An Insurrectionist Manifesto contains four insurrectionary gospels based on Martin Heidegger's philosophical model of the fourfold: earth and sky, gods and mortals. Challenging religious dogma and dominant philosophical theories, they offer a cooperative, world-affirming political theology that promotes new life through not resurrection but insurrection. The insurrection in these gospels unfolds as a series of miraculous yet worldly practices of vital affirmation. Since these routines do not rely on fantasies of escape, they engender intimate transformations of the self along the (...) very coordinates from which they emerge. Enacting a comparative and contagious postsecular sensibility, these gospels draw on the work of Slavoj i ek, Giorgio Agamben, Catherine Malabou, François Laruelle, Peter Sloterdijk, and Gilles Deleuze yet rejuvenate scholarship in continental philosophy, critical race theory, the new materialisms, speculative realism, and nonphilosophy. They think beyond the sovereign force of the one to initiate a radical politics "after" God. (shrink)

Policy often focuses on reducing health care disparities through interventions at the patient and provider level. While unquestionably important, system-wide reforms to reduce uninsurance, improve geographic availability of services, increase workforce diversity, and promote clinical best practices are essential for progress in reducing disparities.

As this nation embarks on new efforts to reform the U.S. health system, we face a critical unfinished agenda from the mid- 1960s: persistent racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic disparities in health and health care. Medicaid, Medicare, and Community Health Centers — public programs with very different legislative histories and financing mechanisms — were the first federally funded, nationwide efforts to improve health care access for low-income and elderly Americans. Members of racial and ethnic minority groups also greatly benefited from these (...) efforts because recipients of federal funds, such as Medicare, were required to comply with the newly passed Civil Rights Act of 1964, which barred racial discrimination. Unquestionably, government played a major role in the gains in health care access that have occurred in the last half century. Yet today all Americans do not have the same opportunities for health, access to care, or quality of care when they receive it. (shrink)

David Naguib Pellow demonstrates his impressive scholarship of environmental justice and social movements in his latest work, Total Liberation. Exhaustive in its breadth of research and perspective...

Nietzsche and Freud saw Christianity as metaphysical escapism, with Nietzsche calling the religion a "Platonism for the masses" and faulting Paul the apostle for negating more immanent, material modes of thought and political solidarity. Integrating this debate with the philosophies of difference espoused by Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ward Blanton argues that genealogical interventions into the political economies of Western cultural memory do not go far enough in relation to the imagined (...) founder of Christianity. Blanton challenges the idea of Paulinism as a pop Platonic worldview or form of social control. He unearths in Pauline legacies otherwise repressed resources for new materialist spiritualities and new forms of radical political solidarity, liberating "religion" from inherited interpretive assumptions so philosophical thought can manifest in risky, radical freedom. (shrink)

Blanton Ward traces the current critical engagement of Agamben, Derrida and Zizek, among others, back to the 19th and early 20th century philosophers of early Christianity.

Recent debates about the legacy (and, sometimes, surpassing) of Derridean philosophy have often oriented themselves around questions of a new austerity in relation to the implicit philosophical functioning of God. Indeed, an increasing philosophical vigilance about the death or nonexistence of God has begun to be presented as a hallmark of recent criticisms of earlier receptions of Derrida and, by way of messianic structures of time, of Derridean politics as well. We argue that the inflating value of atheism in recent (...) texts operates most effectively within a broader forgetfulness of the many modes in which a serial dying of gods constitutes a more fundamental quality of the religio-political archive than the stability or life of these gods. We find, moreover, there to be something comical about a reconfiguration of the ontotheological archive around a tableau of serially dying Gods, this God who cannot stabilize or maintain for long any system of divine life support. Most importantly, we find that our sense of comedy is itself indicative of important shifts within the stylistics of Derridean discussions of auto-immunity and supplement which have yet to be worked through with any real seriousness. In this respect, our reflections pair Bergson's reflections on the universe as a ‘machine for the manufacture of gods’ with Bergson's explorations of comedy as a fundamentally mechanical affair. The serially dying gods of our religious and philosophical traditions are best understood in the same modes as Bergson's comedy, often marked by an automatism of everyday mechanisms of life which outlive their useful functioning. (shrink)

Collectively these essays inform educators and researchers at different grade levels about the teaching and learning of proof at each level and, thus, help ...

