There exists today a tragic rift between Americans and the world’s Muslims. Yet in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, there was widespread sympathy for the U.S. throughout the Muslim world. This book explores what happened. It examines the disconnect that leads Americans and Muslims to view the same words and images in fundamentally different ways. Partly a result of a centuries-old 'us' against 'them' dichotomy, the problem is exacerbated by an increasingly polarised media and by leaders on both sides who either don't understand or don't care what impact their words and policies have in the world at large.
Journalist-scholar Lawrence Pintak, a former CBS News Middle East correspondent, argues that the Arab media revolution and the rise of 'patriot-journalists' in the US marginalized voices of moderation, distorting perceptions on both sides of the divide with potentially disastrous results.
Built on the author's extensive journalistic experience, the book will appeal to policymakers, students of media studies, Middle East studies and Islamic studies, and general current affairs readers.
Hard of hearing since early childhood, John Christiansen spent the first 30 years of his life trying to fit in to a hearing world that did little to accommodate his communication needs. Although he excelled in academics, Christiansen found social situations stressful at every level, until he obtained a position as a professor of sociology at Gallaudet University. There he learned sign language and joined a new community. Reflections: My Life in the Deaf and Hearing Worlds grew out of his personal experiences inhabiting these two worlds.
As a sociologist, Christiansen could identify the toll that trying to communicate with hearing people took on his psyche, the classic looking-glass self in action: I am what I think you think I am. He saw that people with hearing loss frequently blame themselves for social awkwardness and gaffs, even though the responsibility for clear communication should be shared. Still, after living in the hearing world for most of his life, he opted to undergo a cochlear implantation to try to improve interaction with his hearing friends, wife, and children.
His description of adjusting to his cochlear implant brings fresh reality to the implant process. As he puts it, he was not a superstar. After ten years, though, he feels positive enough about his experience to endorse it. As a denouement to his affecting memoir, he describes the disruptive 2006 protest at Gallaudet over the choice of a new president from his vantage point as a member of the search committee. Reflections stands as a remarkable account of one person’s navigation through the intricacies of two different and occasionally opposing worlds.
As editor of Modern Age in the 1960s, Eugene Davidson introduced each quarterly issue with a thought-provoking contemplation of one or another of the decade's dizzying events. Gathered together here for the first time, the essays in Reflections on a Disruptive Decade present an intellectual conservative's perspective on an era which, because it underscores so many of the political divisions still with us today, continues to hold our fascination.
Davidson deals with the marvelous but confused realm of post-1945 international politics, in which the American people faced a new enemy, one often baffling and terrifying. The Cuban missile crisis was probably the most uncertain moment in foreign policy during this century. Although the crisis was resolved without bloodshed, there was intense danger of irrationality, for the Russians foolhardily had sent nuclear missiles to Cuba.
Other topics Davidson addresses are the Civil Rights movement, the policies and programs of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, and the East-West battles of ideology and arms in Europe, Vietnam, and the Middle East. With remarkable shrewdness, Davidson illuminates many contradictions and excesses of the decade's liberal ascendancy, and presciently detects signs pointing to a resurgence of the nation's conservative forces.
Although more than thirty years have passed, Davidson's essays still contain great clarity, and his appraisals are still keen. Reflections on a Disruptive Decade is a truly remarkable addition to the work of this distinguished scholar.
With their powerful blend of political and aesthetic concerns, Edward W. Said's writings have transformed the field of literary studies. This long-awaited collection of literary and cultural essays, the first since Harvard University Press published The World, the Text, and the Critic in 1983, reconfirms what no one can doubt--that Said is the most impressive, consequential, and elegant critic of our time--and offers further evidence of how much the fully engaged critical mind can contribute to the reservoir of value, thought, and action essential to our lives and our culture.
