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28164 books match the query 'History' and 908 start with d

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Dwelling in the Splendor of Truth

Catholic Moral Theology in Light of <i>Veritatis splendor</i>

James W. Stroud

Catholic University of America Press, 2026

On August 6, 1993, Pope John Paul II promulgated the long-awaited encyclical on moral theology entitled Veritatis splendor. In this landmark encyclical, directed principally toward bishops, Pope John Paul II sought a reset of the discipline of Catholic moral theology after the Second Vatican Council in response to the theological dissent that had called into question the foundations of Catholic morality. More than thirty years after the promulgation of Veritatis splendor, the essays in this edited volume consider the major themes and topics of this encyclical as it seeks to contribute to the revitalization of moral theology today. These themes and topics include: the rich young man and the renewal of moral theology, freedom, nature, and law, conscience, intrinsically evil acts, the state of revisionism, the moral object, martyrdom and morality, evangelization, the role of the moral theologian, and the role of scripture in moral theology. Contributors include: William C. Mattison, III, Irene Alexander, Matthew Levering, Matthew Dugandzic, James W. Stroud, Stephen L. Brock, Patrick Clark, Timothy P. O’Malley, Jana Marguerite Bennet, John Grabowski, with a foreword by Archbishop of Sydney Anthony Fisher, OP.

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Dyed in Crimson

Football, Faith, and Remaking Harvard's America

Zev Eleff

University of Illinois Press, 2023

In 1926, Harvard athletic director Bill Bingham chose former Crimson All-American Arnold Horween as coach of the university’s moribund football team. The pair instilled a fresh culture, one based on merit rather than social status, and in the virtues of honor and courage over mere winning. Yet their success challenged entrenched ideas about who belonged at Harvard and, by extension, who deserved to lay claim to the American dream.

Zev Eleff tells the story of two immigrants’ sons shaped by a vision of an America that rewarded any person of virtue. As a player, the Chicago-born Horween had led Harvard to its 1920 Rose Bowl victory. As a coach, he faced intractable opposition from powerful East Coast alumni because of his values and Midwestern, Jewish background. Eleff traces Bingham and Horween’s careers as student-athletes and their campaign to wrest control of the football program from alumni. He also looks at how Horween undermined stereotypes of Jewish masculinity and dealt with the resurgent antisemitism of the 1920s.

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Dying to Know

Scientific Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian England

George Levine

University of Chicago Press, 2002

"Dying to Know is the work of a distinguished scholar, at the peak of his powers, who is intimately familiar with his materials, and whose knowledge of Victorian fiction and scientific thought is remarkable. This elegant and evocative look at the move toward objectivity first pioneered by Descartes sheds new light on some old and still perplexing problems in modern science." Bernard Lightman, York University, Canada

In Dying to Know, eminent critic George Levine makes a landmark contribution to the history and theory of scientific knowledge. This long-awaited book explores the paradoxes of our modern ideal of objectivity, in particular its emphasis on the impersonality and disinterestedness of truth. How, asks Levine, did this idea of selfless knowledge come to be established and moralized in the nineteenth century?

Levine shows that for nineteenth-century scientists, novelists, poets, and philosophers, access to the truth depended on conditions of such profound self-abnegation that pursuit of it might be taken as tantamount to the pursuit of death. The Victorians, he argues, were dying to know in the sense that they could imagine achieving pure knowledge only in a condition where the body ceases to make its claims: to achieve enlightenment, virtue, and salvation, one must die.

Dying to Know is ultimately a study of this moral ideal of epistemology. But it is also something much more: a spirited defense of the difficult pursuit of objectivity, the ethical significance of sacrifice, and the importance of finding a shareable form of knowledge.

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Dynamic Repetition

History and Messianism in Modern Jewish Thought

Gilad Sharvit

Brandeis University Press, 2022

A fine example of the best scholarship that lies at the intersection of philosophy, religion, and history.

Dynamic Repetition proposes a new understanding of modern Jewish theories of messianism across the disciplines of history, theology, and philosophy. The book explores how ideals of repetition, return, and the cyclical occasioned a new messianic impulse across an important swath of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German Jewish thought. To grasp the complexities of Jewish messianism in modernity, the book focuses on diverse notions of “dynamic repetition” in the works of Franz Rosenzweig, Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka, and Sigmund Freud, and their interrelations with basic trajectories of twentieth-century philosophy and critical thought.

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Dynamics of Class and Stratification in Poland

1945–2015

Irina Tomescu-Dubrow

Central European University Press, 2018

This book is about long-term changes to class and inequality in Poland. Drawing upon major social surveys, the team of authors from the Polish Academy of Sciences offer the rare comprehensive study of important changes to the social structure from the communist era to the present. The core argument is that, even during extreme societal transformations, key features of social life have long-lasting, stratifying effects. The authors analyse the core issues of inequality research that best explain “who gets what and why:” social mobility, status attainment and their mechanisms, with a focus on education, occupation, and income. The transition from communist political economy to liberal democracy and market capitalism offers a unique opportunity for scholars to understand how people move from one stratifi cation regime to the next. There are valuable lessons to be learned from linking past to present. Classic issues of class, stratification, mobility, and attainment have endured decades of radical social change. These concepts remain valid even when society tries to eradicate them.

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Dynamics of an Authoritarian System

Hungary, 2010–2021

Mária Csanádi

Central European University Press, 2022

This conceptually synthetic and empirically rich book demonstrates the vulnerability of democratic settings to authoritarianism and populism. Six scholars from various professional fields explore here the metamorphosis of a political party into a centralized authoritarian system. Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party needed less than ten years to accomplish this transformation in Hungary. In 2010, after winning a majority that could make changes in the constitution – two-thirds of the parliamentary seats, they evolved and stabilized the system, which produced again the two-thirds majority in 2014 and 2018.

The authors reveal how a democratic setting can be used as a device for political capture. They show how a political entity managed to penetrate almost all sub-fields of the economy to arrive at institutionalized corruption, and how the centralized power structure reproduces itself. With the help of a powerful empirical apparatus—among others analyses of more than 220,000 public tenders, redistributions of state subsidies, and the interconnectedness of those privileged with the political elite — the authors detail the functioning of a crony system and the network aspects of political connections in the rapid enrichment of politically-linked businesses. Their studies demonstrate the role of political capture in this redistribution and how this capture leads to a new social stratification.

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