Results by title

One of the preeminent theologians of our time, Reinhard Hütter, has taught at the Catholic University of America, Duke University Divinity School, and Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, has held prestigious visiting professorships at Providence College and Mundelein Seminary, and has published groundbreaking books engaging with Aquinas and Newman (among others). He has served as co-editor of Nova et Vetera and as editor of Pro Ecclesia, has been the president of the Academy of Catholic Theology, and has been a member of the International Theological Commission, the most important theological body in the Roman Catholic Church. This festschrift in honor of Reinhard Hütter contains twelve essays, with attention especially to theological method, the doctrine of the Triune God, faith and reason, the virtues, and ecclesiology, in light of Hütter’s own emphases. The Introduction explores Hütter’s distinctive contributions to Catholic theology, focusing on his constructive engagements with the theologies of Augustine, Aquinas, Newman, and Ratzinger. Contributors include Michael Root, Matthew Levering, Thomas Joseph White OP, Bruce D. Marshall, Peter Casarella, John R. Betz, Mats Wahlberg, Miguel J. Romero, Holly Taylor Coolman, Guy Mansini OSB, Edgardo A. Colón-Emeric, and Thomas Pfau.

Vittorio Gregotti—the architect of Barcelona’s Olympic Stadium, Milan’s Arcimboldi Opera Theater, and Lisbon’s Centro Cultural de Belém, among many other noted constructions—is not only a designer of international repute but an acclaimed theorist and critic. Architecture, Means and Ends is his practical and imaginative reflection on the role of the technical aspects of architectural design, both as part of the larger process of innovation and in relation to the mythic opposition between vision and construction.

Interweaving the seemingly irreconcilable concerns of aesthetics, meaning, and construction,  Architecture, Means and Ends reflects Gregotti’s overarching claim that buildings always have a symbolic, cultural content. In this book, he argues that by making symbolic expression a primary objective in the design of a project, the designer will produce a practical aesthetic as well as an ethical solution. Architecture, Means and Ends embraces that philosophy and will appeal to those, like Gregotti, working at the intersections of the history of design, art criticism, and architectural theory.

A uniquely broad perspective that challenges current ideas about worldwide cultural and political change.

Political and Social Theory/Cultural Studies

A uniquely broad perspective that challenges current ideas about worldwide cultural and political change. An intervention into current debates about globalization, nationalism, imperialism, and culture, this book offers a cogent critique of much of what is being said about globalization, by both the Right and the Left. In doing so, it charts the complex processes of globalization, drawing out their historical and philosophical roots and outlining the connections between cultural, political, and economic life that globalization has made, historically and in our day.The author’s orientation toward political theory and comparative civilizations-a rarity in globalization studies-allows him to detect in specific terms what is most dangerous and opportune in what is happening in the world today. Mohammed A. Bamyeh makes a compelling argument that we are witnessing a process typified by massive disjunctions between political, cultural, and economic logics on a world scale. Bamyeh demonstrates how the disruptions caused by globalization, while they blur our vision and block our rational approaches, also possess the potential to liberate the autonomous and convivial human possibilities and capabilities long shackled by such modernist institutions of governance as the nation-state.Translation Inquiries: University of Minnesota Press

 For over a century, the idea of primitivism has motivated artistic modernism. Focusing on the three decades after World War II, known in France as “les trentes glorieuses” despite the loss of most of the country’s colonial empire, this probing and expansive book argues that primitivism played a key role in a French society marked by both economic growth and political turmoil.

A timely and original intervention in our understanding of this major philosopher through the lens of his influence on others

What do we read when we read Kierkegaard? How do we know? Insisting that Kierkegaard remains a far more enigmatic and paradoxical writer than is often assumed, Geoffrey A. Hale argues that the best way to approach Kierkegaard’s work and understand its significance for our own thought is to retrace its formative influence on major intellectuals of the early twentieth century.

In mutually reflective readings of Kierkegaard’s foundational texts through the work of three pivotal authors—Franz Kafka, Theodor Adorno, and Rainer Maria Rilke—Hale shows how each of these writers draws attention to the unwavering sense of human finitude that pervades all of Kierkegaard’s work and, with it, the profoundly unsettling indeterminacy in which it results. It is the very limitations of language, Hale argues, that hold it open to meaning, to interpretation, and thus to freedom. Resisting clear circumscription in this way, Kierkegaard’s work becomes all the more fruitful to us—and all the more challenging—to the extent that it resists our understanding.

