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  Hebrews: Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible

  Stephen D. Long

  The book of Hebrews is a fascinating extended sermon which has nurtured and challenged the church for centuries. It stands in tension with our sensibilities but provides guidance for the church's life and for individual Christians. In this theological commentary, D. Stephen Long explores this captivating book. He finds Hebrews extremely relevant for today since it integrates doctrine, ethics, and politics while helping faithful Christians find their ways through troubled times. It invites us into a robust world beyond the assumptions of today's scientific worldviews. Hebrews also helps us understand how to read Scripture after the triumph of Jesus Christ. Long's expert theological guidance helps us understand Hebrews and hear its message for our contemporary world.

  The volumes in Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible from Westminster John Knox Press offer a fresh and invigorating approach to all the books of the Bible. Building on a wide range of sources from biblical studies, the history of theology, the church's liturgical and musical traditions, contemporary culture, and the Christian tradition, noted scholars focus less on traditional historical and literary angles in favor of a theologically focused commentary that considers the contemporary relevance of the texts. This series is an invaluable resource for those who want to probe beyond the backgrounds and words of biblical texts to their deep theological and ethical meanings for the church today.

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  Subjectivity and Lifeworld in Transcendental Phenomenology

  Sebastian Luft

  The purpose of Sebastian Luft's book is threefold: first, to contribute to the renaissance of Husserl interpretation inspired by the continuing publi­cation of Husserl's works, mainly his unpublished manuscripts; second, to account for the historical origins and influence of the phenomenological project by articulating Husserl's relationship to authors before and after him; and finally, to argue for the continuing viability of the transcendental-phenomenological project, as conceived by Husserl in his later years, for contemporary thought. In this last regard, Luft shows that Husserlian phenomenology is not exhausted in the Cartesian, or early, perspective, which is indeed its weakest and most vulnerable presentation.

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  The Routledge Companion to Phenomenology

  Sebastian Luft and Søren Overgaard

  Phenomenology was one of the twentieth century’s major philosophical movements and continues to be a vibrant and widely studied subject today. The Routledge Companion to Phenomenology is an outstanding guide and reference source to the key philosophers, topics and themes in this exciting subject, and essential reading for any student or scholar of phenomenology.

  Comprising over fifty chapters by a team of international contributors, the Companion is divided into five clear parts:

  • main figures in the phenomenological movement, from Brentano to Derrida
  • main topics in phenomenology
  • phenomenological contributions to philosophy
  • phenomenological intersections
  • historical postscript.

  Close attention is paid to the core topics in phenomenology such as intentionality, perception, subjectivity, the self, the body, being and phenomenological method. An important feature of the Companion is its examination of how phenomenology has contributed to central disciplines in philosophy such as metaphysics, philosophy of mind, moral philosophy, aesthetics and philosophy of religion as well as disciplines beyond philosophy such as race, cognitive science, psychiatry, literary criticism and psychoanalysis.

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  Sing Not War: The Lives of Union and Confederate Veterans In Gilded Age America

  James Marten

  After the Civil War, white Confederate and Union army veterans reentered--or struggled to reenter--the lives and communities they had left behind. In Sing Not War, James Marten explores how the nineteenth century's "Greatest Generation" attempted to blend back into society and how their experiences were treated by non-veterans.

  Many soldiers, Marten reveals, had a much harder time reintegrating into their communities and returning to their civilian lives than has been previously understood. Although Civil War veterans were generally well taken care of during the Gilded Age, Marten argues that veterans lost control of their legacies, becoming best remembered as others wanted to remember them--for their service in the war and their postwar political activities. Marten finds that while southern veterans were venerated for their service to the Confederacy, Union veterans often encountered resentment and even outright hostility as they aged and made greater demands on the public purse. Drawing on letters, diaries, journals, memoirs, newspapers, and other sources, Sing Not War illustrates that during the Gilded Age "veteran" conjured up several conflicting images and invoked contradicting reactions. Deeply researched and vividly narrated, Marten's book counters the romanticized vision of the lives of Civil War veterans, bringing forth new information about how white veterans were treated and how they lived out their lives.

