In The Force of Witness Rosa-Linda Fregoso examines the contra feminicide movement in Mexico and other feminist efforts to eradicate gender violence. Drawing on interviews, art, documentaries, and her years of activism, Fregoso traces the micro and macro scales of misogyny and the patterns of state complicity with gender violence. She shows how different forms of witnessing—from activist-mothers’ bearing witness to the memories of their daughters and expert witnesses in court cases to communal witnessing and a scholar-activist-citizen witnessing her own actions—are key to resisting feminicidal violence. Fregoso situates these forms of witness in the histories, contexts, structures, bodies, and intersectional struggles they emerge from. By outlining the complexities of feminicidal violence in relation to witnessing processes, Fregoso challenges the notion of witness as an individual or autonomous subject inscribed solely in the legal or religious arenas. Rather, she theorizes witness as a force of collectivity and a constellation of multiple social locations and intersectional practices that work together to abolish feminicidal violence.

In Invited to Witness, Jennifer Lynn Kelly explores the significance of contemporary solidarity tourism across Occupied Palestine. Examining the relationships among race, colonialism, and movement-building in spaces where tourism and military occupation operate in tandem, Kelly argues that solidarity tourism in Palestine functions as both political strategy and emergent industry. She draws from fieldwork on solidarity tours in Palestine/Israel and interviews with guides, organizers, community members, and tourists, asking what happens when tourism is marketed as activism and when anticolonial work functions through tourism. Palestinian organizers, she demonstrates, have refashioned the conventions of tourism by extending invitations to tourists to witness Palestinian resistance and the effects of Israeli state practice on Palestinian land and lives. In so doing, Kelly shows how Palestinian guides and organizers wrest from Israeli control the capacity to invite and the permission to narrate both their oppression and their liberation.

Fire and Witness is the second volume in James Patrick’s saga recounting the current of inspiration guiding, and at times sweeping, the Christian heart toward full integration of the mind in the experience of revelation. In the first volume, A Waiting World, Patrick like a true storyteller captures the wonder and anxiety that finally perceives design and canon. 

The second installment presents the parallel struggle to build heart and mind, as heresy and temporal demands challenge the memory and vitality of what Christians have received. The writing mind in this sense sustains and gives purpose to the heart, pressed under the burden of doubt and worldly expectation. The reader knows that Christianity endures, but how did this happen? Patrick at every turn discloses the role of the Paraclete who remains the unseen protagonist. In this sense, Patrick surprises even those who think they know the story, and no one is safe from being exposed to a bit of the same inspiration that moves the characters in history passed. Indeed, the reader will feel like a part of this same narrative, in a new unwritten chapter but encountering the same Paraclete who has meddled in and marked events with holy breath that even Patrick cannot fully represent. 
Highlights of Fire and Witness are Patrick’s presentation of pivotal yet forgotten works such as The Shepherd of Hermes, and his treatment of Origen and Athanasius in their respective social and spiritual contexts. This volume grants the reader a glimpse into a time when resolutions needed to be made and defended with argument, but also with silent witness and the flame of a resolve dimmed not even by death. Patrick’s description of imperial Christianity and the Christian imagination that ultimately fashions the proper image of Christian places is likewise stunning and not to be missed. 

Graeme D. Bird examines a small group of early papyrus manuscripts of Homer’s Iliad, known as the Ptolemaic papyri, which, although fragmentary, are the oldest surviving physical evidence of the text of the Iliad, dating from the third to the first centuries BCE.

These papyri have been described as “eccentric” or even “wild” by some scholars. They differ significantly from the usual text of the Iliad, sometimes showing lines with different wording, at other times including so-called “interpolated” lines that are completely absent from our more familiar version.

Whereas some scholars denigrate these papyri because of their “eccentricity,” this book analyzes their unusual readings and shows that in fact they present authentic variations on the Homeric text, based on the variability characteristic of oral performance.

“A classic for our time.”—Saturday Review

The Nobel Prize–winning writer on poetry as testimony to the upheavals of the twentieth century.

For many years, Polish émigré Czeslaw Milosz’s poetry was relatively unknown outside of Eastern Europe. While his 1953 anticommunist tract The Captive Mind had solidified his reputation as a political thinker in the West, his poems languished in obscurity, distributed mostly by underground Polish presses evading censorship from the communist regime. Only once he won the Nobel Prize in 1980 did his unique poetic voice—prophetic, ironic, sometimes bitter, but always hopeful—gain wider recognition, from both English-speaking audiences and the Polish government itself, which could no longer suppress the brilliant, irascible defector.

Collecting Milosz’s 1981–1982 Norton Lectures, The Witness of Poetry offers an unparalleled window into this heady moment in his career. Newly recognized as one of the great poets of his time, Milosz stages an ambitious defense of the need for poetry amid the ruins of a catastrophic twentieth century. Rather than reacting to the procession of world wars and totalitarian regimes by fleeing from reality into abstruse symbolism or “pure poetry,” Milosz argues that poetry must be “a passionate pursuit of the real.” Only then will poets liberate themselves from the cramped confines of a bohemian subculture and rejoin the “great human family.” And only then will poetry become “as essential as bread.”