Reimagining transparency and secrecy in the era of digital data

When total data surveillance delimits agency and revelations of political wrongdoing fail to have consequences, is transparency the social panacea liberal democracies purport it to be? This book sets forth the provocative argument that progressive social goals would be better served by a radical form of secrecy, at least while state and corporate forces hold an asymmetrical advantage over the less powerful in data control. Clare Birchall asks: How might transparency actually serve agendas that are far from transparent? Can we imagine a secrecy that could act in the service of, rather than against, a progressive politics? 

To move beyond atomizing calls for privacy and to interrupt the perennial tension between state security and the public’s right to know, Birchall adapts Édouard Glissant’s thinking to propose a digital “right to opacity.” As a crucial element of radical secrecy, she argues, this would eventually give rise to a “postsecret” society, offering an understanding and experience of the political that is free from the false choice between secrecy and transparency. She grounds her arresting story in case studies including the varied presidential styles of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump; the Snowden revelations; conspiracy theories espoused or endorsed by Trump; WikiLeaks and guerrilla transparency; and the opening of the state through data portals.

Postsecrecy is the necessary condition for imagining, finally, an alternative vision of “the good,” of equality, as neither shaped by neoliberal incarnations of transparency nor undermined by secret state surveillance. Not least, postsecrecy reimagines collective resistance in the era of digital data.

An urgent and galvanizing argument for an Economic Bill of Rights—and its potential to confer true freedom on all Americans.

Since the Founding, Americans have debated the true meaning of freedom. For some, freedom meant the provision of life’s necessities, those basic conditions for the “pursuit of happiness.” For others, freedom meant the civil and political rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights and unfettered access to the marketplace—nothing more.  As Mark Paul explains, the latter interpretation—thanks in large part to a particularly influential cadre of economists—has all but won out among policymakers, with dire repercussions for American society: rampant inequality, endemic poverty, and an economy built to benefit the few at the expense of the many.

In this book, Paul shows how economic rights—rights to necessities like housing, employment, and health care—have been a part of the American conversation since the Revolutionary War and were a cornerstone of both the New Deal and the Civil Rights Movement. Their recuperation, he argues, would at long last make good on the promise of America’s founding documents. By drawing on FDR’s proposed Economic Bill of Rights, Paul outlines a comprehensive policy program to achieve a more capacious and enduring version of American freedom. Among the rights he enumerates are the right to a good job, the right to an education, the right to banking and financial services, and the right to a healthy environment.

Replete with discussions of some of today’s most influential policy ideas—from Medicare for All to a federal job guarantee to the Green New Deal—The Ends of Freedom is a timely and urgent call to reclaim the idea of freedom from its captors on the political right—to ground America’s next era in the country’s progressive history and carve a path toward a more economically dynamic and equitable nation.
 

In The Ends of Research Tom Özden-Schilling explores the afterlives of several research initiatives that emerged in the wake of the “War in the Woods,” a period of anti-logging blockades in Canada in the late twentieth century. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among neighboring communities of White environmental scientists and First Nations mapmakers in northwest British Columbia, Özden-Schilling examines these researchers’ lasting investments and the ways they struggle to continue their work long after the loss of government funding. He charts their use of planning documents, Indigenous territory maps, land use plots, reports, and other documents that help them not only to survive institutional restructuring but to hold on to the practices that they hope will enable future researchers to continue their work. He also shows how their lives and aspirations shape and are shaped by decades-long battles over resource extraction and Indigenous land claims. By focusing on researchers’ experiences and personal attachments, Özden-Schilling illustrates the complex relationships between researchers and rural histories of conservation, environmental conflict, resource extraction, and the long-term legacies of scientific research.

In this book, Eric C. Smith uses the postcolonial theory of necropolitics to interpret the Acts of the Apostles. Necropolitics, a way to account for how power makes claims on the lives of persons especially in colonial or imperial circumstances, is particularly relevant for the study of Acts because of its attention to those specific imperial situations and the way coercion, violence, intimidation, imprisonment, and fear show up in the lives of its characters. Necropolitics reveals a useful perspective for understanding Acts and its account of the aftermath of Jesus’s death, the expansion of the Jesus movement across the Mediterranean basin, and the movement’s many encounters with representatives of cultural, religious, and political power.