Search results for ""Fordham University Press""

Rhonheimer applies moral theology to practical questions, such as, what does it mean to violate the natural law, or to be “unnatural”?

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"For a Vast Future Also": Essays from The Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, brings together the most informative and thoughtful articles by fourteen accomplished scholars in the Lincoln field. The essays provide compact, detailed treatments concerning different facets of three general themes: Lincoln and the problems of emancipation; Lincoln and presidential politics; and the Lincoln legacy. Readers of the collection will understand why the Civil War profoundly changed the nation. These essays give insight into how Lincoln and his administration dealt with the profound issues of war and slavery and the continuing legacy of Lincoln and the war. No book or essay collection brings together the writings of such luminaries in the field as John Hope Franklin, James M. McPherson, Don E. Fehrenbacher, T. Harry Williams, Phillip S. Paludan, Harold Hyman, John Niven, William A. Gienapp, Norman B. Ferris, John T. Hubbell, Arthur Zilversmit, Eugene H. Berwanger, Christopher N. Breiseth, and Michael Vorenberg. Researchers now have these valuable essays available in one volume. It offers the general public the distillation of scholarship supported by the Abraham Lincoln Association over the past twenty-five years. And college and university introductory courses will find this book a valuable summary of, and introduction to, the major issues of the Civil War period.

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Katharine Tekakwitha is the first Native American to be declared a Blessed. This book introduces the cause for her beatification and canonization.

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This book provides a comprehensive, critical study of the oldest and most famous argument for the existence of God: the Cosmological Argument. Professor Rowe examines and interprets historically significant versions of the argument from Aquinas to Samuel Clarke and explores the major objections that have been advances against it. Beginning with analyses of the Cosmological Argument as expressed by Aquinas and Duns Scotus in the thirteenth century, the author seeks to uncover, clairfy , and critically explore the philosophical concepts and theses essential to the reasoning exhibited in the principal versions of the Cosmological Argument. The major focus of the book is on the form that the argument takes in the eighteenth century, principally in the writings of Samuel Clarke. The author concludes with a discussion of the extent to which the Cosmological Argument may provide a justification for the belief in God. In a new Preface, the author offers some updates on his own thinking as well as that of others who have grappled with this topic.

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Marx, Nietzche, and Freud are among the most influential of modern atheists. The distinctive feature of their challenge to theistic and specifically Christian belief is expressed by Paul Ricoeur when he calls them the "masters of suspicion." While skepticism directs its critique to the truth or evidential basis of belief, suspicion asks two different, intimately intertwined questions: what are the motives that lead to this belief? and what function does it play, what work does it do for the individuals and communities that adopt it. What suspicion suspects is that the survival value of religious beliefs depends on satisfying desires and interests that the believing soul and the believing community are not eager to acknowledge because they violate the values they profess, as when, for example, talk about justice is a mask for deep-seated resentment and the desire for revenge. For this reason, the hermeneutics of suspicion is a theory, or group of theories, of self-deception: ideology critique in Marx, genealogy in Nietzsche, and psychoanalysis in Freud. Suspicion and Faith argues that the appropriate religious response ("the religious uses of modern atheism") to these critiques is not to try to refute or deflect them, but rather to acknowledge their force in a process of self-examination.

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What is Imagination? What is the relationship between aesthetics and ethics in a contemporary civilization dominated by the image? How can we reconcile the right to imagine with the right to justice? Are the claims of artistic creativity and moral responsibility compatible? With an extended foreword and an afterword chapter, and fascinating new material on the narrative imagination, Poetics of Imagining: Modern to Post-modern provides a critically developed and accessible account of the major theories of imagination in modern European thought. It analyses and assesses the decisive contributions made to our understanding of the imaginary life by phenomenology (Husserl, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard), hermeneutics (Heidegger, Ricoeur), and post-modernism (Vattima, Kristeva, Lyotard). Richard Kearney achieves this with a coherent and committed approach, which displays his own passionate concern for the claims of imagination in our post-modern world of fragmentation and fracture. This is essential reading for those interested in current leading debates on the role of imagining in continental philosophy, ethics, psychoanalysis, art theory and literary criticism.

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Affairs of party, Jean Baker asserts, were a central feature of public life in nineteenth-century America. In this book she explores the way in which the Northern Democrats of the mid-eighteen hundreds lived their public lives. She begins with a psychobiographical explanation of how people became Democrats, weighing the importance of such influences as education and family life. She then discusses two major elements that set Democrats apart from members of other political organizations: a modified Republican ideology tailored to the circumstances of the Civil War, and a mordant racism conveyed most strikingly through minstrelsy. Finally, Baker studies the neglected subject of partisan behavior, concentrating on the significance of parades, voting, and other rituals. In Affairs of Party Jean Baker brings together the three basic components of a political culture—education, thought, and behavior—and provides an understanding of the collective values of Northern Democrats and an insight into the elusive meaning of party experience. In her new preface, Professor Baker places her book in the context of both recent scholarship and recent political and cultural developments.

