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In this study, Steven Kepnes constructs a 'positive' Jewish theology, one that gives expression to God's nature and powers and that opposes 'apophatic' Holocaust and postmodern theologies that deny the ability of language to express God's nature. Drawing from the Pentateuch, Prophets, and Jewish prayer, Kepnes also uses methods from medieval philosophy, analytic philosophy, and hermeneutics. From medieval philosophy and the Bible, Kepnes develops what he calls a 'soft' metaphysics with principles of God and the revealed Torah at its center. Identifying a fundamental contradiction between the transcendent God of philosophy and the personal God of the Bible, he demonstrates how analytic philosophy, Jewish hermeneutics, and Jewish liturgy offer constructive strategies to negotiate this contradiction. Kepnes also argues that Jewish theology can neither remain in the domain of metaphysics nor the nature of God, but must turn toward the practical and ethical. He concludes with a call for a prophetic theological ethics to address the pressing issue of climate change.
Pablo Neruda in Context includes forty-two essays by some of the main experts on Pablo Neruda's oeuvre that focus on how his places of residence and travel (Mexico, Argentina, Spain, France, Asia), the landmark event of the Cold War, as well as literary and political influences affected his poetic evolution. It also considers the other genres of his writing, including memoirs, letters, translation, and drama, as well as the musical and film adaptions of his work throughout the world. Other essays study his anti-colonial and ecocritical messages, his complicated relationships with women and other writers, as well as his take on race and the significance of his plausible assassination by Augusto Pinochet's military junta. The last section explores Neruda's poetry as world literature as well as his impressive reception in India, Japan, China, the Arab world, the Anglophone world, Russia and Eastern Europe, and his overall lasting legacy.
A truly unique all-embracing narrative of the American war in Afghanistan from the own words of its architects. Choosing Defeat takes an unparalleled inside look at America's longest war, pulling back the curtain on the inner deliberations behind the scenes. The author combines his own extensive experience in the Army, the CIA, and the White House, with interviews from policymakers within the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations, to produce a groundbreaking study of how American leaders make wartime decisions. Transporting you inside the White House Situation Room, every key strategic debate over twenty years – from the immediate aftermath of 9/11, to Obama's surge and withdrawal, to Trump's negotiations with the Taliban, and Biden's final pullout is carefully reconstructed. Paul D. Miller identifies issues in US leadership, governance, military strategy, and policymaking that extend beyond the war in Afghanistan and highlight the existence of deeper problems in American foreign policy.
Other than Paul, no writer has had greater influence on the theology of justification than Augustine. This landmark study fills an astonishing lacuna in scholarship, offering the first comprehensive study of Augustine's theology of justification. Bringing an innovative approach to the topic, Christopher Mooney follows Augustine's own insistence that justification in Scripture is impossible to define apart from a precise understanding of faith. He argues that Augustine came to distinguish three distinct senses of faith, which are motivated by fear, hope, or love. These three types of faith result in very different accounts of justification. To demonstrate this insight, Mooney offers a developmental reading of Augustine, from his earliest to his latest writings, with special focus on the nature of justification, faith, hope, baptism, Augustine's reading of Paul, the Pelagian controversy, and Christology. Clear and engaging, Mooney's study of Augustine also illuminates numerous related issues, such as his theology of grace, the virtues, biblical exegesis, and the sacraments.
This volume provides a comprehensive overview of the social psychology of conflict rooted in human evolution, with a particular focus on migration and its challenges in a globalized world. It examines theories for how conflict emerges between cultural, social, and political groups striving to advance their own interests and agendas and considers their impact on democratic systems that guarantee human rights and freedoms. Building on the study of social psychological tendencies and motivations, including human needs for identity and affiliation, new empirical procedures are introduced for bridging cultural, social, and political divides that encourage students, scholars, and policymakers to consider reconciliatory strategies for conflict resolution. By examining political leanings and tendencies for activism and democratic engagement, this book articulates the ethical and political moral grounds guiding decision-making in intergroup and intercultural relations and challenges readers to reflect on their moral standpoints.
