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Art & Outrage
Provocation, Controversy and the Visual Arts
John A. Walker
Pluto Press, 1998

When art hits the headlines, it is usually because it has caused offence or is perceived by the media to have shock-value. Over the last fifty years many artists have been censored, vilified, accused of blasphemy and obscenity, threatened with violence, prosecuted and even imprisoned. Their work has been trashed by the media and physically attacked by the public.

In Art & Outrage, John A. Walker covers the period from the late 1940s to the 1990s to provide the first detailed survey of the most prominent cases of art that has scandalised. The work of some of Britain’s leading, and less well known, painters and sculptors of the postwar period is considered, such as Richard Hamilton, Bryan Organ, Rachel Whiteread, Reg Butler, Damien Hirst, Jamie Wagg, Barry Flanagan and Antony Gormley. Included are works made famous by the media, such as Carl Andre’s Tate Gallery installation of 120 bricks, Rick Gibson’s foetus earrings, Anthony-Noel Kelly’s cast body-parts sculptures and Marcus Harvey’s portrait of Myra Hindley. Walker describes how each incident emerged, considers the arguments for and against, and examines how each was concluded. While broadly sympathetic to radical contemporary art, Walker has some residual sympathy for the layperson’s bafflement and antagonism. This is a scholarly yet accessible study of the interface between art, society and mass media which offers an alternative history of postwar British art and attitudes.

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Before Amoris Laetitia
The Sources of the Controversy
Jaroslaw Kupczak
Catholic University of America Press, 2021
The publication of Pope Francis’ post-synodal apostolic exhortation, Amoris Laetitia started the most important theological debate in the Catholic Church since the end of the Second Vatican Council. The cardinals, bishops, theologians, priests, lay Catholics found themselves on the opposite sides of this crucial and complicated discussion. This book attempts to shed some light on this debate by tracing its genealogy. Since Amoris Laetitia is a post-synodal document, the large part of the book is devoted to the theological analysis of the two Synods of Bishops convoked by Pope Francis in the first years of his pontificate: the extraordinary in October 2014 and the ordinary that took place a year later. The main topics for the two synods were determined, however, in the speech given by Cardinal Walter Kasper during the cardinals consistory in February 2014 whose main aim was to prepare the possibility of admitting divorced persons who live in second unions to Holy Communion. The arguments of Cardinal Kasper are presented in the first chapter of the book and confronted with the most significant statements of the Magisterium of the Church on the issue of admittance to the Holy Communion. This book is a study at the intersection of Church history, the history of theology, and systematic theology: dogmatic and moral. Kupczak is interested in the chronology of the events connected to the two synods on the family but in the context of theological problems discussed therein: the theological significance of contemporary cultural changes; the relation of the Church to the world; the understanding of the indissolubility of the sacramental marriage and the Eucharist; the methods of ethically assessing human acts, particularly the concept of so-called intrinsically evil acts (intrinsece malum); and the relation of conscience to the general moral norm. The non-partisan ambition of this book is to serve as a “road map”— a help in navigation for the reader in the complicated discussions leading to publication of Amoris Laetitia. The uniqueness of this book consists in combining the historical analysis of the events leading to the publication of Amoris Laetitia with research of the theological discussion that ensued. Since Amoris Laetitia is a post-synodal exhortation, this book rests on the assumption that crucial for its understanding is a thorough analysis of its genealogy. Only in the light of this historical and theological perspective the debates surrounding Amoris Laetitia may be understood.
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A Century of Controversy
Constitutional Reform in Alabama
H. Bailey Thomson
University of Alabama Press, 2002
A timely examination of Alabama’s severely criticized state constitution

Alabama’s present constitution, adopted in 1901, is widely viewed as the source of many, if not most, of the state’s historic difficulties and inequities. Chief among these is a poorly funded school system, an imbalanced tax system that favors special business interests, legislated racism, and unchecked urban sprawl. Many citizens believe that, after 100 years of overburdening amendments and confusing addendums, the constitution urgently needs rewriting.

With this book, Bailey Thomson has assembled the best scholarship on the constitution, its history, and its implications for the future. Historian Harvey H. Jackson III details the degree to which the 1901 document was drafted as a legal tool to ensure white supremacy at the expense of poor whites and blacks, while Joe A. Sumners illustrates how the constitution ties the hands of elected civic leaders by handing authority for local decisions to state government in Montgomery. James W. Williams Jr. explores the impact of the state constitution on the beleaguered tax system and the three principal “revenue crises” it has engendered. Thomson’s own contribution explains how, in contrast to the previous failed attempts for constitutional change by past governors who appealed to their fellow power brokers, the current reform movement arose from the grassroots level.

