The current work historically reconstructs the role played by the Brazilian Catholic Church during the military dictatorship that governed the country from 1964 to 1985. If in Latin America the denial of identity and rights has for centuries gone hand in hand with the role played by the Church in Brazil, in the twenty years covered by the book the national Catholic Church managed to establish itself as the only democratic bastion against the army, not only acting to safeguard trampled human rights but also to criticise the situaion. Thanks to the influence of liberation theology, the church gave priority to the intellectual progress of the working classes, developing one of the largest operations of non-governmental popular education in the contemporary era, which - to cite Antonio Gramsci - provided an opportunity for the "subaltern classes who want to educate themselves in the art of government".

How does culture contribute to healing our planet? Is there anything we should learn from the pandemic? The book answers these questions, exploring the contribution of culture to the protection of the planet, comparing the Italian and the Brazilian contexts, the latter a true thermometer of world trends, from economic and financial to environmental and climatic, social and health. It emerges a reflection on the role of culture as a driving force for the restart and as a bridge to a new normal that awaits us after the pandemic.

From Larry Kramer's New York to Roth's Newark and Colla's Baghdad, this collection of 15 essays explores how American contemporary literature tackles the issue of urban violence, its relationship with the forerunners of the genre, and how its main features evolved over time.

This book intends to explore the atmospheric issue from an independent, architectural perspective. It is composed of two main sections. The first one introduces and analyzes the atmospheric concept inside the lexical scope of the architectural discipline, mapping the whole taxonomy of semantic declinations that are recognized by architecture, in addition to retracing the etymology of the term ‘atmosphere’ and its evolution. The second section studies the topic throughout the sensory-emotional filter of the perceiving subject located in the built environment, gleaning suggestions from neuroscientific knowledge. More recently, architecture and neuroscience have started to interact, both in the combination of their theories and through experiment-based investigations.

Far from merely considering the aural 'segments' of audiovisual texts (i.e. the soundtrack) in terms of their expressive and artistic significance, or being concerned only with 'audio' and technologically mediated sound in and of itself, this volume aims to understand how the theoretical concepts and methods developed to investigate aurality could reframe cinema and visual media as research objects. Distributed across ten different thematic sections, the contributors develop the theoretical content of 'aural epistemologies' in Film and Media Studies, discuss the role of listening culture in our experience as film spectators and media users and, finally, re-assess the significance of sound archives and sonic archaeologies in relation to our knowledge of past (sound)mediascapes.

After researching the life of a British Special Operation Executive agent, Oliver Churchill, who operated over the summer of 1944, Andrea Cominini found that his brother, Peter, had also been an SOE agent operating in France during WWII. Peter carried out four missions, spending 225 days in enemy territory. Finally captured, he spent over two years in captivity. After the war he wrote four novels based on his wartime experiences. Reviewing his second book, The Daily Herald wrote: "Now Peter Churchill wrote one of the best spy books of all time". The author describes the different literary genres in which Churchill's works can be situated and – through a subsequent analysis of the novels – how they provide a clear and historical representation of everyday life of a British secret agent during WWII. Peter Churchill’s works are then compared to those of pther novelists of his time, uncovering a range of connections with other related authors and literary genres. After the war, Churchill was awarded the Distinguished Service Order and the Croix de Guerre; his wife Odette, who worked with him as an underground courier during the war, was the first woman to receive the George Cross.

In 1956, together with his research group, the anthropologist Gregory Bateson published a theory that was to revolutionize the way of conceiving mental illness. Over the years, the central concept of this theory, the double bind, proved effective in an increasing number of fields of knowledge: from the theory of communication to epistemology, from sociology to pedagogy, from literature to philosophy. Through an examination of the inception and development of this concept, the book retraces the main themes, connections and critical points that mark the whole of Bateson’s multifaceted research: from the early ethnographic surveys in New Guinea through to the ecological ideas of his later years, including the cybernetic reflections, his studies of human and animal communication, his work in the psychiatric field. This analysis of the double bind theory, originally formulated as a hypothesis to explain schizophrenia, is not only a guide to the work of one of the most unpredictable and original thinkers of the last century, but also gives access to essential theoretical tools for bringing into focus a number of increasingly persistent contemporary problems.

The volume consists of a collection of fifteen contributions to Political Theory, the focuses of which represent an interaction between different themes and perspectives. The collection brings together a series of philosophical, moral, political, psychological, medical, anthropological and mytho-symbolical issues, divided into three main sections. A first section concerns ethical, moral and jurisdictional constitutional issues of Political Theory, including contributions by Fabrizio Sciacca, Cassandra Basile, Andrea Germani and Paola Russo. A second section is devoted to the analysis of political myths and representations, including contributions by Giangiacomo Vale, Viviana Faschi, Giada Fiorese, Raffaella Sabra Palmisano, Alessandra Spano and Giuseppe d’Ambrosio. A third and final section focuses on the analysis of political dynamics specific to modernity, with contributions from Michele Lanna, Federica Rauso, Cornelia Stefan, Michele Olzi and Maria Rosaria Vitale.

Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) was part of an important group of artists who left Europe for America during the Second World War. Andre Breton described her as possessing two priceless gifts: the enlightenment of a lucid madness and the sublime potential of solitary thought. For Max Ernst, she was the Bride of the Wind, a figure who brought energy through her intense life, mystery and poetry. The current volume brings together a reconstruction of Carrington’s biography with a detailed analysis of her artistic production, beginning with her fleeing English high society to follow a dream of freedom, her crazy love affair with Max Ernst and her time in the small village of Saint Martin d’Archèche in the south of France, where she began to paint, write and sculpt. After the outbreak of war, the abyss of madness led her to an asylum, to escaping to New York and finally to Mexico. The culture of Mexico fed her imagination, inspiring a fantastic mythography that amalgamates a deep understanding of the Italian Renaissance, the hybrid figures of Surrealism and studies of esotericism and alchemy, producing original and extremely sophisticated creations. The book provides an intense narrative that spans across the fundamental stations of Carrington’s life, situating her individual journey within the cultural context of the 20th century, a journey that begins in England, moves across the Ocean and concludes in the new millennium in Mexico City, where the author met and became acquainted with the artist.

Digital culture, taken etymologically, means a culture of the fingers (from the Latin digitus). Although our contemporary times are still envisioned through the lens of an over-reigning visual paradigm, our media practice has become mainly bodily, since the role of hands has proven ever more decisive and as gestures have increasingly been constructed as tools for thinking and conceptualization. This issue presents crucial case studies in film and visual culture, ranging from classic to experimental cinema, from science visualization to esoteric culture. In every field, filmed hands come to be extraordinary operators of visibility: they depict imaginary worlds which do not rely upon eye perception, they make visible the intimacy of the human being, they give shape to the spectator’s gaze and, in a more concrete fashion, to the image itself through gestures of care and restoration of the filmstrip as well as by anchoring vision through data visualization processes. A hypnotic and a powerful motif, hands represent the corporeal grounds of the cinematic medium and the indelible crystallization of the human in technique.

The book deals with the complex notion of process worked out by Alfred N. Whitehead, a notion that includes his deep revision of the concepts of time and space. Throughout his whole career, Whitehead emphasized the importance of process for the account of reality. The book discusses Whitehead's concept of process starting from his works in mathematics, logic and epistemology of the natural sciences, in order to pave the way for a better understanding of Whitehead's speculative philosophy. The focus is on the relationship between concrescence and transition, seen as deeply correlated and reciprocally determined. In this perspective, the book offers a reinterpretation of Whitehead's most enigmatic proposal: the event of subjectivity interpreted as a process of subjectivation. This poses the problem of the endurance of subjectivity. The book suggests that this problem is solved by Whitehead through is appropriation of Plato's notion of chora, seen as the "place" of a processual subject.

"In the beginning, the beginning of your story, this story that isn't yours, there was a single article…." These are the opening words: the location is Manhattan, the protagonist is Richard Schwan, journalist for the New York Times. There follows a newsroom, an airplane, more airplanes, an ocean, two oceans, then after New York there is Los Angeles, Istanbul, Baghdad, Rome and then the return to New York via Bamberg (Baveria), everything to cross over, suffer, enjoy, to be lived. And in this living there is a war, one of those wars that continues but is never declared, that springs up just like that, as if by accident. And Richard Schwan will be there, with his ideals of truth and freedom. And the research for truth and freedom will also be the search for life, the search for life will be a search for the self, for the soul. And so, with a soul laid bare, he will go out into the world. Beyond the peculiarities of contingency, including the elements of time and space, this novel pushes the reader to look beyond, pass over from non-being into being.

In recent years the latest therapeutic interventions have been increasingly characterized by an experiential approach, which allows a person to experience moments of authentic and deep emotional repair within the therapeutic relationship. MIMT represents a further evolution in this sense, thanks to the inclusion of the mirror within the clinical setting, it encourages a continuous process of encounter with oneself and with the other. The Self thus becomes an element with which to enter explicitly into relationship. The continuous attunement and mirroring that patient and therapist experience in front of the mirror allow them to live a constant integrative and reparative experience of their own Self in a deep and authentic relational dimension. In this book, the authors integrate different theoretical contributions, giving life to an innovative approach, with systematized procedures that are effective for a therapeutic intervention aimed at the reconstruction of a cohesive Self able to connect to everything that surrounds it.

What can we learn from the way artists live and operate in the world? This is one of the questions that Nietzsche asks himself throughout the course of his work, although it is not one for which he is most famous. In its answer, the question functions as a swinging incessant movement that oscillates between a highly critical analysis of dogmas and prejudices of the Western philosophical tradition and an equally profound recognition of how important it is for each of us to cling to a system of certainties and truths that are but illusions necessary to life. Art speaks to us of this perpetual transit from the brutality of the real to the enchantment of an invented world and teaches us how to move between both extremes. Beyond stereotypes and false myths, the crucial nodes of Nietzsche’s thought are shown in a different light, demonstrating once again the complexity of a philosophy that resists all simplifications.

Revolutionary Gnosticism is a movement common to a great deal of modern and contemporary revolutionary phenomena such as Nazism, Bolshevism and Jacobinism. However no one has studied Salafi- Jihadism yet, the latest existing revolutionary ideology, in gnostic terms. If Salafi-Jihadism were a gnostic phenomenon, it would reveal its Promethean and atheist conception of the world that stands in the forgetfulness of a pure transcendent dimension, notwithstanding the apparently spiritual framework and religious justification that jihadists provide. A similar study, hence, would reveal Salafi-Jihadis’ will of redeeming humankind from Evil (with capital letter) and building the perfect society, leaving God without a clear possibility of intervening in human affairs.

Kamil is a cheerful, lively five-year-old, who goes to kindergarten and loves to make silly jokes. Is he a boy like anyone else? Yes and no: he behaves normally but he is blind from birth. The book shows the daily life of a special child, without resorting to sentimentality but also without glossing over anything. The book includes several short stories: sometimes happy, sometimes poignant, sometimes dramatic. Once they’ve read it, children should know how to behave when in the company of a blind person: loud comments should be avoided and there’s no need to console but only to help, if necessary.