In the late summer of 1894, Sultan Abdülhamid II ordered several battalions of Ottoman soldiers to destroy Armenian 'bandits' operating in the remote mountains of Sasun. Over a three-week period, these soldiers systematically murdered men, women, and children, beginning a chain of events which led directly to the Hamidian massacres of 1895 to 1897 and prefigured many patterns of the Armenian genocide of 1915–1917. Taking a microhistorical approach, Owen Robert Miller examines how the Ottoman State harnessed three nascent technologies (modern firearms, steamboats, and telegraphs) to centralize authority and envisage new methods of conquest. Alongside developing an understanding of how the violence took place, this study explores how competing narratives of the massacre unfolded and were both disseminated and repressed. Emphasizing the pivotal significance of geography and new technologies, The Conquest of the Mountains reveals how the tragic history of these massacres underscores the development of Ottoman State authoritarianism.
István Hont (1947–2013) defected from Communist Hungary in the 1970s and became renowned globally as a scholarly visionary in European political ideas. Following his death, a wealth of unpublished material from an early project rewriting the history of liberty, politics and political economy from Samuel Pufendorf to Karl Marx was discovered. This book brings together seven of Hont's previously unpublished papers, providing a revolutionary intellectual history of the Marxian notion of communism and revealing its origin in seventeenth-century natural jurisprudence. Hont aspired to integrate the history and theory of politics and economics, to infuse present-day concerns with a knowledge of past events and theoretical responses. The essays selected for this volume realise Hont's historical imagination, range and intellectual ambition, exploring his belief that Marxism ought to be abandoned and explaining how to do it.
In late eighteenth-century Havana, residents frequently referred to the existence of large communities of negros and pardos as 'officers in the trade of painter' and the authors of 'exquisite works.' But who are these artists, and where can we find their works? What sort of works did they produce? Where were they trained, and how did they master their crafts with such perfection? By centering the artistic production and social worlds of artists of African descent in Cuba since the colonial period, this revisionist history of Cuban art provides compelling answers to these questions. Carefully researched and cogently argued, the book explores the gendered racial biases that have informed the constitution of the Cuban art canon; exposes how the ideologues of the slave owning planter class institutionalized the association between 'fine arts' and key attributes of whiteness; and examines how this association continues to shape art historical narratives in Cuba.
Global commodities, from tea and sugar to coal and oil, have had an enduring presence in literary texts. Commodity cultures have also shaped literary ones, from the early influence of the literary coffeehouse to the serial novels facilitated by print's own emergence as a mass commodity. This book offers an accessible overview of the many intersections between literature and commodities. Tracing the stories of goods as diverse as coffee, rum, opium, guano, oil and lithium, as they appear across a range of texts, periods, areas, and genres, the chapters bring together existing scholarship on literature and commodity culture with new perspectives from world-literary, postcolonial and Indigenous studies, Marxist and feminist criticism, the environmental and energy humanities, and book history. How, this volume asks, have commodities shaped literary forms and modes of reading? And how has literature engaged with the world-making trajectories and transformations of commodities?
This diary will take the reader back to the pivotal period at the turn of the Millennium, when Hans Blix was the UN Chief Weapons Inspector to Iraq, responsible for extensive investigations into the possible existence of weapons of mass destruction. Blix was required to report to the world what he had – and had not – found, under immense time pressure from a broader political context, where the success of the inspections might avert a US led war. It sheds new light on the intense diplomacy behind the scenes at the UN headquarters in New York and capitals around the world, where Hans met with leaders like US President Bush, UK Prime Minister Blair and French President Chirac. The diary is a valuable historical document of events leading up to the Iraq war but it can also be read as a guide in practical diplomacy with the highest of stakes.
In a 1962 meeting at the White House, Iran's last monarch, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, complained to US President John F. Kennedy 'America treats Turkey as a wife, and Iran as a concubine.' Taking this protest as a critical starting point, this book examines the transnational history of comparisons between Türkiye and Iran from Cold War-era modernization theory to post-9/11 studies of 'moderate Islam'. Perin E. Gürel explores how US policymakers and thought leaders strategically used comparisons to advance shifting agendas, while stakeholders in Türkiye and Iran responded by anticipating, manipulating, and reshaping US-driven narratives. Juxtaposing dominant US-based comparisons with representations originating from Iran and Türkiye, Gürel's interdisciplinary and multilingual research uncovers unexpected twists: comparisons didn't always reinforce US authority but often reflected and encouraged the rise of new ideologies. This book offers fresh insight into the complexities of US-Middle Eastern relations and the enduring impact of comparativism on international relations.