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  Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism

  Jodi Melamed

  In the global convulsions in the aftermath of World War II, one dominant world racial order broke apart and a new one emerged. This is the story Jodi Melamed tells in Represent and Destroy, portraying the postwar racial break as a transition from white supremacist modernity to a formally antiracist liberal capitalist modernity in which racial violence works normatively by policing representations of difference.

  Following the institutionalization of literature as a privileged domain for Americans to get to know difference—to describe, teach, and situate themselves with respect to race—Melamed focuses on literary studies as a cultural technology for transmitting liberal racial orders. She examines official antiracism in the United States and finds that these were key to ratifying the country’s global ascendancy. She shows how racial liberalism, liberal multiculturalism, and neoliberal multiculturalism made racism appear to be disappearing, even as they incorporated the assumptions of global capitalism into accepted notions of racial equality.

  Yet Represent and Destroy also recovers an anticapitalist “race radical” tradition that provides a materialist opposition to official antiracisms in the postwar United States—a literature that sounds out the violence of liberal racial orders, relinks racial inequality to material conditions, and compels desire for something better than U.S. multiculturalism.

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  The Creolizing Subject: Race, Reason, and the Politics of Purity

  Michael Monahan

  How does our understanding of the reality (or lack thereof ) of race as a category of being affect our understanding of racism as a social phenomenon, and vice versa? How should we envision the aims and methods of our struggles against racism?

  Traditionally, the Western political and philosophical tradition held that true social justice points toward a raceless future—that racial categories are themselves inherently racist, and a sincere advocacy for social justice requires a commitment to the elimination or abolition of race altogether. This book focuses on the underlying assumptions that inform this view of race and racism, arguing that it is ultimately bound up in a “politics of purity”—an understanding of human agency, and reality itself, as requiring all-or-nothing categories with clear and unambiguous boundaries. Racism, being organized around a conception of whiteness as the purest manifestation of the human, thus demands a constant policing of the boundaries among racial categories.

  Drawing upon a close engagement with historical treatments of the development of racial categories and identities, the book argues that races should be understood not as clear and distinct categories of being but rather as ambiguous and indeterminate (yet importantly real) processes of social negotiation. As one of its central examples, it lays out the case of the Irish in seventeenth-century Barbados, who occasionally united with black slaves to fight white supremacy—and did so as white people, not as nonwhites who later became white when they capitulated to white supremacy.

  Against the politics of purity, Monahan calls for the emergence of a “creolizing subjectivity” that would place such ambiguity at the center of our understanding of race. The Creolizing Subject takes seriously the way in which racial categories, in all of their variety and ambiguity, situate and condition our identity, while emphasizing our capacity, as agents, to engage in the ongoing contestation and negotiation of the meaning and significance of those very categories.

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  Light Breaks Forth

  Agbonkhianmeghe E. Orobator

  ‘If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping in a closed room with one mosquito.’ So goes the African proverb quoted by one of the contributors to these reflections on the daily readings for Lent.

  One small mosquito can turn a peaceful night’s sleep into a waking nightmare. And each one of us has our own small but vital part to play in the great drama of Lent and Easter.

  In these forty days, shadowing the wilderness experience of Jesus, our lives, like his, are at a turning point. Do we choose the way of hope, love and justice, or the way of possessions, competitiveness and power? In these reflections on the common lectionary readings for each day of Lent, some of our finest spiritual writers reveal for us the transfiguring power of the scriptures.

