front cover of The Broken World of Sacrifice
The Broken World of Sacrifice
An Essay in Ancient Indian Ritual
J. C. Heesterman
University of Chicago Press, 1993
In this book, J. C. Heesterman attempts to understand the origins and nature of Vedic sacrifice—the complex compound of ritual practices that stood at the center of ancient Indian religion.

Paying close attention to anomalous elements within both the Vedic ritual texts, the brahmanas, and the ritual manuals, the srautasutras, Heesterman reconstructs the ideal sacrifice as consisting of four moments: killing, destruction, feasting, and contest. He shows that Vedic sacrifice all but exclusively stressed the offering in the fire—the element of destruction—at the expense of the other elements. Notably, the contest was radically eliminated. At the same time sacrifice was withdrawn from society to become the sole concern of the individual sacrificer. The ritual turns in on the individual as "self-sacrificer" who realizes through the internalized knowledge of the ritual the immortal Self. At this point the sacrificial cult of the fire recedes behind doctrine of the atman's transcendence and unity with the cosmic principle, the brahman.

Based on his intensive analysis Heesterman argues that Vedic sacrifice was primarily concerned with the broken world of the warrior and sacrificer. This world, already broken in itself by the violence of the sacrificial contest, was definitively broken up and replaced with the ritrualism of the single, unopposed sacrificer. However, the basic problem of sacrifice—the riddle of life and death—keeps breaking too surface in the form of incongruities, contradictions, tensions, and oppositions that have perplexed both the ancient ritual theorists and the modern scholar.
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The Broken World
POEMS
Marcus Cafagna
University of Illinois Press, 1996
  Selected by Yusef Komunyakaa
        as one of five volumes published in 1996 in the National Poetry Series
      "Marcus Cafagña is a poet who shies at nothing, who will
        not turn away from what he sees--ordinary people struggling against, and
        sometimes breaking on, the wheel of their fate. The Broken World
        is a deeply humane and accomplished first book--probing, watchful, compassionate,
        and necessary."
        -- Edward Hirsch
      "I challenge anyone to be unmoved by The Broken World. Cafagña
        never gives up in these difficult, heart-rending poems." -- Jim Daniels,
        editor of Letters to America: Contemporary American Poetry on Race
      The Broken World, the powerful debut of a poet of great depth
        and maturity, begins with narratives of individuals caught up in circumstance--a
        distressed girl on a Detroit overpass, a boy shooting baskets at a crisis
        center. By the end of the slim volume, Marcus Cafagña has led us
        through the postwar New York of Jewish Holocaust survivors to his native
        Michigan, where his marriage ended tragically with his wife's suicide,
        a death that has come to symbolize for Cafagña the confusion and
        madness of the twentieth century.
 
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The Living Moment
Modernism in a Broken World
Jeffrey Hart
Northwestern University Press, 2012

In the spirit of Lionel Trilling, Edmund Wilson, and Susan Sontag, the renowned literary critic Jeffrey Hart writes The Living Moment, a close reading of literature as it intersects with the political. Hart’s book is an even-handed guide for anyone toddling into the mists of the modernist moment, effortlessly moving between such modernist monuments as Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Mann’s Doctor Faustus, and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Hart’s most stunning achievement is his brilliant inclusion of Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead as a modernist text, for the way the novel teaches us to see more, to hear more, to feel more. Hart’s dazzling study is an examination of important works of literature as they explore the experience of living in a broken world with thought and sometimes with examples of resolve that possess permanent validity. The Living Moment is for anyone who is wearied by so much of today’s trendy, narrow, and ideologically driven criticism.

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front cover of To Repair a Broken World
To Repair a Broken World
The Life of Henrietta Szold, Founder of Hadassah
Dvora Hacohen
Harvard University Press, 2021

The authoritative biography of Henrietta Szold, founder of Hadassah, introduces a new generation to a remarkable leader who fought for women’s rights and the poor.

Born in Baltimore in 1860, Henrietta Szold was driven from a young age by the mission captured in the concept of tikkun olam, “repair of the world.” Herself the child of immigrants, she established a night school, open to all faiths, to teach English to Russian Jews in her hometown. She became the first woman to study at the Jewish Theological Seminary, and was the first editor for the Jewish Publication Society. In 1912 she founded Hadassah, the international women’s organization dedicated to humanitarian work and community building. A passionate Zionist, Szold was troubled by the Jewish–Arab conflict in Palestine, to which she sought a peaceful and equitable solution for all.

Noted Israeli historian Dvora Hacohen captures the dramatic life of this remarkable woman. Long before anyone had heard of intersectionality, Szold maintained that her many political commitments were inseparable. She fought relentlessly for women’s place in Judaism and for health and educational networks in Mandate Palestine. As a global citizen, she championed American pacifism. Hacohen also offers a penetrating look into Szold’s personal world, revealing for the first time the psychogenic blindness that afflicted her as the result of a harrowing breakup with a famous Talmudic scholar.

Based on letters and personal diaries, many previously unpublished, as well as thousands of archival documents scattered across three continents, To Repair a Broken World provides a wide-ranging portrait of a woman who devoted herself to helping the disadvantaged and building a future free of need.

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