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This collection of essays examines the issue of norms and social practices both in epistemology and in moral and social philosophy. The contributors examine the issue across an unprecedented range of issues, including epistemology (realism, perception, testimony), logic, education, foundations of morality, philosophy of law, the pragmatic account of norms and their justification, and the pragmatic character of reason itself.

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Silent Music breaks down the barriers between science and religion, as well as between religions themselves, in order to extrapolate a comprehensive understanding of the "science of meditation." Johnston explores the concept of meditation from all perspectives in a rich account that runs the gamut from friendship to biofeedback. Understanding all approaches and incorporating them into a united vision, Silent Music reveals as new way of understanding the mystical and our search for wisdom in the modern world. Included is a glossary of terms and an index.

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A great thinker once said that "all philosophy is merely footnotes to Plato." Through Plato, Father O'Connell provides us here with an introduction to all philosophy. Designed for beginning students in philosophy, Plato on the Human Paradox examines and confronts human nature and the eternal questions concerning human nature through the dialogues of Plato, focusing on the Apology, Phaedo, Books III-VI of the Republic, Meno, Symposium, and O'Connell presents us here with an introduction to Plato through the philosopher's quest to define "human excellence" or arete in terms of defining what "human being" is body and soul, focusing on Plato's preoccupations with the questions of how and what it means to have a "good life" in relation to or as opposed to a "moral life."

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As the discourse of contemporary cultural studies brings questions of race, nationality, and gender to the center of critical attention nowadays, there is a strong sense that religious, or perhaps religious experience, should command the attention of the academic and wider reading community. Seeing into the Life of Things is a response to that need. By combining the theoretical and the practical, this book serves as both a pioneering scholarly contribution to a devleoping field and a valuable guide for those who read, reflect on, and discuss points of intersection of religion and literature. The contributors to this pioneering study represent a range of voices and viewpoints, some of them established leaders in their fields, others in the process of becoming new leaders. E. Dennis Taylor, Joseph Appleyard, Philip Rule, John Boyd, and Jane and Charles Rzepka work toward the development of a discourse that can take its place with discourses that have developed around a New Historicism and Feminism. Robert Kiely, Stephen Fix, Keven Van Anglen, J. Robert Barth, Richard Kearney, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Judith Wilt, John L. Mahoney, David Leigh, Melinda Ponder, John Anderson, and Michael Raiger offer more focused approaches to writers as varied as Gerard Manley Hopkins, Katherine Lee Bates, Flannery O'Connor, Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, and Seamus Heaney and to special genres like spritual autobiography and film.

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The Man Who Rode the Tiger is the dramatic story of the biggest investigation of political corruption in American municipal history.

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In Edmund Burke: A Bibliography of Secondary Studies to 1982 Clara Gandy and Peter Stanlis write, "One of the large unanswered questions is how Burke's economic theory is related to his political theory, and whether they are complementary or contradictory." Canavan is the first to offer a book-length treatment of this question, and in so doing, he places the strength of his argument largely on primary sources rather than a patchwork of previous interpretations. Canavan aims to show that Burke's own emphasis was no on capitalistic laissez-fair economics, as has been assumen, but that his goals were primarily political and cultural. Namely, Burke sought the preservation and development of an aristocratic and Christian civilization supported economically by a leading class of landed property owners. This study projects a new profile of Burke which challenges C.B. Macpherson's sketch of him as a bourgeois capitalist, or, as depicted by J.B. Plumb and Frank O'Gorman, as a hired philsopher of the Whig Oligarchy. Nor does Canavan's study present the philosopher as one who would "declare war on the poor," as Gertrude Himmelfarb charged in her The Idea of Poverty. Burke emerges from Canavan's treatment as a Whiug who admired paternalistic government by the rich and virtuous whom he felt would govern as trustees for the benefit of the whole people. Burke did not support the notion that property by monopolized by any one class in society, but wanted the wealthy to empower intermediary institutions which would hold in check the control of the expansive state, whether that meant the Crown in Britain or the revolutionary state in France.

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This book explores the background of the NRA, the most important economic measure of the first hundred days of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. It also is the history of the business community's efforts during the 1920s and '30s to emasculate the federal policy of maintaining a competitive enterprise system.

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A collection of some 600 excerpts from contemporary essays and letters, plus numerous b&w photos and reproductions, capturing a panoramic picture of the city from Dutch days to the 1950s. Pieces by authors such as James Fenimore Cooper, Charles Dickens, and Mark Twain are organized chronologically, covering eras such as the early national period, the emergence of the modern city (1870-1900), and the golden generation (1900-1930). A new introduction by James F. Richardson brings the account up to date.

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The Limits of Language concerns itself with the nature and limits of language at a time when our understanding of the world and of ourselves is intimately related to what we understand of language.

