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Captures the sometimes outrageous, often humorous, and always bigger-than-life spirit of the World's Greatest Pitcher, Leroy Satchel Paige

This book began when the author met "the Satch" for the first time at the Twilight Zone Lounge of the Rhythm Lanes Bowling Alley in Kansas City. What started as a simple interview for Holiday magazine quickly grew into an animated conversation that lasted nearly a week as Paige and Fox moved from bar to club to restaurant to auto repair shop and from one topic to the next. Fox describes, with amazement, the reception the legendary baseball player received at Gates' Place, a famous barbecue restaurant, and The Flamingo, a big dance club. Over the course of the week, Paige shared stories about his start in the Negro leagues, his time with the Kansas City Monarchs, and barnstorming around the country, sleeping on the ground because there were no hotels for blacks. He also tells of his breakthrough to the big leagues when he signed with the Cleveland Indians and later pitched two shutouts against the Chicago White Sox.

In addition to his baseball career, Paige tells Fox about his childhood in Mobile, Alabama, catching fish during the Jubilee, throwing rocks at white boys, hustling bags at the train station, and working in the Depression era medicine shows. In contrast to these humble beginnings, Satchel recounts his later connections with film and music celebrities like Orson Welles, Jelly Roll Morton, Billie Holliday, and Cab Calloway. He also expounds on his friendships with other sports greats, including Goose Tatum, Meadowlark Lemon, and Sugar Ray Robinson.

The ironic intersections between oppression and fame, and between poverty and wealth, that emerge from Paige's narrative memoir exemplify the affliction of talent and genius in an era of racial discrimination and segregation.

A crucial text for any university course on the interaction of archaeology and the Bible

The world of early Christians was not a world lived in texts; it was a world saturated with material reality and concerns: what, where and when to eat or drink; how to present oneself in the space of bodily life and that of death; how to move from one place to another; what impacted status or the adjudication of legal charges. All these and more controlled so much of life in the ancient world. The Christians were not immune from the impact of these realities. Sometimes they absorbed their surrounds; sometimes they quite explicitly rejected the material practices bearing in on them; frequently they modified the practice and the rationale to create a significant Christian alternative. The collection of essays in this volume come from a range of international scholars who, for all their different interests and critical commitments, are yet united in treasuring research into the Greek and Roman worlds in which Christians sought to make their way. They offer these essays in honor of one who has made a lifetime's work in mining ancient material culture to extract nuggets of insight into early Christian dining practices: Dennis E. Smith.

Features

• Rich examples of method in the utilization of ancient material culture for biblical interpretation.
• Thirteen essays with a response from Dennis E. Smith
• Maps, diagrams, and plates

Next to the Socratic Method, the best method for organizing a logical debate over a controversial philosophical or theological issue is the method St. Thomas Aquinas uses in the Summa Theologiae. As the charm of the Socratic dialogue is its dramatic length, its uncertainty, and the psychological dimension of a clash between live characters, so the charm of the Summa method is the opposite: its condensation and its impersonality, objectivity, simplicity, directness, and logical clarity. Beginning philosophy students pick up both methods very quickly, and write adept imitations of them. It’s both profitable and fun to do it.    Yet professionally philosophers have not followed these tried-and-true roads. Why not? Probably it is pride, the refusal to stoop to conquer, the confusion of “stooped” with “stupid.”

      Peter Kreeft has written over a dozen books of Socratic dialogues, and readers like them – they like the form, or format, irrespective of the content. There is no reason that the Summa format cannot produce the same results. It is a very simple five-step procedure: (1) the formulation of the question; (2) the opponent’s leading objections to your answer or thesis, formulated as clearly and fairly and strongly as possible; (3) a short argument from some recognized past authority for your thesis; (4) your own longer, original argument; and (5) a refutation of each objection, “deconstructing” it and showing how and where it went wrong . . . all in one or two pages, severely condensed, clear and simple (and therefore usually in syllogisms, the clearest and simplest and most direct form of logical argument).

     Kreeft has taken 110 of the most important and most often argued-about questions in each major division of philosophy and applied this method to it. The answers usually match common sense (and therefore Aristotle’s philosophy and Aquinas’s theology). At the very least, this is a useful philosophical reference book for arguments; not necessarily the elaborate and artificial arguments that might occur to contemporary “analytic” philosophers, but the arguments ordinary people would give, and still give on both sides of these great questions. Why no one has written such a book before is mind-boggling. We fully expect that many readers of this book will imitate it, as Kreeft has imitated Aquinas. This book is pregnant with many children.