As citizens and politicians in Alabama review the 1901 constitution for revision, as they navigate the pitfalls and opportunities inherent in change, it is incumbent that they inform themselves adequately on the controversies that have swirled around the constitution since its adoption. The future of Alabama’s government will depend upon it, as will the fortunes of Alabama’s business interests and the well-being of every citizen in the state for years to come.
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Cleavage
Technology, Controversy, and the Ironies of the Man-Made Breast
Jacobson, Nora
Rutgers University Press, 1999
Women's breasts have been idealized as symbols of femininity and motherhood. They have held great social and psychological significance as objects drawing intrusive gazes, and as images of self worth to be measured against an idealized form. It is no wonder, then, that a technology emerged to alter and "enhance" their appearance. Nora Jacobson traces the hundred-year history of one such technology: breast implants.

Organized both chronologically and thematically, this book examines the history of breast implant technology from 1895 to 1990, including the controversies that erupted in the early 1990s over the safety of the devices and the Food and Drug Administration's regulation of their use. Jacobson examines such topics as politics and bias in medical practice and the role of bureaucracies, corporations, and governments in establishing policy and regulating implant technology.
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Colleges in Controversy
The Jesuit Schools in France from Revival to Suppression, 1815–1880
John W. Padberg, S.J.
Harvard University Press, 1969

Until the suppression of the Society of Jesus in 1773 by Pope Clement XIV, the Jesuits had been the undisputed “schoolmasters of Europe.” In France, especially, the educational system of the Society had attained its most widespread development and its greatest fame. The nineteenth-century colleges, formed after the revival of the Society in 1814, never reached the number, size, or influence of their predecessors; but for their time and for the new obstacles they faced, these schools were important. Founded during a period of growing secularization, they faced the constant threat of political attack. Indeed, both their admirers and their critics believed that the Jesuit schools fostered in their graduates distinctive attitudes toward state and society.

John W. Padberg, S.J., has written the first full-length study of these colleges, from their revival in 1815 to their suppression in 1880. Drawing almost exclusively on archival material not previously utilized, Father Padberg places his study against the background of anti-clericalism, revolution, the Second Empire, and the first decade of the Third Republic. He describes the founding of the schools; their resources; their curriculum structure and content; their inner life—religious practices, the daily order, the social structure; and their relation to the political and social milieu of the times. He also discusses the backgrounds and ideological orientations of the faculty and students.

The author first portrays life in the semi-clandestine seminary schools in France from 1815 to 1828. He then depicts the experiences of the exile colleges on the borders of France. With the passage of the Falloux Law of 1850, Jesuit colleges became legal in France for the first time since the 18th century. Father Padberg describes the subsequent rush to found new schools and the resultant problems of lack of personnel, financial crises, and governmental suspicion. He discusses in detail the inner lives of these seventeen new colleges.

During the early years of the Third Republic, the Jesuits founded eleven more colleges. But the mutual fear and misunderstanding between the Society and the Republic and the growing anti-clericalism of the government came to a climax in 1880, when Jules Ferry expelled the Jesuits from these institutions and made impossible their control over any such schools in France.

Father Padberg concludes that during these sixty-five years the French Jesuit schools had little room to maneuver. Externally, government suspicion and hostility circumscribed them. Internally, they reacted to this hostility, which antedated the French Revolution, by the inability to adapt to contemporary circumstances their commitment to the values of a humane and Christian education.

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Concept and Controversy
Sixty Years of Taking Ideas to Market
By W. W. Rostow
University of Texas Press, 2003

A trusted advisor to Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson and one of America's leading professors of economic history, W. W. Rostow has helped shape the intellectual debate and governmental policies on major economic, political, and military issues since World War II. In this thought-provoking memoir, he takes a retrospective look at eleven key policy problems with which he has been involved to show how ideas flow into concrete action and how actions taken or not taken in the short term actually determine the long run that we call "the future."

