Wrestling with God in the modern West -- Understanding Christian wrestling about ethics -- Wrestling with the violence of conquest -- Wrestling with war in a modern world -- Wrestling with the violence of oppression -- Wrestling with violence and injustice abroad and at home -- Has anyone prevailed?

Two types of Judeo-Christian perspective stress the imperative to act to relieve suffering and transcend violence: liberation theology and the "religious humanitarian perspective." Both link ethics and action; both influence political debate.

Lynch addresses the return to Immanuel Kant—a "prophet of progressive international reform"—and examines the relationship between the Kantian system of ethics and the development of international law in the post-Cold War era.

During the last two decades, the discovery of thousands of manuscripts in different regions of sub-Saharan Africa has questioned the long-standing approach of Africa as a continent only characterized by orality and legitimately assigned to the continent the status of a civilization of written literacy. However, most of the existing studies mainly aim at serving literary and historical purposes, and focus only on the textual dimension of the manuscripts. This book advances on the contrary a holistic approach to the study (...) of these manuscripts and gather contributions on the different dimensions of the manuscript, i.e. the materials, the technologies, the practices and the communities involved in the production, commercialization, circulation, preservation and consumption. The originality of this book is found in its methodological approach as well as its comparative geographic focus, presenting studies on a continental scale, including regions formerly neglected by existing scholarship, provides a unique opportunity to expand our still scanty knowledge of the different manuscript cultures that the African continent has developed and that often can still be considered as living traditions. (shrink)

The rule books, though they claimed to heed only the call of logic, were nonetheless bound by their historical context: punctuation guidelines have been heavily indebted to intellectual, cultural, and aesthetic trends. No matter what analytical authority rule books claimed, their codifications had at least as much to do with their historical context as with syntax. When punctuation is properly contextualized, it can yield insight into problems that transcend disciplinary boundaries: it asks us to consider how we communicate within the (...) disciplines and beyond them and how disciplines create and maintain interpretive norms. It is this account of punctuation that I begin to develop here.I want to track the much-maligned semicolon and its fellow punctuation marks as rules for their usage were established and evolved. I consider the consequences of the nineteenth-century explosion of systems of grammar rules by way of the story of a semicolon in a statute that deprived Bostonians of late-night liquor from 1900–1906. The “Semicolon Law,” as it came to be known, exemplifies problems of interpretation still live in legal theory. I contrast the demands of legal formalism with the expectations of close reading in the humanities and social sciences. I conclude by attending to the inheritance left to us by nineteenth-century grammarians' impassioned attempts to bring order to English: The Chicago Manual of Style. I raise some critical questions about our attitudes towards rules, and consider how those attitudes influence our approach to punctuation and our passions about semicolons. (shrink)

What does it mean to teach for human dignity? Pivoting around the recently published, Descriptive Inquiry in Teacher Practice: Cultivating Practical Wisdom to Create Democratic Schools, book authors and critics with disparate backgrounds will respond to this question. In the process, they will invite readers to also respond, working together to construct further understanding. In bringing together scholars around a shared question, the review borrows from Descriptive Inquiry – the method for studying teaching described in the book. Critics: Ashley Taylor, (...) Colgate University & Vikramadity Joshi, Teachers College, Columbia, Doris Santoro, Bowdoin College, Sam Rocha, University of British Columbia, Rachel Wahl, University of Virginia. (shrink)

This paper is premised on the understanding that racism is deeply and widely entrenched in our culture and the ethical claim that we operate within complex networks of habituated practices. Within this framework, we ask how do we disrupt these calcified, complex, and racist ways of being? Specifically, we explore how teachers are habituated into particular ways of seeing and acting. We argue generally that conscious cultivation can promote greater equity and specifically that changing teacher talk is a necessary part (...) of this cultivation if racist norms are to be disrupted and replaced with more equitable ways of seeing in schools. In making this argument, we draw on a practice, Descriptive Inquiry, to cultivate more equitable talk and describe how it led to changes in four urban public schools. (shrink)

Taking the cue from the translation of Land und Herrschaft by Otto Brunner, the essay explores how his work challenges the historian as well as the translator. Using ideologized concepts as Staat, Land, Herrschaft, Friede, Recht, Brunner gives to these expressions a specific value from the temporal point of view. After the transformation of the social and political concepts between the XVIII and XIX centuries, which made many concepts so temporally determined that they are of little use, Brunner redefines them (...) radically and makes intelligible a language which is otherwise obscure. (shrink)