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  Reconciliation, Justice, and Peace: The Second African Synod

  Agbonkhianmeghe E. Orobator

  This book addresses the theme of the Second African Synod on Reconciliation, Justice, and Peace in the wider context of globalization, inculturation, post-modernity, and pertinent socio-economic and political factors that shape the contemporary church and society in Africa. The 20 contributors represent a variety of disciplines and some of the issues discussed include:

  • Ecclesiology and the challenges of reconciliation, justice and peace in the context of crises, conflict, and poverty
  • Reconciliation, justice, and peace in Scripture, small Christian communities, and the church
  • Corruption, democratic principles, and governance
  • Integrity of the earth: environment, ecology, natural resources, and the church in Africa
  • The role of the Catholic Church in the public sphere
  • Women, leadership, and the theology of the church
  • Gender justice in the church and in African society
  • Interreligious dialogue (Christianity, Islam, and African Religion)
  • The challenge and ethics of HIV/AIDS prevention.

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  Theology Brewed in an African Pot

  Agbonkhianmeghe E. Orobator

  Using a framework of excerpts from Chinua Achebe's acclaimed novel, Things Fall Apart, Orobator introduces the major themes of Christian doctrine: God, Trinity, creation, grace and sin, Jesus Christ, church, Mary, the saints, inculturation, and spirituality. While explaining basic Christian beliefs, Theology Brewed in an African Pot also clarifies the differences between an African view of religion and a more Eurocentric understanding of religion offering a wider perspective on theology and culture.

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  Confronting the Climate Crisis: Catholic Theological Perspectives

  Jame Schaefer

  Can theologians respond meaningfully to the overwhelming scientific evidence that human activities are accelerating the temperature of Earth and adversely affecting people, other species, ecological systems, and the biosphere? Members of the Catholic Theological Society of Americas Interest Group on Global Warming have dug deeply into the biblical to contemporary traditions, reflected systematically, and produced seventeen original essays that demonstrate fruitful ways in which to approach the climate crisis so that current and predicted effects may be mitigated. Framing these essays are an overview of basic scientific findings that compelled this group effort and statements by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and Pope Benedict XVI.

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  Imagination and the Contemporary Novel

  John J. Su

  Imagination and the Contemporary Novel examines the global preoccupation with the imagination among literary authors with ties to former colonies of the British Empire since the 1960s. John Su draws on a wide range of authors including Peter Ackroyd, Monica Ali, Julian Barnes, André Brink, J. M. Coetzee, John Fowles, Amitav Ghosh, Nadine Gordimer, Hanif Kureishi, Salman Rushdie and Zadie Smith. This study rehabilitates the category of imagination in order to understand a broad range of contemporary Anglophone literature. The responses of such literature to shifts in global capitalism have often been misunderstood by the dominant categories of literary studies, the postmodern and the postcolonial. As both an insightful critique into the themes that drive a range of today's best novelists and a bold restatement of what the imagination is and what it means for contemporary culture, this book breaks new ground in the study of twenty-first-century literature.

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  Variations on Truth: Approaches in Contemporary Phenomenology

  Pol Vandevelde and Kevin Hermberg

  Bringing together leading scholars from across the world, this is a comprehensive survey of the latest phenomenological research into the perennial philosophical problem of ‘truth'.
  
  Starting with an historical introduction chronicling the variations on truth at play in the Phenomenological tradition, the book explores how Husserl's methodology equips us with the tools to thoroughly explore notions of truth, reality and knowledge. From these foundations, the book goes on to explore and extend the range of approaches that contemporary phenomenological research opens up in the face of the most profound ontological and epistemological questions raised by the tradition. In the final section, the authors go further still and explore how phenomenology relates to other variations on truth offered up by hermeneutic, deconstructive and narrative approaches.
  
  Across the 12 essays collected in this volume, Variations on Truth explores and maps a comprehensive and rigorous alternative to mainstream analytic discussions of truth, reality and understanding.

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  Economic Methodology: Understanding Economics as a Science

  Marcel Boumans and John Davis

  Like other sciences, the study of economics has been shaped by rigorous arguments and debates that continue to influence economists today. In this fascinating introduction, Boumans and Davis consider the scientific nature of the methods, logic, and forms of explanation that underlie economics as a discipline.

