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The Long Goodbye: Dementia Diaries discusses a disease that is both personal and social for more than five million patients and their families and friends in the United States today. Now that there are medical strategies for preventing and/or curing strokes, heart attacks, even cancer, many more people are going to live into the dementia years in the near future. Although many dementia horror stories circulate in conversation and in the media, they are not the whole story. Creative approaches to loving a dementia patient can make for a valuable learning experience for family and caregivers. In The Long Goodbye Margaret Miles describes her commitment to making–rather than passively suffering–her spouse's dementia experience. Family and friends who accompany patients find embedded in the experience moments of great beauty, hilariously funny incidents, new companions, and life insights. The narrative provides both a travelogue and suggestions for a richly meaningful life passage for all participants. The Long Goodbye seeks to supply a balanced picture of a disease usually represented as unmitigated loss.

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Beyond the Centaur questions the accuracy and usefulness of the virtually unquestioned ancient consensus that persons are composed of unequally valued, hierarchically stacked antagonistic components, usually soul or mind and body. Part I explores the gradual historical development of this notion of person. Part II consists of a thought experiment, examining an understanding of persons, not as stacked components, but as intelligent bodies–one entity. It explores how a new understanding of persons can affect in important and fruitful ways how we live: how we move, feel, think, believe, and die.

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This book of conversations between Margaret R. Miles and Hiroko Sakomura compares the experiences of two women who grew up in different societies, with different educations, different professions, and different religious orientations. Reflecting on the different ways in which Japanese and American societies inhibited and enabled them, these two women share their struggles, difficulties, and achievements. All of this is set in the context of one of the most radical social movements in the history of the world, as women are gaining increments of equality with men in designing and administering the institutions of public life with opportunities, dangers, and rewards. This is a moment in which a critical mass of women «want it all now,» in the best sense of the phrase, seeking to preserve and reinterpret traditional values while exercising their capabilities and skills both in the home and in public life. This book is the memoir of two women's painful and joyful experiences in «getting here from there.»

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The Wendell Cocktail describes a major social problem, exemplified by the journals of a person with coexisting conditions–mental illness and addiction. Although there are resources for people with each of these conditions–psychiatry for mental illness and twelve-step programs for addiction–there are few effective resources for people with both. Since about half of the mentally ill medicate with an addiction, an increasingly large percentage of the American population is left without adequate care. Wendell's journals illuminate the complexity of a tormented mind that is nevertheless capable of exquisite enjoyment of music, natural beauty, and delight in the observation of birds and animals. The book's conclusion suggests approaches to understanding and better providing for persons with addiction and mental illness.

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Several years before his death, Augustine of Hippo reviewed his published works, commenting on his purpose in writing each, and correcting, from his present perspective, the mistakes he noticed. Inspired by Augustine's Retractationes, Miles's Recollections and Reconsiderations undertakes a similar project, a critical review of almost fifty years of her publications. Rereading and rethinking in chronological order effectively bonds life and thought into a corpus, a body of work with consistent values and interests. Such a review would be an illuminating project for any longtime scholar/student–both rewarding and humbling, an exercise in self-knowledge. Informed by a lifetime of studying Christian traditions, Miles concludes by describing both endemic problems with Christianity, and what she sees is its essence and beauty.

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Education is about learning to think. Much of what we call thinking, however, is a hodge-podge of repetitious self-talk, opinion, and cutting and pasting of second-hand ideas. Moreover, thinking in the present has often been alien to scholars who were tempted to think abstractly. But life and thought belong together and require each other, as Plotinus pointed out many centuries ago: «[T]he object of contemplation is living and life, and the two together are one» (Ennead 3.8.8). Presently, many women and men in the academic world are thinking concretely within the context of their own lives and with acknowledged accountability to broader communities with whom they think and to whom they are answerable. The essays in this volume consider Christianity as an aspect of North American culture, bringing the critical tools of the academy to thinking about some of the perplexing and pressing problems of contemporary public life.
Three interactive and interdependent themes traverse these essays: gender, the effects of media culture, and institutions. Each of these themes has been central to Margaret Miles's work for thirty years. Each understands corporeality as fundamental both to subjectivity and society. Miles finds that Christianity, critically appropriated, provides ideas and methods for thinking concretely about life in North American society.

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