Sex And Death

In this introduction to philosophy of biology, Kim Sterelny and Paul E. Griffiths present both the science and the philosophical context necessary for a critical understanding of the debates shaping biology at the end of the 20th century.

From lauded cheesemonger and creator of the popular blog Cheese Sex Death, a bible for everything you need to know about cheese For many people, the world of artisan cheese is an intriguing but intimidating place. There are so many strange smells, unusual textures, exotic names, and rules for serving. Where should a neophyte begin? From evangelist cheesemonger Erika Kubick, this comprehensive book guides readers to become confident connoisseurs and worshippers of Cheesus. A preacher of the curd word, Kubick provides the Ten Commandments of Cheese, which breaks down this complex world into simplified bites. A welcoming sanctuary devoted to making cheese a daily part of life and gatherings, this book explores the many different styles of cheese by type, profiling commonly found and affordable wedges as well as the more rare and refined of rinds. Kubick offers divine recipes that cover everything from everyday crowd pleasers (think mac and cheese and baked brie) to festive feasts fit for holidays and gatherings. This cheese devotee outlines the perfect cheese plate formula and offers inventive yet easy-to-execute beverage pairings, including wine, beer, spirits, and non-alcoholic drinks. These heavenly spreads and recipes wring maximum indulgence out of minimal effort and expense. Filled with seductive photography and audacious prose, Cheese Sex Death is a delightfully approachable guide to artisan cheese that will make just about anyone worship at the altar of Cheesus.

My worst fear happened. My husband of 15 years left our 6 year old daughter downstairs watching ET, kissed me, and left to walk the dog. He never came home. He was hit by a car and was killed. He was 39. Sex, Death and Tantra is the story of my first years as a single, gay, widower, dad, embracing my grief, parenting a grieving child, attending to her educational, social, emotional needs, all while trying to create a wholly new life for myself. Tantra? While intense and wildly pleasurable sex is a part of Tantra, it is not Tantra. Tantra is a set of principles and practices (most of which are not sexual) which transcends the self. For decades I sought a marriage of sex and spirituality yet these practices seemed to exclude gay men. The year prior to Zachary's death, we met Ken and began our study of tantra with him. Ken was a successful psychotherapist who taught tantra to gay men. He had a separate erotic healing practice where he used tantra, eroticism, and sex to help men do profound emotional, psychological healing work. He was a father. He was a husband. He was a sacred whore. Tantra is not an easy path. Zachary and I each dealt with painful psychological and emotional issues as we deepened our spiritual selves, our erotic knowledge and experience. It was also sexy and fun. I got a taste of how sex--highly pleasurable, conscious sex--can be a pathway towards healing, personal growth, and spiritual awakening. Feeling lost and afraid, sitting in the hospital with Zachary's wrecked lifeless body, I called Ken. And we began our journey together. We explored grief--my grief-- using tantra as our foundation. From that day forward, Ken and I met most days at 5AM before my daughter awoke, for tea, meditation, erotic practices, and conversation. I credit him with saving my life after Zachary's sudden death. Sex, Death, and Tantra is not only a story about love and loss, but one of optimism and healing. Reminiscent of Spanbauer's The Man Who Fell In Love WIth The Moon, my story chronicles an uncommon, radical, application of Tantra which transcends gender and orientation. My story is real, raw, erotic, and emotional. While this is not a definitive tantra text, many tantric principles and practices are brought to light.

From the irrepressible author of Trout Bum and The View from Rat Lake comes an engaging, humorous, often profound examination of life's greatest mysteries: sex, death, and fly-fishing. John Gierach's quest takes us from his quiet home water (an ordinary, run-of-the-mill trout stream where fly-fishing can be a casual affair) to Utah's famous Green River, and to unknown creeks throughout the Western states and Canada. We're introduced to a lively group of fishing buddies, some local "experts" and even an ex-girlfriend, along the way Contemplative, evocative, and wry, he shares insights on mayflies and men, fishing and sport, life and love, and the meaning (or meaninglessness) of it all.

This book discusses sex and death in the eighteenth-century, an era that among other forms produced the Gothic novel, commencing the prolific examination of the century’s shifting attitudes toward death and uncovering literary moments in which sexuality and death often conjoined. By bringing together various viewpoints and historical relations, the volume contributes to an emerging field of study and provides new perspectives on the ways in which the century approached an increasingly modern sense of sexuality and mortality. It not only provides part of the needed discussion of the relationship between sex, death, history, and eighteenth-century culture, but is a forum in which the ideas of several well-respected critics converge, producing a breadth of knowledge and a diversity of perspectives and methodologies previously unseen. As the contributors demonstrate, eighteenth-century anxieties over mortality, the body, the soul, and the corpse inspired many writers of the time to both implicitly and explicitly embed mortality and sexuality within their works. By depicting the necrophilic tendencies of libertines and rapacious villains, the fetishizing of death and mourning by virtuous heroines, or the fantasy of preserving the body, these authors demonstrate not only the tragic results of sexual play, but the persistent fantasy of necro-erotica. This book shows that within the eighteenth-century culture of profound modern change, underworkings of death and mourning are often eroticized; that sex is often equated with death (as punishment, or loss of the self); and that the sex-death dialectic lies at the discursive center of normative conceptions of gender, desire, and social power.

