This article has three tasks. The ¢rst is to demonstrate that a high degree of overlap in argument and method exists between two major works by thinkers who are usually regarded as being fundamentally opposed in their approaches to understanding society. The two works are Norbert Elias's The Civilizing Process and Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality, especially the second and third volum...

Jewish, Islamic and Near Eastern Studies is an interdisciplinary program whose purpose is to explore the historical experience; literary, religious and cultural expression; and political and material life of the Jewish, Islamic and Near Eastern civilizations. Our program is unique in the United States because it integrates Islamic studies and Jewish studies. Whether students favor the study of ...

To account, in a proper epidemiological way, for the nation’s births and deaths as well as cases of cancer has, until recently, been a hallmark of our Nordic civilization, if we can use such a term. Today, I have an increasing feeling that this is not the case any more. Unfortunately, we have seen examples in our countries that would support such a feeling. The title represents a challenge to t...

In the early middle ages, a community of Irish monks constructed monastery outpost on lonely Skellig Michael just offshore County Kerry. These skelligs served as mysterious boundary land where known met unknown, worldly wrangled with spiritual, and very parameters humanity itself were brought into question. Amid period great transition in society, willfully abandoned luxuries developing Western...

The concept of space, ubiquitous among all humans from birth, has changed profoundly in the course history Western civilization, only one to be considered here. An important contribution this change was theoretical elaborations philosophers nature and mathematicians, started Ancient Greece. Here, process is up Newton, when space for physicists, who then replaced traditional nature, took on a co...