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A story of law and social policy in a place you might not expect: community gardens and urban farms. 

Though Chicago is a city of legendary skyscrapers and dense apartment blocks, it is also a city of wide-open tracts of land. This surprising juxtaposition can be viewed as an opportunity, in that available land can become a food source for urban dwellers, especially those experiencing poverty or limited access to grocery stores. But most empty land in Chicago remains empty — why? In Cultivating the City, sociologist and legal scholar Nate Ela examines the history of Chicago’s urban farms and gardens, their promotion as a tool to support the poor and unemployed, and their repeated failure to take root as a permanent part of Chicago’s landscape. 

Ela’s fresh take on contemporary urban agriculture features a new perspective on social policy and urban governance. For hundreds of years, social reformers have worked to address poverty and unemployment by letting people use land to grow food. Reformers experimented with the possibilities of property use, including deals to match gardeners with public or private land, proposals to let growers use land without owners’ permission, and the transformation of private land into municipal gardens. By exposing the dynamics of this longstanding but long-overlooked form of social policy in Chicago, Ela offers a new strategy for cultivating cities that are productive, resilient, and just. 

What exactly is a "good student," and how do educators foster this individual? As Douglas LeBlanc argues, the good student is the individual who—more than being intelligent—is morally virtuous in the realm of study. The classical and Christian traditions divide the moral virtues under the cardinal virtues of temperance, fortitude, justice, and prudence. In order to foster good students, then, teachers must foster the sub-virtue of each of the cardinal virtues that is most related to learning. LeBlanc identifies these virtues as studiosity (temperance), magnanimity (fortitude), docility (justice), and self-knowledge (prudence). Each of these four is given a historical and philosophical analysis in its own chapter; therein, it is demonstrated that each virtue is needed in order for young adults to have a moral intellectual life. Additionally, for each of these four virtues, another chapter is dedicated to the practical means whereby teachers and administrators can foster these virtues. LeBlanc shows educators how they can guide students in the practice of the virtue in question. Additionally, he describes the ways educators must practice these four virtues themselves, insisting that teachers and administrators must serve as models of what it means to be one who possesses a moral intellectual life. In the conclusion, he argues that these four virtues are not just needed by young adults and their teachers. They are ultimately needed by everyone, for all adults are called to have moral intellectual lives. By fostering studiosity, magnanimity, docility, and self-knowledge, teachers empower their students to be life-long learners—life-long "good students."

Highlighting the critical role of midwestern farmers in the creation of the American Century

Though often left out of the story of the making of the American Century, the farmers of the Midwest were at its center, fueling the nation’s growing power in the midtwentieth century. In Global Heartland, Peter Simons explores how, after decades of slipping to the margins of an urbanizing economy, these farmers assumed renewed strategic and cultural importance as they produced essential sustenance for overseas troops and food rations for a domestic population.

During the mid-1900s, once-isolationist midwestern farmers came to see the continental interior not as an insulated space but as an environmentally rich landscape that mandated them to accept a larger stake in global affairs. Simons traces this transformation from an older agrarian internationalism rooted in religion and ties to family abroad to illuminate the increasing influence of the U.S. agricultural community during the Cold War. Examining regional political parties, Lend-Lease programs, wartime mass media, and farmer-led relief programs, and interspersing this history with vignettes revisiting the Mercy Wheat campaign of 1947, the postwar International Farm Youth Exchange, and the Flying Farmers organization, Simons offers an enlightening consideration of midwestern farmers’ involvement in America’s international ascent.

Unique in its focus on farmers and their work rather than the more common attention to food or agricultural commodities, Global Heartland complicates and expands ideas of the farm industry’s role in American history.

With the 2015 publication of Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si’, many people of faith have found themselves challenged to seek new ways of addressing serious ecological questions — issues essential to the flourishing of all creatures and not just human beings. This volume brings together fifteen select scholars to consider pressing contemporary environmental concerns through the lens of Catholic theology. Drawing from the early church fathers and other authoritative voices in the Christian tradition, the contributors to On Earth as It Is in Heaven show how ancient, creedal Christianity offers significant insights into our current ecological dilemmas and speaks powerfully about what it means for us today to care well for God’s good creation.

Beautifully illustrated, Planting Paradise charts the evolution of thinking about the cultivation of gardens from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. In this age of discovery, when the world was being explored as never before, gardening itself took on new dimensions. The Renaissance belief in direct observation of nature offered an alternative way of thinking and inspired the scientific approach of the Enlightenment, and soon gardens were no longer just places of beauty, but also laboratories for scientific investigation.

            Planting Paradise reveals how the botanic gardens of early modern Europe were largely viewed as a means of supplying surgeons with medicines but by the seventeenth and eighteenth century the interest in gardens and cultivating exotic plants had spread to all levels of society. As global exploration took Europeans all over the world, gardens became a tapestry of many diverse botanical histories—some plants were native, some were introduced from foreign lands, and others were bred in the garden. Planting Paradise shows how the garden became a symbol of human interactions within the botanical world.

            A lovely gift book for garden lovers, Planting Paradise showcases the superb collection of botanical illustrations in the Plant Sciences Department and Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, and presents a handsome and fascinating look at the history of the garden from the picturesque to the practical and back again.

In an era in which the internet has made pornography readily accessible, Seeing with the Eyes of the Heart offers a theological critique of pornography and retrieves from the Christian tradition an alternative visual culture. This visual culture is constituted by both the character of the images we behold and the manner in which we see. Contributors include psychologists William M. Struthers and Jill Manning, who address the neurological effects of pornography and its influences on personal, familial, and social life. Their professional analysis is complemented by the testimony of a young man in recovery from pornography addiction. In an exposition of Christian visual culture, Orthodox iconographer Randi Sider-Rose describes the spiritual discipline of icon writing, Danielle M. Peters, S.T.D., surveys the iconography and art of Marian traditions, and art historian Dianne Phillips elucidates the meaning of divine desire as evident in Catholic visual culture of the late medieval and early modern periods. Catholic theologians Ann W. Astell, Nathanial Peters, Boyd Taylor Coolman, and Nicolas Ogle discuss specific practices and dimensions of the Catholic tradition that can contribute to the cultivation of sacramental vision, and David W. Fagerberg, Kimberly Hope Belcher, Jennifer Newsome Martin, and John C. Cavadini offer reflections on sacramental imagination and the healing of vision. Seeing with the Eyes of the Heart is a work of scholarship composed with pastoral care and concern, and it will be serviceable to both classroom teachers and pastoral ministers. A special feature of the book is an inset of seventy-two full-color plates featuring both classic and contemporary works of Christian iconography and art. The essays and images invite readers to behold in beauty the truth that we are created by the triune God not for sexual objectification but with a sacramental vocation to deification through Christ and the Holy Spirit of love.