160 books match the query 'Reflections' and 5 start with o

cover of On Our Way Home from the Revolution: Reflections on Ukraine

On Our Way Home from the Revolution

Reflections on Ukraine

Sonya Bilocerkowycz

The Ohio State University Press, 2019

One of USA Today's “10 books to help understand what's happening in Russia and Ukraine”
In 2014 Sonya Bilocerkowycz is a tourist at a deadly revolution. At first she is enamored with the Ukrainians’ idealism, which reminds her of her own patriotic family. But when the romantic revolution melts into a war with Russia, she becomes disillusioned, prompting a return home to the US and the diaspora community that raised her. As the daughter of a man who studies Ukrainian dissidents for a living, the granddaughter of war refugees, and the great-granddaughter of a gulag victim, Bilocerkowycz has inherited a legacy of political oppression. But what does it mean when she discovers a missing page from her family’s survival story—one that raises questions about her own guilt?

In these linked essays, Bilocerkowycz invites readers to meet a swirling cast of post-Soviet characters, including a Russian intelligence officer who finds Osama bin Laden a few weeks after 9/11; a Ukrainian poet whose nose gets broken by Russian separatists; and a long-lost relative who drives a bus into the heart of Chernobyl. On Our Way Home from the Revolution muddles our easy distinctions between innocence and culpability, agency and fate.
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cover of On the Happiness of the Philosophic Life: Reflections on Rousseau's "Rêveries" in Two Books

On the Happiness of the Philosophic Life

Reflections on Rousseau's "Rêveries" in Two Books

Heinrich Meier

University of Chicago Press, 2016

A paradigm-shifting, original examination of Rousseau’s final work, Rêveries.

On the Happiness of the Philosophic Life presents Heinrich Meier’s confrontation with Rousseau’s Rêveries, the philosopher’s most beautiful and daring work, as well as his last and least understood. Bringing to bear more than thirty years of study of Rousseau, Meier unfolds his stunningly original interpretation in two parts. 
           
The first part of On the Happiness of the Philosophic Life approaches the Rêveries not as another autobiographical text in the tradition of the Confessions and the Dialogues, but as a reflection on the philosophic life and the distinctive happiness it provides. The second turns to a detailed analysis of a work referred to in the Rêveries, the “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar,” which triggered Rousseau’s political persecution when it was originally published as part of Émile.  In his examination of this most controversial of Rousseau’s writings, which aims to lay the foundations for a successful nonphilosophic life, Meier brings to light the differences between natural religion as expressed by the Vicar and Rousseau’s natural theology. Together, the two reciprocally illuminating parts of this study provide an indispensable guide to Rousseau and to the understanding of the nature of the philosophic life.

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cover of On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig

On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life

Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig

Eric L. Santner

University of Chicago Press, 2001

In On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life, Eric Santner puts Sigmund Freud in dialogue with his contemporary Franz Rosenzweig in the service of reimagining ethical and political life. By exploring the theological dimensions of Freud's writings and revealing unexpected psychoanalytic implications in the religious philosophy of Rosenzweig's masterwork, The Star of Redemption, Santner makes an original argument for understanding religions of revelation in therapeutic terms, and offers a penetrating look at how this understanding suggests fruitful ways of reconceiving political community.

Santner's crucial innovation in this new study is to bring the theological notion of revelation into a broadly psychoanalytic field, where it can be understood as a force that opens the self to everyday life and encourages accountability within the larger world. Revelation itself becomes redefined as an openness toward what is singular, enigmatic, even uncanny about the Other, whether neighbor or stranger, thereby linking a theory of drives and desire to a critical account of sociality. Santner illuminates what it means to be genuinely open to another human being or culture and to share and take responsibility for one's implication in the dilemmas of difference.

By bringing Freud and Rosenzweig together, Santner not only clarifies in new and surprising ways the profound connections between psychoanalysis and the Judeo-Christian tradition, he makes the resources of both available to contemporary efforts to rethink concepts of community and cross-cultural communication.
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cover of Our Politics: Reflections on Political Life

Our Politics

Reflections on Political Life

Douglas Kane, with a foreword by Mike Lawrence

Southern Illinois University Press, 2019

Douglas Kane, an American politician and economist, offers readers a straightforward, personal account of what it is like to run for and hold public office—the demands, conflicts, temptations, and rewards created by political, economic, and social forces. Throughout the book, Kane references Illinois and Wisconsin politics. The campaigns of his wife, Kathleen Vinehout, and her years in the Wisconsin senate show that the centralization of political power, the structure of campaign organizations, and the policy decisions that Kane experienced as an Illinois legislator are not unique to any one state.
 
In Our Politics Kane reflects on his nearly fifty years of active engagement in state and local politics. In a series of essays, he seeks to understand the forces, motivations, incentives and technologies that shape our politics and produce the consequences that we live with every day.  He describes how candidates and officeholders deal with the fundamental contradictions inherent in the democratic process, and how and why the political power structure has changed. He also explores the personal experience of being a legislator, from deciding how to vote to building relationships with party leaders, fellow legislators, the governor, and the voters in the district. Kane concludes by considering the possibility of change, how it might happen, and the steps that candidates, political parties, activists and others might take to better our politics with results more to our liking.
 
While many journalists record politics from the outside, and numerous political memoirs focus on personalities and what happened to whom and when, this book gives an insider’s view of politics at the level of state government. This book is not about those politicians but about our politics, which together we have created and together we must deal with.
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cover of Out in the Field: Reflections of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists

Out in the Field

Reflections of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists

Edited by Ellen Lewin and William L. Leap

University of Illinois Press, 1996

      "Definitive and well-rounded. . . . Explores how anthropologists
        manage issues of identity and sexuality in field research and professional
        life. In an era when the field worker's positionality is critical to research
        and ethnographic writing, this insightful book has much to say to gay
        and straight researchers alike." -- Louise Lamphere, University of
        New Mexico
      "Addresses sensitive, controversial, and tabooed subjects. . . .
        Out in the Field will be read by a variety of audiences, within
        and outside of anthropology." -- Jean Jackson, Massachusetts Institute
        of Technology
      Lesbian and gay anthropologists write candidly in Out in the Field
        about their research and personal experiences in conducting fieldwork,
        about the ethical and intellectual dilemmas they face in writing about
        lesbian or gay populations, and about the impact on their careers of doing
        lesbian/gay research.
      The first volume in which lesbian and gay anthropologists discuss personal
        experiences, Out in the Field offers compelling illustrations of
        professional lives both closeted and out to colleagues and fieldwork informants.
        It also concerns aligning career goals with personal sexual preferences
        and speaks directly to issues of representation and authority currently
        being explored throughout the social sciences.
      CONTRIBUTORS: Geoffrey Burkhart, Liz Goodman, Delores M. Walters, Walter
        L. Williams, Sabine Lang, Ellen Lewin, William L. Leap, Ralph Bolton,
        Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy, Madeline Davis, Will Roscoe, Esther Newton,
        Stephen O. Murray, James Wafer, Kath Weston, Sue-Ellen Jacobs
 
 
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