Over the past thirty years, Italy—the historic home of Catholicism—has become a significant destination for migrants from Nigeria and Ghana. Along with suitcases and dreams of a brighter future, these Africans bring their own form of Christianity, Pentecostalism, shaped by their various cultures and religious worlds. At the heart of Annalisa Butticci’s beautifully sculpted ethnography of African Pentecostalism in Italy is a paradox. Pentecostalism, traditionally one of the most Protestant of Christian faiths, is driven by the same concern as Catholicism: real presence.

In Italy, Pentecostals face harsh anti-immigrant sentiment and limited access to economic and social resources. At times, they find safe spaces to worship in Catholic churches, where a fascinating encounter unfolds that is equal parts conflict and communion. When Pentecostals watch Catholics engage with sacramental objects—relics, statues, works of art—they recognize the signs of what they consider the idolatrous religions of their ancestors. Catholics, in turn, view Pentecostal practices as a mix of African religions and Christian traditions. Yet despite their apparently irreconcilable differences and conflicts, they both share a deeply sensuous and material way to make the divine visible and tangible. In this sense, Pentecostalism appears much closer to Catholicism than to mainstream Protestantism.

African Pentecostals in Catholic Europe offers an intimate glimpse at what happens when the world’s two fastest growing Christian faiths come into contact, share worship space, and use analogous sacramental objects and images. And it explains how their seemingly antithetical practices and beliefs undergird a profound commonality.

Jan-Heiner Tück presents a work that explores the sacramental theology, lived spirituality, and Eucharistic poetry of the Church’s doctor communis, St. Thomas Aquinas. Although Aquinas’ Eucharistic poetry has long occupied an important place in the Church’s liturgical prayer and her repertoire of sacred music, the depth of these poems remains hidden until one grasps the rich sacramental theology underlying it. Consequently, Tück first offers a detailed but approachable primer of Aquinas’ theology of the sacraments, before diving deeply into the Angelic Doctor’s theology and poetry of the Eucharist. The Scriptural accounts stand at the heart of the systematic framework developed by Aquinas, and thus significant attention is devoted to showing the harmony between the accounts of Christ’s passion and the detailed exposition of the Summa theologiae. Moreover, the Eucharistic controversies of the ninth and eleventh centuries provide the contrapuntal context in which Aquinas did his thinking, praying, and writing. Not surprisingly, therefore, the response he crafts to these controversies draws upon both speculative powers and contemplative prayer, brought together in the unity of Aquinas’ theology and spirituality. The net result is a twofold treasure for the Church: a careful systematic presentation of Eucharistic theology and the lived devotional expression of the same in the carefully constructed—and now much beloved—stanzas of Pange lingua gloriosi, Lauda Sion, Adoro te devote, etc. By revealing the lively interplay of the saint’s powerful speculative intellect and a heart steeped in love for the Eucharistic Lord, Tück offers a sophisticated exposition of Aquinas’ Eucharistic poetry and the roots it sinks into a wider theological framework. Finally, the contemporary significance and power of Aquinas’ work is drawn out, not only in the rarefied realm of intellectual inquiry but also in the everyday expanse of ordinary life.

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year

Beginning with metaphysical debates in the sixteenth century over the nature of Christ’s presence in the host, the distinguished historian and scholar of religion Robert Orsi imagines an alternative to the future of religion that early moderns proclaimed was inevitable.

“Orsi’s evoking of the full reality of the holy in the world is extremely moving, shot through with wonder and horror.”
—Caroline Walker Bynum, Common Knowledge

“This is a meticulously researched, humane, and deeply challenging book. The men and women studied in this book do not belong to ‘a world we have lost.’ They belong to a world we have lost sight of.”
—Peter Brown, Princeton University

“[A] brilliant, theologically sophisticated exploration of the Catholic experience of God’s presence through the material world… On every level—from its sympathetic, honest, and sometimes moving ethnography to its astute analytical observations—this book is a scholarly masterpiece.”
—A. W. Klink, Choice

“Orsi recaptures God’s breaking into the world … The book does an excellent job of explaining both the difficulties and values inherent in recognizing God in the world.”
—Publishers Weekly

“This book is classic Orsi: careful, layered, humane, and subtle…a thought-provoking, expertly arranged tour of precisely those abundant, excessive phenomena which scholars have historically found so difficult to think.”
—Sonja Anderson, Reading Religion

This book plumbs the virtues of the Homeric poems as scripts for solo performance. Despite academic focus on orality and on composition in performance, we have yet to fully appreciate the Iliad and Odyssey as the sophisticated scripts that they are. What is lost in the journey from the stage to the page?

Readers may be readily impressed by the vividness of the poems, but they may miss out on the strange presence or uncanniness that the performer evoked in ancient audience members such as Plato and Aristotle. This book focuses on the performer not simply as transparent mediator, but as one haunted by multiple stories and presences, who brings suppressed voices to the surface.

Performance is inextricable from all aspects of the poems, from image to structure to background story. Background stories previously neglected, even in some of the most familiar passages (such as Phoenix’s speech in Iliad 9) are brought to the surface, and passages readers tend to rush through (such as Odysseus’s encounter with Eumaeus) are shown to have some of the richest dramatic potential. Attending to performance enlivens isolated features in a given passage by showing how they work together.

