Books by "Richard Guy Wilson"
2 books found
What would Christianity be like without the soul? While most people would expect the Christian bible to reveal a highly traditional opposition of matter and spirit, the spirit forces of the Old and New Testaments are often surprisingly physical, dynamic, and practical, a matter of energy as much as ethics. The Secret History of the Soul examines the forgotten or suppressed models of body, soul, and human consciousness found in the literature, philosophy and scripture of the ancient and classical worlds. It shows how the spirit forces of Homer, Plato, Aristotle, and the Old and New Testaments tended to be quantities not entities, and to be closely bound up with the dynamic physical flux of the human body, rather than cleanly abstracted in some absolute immaterial realm. Forces such as menos and thymos, nephesh, pneuma and dynamis not only blurred the line between body and soul, but were potent and transferable, being used, in New Testament culture, to effect magical cures or bestow magical power. Related to this surprising lack of body-soul dualism is a lack of dualistic afterlife in either Homer or Hebrew scripture, where Hades and Sheol are the sole post-mortem destinations. The Secret History of the Soul restores the living strangeness of a spirit world filled with potent energy and practical magic, in cultures which had not yet glimpsed the abstracted soul of later Christianity.
A hilarious collection of essays, riffs, and lists that celebrate the insanity of Hollywood--for anyone who loves the movies. Richard Roeper, like the rest of us, adores the movies. In this uproarious, off-beat book, he gives us a whole new set of critical lenses for assessing the movies and the people and the industry that make them. With his characteristic acerbic wit, he weaves short essays with lists that work together to explain where Hollywood succeeds -- and where it so often frustrates, disappoints, and fails us. But while Roeper devotes most of the book to mockery and ridicule, this book is, in the end, a love letter to film. Some of the essays and lists included in Schlock Value: Comical statistical breakdowns, including career batting averages of actors Reviews of Hollywood finances, including budgets, salaries, and ticket prices A proposed moratorium on pet projects, e.g., Kevin Costner's The Postman or John Travolta's Battlefield Earth The age differences between Woody Allen and his various leading ladies Actors appearing around the world in television commercials, including a list of the biggest stars that do overseas commercials -- and the products they push Schlock Value is the perfect book for anyone who loves grumbling and complaining about the movies -- but still can't help spending their weekends and evenings in front of the screen.