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Focusing on European and American trial fiction since about 1880, Dark Mirror argues that although it is generally animated by a sense of injustice, this literature reflects the virtual collapse in Western culture of the idea of a universal, or "natural," ethical law. From the ancient Greeks to the Victorians, that idea, though powerfully contested by the notion that justice was simply "the interest of the stronger," remained vigorously alive in books as in people’s minds. It thus constituted an alternative to injustice which modern literature, whether its angle is religious, social, or absurdist, rarely presents. Sterne presents the argument that the tradition of natural law can be adapted to the present condition, a hypothesis that necessitates a view of an international community in which distributive as well as punitive justice is done. Creators of literature, who have so persuasively dramatized the corruptions, cruelties, and absurdities of our time, would then eb called upon to increasingly choose to imagine "just" ways for us to emerge from chaos. Dark Mirror is the first study that combines, comprehensively, the treatment of the historical conflict between idealistic (natural law) and "realistic" or cynical approaches to the idea of justice.

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Contemporary readers who look at late-eigteenth-century or nineteenth-century imaginative literature must be struch by a phenomenon that is nearly universal in the period: the powerful presence of sentimentality. An often overlooked fact is that "Sentimentality" not only is a critical term, but is limited to a historical period, from roughly 1700 to the present. Fulweiler's hypothesis is that setimentality in writing has played a crucial part in shaping Western consciousness. As a study of evolution of consciousness-rather than the history of ideas- the argument grows out of the work of philosophers such as Ernst Cassirer and Susanne Langer, historical philosophers including R.G. Collingwood, Thomas Kuhn, and Michel Foucault, historically oriented literary critics such as Erich Auerbach, and finally the eclectic writing of Owen Barfield. Fulweiler's hypothesis is that the general consciousness of Western society has undergone severe shocks as a result of the loss-and sometimes repression- of an older human awareness of what anthropologists have called "participation," a term that may be defined as a non-sensory link between human beings and nature. This loss of participation has become gradually apparant with the erosiion of its visible emblems: The Church (with its supporting Law); the extended family, as visualized in feudal, hierarchical theories of society; and finally the nineteeth-century ideal, the nuclear family, with its sacred location, the home, and its glorified Proprietress, the Woman. Sentimentality emerges, then, as a desperate, if often illegitimate, attempt to regain what has been lost, so that imaginative literature of the nineteenth century, even very good literature, is overwhelmed by domestic sentimentality. In the twentieth century it has been heavily, although covertly, affected by a sexual sentimentality of the previous era. This sentimental journey is traced by focusing on six major writers: Tennyson and Dickens as the giants of Victorian domestic sentimentality, Hopkins and Hardy as transitional figures in whom the sentimental tropes of the ninteenth century are moving toward the sexual sentimentality of the twentieth, Lawrence and Eliot as representatives, in different ways, of that era. This multi-faceted study will be of considerable interest to specialists across a number of fields including literature, history, psychology, philosophy, and religious studies.

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This basic introduction to the philosophical inquiry into the fundamental questions of human knowing features a range of carefully designed study questions.

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The most recent commentators on Edmund Burke have renewed the charge that his political thought lacks the consistency and coherency necessary to even claim the status of a political philosophy and that he is indeed a "utilitarian." They mark him off as an "ideologist," a "rhetorician," and a "deliberate propagandist." Even Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, his most profound statement of a political philosophy, is regarded by some as a work of mere "persuasion," not "philosophy." All this occurs in spite of the seminal work of Stanlis, Canavan, and Wilkins, who in the 1950s and ‘60s, demonstrated the natural law foundations of Burke’s politics. Burke revisionists, forced to acknowledge his use of the "natural law," label such use as a rhetorical means for utilitarian ends. Directly opposed to this renewed "utilitarian" interpretation of Burke is Joseph Pappin’s work The Metaphysics of Edmund Burke. Not only does this work challenge the "utilitarian" view of Burke, it sets out, as not other work on Burke has attempted to do, "to make explicit the implicit metaphysical core of Burke’s political thought." Pappin does this by examining both Burke’s critics and Burke’s own attack on a rationalist, ideologically inspired metaphysics. Drawing from Burke’s vast writings, Pappin establishes as his goal "to demonstrate that Burke’s political philosophy is grounded in a realist metaphysic, one that is basically consonant with the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition." Does the author succeed? According to Francis Canavan, in his Foreword to this work, the "explanatory key" of a realist metaphysics grounding Burke’s politics "is a key that fits the lock better than any other that scholars have offered." Canavan further holds that the author offers "us a more thorough analysis of Burke’s understanding of God, the creation, nature, man, and society than has previously appeared."

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As a young student in Paris, O’Connell was first enamored of the intriguing artistic imagery of Augustine’s works. The imagery continued to impress him as his scholarship continued. Now, after many years of research and regarding study on the topic, a thorough treatment of Augustine’s "image clusters" is revealed in this volume, Soundings in St. Augustine’s Imagination. That St. Augustine’s writings are empowered by use of poetic imagery is of interest to readers of philosophy, theology, as well as language. In this work, Augustine’s imagery is used as a basis to shed light on some of his thought which had previously puzzled the scholarly world. Soundings in St. Augustine’s Imagination is an imperative addition to any philosophical library and a rich reward for all intrigued by his dramatic use of language and metaphor.