As in the title essay, the widely admired "Reflections on Exile," the fact of his own exile and the fate of the Palestinians have given both form and the force of intimacy to the questions Said has pursued. Taken together, these essays--from the famous to those that will surprise even Said's most assiduous followers--afford rare insight into the formation of a critic and the development of an intellectual vocation. Said's topics are many and diverse, from the movie heroics of Tarzan to the machismo of Ernest Hemingway to the shades of difference that divide Alexandria and Cairo. He offers major reconsiderations of writers and artists such as George Orwell, Giambattista Vico, Georg Lukacs, R. P. Blackmur, E. M. Cioran, Naguib Mahfouz, Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, Walter Lippman, Samuel Huntington, Antonio Gramsci, and Raymond Williams. Invigorating, edifying, acutely attentive to the vying pressures of personal and historical experience, his book is a source of immeasurable intellectual delight.
In Reflections on Judging, Richard Posner distills the experience of his thirty-one years as a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. Surveying how the judiciary has changed since his 1981 appointment, he engages the issues at stake today, suggesting how lawyers should argue cases and judges decide them, how trials can be improved, and, most urgently, how to cope with the dizzying pace of technological advance that makes litigation ever more challenging to judges and lawyers.
For Posner, legal formalism presents one of the main obstacles to tackling these problems. Formalist judges--most notably Justice Antonin Scalia--needlessly complicate the legal process by advocating "canons of constructions" (principles for interpreting statutes and the Constitution) that are confusing and self-contradictory. Posner calls instead for a renewed commitment to legal realism, whereby a good judge gathers facts, carefully considers context, and comes to a sensible conclusion that avoids inflicting collateral damage on other areas of the law. This, Posner believes, was the approach of the jurists he most admires and seeks to emulate: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Louis Brandeis, Benjamin Cardozo, Learned Hand, Robert Jackson, and Henry Friendly, and it is an approach that can best resolve our twenty-first-century legal disputes.
Economic development has been an challenge facing the countries of Latin America. Because the United States, from the very nature of its geographic and economic relationship with its southern neighbors, must inevitably exercise a strong influence on the course which that development takes, it is important that North Americans understand conditions in Latin America and the attitudes of its peoples. Roberto de Oliveira Campos, former Brazilian Minister of Economic Planning, is in a unique position to evaluate both past accomplishments and future problems.
In this group of essays, Campos gives a comprehensive analysis of many aspects of Latin American development in the mid-twentieth century. He examines relations between the United States and Latin America from a variety of angles, and he outlines the basic problems of economic development, of governmental policy, and of public and private administration. He gives particular attention in several essays to the relationship of foreign trade and foreign aid to economic development, and he presents a long discussion of the Alliance for Progress—its history, its purposes, its accomplishments, and its failures.
Campos’s philosophy regarding the role of the state in economic development and other questions emerges clearly from these pithy essays. “The valid distinction I see on the basis of my analysis of men and things is between pragmatic or functional nationalists and romantic or temperamental nationalists,” he writes. “The latter confuse intention with results. They start with enthusiasm and end in fanaticism, this being, according to Santayana, ‘the art of redoubling efforts after losing sight of objectives.’ . . . Many [romantic nationalists], though they do not confess it, favor the dangerous purgery of revolution.
“The pragmatic nationalist seeks to operate within the frame of democratic institutions and prefers reform to revolution. As to myself, I shall continue considering myself a pragmatic nationalist. I renounce the temptation of mobilizing resentment in order to gain the authority to plan development. I would rather strengthen the national entrepreneur than merely antagonize the foreigner. I would want the state not to do what it cannot do in order to do what it should do. I prefer to love my own country rather than to hate the others’.”
In this rich and unique reference, David L. Jewell compiles the first anthology of reflections on leisure, play, and recreation.
As he began to collect these considered opinions, Jewell was pleased to discover that many people from quite diverse backgrounds shared his belief in the redeeming value of leisure, play, and recreation.
Jewell was less pleased, however, to note how often these judicious opinions have been ignored. Disproportionately high budget cuts in parks and recreation services demonstrate too clearly society’s view of leisure activities as frivolous and expendable. By selecting these voices of reason and making them available in a single volume, Jewell hopes to emphasize the "frailties of a capitalistic society’s demeaning perception" of anything other than work.