The reign of Constantine, Roman emperor from 306 to 337, was one of the most important periods in world history. Although literary texts often represented him as the first Christian emperor, the inscriptions engraved on monuments, statue bases, and milestones offer alternative perspectives. Inscriptions highlight the influence of the other emperors, the prominence of senators at Rome, the civic traditions for praising benefactors in provincial cities, the logistics of the economy, and the abiding importance of traditional cults. This book includes the Greek and Latin texts of over 800 inscriptions from the early fourth century, with translations and critical annotations. An extended Introduction and almost 200 short essays provide context by explaining the issues and problems, correlating the literary texts, and comparing the legends and images of coins. Without the emperor as the constant focus, the Age of Constantine becomes all the more fascinating.
What is moral heroism? In this book, Kyle Fruh criticizes virtue-centric answers to this question and builds a compelling alternative theoretical view: moral heroism without virtue. Drawing on real-world examples, psychology, and moral philosophy both ancient and contemporary, he argues that in fact the central achievement of moral heroes is the performance of high-stakes sacrifices, so that moral heroism is clearly not a sign of rare moral attainment among an enlightened few, but is instead something enacted by all sorts of people from all walks of life. He also looks at the question of how we respond to moral heroism, both by honoring it and by recruiting it to our efforts at moral improvement and moral education. His book is for anyone interested in moral excellence, the long philosophical traditions which examine it, and contemporary discussions of morally outstanding actions and agents.
In this timely and impactful contribution to debates over the relationship of politics to storytelling, Lee Manion uncovers the centrality of narrative to the European concept of sovereignty. In Scottish and English texts traversing the political, the legal, the historiographical, and the literary, and from the medieval through to the early modern period, he examines the tumultuous development of the sovereignty discourse and the previously underappreciated role of narratives of recognition. Situating England and Scotland in a broader inter-imperial milieu, Manion shows how sovereignty's hierarchies of recognition and stories of origins prevented more equitable political unions. The genesis of this discourse is traced through tracts by Buchanan, Dee, Persons, and Hume, histories by Hardyng, Wyntoun, Mair, and Holinshed, and romances by Malory, Barbour, Spenser, and Melville. Combining formal analysis with empire studies, international relations theory, and political history, Manion reveals the significant consequences of literary writing for political thought.
What is the biggest challenge for the writing of early Christian history? As Markus Vinzent suggests in this study, it is not the interpretation of material evidence. Rather, it is the interpreter herself or himself. Unlike most historical studies, which aim at keeping to sources, facts, and close readings of texts as objectively as possible, Vinzent here offers a new approach: autobiographical historiography and personal methodological reflection, including test cases that advocate transparency, courage, and willingness to be challenged. He takes the reader on a journey through the notions of 'space', 'space in-between', 'the argument from silence', 'cognitive historiography' and 'evolution', 'time', 'scholarship', 'evidence/fact', 'tradition' and 'future'. Proposing a contemporary, post-postmodern reading of history that goes far beyond the field of Early Christianity, Vinzent's anachronological study interrogates traditional historical approaches and challenges both conservative and progressive scholars and students to contradict, engage with, and argue over established interpretations of events.
In the Later Roman Empire (AD 300–650), power seems to manifest itself mostly through legislation, bureaucracy, and an increasingly distant emperor. This book focuses instead on personal interaction as crucial to the exercise of power. It studies four social practices (petitions, parrhesia, intercession, and collective action) to show how they are much more dynamic than often assumed. These practices were guided by strong expectations of justice, which constrained the actions of superiors. They therefore allowed the socially inferior to develop strategies of conduct that could force the hand of the superior and, in extreme cases, lead to overturning hierarchical relations. Building on the analysis of these specific forms of interaction, the book argues for an understanding of late antique power rooted in the character and virtue of those invested with it.