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  The American Journalism History Reader

  Bonnie Brennen and Hanno Hardt

  The American Journalism History Reader presents important primary texts—news articles and essays about journalism from all stages of the history of the American press—alongside key works of journalism history and criticism. The volume aims to place journalism history in its theoretical context, to familiarize the reader with essential works of, and about, journalism, and to chart the development of the field.

  The reader moves chronologically through American journalism history from the eighteenth-century to the present, combining classic sources and contemporary insights. Each century's section begins with a critical introduction, which establishes the social and political environment in which the media developed to highlight the ideological issues behind the historical period.

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  Global Social Economy: Development, Work and Policy

  John B. Davis

  This book addresses ‘global social economy’ which addresses the relation of capitalism to human flourishing, the role of international governance in the world economy, the transformation of work and use of time in internationalizing economies, cross-country developments in gender, poverty, and ageing, and ethics economic policy issues in the international economy.

  This edited collection examines the social nature of capitalism today, the possibilities for social and economic development in the world under the democratic leadership of the United Nations, and the middle ground between market and hierarchy occupied by gift exchange as a means of coordinating economic value creation and the creation of knowledge. It considers long term issues in the global social economy concerning gender and discrimination, intergenerational poverty transmission, and the role of ageing.

  From a variety of internationally acclaimed contributors, this collection introduces new social economic perspectives on the global economy that contest the neoliberal Washington Consensus view dominant until recent financial crises.

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  Individuals and Identity in Economics

  John B. Davis

  This book examines the different conceptions of the individual that have emerged in recent new approaches in economics, including behavioral economics, experimental economics, social preferences approaches, game theory, neuroeconomics, evolutionary and complexity economics, and the capability approach. These conceptions are classified according to whether they seek to revise the traditional atomist individual conception, put new emphasis on interaction and relations between individuals, account for individuals as evolving and self-organizing, and explain individuals in terms of capabilities. The method of analysis uses two identity criteria for distinguishing and re-identifying individuals to determine whether these different individual conceptions successfully identify individuals. Successful individual conceptions account for sub-personal and supra-personal bounds on single individual explanations. The former concerns the fragmentation of individuals into multiple selves; the latter concerns the dissolution of individuals into the social. The book develops an understanding of bounded individuality, seen as central to the defense of human rights.

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  A Cultural History of Childhood and Family

  Elizabeth Foyster and James Marten

  A Cultural History of Childhood and Family presents an authoritative survey from ancient times to the present. This set of six volumes covers 2800 years of history, charting the cultural, social, economic, religious, medical and political changes in domestic life.

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  AIDS, Sexuality, and the Black Church

  Angelique Harris

  AIDS, Sexuality, and the Black Church: Making the Wounded Whole is a revealing account of AIDS activism within Black churches in New York City. AIDS has taken a devastating toll on the Black community. Blacks make up approximately 13% of the total United States population, but almost half of all those infected with HIV in the U.S. are Black. Previous research has claimed that these high rates are due, in large part, to the lack of an immediate response by Black Church leaders and officials when AIDS first began to strike Blacks in the early 1980s. The Black Church can play a major role in providing AIDS education to its parishioners and community. However, feeling uncomfortable with addressing sexuality and homosexuality, many Black churches have simply avoided addressing AIDS believing that such conversations were inappropriate for church. As a result, The Balm in Gilead was formed in 1992 to encourage AIDS awareness among Black religious institutions. The Balm in Gilead is now the largest organization to work exclusively with the Black Church to promote AIDS education and awareness. In AIDS, Sexuality, and the Black Church, Angelique Harris examines the formation of the Black Church AIDS movement and the organizational development of The Balm in Gilead. This research begins from the perspective that the Black Church is working to address AIDS, and details how this work is being done. Harris couches her findings within social movement theory, the sociology of health and illness, social marketing, and the social construction of knowledge. This text provides a unique lens through which to examine AIDS discourse within the Black community. AIDS, Sexuality, and the Black Church is essential reading for AIDS scholars, researchers, and community activists alike.