The issues that Rostow discusses are these:

  • The use of air power in Europe in the 1940s
  • Working toward a united Europe during the Cold War
  • The death of Joseph Stalin and early attempts to end the Cold War
  • Eisenhower's Open Skies policy
  • The debate over foreign aid in the 1950s
  • The economic revival of Korea
  • Efforts to control inflation in the 1960s
  • Waiting for democracy in China
  • The Vietnam War and Southeast Asian policy
  • U.S. urban problems in disadvantaged neighborhoods
  • The challenges posed by declining population in the twenty-first century

In discussing how he and others have worked to meet these challenges, Rostow builds a compelling case for including long-term forces in the making of current policy. He concludes his memoir with provocative reflections on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and on how individual actors shape history.

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The Controversy of Renaissance Art
Alexander Nagel
University of Chicago Press, 2011
 

Many studies have shown that images—their presence in the daily lives of the faithful, the means used to control them, and their adaptation to secular uses—were at the heart of the Reformation crisis in northern Europe.  But the question as it affects the art of Italy has been raised only in highly specialized studies.

In this book, Alexander Nagel provides the first truly synthetic study of the controversies over religious images that pervaded Italian life both before and parallel to the Reformation north of the Alps. Tracing the intertwined relationship of artistic innovation and archaism, as well as the new pressures placed on the artistic media in the midst of key developments in religious iconography, The Controversy of Renaissance Art offers an important and original history of humanist thought and artistic experimentation from one of our most acclaimed historians of art.

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The Cross
History, Art, and Controversy
Robin M. Jensen
Harvard University Press, 2017

The cross stirs intense feelings among Christians as well as non-Christians. Robin Jensen takes readers on an intellectual and spiritual journey through the two-thousand-year evolution of the cross as an idea and an artifact, illuminating the controversies—along with the forms of devotion—this central symbol of Christianity inspires.

Jesus’s death on the cross posed a dilemma for Saint Paul and the early Church fathers. Crucifixion was a humiliating form of execution reserved for slaves and criminals. How could their messiah and savior have been subjected to such an ignominious death? Wrestling with this paradox, they reimagined the cross as a triumphant expression of Christ’s sacrificial love and miraculous resurrection. Over time, the symbol’s transformation raised myriad doctrinal questions, particularly about the crucifix—the cross with the figure of Christ—and whether it should emphasize Jesus’s suffering or his glorification. How should Jesus’s body be depicted: alive or dead, naked or dressed? Should it be shown at all?

Jensen’s wide-ranging study focuses on the cross in painting and literature, the quest for the “true cross” in Jerusalem, and the symbol’s role in conflicts from the Crusades to wars of colonial conquest. The Cross also reveals how Jews and Muslims viewed the most sacred of all Christian emblems and explains its role in public life in the West today.

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Genetic Witness
Science, Law, and Controversy in the Making of DNA Profiling
Jay D. Aronson
Rutgers University Press, 2007
When DNA profiling was first introduced into the American legal system in 1987, it was heralded as a technology that would revolutionize law enforcement. As an investigative tool, it has lived up to much of this hype—it is regularly used to track down unknown criminals, put murderers and rapists behind bars, and exonerate the innocent. 
   
Yet, this promise took ten turbulent years to be fulfilled.  In Genetic Witness, Jay D. Aronson uncovers the dramatic early history of DNA profiling that has been obscured by the technique’s recent success.  He demonstrates that robust quality control and quality assurance measures were initially nonexistent, interpretation of test results was based more on assumption than empirical evidence, and the technique was susceptible to error at every stage. Most of these issues came to light only through defense challenges to what prosecutors claimed to be an infallible technology.  Although this process was fraught with controversy, inefficiency, and personal antagonism, the quality of DNA evidence improved dramatically as a result. Aronson argues, however, that the dream of a perfect identification technology remains unrealized.
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Misbehaving Science
Controversy and the Development of Behavior Genetics
Aaron Panofsky
University of Chicago Press, 2014
Behavior genetics has always been a breeding ground for controversies. From the “criminal chromosome” to the “gay gene,” claims about the influence of genes like these have led to often vitriolic national debates about race, class, and inequality. Many behavior geneticists have encountered accusations of racism and have had their scientific authority and credibility questioned, ruining reputations, and threatening their access to coveted resources.  