The apostle Paul has reemerged as a force on the contemporary philosophical scene. Some of the most powerful recent affirmations of nonrepresentational, materialist, and event-oriented philosophies repeat topics and tropes of the ancient apostle. Paul is appropriated both for and against Kantian cosmopolitanism, psychoanalytic models of subjectivity and power, Schmittian political theologies, Derridean messianism, political universalism, and an ongoing refashioning of identity politics within postsecular contexts. This book provides the most comprehensive constellation to date of current thinking about Paul and (...) his cultural or philosophical "afterlives" in ancient, modern, and contemporary contexts. (shrink)

Newly translated and critically situated, this edition of A Radical Philosophy of Saint Paul takes a fresh approach to the philosopher's classic work, reacquainting readers with the remarkable ways in which an ancient apostle can reset our understanding of the political. Breton begins with Paul's biography and the texts of his conversion, which challenge common conceptions of identity. He broaches the question of allegory and divine predestination, introduces the idea of subjectivity as an effect of power, and he confronts Paul's (...) critique of law, which leads to an exploration of the logics and limits of agency and power. Breton develops these and other insights in relation to Paul's subversive reflections on the crucified messiah, which challenge meaning and reason and upend our current world order. (shrink)

The rash of high-profile accounting frauds involving internal corporate accountants calls into question the individual accountant’s perceptions of the ethical climate within their organization and the limits to which these professionals will tolerate unethical behavior and/or accept it as the norm. This study uses social cognitive theory to examine the antecedents of individual corporate accountant’s perceived personal fit with their organization’s ethical climate and empirically tests how these factors impact organizational attitudes. A survey was completed by 203 corporate accountants to (...) assess their perception of relevant variables. The results of the structural equation model indicate three significant antecedents relating to ethical climate fit: higher internal levels of locus of control; greater numbers of prior job changes; and higher perceptions of an increasingly better fit with the firm’s ethical climate. Our results also indicate that higher levels of perceived fit to the ethical climate of a firm are associated with higher levels of perceived job satisfaction and organizational commitment. We also theorize that perceptions of an organization’s ethical climate may be reflections of client narcissism and serve a potential indicator of fraud risk. This is an important topic of study, since current auditing standards call for auditors to examine organizational attitudes toward fraud, but offer minimal guidance in doing so. (shrink)

Research on interventions that aim to cultivate character strengths, or virtues, has been conducted primarily among highly resourced, predominantly White communities, and the interventions have been developed to reflect the values of those communities. The purpose of this study was to use a participatory action research approach to develop a virtue intervention focused on addressing the community-identified problem of violence in a predominantly Black community, and to test its effectiveness in a pilot study. Participants were 37 youth (M age = (...) 12.1 years old; 97% Black) who attended summer programs in two sites (on intervention, one control condition). Participants in the intervention group had greater increases in effective nonviolent behavior than participants in the comparison group according to teacher report. Overall, the results of this pilot test suggest it is possible to build a feasible, attractive, evidence-based intervention to promote character strengths using participatory action research. (shrink)

Appearing in English for the first time, Schelling’s 1842 lectures develop the idea that many philosophical concepts are born of religious-mythological notions.

A complete translation of Aristotle's classic that is both faithful and readable, along with an introduction that provides the modern reader with a means of understanding this seminal work and its impact on our culture. In this volume, Joe Sachs (translator of Aristotle's _Physics, Metaphysics,_ and the _Nicomachean Ethics _)also supplements his excellent translation with well-chosen notes and glossary of important terms. Focus Philosophical Library translations are close to and are non-interpretative of the original text, with the notes and a (...) glossary intending to provide the reader with some sense of the terms and the concepts as they were understood by Aristotle’s immediate audience. (shrink)

There are two alternative approaches to accommodating an agent-centered restriction against, say, φ-ing. One approach is to prohibit agents from ever φ-ing. For instance, there could be an absolute prohibition against breaking a promise. The other approach is to require agents both to adopt an end that can be achieved only by their not φ-ing and to give this end priority over that of minimizing overall instances of φ-ing. For instance, each agent could be required both to adopt the end (...) of minimizing their own promise-breakings and to give this end priority over that of minimizing promise-breakings overall. The former is what I’ll call the side-constraint approach, and the latter is what I’ll call the teleological approach. In this chapter, I argue that, when it comes to accommodating restrictions, we should (1) favor the teleological approach over the side-constraint approach, (2) favor an act-consequentialist approach over a non-consequentialist, teleological approach (such as Rossian pluralism), and (3) favor a Kantsequentialist approach over other act-consequentialist approaches, where Kantsequentialism is a version of act-consequentialism that holds that persons are ends-in-themselves who are inherently and unconditionally valuable and are, thus, owed our respect. (shrink)

We must, therefore, make a study of mechanism; but some introduction is advisable, for cybernetics treats the subject from a new, and therefore unusual, ...

The words quoted above distill the common secular conception of death. If we decline the traditional religious reassurances of an afterlife, or their fuzzy new age equivalents, and instead take the hard-boiled and thoroughly modern materialist view of death, then we likely end up with Gonzalez-Cruzzi. Rejecting visions of reunions with loved ones or of crossing over into the light, we anticipate the opposite: darkness, silence, an engulfing emptiness. But we would be wrong.