“Presence and Absence is a book of importance for all who are actively engaged in the philosophical enterprise, whatever their differing persuasions. It shows philosophy to be flourishing in the midst of its own self-proclaimed signs of morbidity.” – The Review of Metaphysics

“A splendid, provocative and profound work, this book explores the manifold ways in which the contrast of presence and absence operate to establish the possibility of human discourse and truthfulness…belongs in every philosophy collection.” – Choice

“Quite simply a superb book, which deserves more than one careful reading. A fresh, unified treatment of a grand philosophical theme, the theme of the connections between thought, truth, and being.” – Man and World

“A thoughtful book about thoughtfulness and truthfulness and their ontological conditions. Simply put, this is a book that will reward its careful reader a hundredfold, for Sokolowski is a speaker who says things in ways that are provocative, exciting, and invariably insightful.” – Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology

“Has few peers in phenomenological literature.” – International Philosophical Quarterly

“[Sokolowski is] an original thinker of the first rank, who has significantly furthered the path of phenomenological philosophy. As well as being an exciting synthesis, a thinking of the previously unthought in predecessors, and a ground-breaking movement, this work is written with a sensitivity to language and its graceful use that one would hope for from one exploring its richness and power.” – Human Studies

In precarious and tumultuous times, schemes of social support, including cash transfers, are increasingly indispensable. Yet the inadequacy of the nation-state frame of membership that such schemes depend on is becoming evermore evident, as non-citizens form a growing proportion of the populations that welfare states attempt to govern. In Presence and Social Obligation, James Ferguson argues that conceptual resources for solving this problem are closer to hand than we might think. Drawing on a rich anthropology of sharing, he argues that the obligation to share never depends only on membership, but also on presence: on being “here.” Presence and Social Obligation strives to demonstrate that such obligatory sharing based on presence can be observed in the way that marginalized urban populations access state services, however unequally, across the global South. Examples show that such sharing with non-nationals is not some sort of utopian proposal but part of the everyday life of the modern service-delivering state. Presence and Social Obligation is a critical yet refreshing approach to an ever-growing way of being together.
 

Any woman who has been examined by a gynecologist could tell Descartes a thing or two about the mind/body problem. Is her body an object? Is it the self? Is it both, and if so, how? Katharine Young takes up this problem in a book that looks at medicine's means of separating self and body--and at the body's ways of resisting.

Disembodiment--rendering the body an object and the self bodyless--is the foundational gesture of medicine. How, then, does medical practice acknowledge the presence of the person in the objectified body? Young considers in detail the "choreography" such a maneuver requires--and the different turns it takes during a routine exam, or surgery, or even an autopsy. Distinctions between public and private, inside and outside, assume new meanings as medical practice proceeds from one venue to the next--waiting room to examining table, anteroom to operating theater, from the body's exterior to its internal organs. Young inspects the management of these and other "boundaries"--as a physician adds layers of clothing and a patient removes layers, as the rules of objective and subjective discourse shift, as notions of intimacy determine the etiquette of exchanges between doctor and patient.

From embodied positions within the realm of medicine and disembodied positions outside it, Young richly conveys the complexity of presence in the flesh.

In ¡Presente! Diana Taylor asks what it means to be physically and politically present in situations where it seems that nothing can be done. As much an act, a word, an attitude, a theoretical intervention, and a performance pedagogy, Taylor maps ¡presente! at work in scenarios ranging from conquest, through colonial enactments and resistance movements, to present moments of capitalist extractivism and forced migration in the Americas. ¡Presente!—present among, with, and to; a walking and talking with others; an ontological and epistemic reflection on presence and subjectivity as participatory and relational, founded on mutual recognition—requires rethinking and unlearning in ways that challenge colonial epistemologies. Showing how knowledge is not something to be harvested but a process of being, knowing, and acting with others, Taylor models a way for scholarship to be present in political struggles.

The world shows up for us—it is present in our thought and perception. But, as Alva Noë contends in his latest exploration of the problem of consciousness, it doesn’t show up for free. The world is not simply available; it is achieved rather than given. As with a painting in a gallery, the world has no meaning—no presence to be experienced—apart from our able engagement with it. We must show up, too, and bring along what knowledge and skills we’ve cultivated. This means that education, skills acquisition, and technology can expand the world’s availability to us and transform our consciousness.

Although deeply philosophical, Varieties of Presence is nurtured by collaboration with scientists and artists. Cognitive science, dance, and performance art as well as Kant and Wittgenstein inform this literary and personal work of scholarship intended no less for artists and art theorists, psychologists, cognitive scientists, and anthropologists than for philosophers.

Noë rejects the traditional representational theory of mind and its companion internalism, dismissing outright the notion that conceptual knowledge is radically distinct from other forms of practical ability or know-how. For him, perceptual presence and thought presence are species of the same genus. Both are varieties of exploration through which we achieve contact with the world. Forceful reflections on the nature of understanding, as well as substantial examination of the perceptual experience of pictures and what they depict or model are included in this far-ranging discussion.