The paradigm wars in educational research have pushed qualitative methods to become increasingly focused on technique and theory. The essays in this volume speak against these trends by examining ethnography as a way of understanding particularities. Examining the ethnographic enterprise itself, Particularities demonstrates the power of ethnography through discrete studies of education and race.

The first of three books in an exciting new series, The Book of Harry Potter Trifles, Trivias and Particularities is designed to delight and challenge Potter fans of all ages. Its nine quests, each built around a different aspect of wizardry - Hogwarts and Academia, Potions and Spells, Magical Menagerie, and others - contain questions in three skill levels: Salamander, Phoenix, and Dragon. These magical creatures increase in size, just as the questions increase in difficulty. All are associated with the element of fire, which is said to govern leadership, enthusiasm, and competitiveness, making it an ideal theme for question difficulty. An answer key at the end of each quest allows readers to check their answers by question number, with the source of the answer cited according to book and chapter number. Scattered throughout, hints and intriguing trivia tidbits, including little-known historical facts referenced in the Potter series, keep readers informed, engaged, and entertained.

Taking Wittgenstein's "Don't think, but look" as his motto, Richard Strier argues against the application of a priori schemes to Renaissance (and all) texts. He argues for the possibility and desirability of rigorously attentive but "pre-theoretical" reading. His approach privileges particularity and attempts to respect the "resistant structures" of texts. He opposes theories, critical and historical, that dictate in advance what texts must--or cannot--say or do.
The first part of the book, "Against Schemes," demonstrates, in discussions of Rosemond Tuve, Stephen Greenblatt, and Stanley Fish among others, how both historicist and purely theoretical approaches can equally produce distortion of particulars. The second part, "Against Received Ideas," shows how a variety of texts (by Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, and others) have been seen through the lenses of fixed, mainly conservative ideas in ways that have obscured their actual, surprising, and sometimes surprisingly radical content.

Kant claimed that the principal topics of philosophy all converge on one question: "Was ist der Mensch?" Starting with the main claim that conceptions of the human play a significant structuring role in theory construction, the contributors in this volume investigate the roles that conceptions of the human play both in philosophy and in other human and social sciences. Renowned scholars from various disciplines - philosophy, anthropology, psychology, literary studies - discuss not only the relations between philosophicy and empirical knowledge of the human being. In a rare dialogue between Anglo-Saxon and German humananities, the contributors refer to each other and take up questions of their co-contributors. Thus, controversial, cross-disciplinary debates develop, arise providing new arguments and insights to a question which is methodologically prior to that posed by Kant: How can conceptions of the human be justified?

Most contemporary moral philosophy is concerned with issues of rationality, universality, impartiality, and principle. By contrast Lawrence Blum is concerned with the psychology of moral agency. The essays in this collection examine the moral import of emotion, motivation, judgment, perception, and group identifications, and explore how all these psychic capacities contribute to a morally good life.

Barth, Origen, and Universal Salvation offers a bold new presentation of universal salvation. Building constructively from the third- century theologian, Origen, and the twentieth-century Swiss theologian, Karl Barth, Tom Greggs offers a defence of universalism as rooted in Christian theology, showing this belief does not have to be at the expense of human particularity, freedom, and Christian faith.

Examining Barth's doctrine of election and Origen's understanding of apokatastasis, Greggs proposes that a proper understanding of the eternal salvific plan of God in the person of Jesus Christ points towards universal salvation. The relationship between the work of the Spirit and the Son in salvation is central to this understanding. Universal salvation is grounded in the person of Christ as himself historic and particular, and the Spirit makes the reality of that universal work of Christ present to individuals and communities in the present. The discussion includes creative suggestions for the political and ecclesial implications of such a presentation of salvation.