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Nature and Spirit: An Essay in Ecstatic Naturalism develops an enlarged conception of nature that in turn calls for a transformed naturalism. Unline more descriptive naturalisms, such as those by Dewey, Santayana, and Buchler, ecstatic naturalism works out of the fundamental ontological difference between nature naturing(natura naturans) and nature natured (natura naturata). This difference underlies all other variations within a generic conception of nature. The spirit operates within a generic conception of nature. The spirit operates within a fragmented nature and has its own unique locations. Ecstatic naturalism does not eulogize spirit nor impose a process theodicy upon nature as a whole but carefully describes the ways in which spirit emerges from finite locations within the world. Methodologically, the text radically regrounds phenomenology so that it can work more closely with a metaphysics seeking the most generic forms of nature. The move from a transcendental phenomenology, which rests upon a profound misconception of the parcel of a radicalized naturalism, makes it possible to show how all orders of relevance are related to nature and to the spirit. This, in turn relocates the human process, with its dialectical tension between finitude and transendence, and places the self fully within the emergent structures of the community of interpreters as that community lives out of hope. The concept of worldhood is regrounded in pragmatic and semiotic terms, thus putting pressure on Heidegger's formulations. Peirce's pragmatic categorical structure is used to show how worldhood differs from any other order within the world. The correlation of the potencies of nature, which are presemiotic and preordinal, wit the orders of the world itself, is possible only through an ordinal phenomenology that remains attuned to the fundamental difference between nature naturing (the potencies) and nature natured (the orders of the world). Finally, the text redefines the divine natures in the light of an ecstatic naturalism that sees god as an order within the world that experiences the fragmented quality of nature. Process theology is challenged for its inability to grasp the tensions between god and the encompassing. Four divine natures are laid bare as they relate to nature and to each other. The work concludes with a description of the divine life in the face of the encompassing.

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The underlying contention of this study is that, since Catholic Modernism was defined not by the so-called modernists but by the anti-modernists, to understand it one must understand the anti-modernist (or integralist) mind. Schultenover argues that, since Catholic Modernism was defined not by modernists but by the anti-modernists, to understand it one must understand the anti-modernist (or integralist) mind.

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The spiritual revival that is sweeping the Soviet Union today had its genesis in the religious renaissance of the early 20th century. In both cases, it was lay intellectuals, disenchanted with simplistic positivism and materialism, who adapted Russian orthodoxy to modern life. Their ideas reverberated, not only in religion and philosophy, but in art, literature, painting, theater and film. Banned by the Soviet government in 1922, the writings of the religious renaissance were rediscovered in the Brezhnev era by a new generation of Soviet intellectuals disillusioned with Marxism. Circulating from hand to hand in illegal typewritten editions (samizdat), they exerted an evergrowing influence on Soviet society, from the very top down to ordinary people. Under the new policy of glasnost, the government itself is currently reprinting their works. The selections included in this volume reflect the profundity and breadth of their thought and are presented in English for the first time. The recognition of the universal need and significance of spiritual values and ideals united this otherwise heterogeneous group and bears witness to the diversity of their approach to the basic issues of the human condition. The centrality of these lay intellectuals’ concerns transcends the specifics of the historical situation in early 20th century Russia and makes their writings relevant to the universal human condition. In order of appearance, the selections are: VLADIMIR SOLOVYOV, The Enemy from the East, The Russian National Ideal; NIKOLAI GROT, On the True Tasks of Philosophy; SERGEI DIAGHILEV, Complex Questions; VASILLY V. ROZANOV, On Sweetest Jesus and the Bitter Fruits of the World; NIKOLAI BERDIAEV, Socialism as Religion; SERGEI BULGAKOV, An Urgent Task; VIACHISLAV IVANOV, Crisis of Individualism, GEORGII CHULKOV, On Mystical Anarchism; DMITRI S. MEREZHKOVSKY, Revolution and Religion, The Jewish Question As a Russian Question; GEORGII FLOROVSKY, In the World of Quests and Wanderings; PAVEL NOVGORODTSEV, The Essence of the Russian Orthodox Consciousness; PETR STRUVE, The Intelligentsia and the National Face; ANDREI BELY, Revolution and Culture; ALEKSANDR BLOK, Catiline; EVGENY TRUBETSKOI, The Bolshevist Utopia and the Religious Movement.

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A recipe book offering full menus from four Sherlock Holmes dinners and recounting a history of the dinners and of the Firehouse Breakfast which has become a tradition with the Culinary Institute of America. All the recipes are served with a little relevant history and research.

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This book argues that a basic problem in thinking about understanding, temporality, and selfhood is due to “imitative” modes of thought found in much traditional Western philosophy and theology. Given this, the book examines the complex role that “image” and “imitation” play in understanding and its world of meaning, the import of language and narrative for configuring human temporality, and the existence of self. The author’s contention is that when critically understood, mimesis, with its roots in performative enactment, holds resources for reconsidering these basic dimensions of human life beyond imitative paradigms of thought.