“In this classic, Gaus writes perceptively of the ‘ecology’ of public administration and its relationship to the rise of the administrative state. He recounts how crises and changes in people, place, physical technology, social technology, and philosophy in the first half of the 20th century led citizens repeatedly to look to government for relief. Politicians, in turn, created or expanded the powers of public agencies.” —Journal of Management History
At the time of his death in 2005, French philosopher Paul Ricoeur was regarded as one of the great thinkers of his generation. In more than half a century of writing about the essential questions of human life, Ricoeur’s thought encompassed a vast range of wisdom and experience, and he made landmark contributions that would go on to influence later scholars in such areas as phenomenology, hermeneutics, structuralism, and theology.
Toward the end of his life, Ricoeur began to focus directly on ethical questions that he feared had been overshadowed by his other work; the result was a two-volume collection of essays on justice and the law. The University of Chicago Press published the English translation of the first volume, The Just, to great acclaim in 2000. Now this translation of the second volume, Reflections on the Just, completes the set and makes available to readers the whole of Ricoeur’s meditations on the concept.
Consisting of fifteen thematically organized essays, Reflections on the Just continues and expands on the work Ricoeur began in with his “little ethics” in Oneself as Another and The Just. In the preface, he considers what revisions he would make were he to start over and how that is reflected in these essays. The opening part brings phenomenology to bear on ethics; the second group of essays comprises shorter, occasional pieces considering the concept of justice in the works of other philosophers, including Max Weber and Charles Taylor. The final part turns to the specific domains of medicine and the law, examining how concepts of right and justice operate in those realms.
Cogent, deeply considered, and fully engaged with the realities of the contemporary world, Reflections on the Just is an essential work for understanding the development of Ricoeur’s thought in his final years.
This compelling and often traumatic book is the memoir of one of the most important figures in modern Russian history, Dmitry S. Likhachev, revered as ‘a guardian of national culture’. Reflections on the Russian Soul is an incredible account of an intellectual’s turbulent journey through twentieth century Russia. Likhachev re-counts the fortunes of people with whom he came into contact and reproduces the air of passed years in Russia.
Likhachev vividly portrays his childhood years in St. Petersburg and continues into his student life at Leningrad University that led to an agonizing period of imprisonment and near death. He describes how a harmless prank caught the attention of the Secret Police, resulting in his exile and confinement within the infamous prison island of Solovki. He describes his first-hand experience of brutality in prison during the early Stalin years and the incident that not only saved him but also haunted him for the rest of his life.
He reflects on the years after his release from prison and the events leading up to the Second World War. His powerful recollection of the blockade of Leningrad provides the reader with a horrific insight into the harsh effects of war, hunger and survival. Lichachev goes on to describe post-war Russia and how his own livelihood developed from literary editor to a return to Leningrad University as Professor of History. This compelling autobiography finishes with Likhachev’s poignant return to Solovki as a free man.
Erich Auerbach’s seminal Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature was published more than sixty years ago and is deservedly considered a classic. The book brought into focus the fundamental difference that exists between the two basic approaches to the textual representation of reality in Western culture. These two “styles,” as Auerbach called them, were archetypically displayed in Homer’s poems and in the Old Testament, respectively. Auerbach’s differentiation is the starting point for Bandera’s insightful work, which expands and develops on this theory in several key ways. One of the more significant differences between the two styles transcends and grounds all the others. It concerns the truth of each of the two archetypal texts, or rather, the attitude exhibited in those texts with regard to the truth of what they narrate. Auerbach, Bandera notes, is amazed at the Bible’s “passionate” concern for the truth of what it says—a concern he found absent in Homer. Bandera finds that what the prophet Isaiah called “a refuge of lies” defines Homer’s work. He draws on his own research and René Girard’s theory of the sacred to develop an enhanced perspective of the relationship between these texts.
This collection of provocative and timely essays addresses the ways in which religious and educational institutions have come to define one another and American culture and identity.