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  Gothic Riffs: Secularizing the Uncanny in the European Imaginary, 1780-1820

  Diane Hoeveler

  Gothic Riffs: Secularizing the Uncanny in the European Imaginary, 1780–1820 by Diane Long Hoeveler provides the first comprehensive study of what are called “collateral gothic” genres—operas, ballads, chapbooks, dramas, and melodramas—that emerged out of the gothic novel tradition founded by Horace Walpole, Matthew Lewis, and Ann Radcliffe. The role of religion and its more popular manifestations, superstition and magic, in the daily lives of Western Europeans were effectively undercut by the forces of secularization that were gaining momentum on every front, particularly by 1800. It is clear, however, that the lower class and the emerging bourgeoisie were loath to discard their traditional beliefs. We can see their search for a sense of transcendent order and spiritual meaning in the continuing popularity of gothic performances that demonstrate that there was more than a residue of a religious calendar still operating in the public performative realm. Because this bourgeois culture could not turn away from God, it chose to be haunted, in its literature and drama, by God’s uncanny avatars: priests, corrupt monks, incestuous fathers, and uncles. The gothic aesthetic emerged during this period as an ideologically contradictory and complex discourse system; a secularizing of the uncanny; a way of alternately valorizing and at the same time slandering the realms of the supernatural, the sacred, the maternal, and the primitive.

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  The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

  Diane Hoeveler and Frederick S. Frank

  Edgar Allan Poe's only long fiction has provoked intense scholarly discussions about its meaning since its first publication. The novel relates the adventures of Pym after he stows away on a whaling ship, where he endures starvation, encounters with cannibals, a whirlpool, and finally a journey to an Antarctic sea. It draws on the conventions of travel writing and science fiction, and on Poe's own experiences at sea, but is ultimately in a category of its own.

  Appendices include virtually all of the contemporary sources of exploration and south polar navigation that Poe consulted and adapted to the narrative, together with reviews and notices of Pym and a sampling of responses to the novel from a wide array of authors, from Herman Melville and Charles Baudelaire to H.P. Lovecraft and Toni Morrison. Seven illustrations are also included.

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  The Existence of God and the Faith-Instinct

  Howard P. Kainz

  Responding to the rash of books supporting a "new atheism" in recent years, some excellent rebuttals and refutations by Berlinski, Novak, Hart, Day, and others have also been published. The present book, however, is not a continuation of these critical salvos against the likes of Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett, and Harris, but engages in a fresh reexamination of several important aspects of the "God-question," along with an exploration of the theory of the "faith-instinct"---a theory that emerges from a respectably long tradition, but in recent years has been largely relegated to the sidelines in theology and philosophy. In the first chapter, scientific, metaphysical, and theological approaches are utilized and integrated in relationship to the question of God's existence. The second chapter is devoted to the "problem of evil," differentiated into the special categories often lumped into that all-too-generic term---moral evils, natural evils, suffering as an evil. Chapter 3 concerns the obvious follow-up question concerning what sort of characteristics, personal or otherwise, we can attribute to God---going beyond the question of God's mere "existence," even if and when we are intellectually convinced of this existence. In the second half of the book, the various meanings of "faith" are considered; and the apparent discrepancy of many New Testament descriptions of faith with the conventional Catholic and Protestant concepts of faith is investigated. Some "family resemblances" of supernatural faith seem to emerge. Then a monograph by Tubingen theologian Max Seckler, Instinkt und Glaubenswille ("Instinct and the Will to Believe"), which comments on thought-provoking texts concerning a "faith-instinct" in the works of Thomas Aquinas, is considered; Seckler brings out the philosophical and theological basis for this concept, as well as its reverberations for modern theology. The theory of a faith-instinct, however, leads to the question of the proper and improper, real or substitute, "objects," of the proposed instinct. Finally, if this instinct is, as hypothesized, implanted in human nature itself, for all places and all times, what is the function of the various religions in "activating" or placing obstacles to, the activation of this instinct? How are "false prophets," who may be instrumental in redirecting or misdirecting this instinct, to be recognized? Is faith bolstered or hindered by miracles---do miracles have any important relationship to faith? The book ends with a final consideration of the probable mental outlook of the atheist confronted with claims by theists of varying persuasions.