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It is an indisputable fact that the credentials of Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936) were by no means those of a professional philosopher. He had no degree in the subject and he never attended a university. Nor was he widely or deeply read in the tradition of Western philosophy. He was, nonetheless, a truly philosophical thinker: convincing, persuasive, provocative, controversial. Despite all this, no one has, up to the present, devoted an entire book to the examination and analysis of his properly philosophical thinking and writing. This book attempts to range far and wide in the writings of Chesterton, perhaps even to betray him slightly by trying to systematize his thought. It is, however, not betraying Chesterton to claim that there is one central theme around which all his thinking and writing can be ordered: the theme of the grandeur of the reality of human, created in the image of God and participating in the beauty of divine creativity. His philosophy, if we want to characterize it in any one way, is a philosophy of life, of human living, with all that implies of rationality and freedom, of truth and paradox, of religion and morality, or faith and hope and love—in short, of all that makes human living spectacularly worthwhile.

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Third and expanded edition with a new biography of Erasmus.

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The most accessible of Ricoeur's early texts, Fallible Man offers an introduction to phenomenological method.

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Hazlitt is easily the most representative of the major British critics writing during the period of 'High Romanticism' (1790-1830), as well as one of the two greatest…No other critic is so central and in so many ways…The Logic of Passion is a book that distils over twenty years of thinking not only about Hazlitt but also about three more general subjects without which a first-class book on Hazlitt as a critic could hardly be written. (1) The English romantics generally; (2) what is rarer, in our academic specialization, a grasp of the eighteenth-century intellectual (and critical) legacy; (3) what is still rarer, a knowledge of the history of criticism as a whole…Professor Mahoney's credentials are impeccable. He has taught and written in all of these fields - English romanticism, the eighteenth century, and the history of criticism. His book is therefore rich in what is usually called 'background.' Yet his learning is carried lightly, as befits a mature scholar who is distilling a complex subject without confronting us with the fatigues of self-display and nit-picking. With the sureness of authority, he moves quickly and cleanly to the essentials. His method is rightly thematic rather than chronological…Professor Mahoney is able, without tedious length, to give a truly comprehensive interpretation…Professor Mahoney's Logic of Passion is one of those rare books one can warmly recommend both to the beginning and the advanced scholar. For its clarity of style and structure, its pace and verve make it as readable as any discussion of any major critic I have encountered. Yet…the subject is so richly nuanced that the mature scholar of both romanticism and the history of criticism will time and again see the implications with a union of freshness and penetration, 'herrlich,' as Goethe said, 'wie am ersten Tage.'

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This is a philosophic study of some aspects of spiritual development, broadly defined. Professor Neville has been influenced significantly by comparison between several of the world’s great spiritual traditions, and he has tried to be faithful to experiences in those traditions. Readers whose interest in spiritual development come out of non-Western traditions will find this book congenial. But this is a philosophical study, and the book puts forward a philosophical theory of spiritual development, paying attention to personal, social, and metaphysical concerns, and analyzing three central images of spiritual "heroism." The central contribution attempted here is a way of understanding the quest for spiritual liberation or perfection through the models of the spiritual soldier, the sage, and the saint. At times the argument aims, not just to understand, but to promote spiritual liberation, and to do so through philosophic understanding.

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It is surely a significant manifestation of the permanence of the soul's quest for God that the Western world, at a time when human values, principles, and ideals are being questioned and rejected, has turned to an interest in the age-old practice of the East - the quest for inner peace and tranquility as found in the profoundly moving experience of contemplation after the method of Zen Buddhism. In this deeply sympathetic study, the author compares the principles and the practices of Zen with the traditional concepts, aims, and results of Christian mysticism. His object is, first, ecumenical - to explore the bases of Zen and Christian mysticism, so that Buddhist and Christian can communicate; second, to rethink the basic concepts of Catholic mystical theology in the light of the Zen experience; and last, to encourage more people to contemplative prayer.

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Albert J. Loomie began the study of the political implications of Spain's concern about English Catholicism during the latter part of the reign of Queen Elizabeth. This led him to probe one over-riding issue within that problem: the relationship of the activities of the English Catholic exiles to the political objectives of Kings Philip II and Philip III. In the documents of the Estado collection at Simancas, the archive of St. Alban's in Valladolid, the letters and reports in the Jesuit archives in Rome, and the State Papers, Foreign of the Public Record Office he found considerable new evidence. The basic research was presented in a doctoral dissertation at London University in 1957 entitled Spain and the English Catholic Exiles, 1580-1604. Since then Loomie has prepared an extensive revision of that original study. He has attempted here to explore the principal ways in which Spain tried to assist the exiles during the Anglo-Spanish war, and the complexity of the problems that its policy raised, but did not always solve.