Education in America-public and private, from the elementary to the university level-is the subject of urgent, ongoing debates. School vouchers, home schooling, prayer in the classrooms, sex education in the schools, and evolution versus creationism are just a few of the touchstones and flashpoints that have ignited a national dialogue concerning the role of religion in U.S. educational institutions.
The ten major essays assembled here emerged from a series of conferences conducted by the Public Religion Project at the University of Chicago Divinity School, funded by a grant from The Pew Charitable Trust. Written by recognized leaders in the fields of education and religion, the essays address such issues as the role of religious studies programs in tax-supported public universities; the evolving role of the university chaplain; the impact of religious doctrine on literary scholarship and the natural sciences; the college president as a spiritual leader; the secularization of private colleges whose foundations rest in the spiritual mission of a specific church or denomination and, conversely, the obligations, if any, of colleges that have maintained distinct denominational identities toward pluralistic outreach and openness; and an examination of the home schooling movement.
A true "dialogue" designed to inspire readers to rethink, argue, act, and continually converse on the subject, Religion, Education, and the American Experience will appeal to educators, college and university administrators, and boards of trustees, as well as academic libraries and scholars of education and religious studies.
This challenging collection of essays offers a refreshing approach to the troubling--and timely--subject of religion and public policy in America, and the ways in which issues of church and state affect our national identity.
The result of a series of conferences on religion and politics conducted by the Public Religion project at the University of Chicago, funded by a grant from the Pew Charitable Trust, this collection brings together an extraordinarily diverse set of contributors. Represented within its pages are the ideas and opinions of scholars, politicians, and religious leaders with backgrounds in law, politics, history, and divinity, among them Senator Paul Simon of Illinois. With its wide range of critical approaches and varied perspectives, this volume makes a vibrant contribution to the national dialogue on politics and religion.Chief among the essay topics are the evangelical roots of American political life; early conflicts between Enlightenment thinking and spiritual impulses in developing a national identity; the practical problems that today's politicians face in campaigning; the impact of constitutional and legal language regarding our definitions of religion; and the way in which the media's treatment of our spiriutal life frames our perceptions of it. These thought-provoking essays will inspire readers to rethink, argue, perhaps act, but most importantly, to converse about this timely and important issue.
This volume will have wide cross-disciplinary appeal. Students and scholars of history, religious studies, and political science will find great value within its pages, as will scholars of divinity and law, and members of this general public concerned with the intersection of faith and politics in American life.
In this truly one-of-a-kind book, the author/narrator—a representative, in extremis, of contemporary American obsession with beauty, celebrity, transmitted image—finds himself suspended, fascinated, in the remoteness of our wall-to-wall mediascape. It is a remoteness that both perplexes and enthralls him.
Through dazzling sleight of hand in which the public becomes private and the private becomes public, the entire book—clicking from confession to family-album photograph to family chronicle to sexual fantasy to pseudo-scholarly footnote to reportage to personal essay to stand-up comedy to cultural criticism to literary criticism to film criticism to prose-poem to litany to outtake —becomes both an anatomy of American culture and a searing self-portrait.
David Shields reads his own life—reads our life—as if it were an allegory about remoteness and finds persuasive, hilarious, heartbreaking evidence wherever he goes.
Winner of the PEN / Revson Award?
The subtle and profound connections between revolutions and the idea of equality are at the heart of this exploration in the history of ideas. Beginning with America’s response to the French Revolution and the wars of liberation in Latin America, David Brion Davis poses the intriguing question of why the United States, born in revolution, has fluctuated between fears of a revolutionary world and a joyous expectation that foreign liberations signal the Americanization of the globe.
Before the Civil War, the question of slavery helped to define the way Americans looked at revolutions in terms of equality, for it was equality, and not liberty, that was the true antithesis of “the peculiar institution.” In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, foreign revolutions were closely tied to messianic aspirations and internal reform. Industrialization, political revolution, and dreams of equality and social justice went hand in hand. Writing in the grand style of Burke, Yale’s distinguished scholar of comparative history forces us to think once more about our revolutionary heritage and its tangled web of liberty, equality, and evil.
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