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  The Land Has Changed: History, Society and Gender in Colonial Eastern Nigeria

  Chima J. Korieh

  A century ago, agriculture was the dominant economic sector in much of Africa. By the 1990s, however, African farmers had declining incomes and were worse off, on average, than those who did not farm. Colonial policies, subsequent 'top-down' statism, and globalization are usually cited as primary causes of this long-term decline. In this unprecedented study of the Igbo region of southeastern Nigeria, Chima Korieh points the way to a more complex and inclusive approach to this issue. Using agricultural change as a lens through which to view socio-economic and cultural change, political struggle, and colonial hegemony, Korieh shows that regional dynamics and local responses also played vital roles in this era of transformation. British attempts to modernize the densely populated Igbo region were focused largely on intensive production of palm oil as a cash crop for export and on the assumption of male dominance within a conventional western hierarchy. This colonial agenda, however, collided with a traditional culture in which females played important social and political roles and male status was closely tied to yam cultivation. Drawing on an astonishing array of sources, including oral interviews, newspapers, private journals, and especially letters of petition from local farmers and traders, Korieh puts the reader in direct contact with ordinary people, evoking a feeling of what it was like to live through the era. As such, the book reveals colonial interactions as negotiated encounters between officials and natives and challenges simplistic notions of a hegemonic colonial state and a compliant native population.

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  A Companion to the Catholic Enlightenment in Europe

  Ulrich Lehner and Michael Printy

  This book offers the first comprehensive overview of the Catholic Enlightenment in Europe. It surveys the diversity of views about the structure and nature of the movement, pointing toward the possibilities for further research. The volume presents a series of comprehensive treatments on the process and interpretation of Catholic Enlightenment in France, Spain, Portugal, Poland, the Holy Roman Empire, Malta, Italy and the Habsburg territories. An introductory overview explores the varied meanings of Catholic Enlightenment and situates them in a series of intellectual and social contexts. The topics covered in this book are crucial for a proper understanding of the role and place not only of Catholicism in the eighteenth century, but also for the social and religious history of modern Europe.

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  Epistemology, Archaeology, Ethics: Current Investigations of Husserl's Corpus

  Sebastian Luft and Pol Vandevelde

  Epistemology, Archaeology, Ethics: Current Investigations of Husserl's Corpus presents fifteen original essays by an international team of expert contributors that together represent a cross-section of Husserl Studies today. The collection manifests the extent to which single themes in Husserl's corpus cannot be isolated, but must be considered in relation to their overlap with each other.

  Many of the accepted views of Husserl's philosophy are currently in a state of flux, with positions that once seemed incontestable now finding themselves relegated to the status of one particular school of thought among several. Among all the new trends and approaches, this volume offers a representative sample of how Husserlian research should be conducted given the current state of the corpus. The book is divided into four parts, each dedicated to an area of Husserl Studies that is currently gaining prominence: Husserlian epistemology; his views on intentionality; the archaeology of constitution; and ethics, a relatively recent field of study in phenomenology.

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  Neo-Kantianism in Contemporary Philosophy

  Rudolph Makkreel and Sebastian Luft

  This comprehensive treatment of Neo-Kantianism discusses the main topics and key figures of the movement and their intersection with other 20th-century philosophers. With the advent of phenomenology, existentialism, and the Frankfurt School, Neo-Kantianism was deemed too narrowly academic and science-oriented to compete with new directions in philosophy. These essays bring Neo-Kantianism back into contemporary philosophical discourse. They expand current views of the Neo-Kantians and reassess the movement and the philosophical traditions emerging from it. This groundbreaking volume provides new and important insights into the history of philosophy, the scope of transcendental thought, and Neo-Kantian influence on the sciences and intellectual culture.