This article presents narratives from 13 Indigenous early career academics (ECAs) at one university in Auckland, New Zealand. These experiences are likely to represent those of Indigenous Māori and Pasifika ECAs nationally, given the small, centralised nature of the national academy of Aotearoa New Zealand. The narratives contain testimony, fictionalised vignettes of experience, and poetic expressions. Meeting the demands of an academic role in one’s first years of working at a university is a big deal for anyone; the extra pressures (...) and challenges for Indigenous Māori and Pacific staff are immense, yet little understood by White ‘others.’ A writing workshop was the initial catalyst of this collective writing project. Through these insider narratives, this article presents a collective description of, and response to, the experience of Māori and Pasifika early career academics. (shrink)

This article considers how networked large urban screens can act as a platform for the creation of an experimental transnational public sphere. It takes as a case study a specific Australia-Korea cultural event that linked large screens in Federation Square, Melbourne, and Tomorrow City, Incheon,1through the presentation of SMS-based interactive media art works. The article combines theoretical analyses of global citizenship, mobility, digital technologies, and networked public space with empirical analyses of audience response research data collected during the screen event. (...) The central argument is that large public screens can offer a strategic site for examining transformations in the constitution of public agency in a digitized, globalized environment. The idea of ‘aesthetic cosmopolitanism’ is finally proposed as a conceptual framework for understanding how new forms of transnational public agency in mediated public spaces might operate. (shrink)

Vernon Lee was the pseudonym of the British writer Violet Paget (1856-1935). She is known mostly for her supernatural fiction. She also wrote essays and poetry. She contributed to The Yellow Book and was a follower of Walter Pater. Her literary works explored the themes of haunting and possession. She was responsible for introducing the concept of empathy into the English language. Empathy was a key concept in Lee's psychological aesthetics which she developed on the basis of prior work by (...) Theodor Lipps. Her response to aesthetics interpreted art as a mental and corporeal experience. This was a significant contribution to the philosophy of art which has been largely neglected. Additionally she wrote, along with her friend and colleague Henry James, critically about the relationship between the writer and his/her audience pioneering the concept of criticism and expanding the idea of critical assessment among all the arts as relating to an audience's (or her personal) response. She was a strong proponent of the Aesthetic movement. Among her famous works are: A Phantom Lover (1890), Hauntings (1890) and Art and Life (1896). (shrink)

Le texte part du fait que Nicolas de Cues ainsi que Franciscus Patricius , philosophe croate du XVIe siècle, font partie d’un courant de penseurs de la Renaissance ayant défendu l’hypothèse de l’infini de l’univers. Il est intéressant de voir comment, malgré ce point de départ commun, leurs théories sur la position de la Terre dans l’univers divergent. Si pour Nicolas de Cues, la Terre est une « stella nobilis », c’est-à-dire une étoile noble, Petrić la considère comme « faex (...) omnium rerum », déjection de toutes choses. L e texte tente de trouver l’origine de cette divergence entre les deux philosophes. (shrink)

This article analyzes selected short stories in Cecelia Ahern’s thirty-narrative collection Roar to see how the perspectives of posthuman and postfeminist critique can be incorporated via the common dystopic umbrella into the mainstream female readership of romance literature. The dystopic worlds created by Ahern in Roar portray inequality and power imbalances with regard to gender and sex. The protagonists are mostly middle-aged women whose family and personal lives are either regulated by dystopic realities or acquire a “dystopic” dimension, the (...) solutions to which are provided by, among other tropes, “posthuman” transformations. Roar introduces other-than-human elements, mostly corporeal alterations, in which the female bodies of Ahern’s characters become de-formed and re-formed beyond androcentric systems of value. The article raises the question of whether feminist and, to some extent, “posthuman” approaches, need to be popularized in such an abridged way as Ahern does in her volume. The answer depends upon the identification of the target audience and their expectations. Ahern’s Roar represents popular literature intended to be sold to as many readers as possible, regardless of their education, state of knowledge, etc. Viewed from that perspective, what some critics could perceive as the collection’s structural weaknesses constitutes its utmost marketing asset. The essay argues that despite not being a structurally innovative work of art, Ahern’s book fulfils the basic requirements of the popular fiction genre, intermittently providing some extra, literary gratification and popularizing rudimentary elements of the posthuman and postfeminist thought. (shrink)