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In this book, a group of prominent scholar-teachers meditate on how to read, in the context of a specifically Christian university or college education, some of the greatest texts of the Western tradition. Each author devotes himself or herself to a single text. In many cases, the authors have been reading, rereading, marking, ruminating, inwardly digesting, teaching, and discussing their text for several decades, so that they offer here a distillation of years of familiarity and reflection. 
    The texts span nearly 3,000 years. They are pre-Christian, Christian, and post-Christian. Each kind of text – indeed, each individual text – offers its own special opportunities and challenges for Christian interpretation. From these diverse readings emerges a sense that these texts all belong to a single great tradition, one to which Christianity made and continues to make enormous contributions. Medieval Christian writers exploit and transform pagan texts, and post-Christian writers like Nietzsche and Joyce are often preoccupied with Christian themes. In one way or another all the texts are about what it is to be a human being and what a good human life might look like. Thus “common threads” bind one text to the next, creating countless resonances among them. 
    The authors of the essays in this book all address the question, “How shall we read these texts from the vantage point of faith in God and Jesus Christ? Moreover, how shall we read them as members of a community with a common vision of the human good, aiming to nurture our students in that vision by reading with them some of the profoundest and most delightful things the human hand has penned?” As the Introduction suggests, the volume hopes to contribute to a renewal of the original intention of university education: to cultivate minds and hearts formed and informed by wisdom, the highest of intellectual goods. 

A call to pleasurable and sustainable action that centers our shared stewardship of shared spaces.

Environmentally-conscious decision-making can seem like an exercise in self-denial: don’t fly, don’t drive, don’t eat meat. But bringing our tote bags to the grocery store will never be enough to solve the climate crisis, nor will dropping out of society. Many of us crave a collective movement that acknowledges the value of comfort, a framework for making choices that are inherently imperfect, but ones we can live with.

In Finding the Beautiful Commons, historian Cathy Gere offers a relatable and inspiring guide to environmental action in a consumerist culture. Recounting her experiences as a young activist at the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp in Berkshire, as an anarchist and guerrilla gardener in a New York City squat, and as an academic working to decarbonize the University of California system, Gere argues for initiatives grounded in common property—streets, libraries, parks, and other shared spaces—where our communal interests can drive sustainability. These are also sites where we can put bourgeois values like beauty and personal enjoyment to good use protecting local landscapes and resources.

Funny, wise, and honest about the contradictions of life during climate crisis, Gere shows us that the commons we already know—the everyday infrastructure of mass transit, natural reserves, and public beaches—is the very foundation for a livable future.
 

Environment, craft, and meaning in the work of Appalachian instrument makers.

How can the craft of musical instrument making help reconnect people to place and reenchant work in Appalachia? How does the sonic search for musical tone change relationships with trees and forests? Following three craftspeople in the mountain forests of Appalachia through their processes of making instruments, Finding the Singing Spruce considers the meanings of work, place, and creative expression in drawing music from wood.

Jasper Waugh-Quasebarth explores the complexities and contradictions of instrument-making labor, which is deeply rooted in mountain forests and expressive traditions but also engaged with global processes of production and consumption. Using historical narratives and sensory ethnography, among other approaches, he finds that the craft of lutherie speaks to the past, present, and future of the region’s work and nature.

Where language, body, and form converge in the poetry of Larry Eigner.

Larry Eigner (1927–1996) wrote thousands of poems in his lifetime, despite profound physical limitations caused by cerebral palsy. Using only the thumb and index finger of his right hand, Eigner generated a torrent of urgent and rich language, participating in vital correspondences as well as publishing widely in literary magazines and poetry journals.

While Eigner wrote before the emergence of ecopoetics, his poetry reflected a serious engagement with scientific writing and media, including Rachel Carson’s seminal Silent Spring. Eigner was writing about environmental disasters and climate change long before such concerns took on a moral incumbency. Similarly, Eigner was ahead of his time in his exploration of disability. The field of disability studies has expanded rapidly in the new millennium. Eigner was not an overtly biographical poet, at least as far as his physical limitations were concerned, but his poetry spoke volumes on the idea of embodiment in all its forms.

Finding the Weight of Things: Larry Eigner’s Ecrippoetics is the first full-length study of Eigner’s poetry, covering his entire career from the beginning of his mature work in the 1950s to his last poems of the 1990s. George Hart charts where Eigner’s two central interests intersect, and how their interaction fueled his work as a poet-critic—one whose work has much to tell us about the ecology and embodiment of our futures. Hart sees Eigner’s overlapping concerns for disability, ecology, and poetic form as inextricable, and coins the phrase ecrippoetics here to describe Eigner’s prescient vision.

• determine how much time you can spend on research by evaluating your current activity level and goals.
• find the time to do research without giving up your social life or risking your GPA.
• avoid common mistakes in the search, application, or interview that make it harder to find a research experience.
• write emails that get you noticed by busy professors by customizing the included templates.
• prepare for tough interview questions so you’ll impress the interviewer with your answers, and be able to determine if the position is right for you.

• navigate the hidden curriculum of finding a research experience in science, technology, engineering, math, and medicine (STEMM).
• set realistic expectations for their research experience.
• understand why conducting research requires effort and will include some failure and other challenges.
• be active participants in their success in the lab.

Examining truth, expertise, and authority in the contemporary United States

In an era defined by accusations of “fake news,” declining institutional trust, and deepening political polarization, Truth After Post-Truth reframes the debate about knowledge and democracy in the United States. Rather than treating the so-called post-truth crisis as a failure of public reasoning or the product of bad-faith actors and digital misinformation, this interdisciplinary volume argues that the problem runs deeper and that solutions require renewed democratic deliberation about how public knowledge itself should be produced, evaluated, and shared.

Contributors move beyond familiar diagnoses that blame either misinformed citizens or manipulative media systems. Instead, they interrogate the intellectual and political norms that underwrite claims about truth, expertise, and authority. This book challenges the assumption that restoring democracy depends on returning the public to a fixed set of knowledge practices and calls instead for open debate about which norms and institutions best serve a pluralistic society. Organized around three urgent questions—what relationship a healthy democracy should have to experts, whether a shared and cross-partisan news sphere is necessary or achievable, and whether media reform or media literacy is the more pressing priority—the essays are rigorous, provocative, and often in productive tension with one another. Together, they model the kind of critical engagement needed to rebuild a more resilient democratic information environment.

Timely and forward-looking, Truth After Post-Truth will be essential reading for readers concerned with the future of democratic public life, as well as for scholars and students of media, politics, and communication.

Contributors include the volume editors as well as Mark Andrejevic, Matt Carlson, Vivek Chibber,  Belinha de Abreu, John Nerone, Whitney Phillips, Sue Robinson, Michael Schudson, Nik Usher, Andrea Wenzel, and Alex Worsnip.