This book is a personal reappraisal of psychoanalytic theories in the light of clinical experience. The first part is about sexuality and begins where psychoanalysis began, with hysteria. The second part is about the ego and the super-ego, the relationship of which dominated Freud's writing from his middle period onwards. The last part is on narcissism and the narcissistic disorders, a major preoccupation of psychoanalysis in the second half of the twentieth century.

The Process Church is one of the most controversial cults of modern times. Its apocalyptic ideas and powerful literature brought on extreme allegiances and shocking accusations. Here, the secretive group's history is finally revealed for the first time. Through its various incarnations, the Process Church has kept its history sealed for decades. Though the church was not as horrifying as some made it out to be, its actual history is truly unexpected and sensational.

Sex and Death in Victorian Literature is a landmark collection of 13 previously unpublished essays on nineteenth-century British poetry, fiction and prose by the most important English and American scholars in the field. The volume observes the subject from an unusually wide variety of viewpoints, including historical, sociological, psychoanalytic, feminist and mythological. There are works central and peripheral to the traditional Victorian canon discussed in Sex and Death; as such the essays present an unprecedented perspective on the shifts and movements of nineteenth-century literature. By grouping the essays under the aegis of sexuality and morality, the volume allows the authors to explore the most important aspects of the works they discuss.

A distinguished and revered elder of the British Psycho-Analytical Society, Dr William Gillespie is one of the few British psychoanalysts who began training in the Vienna of the early 1930s. Later he became well known in England for his pioneering studies of sexual perversion, and for his views on female sexuality, regression in old people facing death, and on instinct theory. William Gillespie is celebrated not only for his scientific contributions but also for his administrative skill, integrity and tact in managing the International Psycho-Analytical Association and the British Psycho-Analytical Society, where he was trusted and respected by both Melanie Klein and Anna Freud. In a biographical introduction the editor, Dr Michael Sinason, looks back on the productive 90 years of Gillespie's life, writing movingly of his early life in China and Scotland and showing his development as a psychoanalytic thinker, organizer and administrator, husband and father. Dr Charles Socarides, an American psychoanalyst eminent in the field of perversion and its treatment, discusses the innovations introduced by each of the papers in the collection shows how Gillespie's ideas influenced by his own contributions and affected the field as a whole.

“A highly personal, richly informed and culturally wide-ranging meditation on the loss of meaning in our times and on pathways to rediscovering it.” —Gabor Maté, MD, author of In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction A neuroanthropologist maps out a revolutionary new practice—Hedonic Engineering—that combines the best of neuroscience and optimal psychology. It’s an intensive program of breathing, movement, and sexuality that mends trauma, heightens inspiration and tightens connections—helping us wake up, grow up, and show up for a world that needs us all. This is a book about a big idea. And the idea is this: Slowly over the past few decades, and now suddenly, all at once, we’re suffering from a collapse in Meaning. Fundamentalism and nihilism are filling that vacuum, with consequences that affect us all. In a world that needs us at our best, diseases of despair, tribalism, and disaster fatigue are leaving us at our worst. It’s vital that we regain control of the stories we’re telling because they are shaping the future we’re creating. To do that, we have to remember our deepest inspiration, heal our pain and apathy, and connect to each other like never before. If we can do that, we’ve got a shot at solving the big problems we face. And if we can’t? Well, the dustbin of history has swallowed civilizations older and fancier than ours. This book is divided into three parts. The first, Choose Your Own Apocalypse, takes a look at our current Meaning Crisis--where we are today, why it’s so hard to make sense of the world, what might be coming next, and what to do about it. It also makes a case that many of our efforts to cope, whether anxiety and denial, or tribalism and identity politics, are likely making things worse. The middle section, The Alchemist Cookbook, applies the creative firm IDEO’s design thinking to the Meaning Crisis. This is where the book gets hands on--taking a look at the strongest evolutionary drivers that can bring about inspiration, healing, and connection. From breathing, to movement, sexuality, music, and substances--these are the everyday tools to help us wake up, grow up, and show up. AKA--how to blow yourself sky high with household materials. And the best part? They’re accessible, by anyone anywhere, no middleman required. Transcendence democratized. The final third of the book, Ethical Cult Building, focuses on the tricky nature of putting these kinds of experiences into gear and into culture—because, anytime in the past when we’ve figured out combinations of peak states and deep healing, we’ve almost always ended up with problematic culty communities. Playing with fire has left a lot of people burned. This section lays out a roadmap for sparking a thousand fires around the world--each one unique and tailored to the needs and values of its participants. Think of it as an open-source toolkit for building ethical culture. In Recapture the Rapture, we’re taking radical research out of the extremes and applying it to the mainstream--to the broader social problem of healing, believing, and belonging. It’s providing answers to the questions we face: how to replace blind faith with direct experience, how to move from broken to whole, and how to cure isolation with connection. Said even more plainly, it shows us how to revitalize our bodies, boost our creativity, rekindle our relationships, and answer once and for all the questions of why we are here and what do we do now? In a world that needs the best of us from the rest of us, this is a book that shows us how to get it done.