Pride: The Seven Deadly Sins (New York Public Library Lectures in Humanities) - Hardcover

Dyson, Michael Eric

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0195160924 ISBN 13: 9780195160925

Publisher: OUP USA, 2006

Synopsis

"Pride goeth before destruction, a hoaughty spirit before a mighty fall." As the biblical fall of Satan suggests, pride as a defining symptom of self-preoccupation follows a paradoxical route at which end lies self-destruction. Dyson explores the fate of pride from Christian theology to the social responsibilities of self-regard and regard for the society as a whole. Pride is also vain glory, or the inordinate obsession with one's existence, body and intellect, which becomes the playground for human vanity. Dyson examines how pride, within black communities, becomes a necessary and ironic defense against a culture that at once formally rejected it in their vreligious beliefs but embraced it in their social realtions. As a result, blacks were ensconced, implicated, even embroiled, in the West's schizophrenic views of the deadly sin. Dyson will explore all these moments of pride, attempting to probe the contradictory facets of a vice that in some instances became a celebrated virtue, and a virtue among some cultures that ultimately became a vice.

About this title

Product Description:

Pride Explores the fate of pride from Christian theology to the social responsibilities of self-regard and regard for the society as a whole. This work examines how pride, within black communities, becomes a necessary defense against a culture that at once formally rejected it in their religious beliefs but embraced it in their social realtions. Full description

Review:

'This is a great little book' (Ronald Segal, Spectator)

'short, muscular book' (Iain Finlayson, Times)

About this edition

• Publisher: OUP USA
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0195160924
• ISBN 13: 9780195160925
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 160