In Misbehaving Science, Aaron Panofsky traces the field of behavior genetics back to its origins in the 1950s, telling the story through close looks at five major controversies. In the process, Panofsky argues that persistent, ungovernable controversy in behavior genetics is due to the broken hierarchies within the field. All authority and scientific norms are questioned, while the absence of unanimously accepted methods and theories leaves a foundationless field, where disorder is ongoing. Critics charge behavior geneticists with political motivations; champions say they merely follow the data where they lead. But Panofsky shows how pragmatic coping with repeated controversies drives their scientific actions. Ironically, behavior geneticists’ struggles for scientific authority and efforts to deal with the threats to their legitimacy and autonomy have made controversy inevitable—and in some ways essential—to the study of behavior genetics.
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Our Lady of Controversy
Alma López's “Irreverent Apparition”
Edited by Alicia Gaspar de Alba and Alma López
University of Texas Press, 2011

Months before Alma López's digital collage Our Lady was shown at the Museum of International Folk Art in 2001, the museum began receiving angry phone calls from community activists and Catholic leaders who demanded that the image not be displayed. Protest rallies, prayer vigils, and death threats ensued, but the provocative image of la Virgen de Guadalupe (hands on hips, clad only in roses, and exalted by a bare-breasted butterfly angel) remained on exhibition.

Highlighting many of the pivotal questions that have haunted the art world since the NEA debacle of 1988, the contributors to Our Lady of Controversy present diverse perspectives, ranging from definitions of art to the artist's intention, feminism, queer theory, colonialism, and Chicano nationalism. Contributors include the exhibition curator, Tey Marianna Nunn; award-winning novelist and Chicana historian Emma Pérez; and Deena González (recognized as one of the fifty most important living women historians in America).

Accompanied by a bonus DVD of Alma López's I Love Lupe video that looks at the Chicana artistic tradition of reimagining la Virgen de Guadalupe, featuring a historic conversation between Yolanda López, Ester Hernández, and Alma López, Our Lady of Controversy promises to ignite important new dialogues.

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Public Lands, Public Debates
A Century of Controversy
Char Miller, editor
Oregon State University Press, 2012
The subject of historic struggle and contemporary dispute, public lands in the United States are treasured spaces. In Public Lands, Public Debates, environmental historian Char Miller explores the history of conservation thinking and the development of a government agency with stewardship at its mission.
 
Owned in common, our national forests, monuments, parks, and preserves are funded through federal tax receipts, making these public lands national in scope and significance. Their controversial histories demonstrate their vulnerability to shifting tides of public opinion, alterations in fiscal support, and overlapping authorities for their management—including federal, state, and local mandates, as well as critical tribal prerogatives and military claims.
 
Miller takes the Forest Service as a gauge of the broader debates in which Americans have engaged since the late nineteenth century. In nineteen essays,he examines critical moments of public and private negotiation to help explain the particular, and occasionally peculiar, tensions that have shaped the administration of public lands in the United States.
 
 “Watching democracy at work can be bewildering, even frustrating, but the only way individuals and organizations can sift through the often messy business of public deliberation is to deliberate...”

—Char Miller, from the introduction

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Sex and the University
Celebrity, Controversy, and a Student Journalism Revolution
Reimold, Daniel
Rutgers University Press, 2010
Who would think that Monday morning's page-turning sports scores could be trumped by Sex on Tuesday? But, during the last decade or so, college newspaper sex columns and campus sex magazines have revolutionized student journalism and helped define a new sexual generation. They are the ultimate authorities on student social interaction, relationships, and sex at a time when sexual activity, sexual dangers, and sexual ignorance are prevalent and sex has become the wallpaper of students' lives.

Daniel Reimold gives readers of all generations an inside look at this phenomenon. Student sex columnists and sex magazine editors are both celebrities on their home campuses. One columnist, echoing the sentiments of many, said he became an overnight rock star golden child of journalism. But, with celebrity comes controversy. These columns and magazines have sparked contentious and far-reaching legal, religious, and intergenerational debates about sex, the student press, and the place of both within higher education. They are also the most prominent modern student press combatants in the fight for free speech. And they have blurred journalistic boundaries between what is considered public and private, art and pornography, and gossip and news.

Sex and the University
explores the celebrity status that student sex columnists and magazine editors have received, the controversies they have caused, and the sexual generation and student journalism revolution they represent. Complete with a sexicon of slang, this book also dives into the columns and magazines themselves, sharing for the first time what modern students are saying about their sex and love lives, in their own words.
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