Ethics for Jessica: Meditations on Living

by Yates, Gayle Graham

• ISBN13: 9781608990658
• ISBN10: 1608990656
• eBook ISBN(s): 9781725245273
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-01-15
• Publisher: Wipf & Stock Pub
• More Book Details

Summary

Jessica's grandmother writes from her loft at her Wisconsin lakeside cottage of the intangibles she wants to give to Jessica and her generation. Writing in view of the red pines and birch trees, The water and The light, with the sound of loons in the distance, Gayle Graham Yates reflects upon insights, knowledge, and stories she has learned. A woman, family member, citizen, environmentalist, and spiritual seeker, Yates considers in this memoir-as-letter-to-her-granddaughter both distresses and joys, people, opportunities, and education that have shaped her own life and that she wants to pass along. The flow of the book is metaphorically seasonal from autumn through summer. Moving through ethical frameworks drawn from Aristotle's ethics and The Ojibway narrative by Ignatia Broker, Night Flying Woman, The chapters develop sequentially through ways of learning, ways of loving, and ways of hoping. All this is to The end of lovingly transmitting to her granddaughter what she knows.

Author Biography

Gayle Graham Yates is Professor Emerita of American Studies at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. She is the author of What Women Want: The Ideas of the Movement, Mississippi Mind: A Personal Cultural History of an American State, and Life and Death in a Small Southern Town: Memories of Shubuta, Mississippi.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Preface	p. xi
Introduction	p. xiii
Living, Learning, and Doing Nothing	p. 1
Living Well	p. 3
Love Is Born, Love Lives On	p. 7
Gold Standard of Love	p. 10
Ways of Learning	p. 18
Aristotle and the Ojibway	p. 25
On Doing Nothing	p. 39
Knowing, Loving, and Hoping	p. 45
On Learning	p. 53
Goodness as Both Intellectual and Moral Excellence	p. 55
Learning	p. 62
Knowing Science and Knowing Art	p. 75
Architecture as Both Science and Art	p. 78
Science, Acid Rain, Radioactive Fallout, Wetlands, and Global Warming: the Life Work of Eville Gorham	p. 89
The Museum of Modern Art	p. 97
Truthtelling	p. 102
Knowing the Earth and Knowing the World	p. 114
Moving from Knowledge to Wisdom	p. 125
On Loving	p. 133
Loving Yourself and Loving Other People	p. 135
Features of Love	p. 148
Family Love	p. 159
Romantic Love	p. 166
Friendship	p. 174
Loving the Earth and Loving the World	p. 179
On Hoping	p. 189
Light and Love	p. 191
Taking Responsibility	p. 200
Living Well	p. 209
Hopefulness	p. 216
Epigraph Sources	p. 221
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