The focus of this study is on the influence of urban ‘woods’ on people’s quality of life in disadvantaged neighbourhoods investigated via the lens of architecture in a Sub-Saharan metropolis. The new intra-Covid Urban Agenda acknowledges that current urban and state-wide resilience management plans, policies, and practices of neighbourhood are…[Read more]

Geertz, perhaps the most influential of the anthropologists, contends that symbolism and meaning are central to religion: “The view of man as a symbolizing, conceptualizing, meaning-seeking animal, which has become increasingly popular both in the social sciences and in philosophy over the past several years, opens up a whole new approach not o…[Read more]

Einstein observed, “Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible laws and connections, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration of this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in fact, religious.” As the p…[Read more]

‘There is no truth, only perception of truth’, and that perception too changes with time. Lysistrata is one such text where this difference of perception prevails. Written by Aristophanes in 411 BCE, Lysistrata is one of the eleven Old Greek Comedy plays surviving out of forty-two. The play revolves around the Peleponnesian war, when women hav…[Read more]

This is pre-publication preview introduces the major questions, methods, and insights of my book When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven: Rabbis & the Reproduction of Species (UC Press, 2023).

“Every culture develops some kind of art as surely as it develops language. Some primitive cultures have no real mythology or religion, but all have some art – dance, song, design (sometimes only on tools or on the human body). Dance, above all, seems to be the oldest elaborated art….. Art is, indeed, the spearhead of human development, social…[Read more]

The volume under review is based on the premise that there is no real dialogue between Greek and Latin studies on the literature (and especially on the poetry) of Late Antiquity, at least not a dialogue as intense as with regard to the earlier, ‘classical’ literature. The reason for this is not least the problem that mutual dependencies between…[Read more]