Introducing Western audiences to a wide range of Polish voices, from Adam Mickiewicz and Wislawa Szymborska to Oscar Milosz, his distant cousin, Milosz’s lectures vividly reveal that Polish poetry remains a wellspring of “incorrigible hope,” not despite but because of Poland’s calamitous history.

A Witness of the Silent Church is a first-hand personal witness to the life of one of the outstanding religious leaders in the Catholic Church and the confessor of faith. It presents the autobiography of Cardinal Josyf Slipyj (1892-1984), who served as a head of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church in the period of the Soviet regime (1944-1984) and led his Church through the difficult period of catacombs and persecutions. This memoir traces the trajectory and main events of Slipyj’s life and sheds light on his personality and inner world of his thoughts and intentions. They cover his childhood and formation period, his pastoral and scholarly ministry in the Church, as well as his suffering in prisons, camps, and exile until his liberation in 1963. Slipyj’s life story appears as a backdrop where the entire epoch unfolds. The reader can observe the religious life of Western Ukraine against the background of the complex religious, political and social developments of the twentieth century, the martyrology and underground activity of the Greek Catholics during the period of Church persecution, the dire fate of the clergy, faithful, and cultural and political leaders in the Soviet time. A Witness of the Silent Church is supplied with extensive commentaries and annotations that provide important insights into the religious life of Ukraine of this period. The introduction to Slipyj’s autobiography presents the complicated textual history of the manuscript, its historical value and prepares a reader for the historically-contextualized reading of these memoirs. Slipyj’s autobiography is supplemented with the two studies, which complete Slipyj’s unfinished narrative, elucidating the circumstances of Slipyj’s release from the Gulag and his activity in Rome during the last twenty years of his life (1963-1984) as well as the events following his death: such as Slipyj’s rehabilitation and the glorious return of his relics to the homeland. The book includes appendices with valuable historical documents related to the activity of Cardinal Josyf Slipyj as a witness of the silent Church of the martyrs. This book is intended for scholars, church historians, and all readers interested in the history of Catholic Church, Christian testimony of faith and the biographies of twentieth-century martyrs and confessors.

When Clinton Giddings Brown (1882–1964) retired from a long and successful career as a trial lawyer in San Antonio, Texas, fishing on the Gulf Coast was out—by doctor’s orders. So he sat on the front gallery of his house in San Antonio and fished with a lead pencil in the richly stocked memories of his professional life. “Some days I didn’t get a nibble, but some mornings they were biting fine.”

The resultant and delightful catch is the story of a full, merry, and successful life. From the day in 1906 when “Mr. Clint” hung out his shingle in a little office over his father’s bank, through the long succession of “fine scraps, rough and tumble, no holds barred,” which were the jury cases he tried for defendant corporations in personal-injury damage suits, there was not much about the law and about human nature that he did not have the opportunity to learn.

The first client in the little office was Charlie Ross, a Pullman porter who wanted to make sure that the title on his new house was clear. The fee was $15, and Charlie was his friend for life. In the pages that follow the reader will meet many other unforgettable characters, including Dr. John Brinkley, the man who made a million dollars a year from his goat-gland operation until Dr. Morris Fishbein called him a “quack”; old Jim Wheat, who killed a white man, and Jim’s little grandson Lige, who knew what God would do to him if he told lies in court; Bosco, who forgot his complete paralysis when the lady lure came into the picture; and pretty little Mary, whom the jury loved.

Brown was elected district attorney for Bexar County, Texas, in 1913 and became mayor of San Antonio the following year; in the latter office he served two terms, resigning to join the Army in the First World War. On his return from France he was invited to work with a law firm that represented many large corporations, among them the Public Service Company, which ran San Antonio’s streetcar and bus lines, and the Southern Pacific Railroad. Soon made a partner, he remained with the firm until his retirement, and through a quarter of a century tried about as many jury cases as any other attorney in the city.

You May Take the Witness is a book for anyone who has ever felt the fascination of courtrooms and trials, and who has not? It is also a book in which lawyers will find an excellent refresher course for both mind and spirit. Here are invaluable tips on all the ins-and-outs of jury trial, not from the flat dimensions of a law-school text but from the full, real world of actual trials and the men and women involved. Brown tells how to handle witnesses and to pick juries, when to object and when not to object. The most important lesson of all, he says, is to value the jury and be an honest person before them. “The jury is decent, so you be decent, and ‘be yourself.’”

It is clear that Clinton Giddings Brown succeeded as a lawyer because he succeeded as a human being, just as it is clear that he knows how to tell story after fine story because he enjoyed living each episode of his life to its fullest.