Bøger af James Harding

Alpha Dogs is the story of the men behind an enormously influential campaign business called the Sawyer Miller Group, men who served as backroom strategists on every presidential contest from Richard M. Nixon's to Barack Obama's. David Sawyer was a New England aristocrat with dreams of a career as a filmmaker, and Scott Miller, the son of an Ohio shoe salesman, had a knack for copywriting. Unlikely partners, they became a political powerhouse, directing democratic revolutions from the Philippines to Chile, steering a dozen presidents and prime ministers into office, and instilling the campaign ethic in corporate giants such as Coca-Cola and Apple. Long after their firm, Sawyer Miller, had broken up and sold out, its alumni had moved into the White House, to dozens of foreign countries, and into the offices of America's blue-chip chief executives. The men of Sawyer Miller were the Manhattan Project of spin politics: a small but extraordinary group who invented American-style political campaigning and exported it around the world.In this lively and engaging narrative, James Harding tells the story of a few men whose marketing savvy, entrepreneurial drive, and sheer greed would alter the landscape of global politics. It is a story full of office intrigue, fierce rivalries, and disastrous miscalculations. And it is the tale of how world politics became American and how American business became political.

This book is a history of the Whore of Babylon image found in the book of Revelation, with an emphasis upon the use and influence of the text on the Brethren of the nineteenth century. The Brethren developed a multi-layered exegesis of the text, using Babylon as a form of vituperative rhetoric through which to vilify all other Christians in order to define their own religious identity. Those with divergent doctrinal beliefs belonged to an epistemological Babylon; those polluted by the world belonged to secular Babylon. Babylon was contagious! It is from the pens of these writers that the Secret Rapture of the Church doctrine developed as a biological ""fight or flight"" response, and a psychological ""fear and fantasy"" response. Whilst the Brethren of the nineteenth century are the central focus, the book will have a wider appeal to those interested in the history of exegesis, hermeneutics, and Apocalypse studies, for it also offers an overview of hermeneutical approaches to the reading of Revelation, a survey of Babylon''s ""afterlife"" throughout the history of the church, and new insights into the ways in which readers, texts, and contexts interact in the broader context of sectarian biblical exegesis.""James Harding is an excellent teacher and a fine scholar with an extraordinarily wide range of interests. This book brings together the apocalyptic book of Revelation with its Brethren readers in the modern world to provide an instructive tale of the tensions between purity and unity in the Christian church, and of the ability of the text of Scripture to evoke powerful emotions and new perspectives when applied in different historical and geographical contexts.""--Graham Tomlin, Bishop of Kensington, President, St. Mellitus College""The complex relationship between biblical texts, individual readers and ''interpretative communities'' is often explored in ways disconnected from the realities of historical and social context. In this book, by contrast, Harding shows by precise and well-documented example how one particular image from the book of Revelation was used by one particular historical community to vilify the other and in the process define the self. The archival work is a particularly strong feature of this study as it roots theory in documented evidence.""--Kenneth G.C. Newport, Professor, Pro Vice-Chancellor (Academic) and Executive Dean of Education, Liverpool Hope UniversityJames Harding is lecturer in missiology at St Mellitus College, London, and an Anglican priest in the Church of England.