Sharon Hewitt Rawlette

When her French fianc told her about the other woman in his life, she began to wonder if there was more to love--and the universe--than she had dared imagine. At 29, Sharon Hewitt was about to see her dreams come true. For the past decade, she'd been living the academic high life in New York, Paris, and Boston but struggling to feel at ease far from her rural roots and the religious faith she'd left behind in college. Now, engaged to a Frenchman and about to settle on a beautiful farm in the rolling countryside of Brittany, she felt she'd finally come home......until a girl her fianc had known in high school unexpectedly resurfaced, changing everything. The Supreme Victory of the Heart is Sharon's candid account of the months following her French fianc 's tearful admission that he wasn't sure he could marry her after all, when she stood to lose not only the man she deeply loved, but the country she had inwardly adopted as her own. Torn between rage and sorrow, sympathy and steely resolve, Sharon found herself plumbing the depths of human love, as well as encountering the possibility of something she'd given up on long ago: a higher purpose behind it all. This book tells the story of her challenging personal journey, and of the intriguing synchronicities that left her with the growing suspicion that love just might be destined to emerge victorious after all.

MIND-BENDING EVIDENCE THAT WILL CHALLENGE SKEPTICS AND BELIEVERS ALIKEEvery now and then, we all have experiences that seem too meaningful to be chance but that we can't explain in any normal way. Now, philosopher Sharon Hewitt Rawlette tackles some of the hardest questions surrounding such "coincidences" How can we tell whether a coincidence is too improbable to be just chance? Is there any hard evidence that coincidences convey genuine messages from God or our deceased loved ones? Do ordinary people have the psychic ability to create coincidences, for themselves or others? Why do coincidences sometimes harm or deceive? Rawlette brings together an immense body of research and personal experience that clearly points to a meaningful reality beyond the bounds of current science and at the same time demonstrates both the promise and peril of interpreting coincidences as signs from above. Rigorously paradigm-shattering, this volume will leave skeptics and believers alike ruminating for years to come.

Winner of New York University's Dean's Outstanding Dissertation AwardThis revolutionary treatise starts from one fundamental premise: that our phenomenal consciousness includes direct experience of value. For too long, ethical theorists have looked for value in external states of affairs or reduced value to a projection of the mind onto these same external states of affairs. The result, unsurprisingly, is widespread antirealism about ethics. In this book, Sharon Hewitt Rawlette turns our metaethical gaze inward and dares us to consider that value, rather than being something "out there," is a quality woven into the very fabric of our conscious experience, in a highly objective way. On this view, our experiences of pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow, ecstasy and despair are not signs of value or disvalue. They are instantiations of value and disvalue. When we feel pleasure, we are feeling intrinsic goodness itself. And it is from such feelings, argues Rawlette, that we derive the basic content of our normative concepts-that we understand what it means for something to be intrinsically good or bad. Rawlette thus defends a version of analytic descriptivism. And argues that this view, unlike previous theories of moral realism, has the resources to explain where our concept of intrinsic value comes from and how we know when it objectively applies, as well as why we sometimes make mistakes in applying it. She defends this view against G. E. Moore's Open Question Argument as well as shows how these basic facts about intrinsic value can ground facts about instrumental value and value "all things considered." Ultimately, her view offers us the possibility of a robust metaphysical and epistemological justification for many of our strongest moral convictions.