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The central Christian belief in salvation through the suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ remains one of the most intractable mysteries of Christian faith. Throughout history, it has given rise to various theories of atonement, many of which have been subject to critique as they no longer speak to contemporary notions of evil and sin or to current conceptions of justice. One of the important challenges for contemporary Christian theology thus involves exploring new ways of understanding the salvific meaning of the cross. In Atonement and Comparative Theology, Christian theologians with expertise in Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism, and African Religions reflect on how engagement with these traditions sheds new light on the Christian understanding of atonement by pointing to analogous structures of sin and salvation, drawing attention to the scandal of the cross as seen by the religious other, and re-interpreting aspects of the Christian understanding of atonement. Together, they illustrate the possibilities for comparative theology to deepen and enrich Christian theological reflection.

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Now What? is an innovative exploration of artworks and films that return to radical histories subject to erasure or otherwise lost or occluded over time. The moments returned to—the Cuban Revolution, Chile’s 1973 coup d’état, the ambiguous 1989 “revolution” in Romania, and the mayhem surrounding the Red Army Faction in 1970s West Germany—stand as historical watersheds, foundational and precipitate moments in the history of radical politics. Delving into these key historical moments by way of Tania Bruguera’s 2009 performance Tatlin’s Whisper in Havana, filmmaker Patricio Guzmán’s decades-long cycle of returns to Allende’s Chile, Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujica’s Videograms of a Revolution, Corneliu Porumboiu’s 12:08 East of Bucharest, the film Germany in Autumn, and Gerhard Richter’s October 18, 1977 suite of paintings, Rachel Weiss convincingly threads these works together through subtle and illuminating reflections on the complex dynamics involved in historical trauma and memory, addressing key questions about the meanings and uses of the past.

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World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth recovers a genealogy of anticolonial thought that advocated collective inexpertise, unknowing, and unrecognizability. Early-twentieth-century anticolonial thinkers endeavored to imagine a world emancipated from colonial rule, but it was a world they knew they would likely not live to see. Written in exile, in abjection, or in the face of death, anticolonial thought could not afford to base its politics on the hope of eventual success, mastery, or national sovereignty. J. Daniel Elam shows how anticolonial thinkers theorized inconsequential practices of egalitarianism in the service of an impossibility: a world without colonialism. Framed by a suggestive reading of the surprising affinities between Frantz Fanon’s political writings and Erich Auerbach’s philological project, World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth foregrounds anticolonial theories of reading and critique in the writing of Lala Har Dayal, B. R. Ambedkar, M. K. Gandhi, and Bhagat Singh. These anticolonial activists theorized reading not as a way to cultivate mastery and expertise but as a way, rather, to disavow mastery altogether. To become or remain an inexpert reader, divesting oneself of authorial claims, was to fundamentally challenge the logic of the British Empire and European fascism, which prized self-mastery, authority, and national sovereignty. Bringing together the histories of comparative literature and anticolonial thought, Elam demonstrates how these early-twentieth-century theories of reading force us to reconsider the commitments of humanistic critique and egalitarian politics in the still-colonial present.

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Sentimental Empiricism reconsiders the legacy of eighteenth and nineteenth century empiricism and moral sentimentalism for the intellectual formation of the generation of postwar French thinkers whose work came to dominate Anglophone conversations across the humanities under the guise of French theory. Panagia's book first shows what was missed in the reception of this literature in the Anglophone academy by attending to how France's pedagogical milieu plays out church and state relations in the form of educational debates around reading practices, the aesthetics of mimesis, French imperialism, and republican universalism. Panagia then shows how such thinkers as Jean Wahl, Simone de Beauvoir, Gilbert Simondon, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Foucault develop a sentimental empiricist critical philosophy that distances itself from dialectical critique and challenges the metaphysical premise of inherent relations, especially as it had been articulated in the tradition of Aristotelian

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This book offers a manifesto for a radical existentialism aiming to regenerate the place of the outside that contemporary theory underestimates. Neyrat calls this outside “atopia”: not utopia, a dreamt place out of the world where everything would be perfect, but atopia, the internal outside that is at the core of every being. Atopia is neither an object that an “object-oriented ontology” would be able to formalize, nor the matter that “new materialisms” could identify. Atopia is what constitutes the existence of any object or subject, its singularity or more precisely its “eccentricity.” Etymologically, to exist means “to be outside” and the book argues that every entity is outside, thrown in the world, wandering without any ontological anchor. In this regard, a radicalized existentialism does not privilege human beings (as Sartre and Heidegger did), but considers existence as a universal condition that concerns every being. It is important to offer a radical existentialism because the current denial of the outside is politically, and aesthetically, damaging. Only an atopian philosophy—a bizarre, extravagant, heretic philosophy—can care for our fear of the outside. For therapeutic element, a radical existentialism favors everything that challenges the compact immanence in which we are trapped, losing capacity to imagine political alternatives. To sustain these alternatives, the book identifies the atopia as a condition of the possibility to break immanence and analyze these breaks in human and animal subjectivity, language, politics and metaphysics.

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India is witnessing a unique moment in populism, with sentiments divided between economic reforms that promise fast industrialization and protests that thwart such industrialization. This book offers an ethnographic study of divergent local responses to the proposed construction of a Tata Motors factory in eastern India that would have produced the Nano, the so-called people’s car. Initial excitement was followed by long protests among the villagers whose agricultural land was being acquired for the project. After these protests secured the relocation of the factory, further demonstrations followed, sometimes involving the same participants, seeking to bring the factory back. People’s Car explores this ambivalence concerning industrialization, asking why long drawn resistances against corporate industrialization coexist with political rhetoric and slogans promoting fast-paced industrialization. Majumder argues that such contradictory rhetoric and promises target divided sentiments in rural India where land is incommensurable with money and a site specially marked by desire for middle caste small landowners aspiring to futures beyond agriculture. Previous studies of industrialization have generally focused on either demands for development or populist critiques. Moving beyond romantic clichés about urban/rural divisions, People’s Car offers a single analytical and ethnographic framework demonstrating how pro- and anti-industrialization forces feed off each other.

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Pragmatism mediates rival extremes, and religion is no exception: The problems of realism versus antirealism, evidentialism versus fideism, and science versus religion, along with other key issues in the philosophy of religion, receive new interpretations when examined from a pragmatist point of view. Religion is then understood as a human practice with certain inherent aims and goals, responding to specific human needs and interests, serving certain important human values, and seeking to resolve problematic situations that naturally arise from our practices themselves, especially our need to live with our vulnerability, finitude, guilt, and mortality.

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In this original and engaging work, author Kent Puckett looks at how British filmmakers imagined, saw, and sought to represent its war during wartime through film. The Second World War posed unique representational challenges to Britain’s filmmakers. Because of its logistical enormity, the unprecedented scope of its destruction, its conceptual status as total, and the way it affected everyday life through aerial bombing, blackouts, rationing, and the demands of total mobilization, World War II created new, critical opportunities for cinematic representation. Beginning with a close and critical analysis of Britain’s cultural scene, War Pictures examines where the historiography of war, the philosophy of violence, and aesthetics come together. Focusing on three films made in Britain during the second half of the Second World War—Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), Lawrence Olivier’s Henry V (1944), and David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945)—Puckett treats these movies as objects of considerable historical interest but also as works that exploit the full resources of cinematic technique to engage with the idea, experience, and political complexity of war. By examining how cinema functioned as propaganda, criticism, and a form of self-analysis, War Pictures reveals how British filmmakers, writers, critics, and politicians understood the nature and consequence of total war as it related to ideas about freedom and security, national character, and the daunting persistence of human violence. While Powell and Pressburger, Olivier, and Lean developed deeply self-conscious wartime films, their specific and strategic use of cinematic eccentricity was an aesthetic response to broader contradictions that characterized the homefront in Britain between 1939 and 1945. This stylistic eccentricity shaped British thinking about war, violence, and commitment as well as both an answer to and an expression of a more general violence. Although War Pictures focuses on a particularly intense moment in time, Puckett uses that particularity to make a larger argument about the pressure that war puts on aesthetic representation, past and present. Through cinema, Britain grappled with the paradoxical notion that, in order to preserve its character, it had not only to fight and to win but also to abandon exactly those old decencies, those “sporting-club rules,” that it sought also to protect.

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In the last ten years, investigators worldwide have focused on the connections between the philosophy of classical figures in American pragmatism (e.g., William James, Charles Peirce, and John Dewey) and the Hispanic world. Pragmatism in the Americas examines the intersection between these two traditions, advancing new and unexplored realms of Western philosophy, and uncovering new relationships. It argues that, with respect to philosophical issues, there are fewer rifts and more affinity than is commonly thought between these two worlds. The book will provide an invaluable source for philosophers and philosophy students, as well as for scholars from other disciplines (e.g., history, political science, sociology, diversity studies, and gender and race studies) to begin understanding the dynamic relationship in thinking between the two Americas. In additional to documenting the results of a new and thriving area of research, it can also function as a primer to direct and provoke further inquiry. The volume is divided into three parts. First, the reception of the classical American Pragmatists within the Hispanic world is explored. Some of the essays argue for the inclusion of Hispanic figures in the history of pragmatism and therefore challenge the notion that pragmatism is a philosophy that is exclusively North American. Others put forth pragmatism as a philosophy that can contribute to dealing with the present social, ethical, or political problems experienced by Hispanics in and outside of the United States. These essays, from North American, Spanish, and Latin American scholars, fill a void in the humanities and introduce a number of Hispanic pragmatists, who are not included in standard pragmatists texts. Altogether, the book questions gaps that never existed, building new bridges instead. It pioneers the way for a twenty-first-century dialogue between two great philosophical traditions.

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Thinking about Thinking examines philosophy from a variety of perspectives as a practice realized by persons who communicate with one another while reflecting about the meaning of human life and thought. Without forgetting the logical and methodological conditions of systematic thought, the author insists on the intimate connections that tie all philosophical texts and conversations to the lives from which they emerge. As product of an individual thinker, who, thanks to individual teachers, has been familiarized with particular traditions of a particular culture, each philosophy is unique. If it is a good one, it is also revealing for many—perhaps even for all—other philosophers. At the same time, all thinking is addressed to individual interlocutors, each of whom responds to it by transforming it into a different philosophy. This fact invites us to explore the dialogical dimension of thinking, which, in turn, refers us to the communitarian and historical contexts from which solitude, as well as solidarity, competition, alliances, and friendships in thought, emerge.

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In February 2009, America celebrates the bicentennial of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, and the pace of new Lincoln books and articles has already quickened. From his cabinet’s politics to his own struggles with depression, Lincoln remains the most written-about story in our history. And each year historians find something new and important to say about the greatest of our Presidents. Lincoln Revisited is a masterly guidePub to what’s new and what’s noteworthy in this unfolding story—a brilliant gathering of fresh scholarship by the leading Lincoln historians of our time. Brought together by The Lincoln Forum, they tackle uncharted territory and emerging questions; they also take a new look at established debates—including those about their own landmark works. Here, these well-known historians revisit key chapters in Lincoln’s legacy—from Matthew Pinsker on Lincoln’s private life and Jean Baker on religion and the Lincoln marriage to Geoffrey Perret on Lincoln as leader and Frank J. Williams on Lincoln and civil liberties in wartime. The eighteen original essays explore every corner of Lincoln’s world—religion and politics, slavery and sovereignty, presidential leadership and the rule of law, the Second Inaugural Address and the assassination. In his 1947 classic, Lincoln Reconsidered, David Herbert Donald confronted the Lincoln myth. Today, the scholars in Lincoln Revisited give a new generation of students, scholars, and citizens the perspectives vital for understanding the constantly reinterpreted genius of Abraham Lincoln.

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A current truism holds that the undergraduate degree today is equivalent to the high-school diploma of yesterday. But undergraduates at a research university would probably not recognize themselves in the historical mirror of high-school vocational education. Students in a vast range of institutions are encouraged to look up the educational social scale, whereas earlier vocational education was designed to “cool out” expectations of social advancement by training a working class prepared for massive industrialization. In Class Degrees, Evan Watkins argues that reforms in vocational education in the 1980s and 1990s can explain a great deal about the changing directions of class formation in the United States, as well as how postsecondary educational institutions are changing. Responding to a demand for flexibility in job skills and reflecting a consequent aspiration to choice and perpetual job mobility, those reforms aimed to eliminate the separate academic status of vocational education. They transformed it from a “cooling out” to a “heating up” of class expectations. The result has been a culture of hyperindividualism. The hyperindividual lives in a world permeated with against-all-odds plots, from “beat the odds” of long supermarket checkout lines by using self-checkout and buying FasTrak transponders to beat the odds of traffic jams, to the endless superheroes on film and TV who daily save various sorts of planets and things against all odds. Of course, a few people can beat the odds only if most other people do not. As choice begins to replace the selling of individual labor at the core of contemporary class formation, the result is a sort of waste labor left behind by the competitive process. Provocatively, Watkins argues that, in the twenty-first century, academic work in the humanities is assuming the management function of reclaiming this waste labor as a motor force for the future.

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In the name of efficiency, the practice of education has come to be dominated by neoliberal ideology and procedures of standardization and quantification. Such attempts to make all aspects of practice transparent and subject to systematic accounting lack sensitivity to the invisible and the silent, to something in the human condition that cannot readily be expressed in an either-or form. Seeking alternatives to such trends, Saito reads Dewey’s idea of progressive education through the lens of Emersonian moral perfectionism (to borrow a term coined by Stanley Cavell). She elucidates a spiritual and aesthetic dimension to Dewey’s notion of growth, one considerably richer than what Dewey alone presents in his typically scientific terminology. The Gleam of Light: Moral Perfectionism and Education in Dewey and Emerson is available from the publisher on an open-access basis.

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The Phenomenon of Man, by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, has been characterized as metaphysics, poetry, and mysticism-virtually everything except what its author claimed it was: a "purely scientific mémoir." Professor O'Connell here follows up on a nest of clues, uncovered first in an early unpublished essay, then in the series of essays contained principally in The Vision of the Past. Those clues all point to Teilhard's intimate familiarity with the philosophy of science propounded by the celebrated Pierre Duhem. It was Duhem's central claim that science, to remain true to itself, must aim at establishing a genuine "natural classification" phenomenal reality. That insight, Professor O'Connell argues, guided Teilhard's lifelong effort to describe the "imposed reality-factors" which science in its variety of forms suggests as ingredients and operative at every phase in the evolutionary development of planet Earth. Limiting his focus to the way Teilhard unfolded his vision of the past, Professor O'Connell concludes that those who deprecate Teilhard as unscientific betray little awareness of how sophisticated his understanding of science truly was.

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