Fordham University Press

The central argument of this book is that the traditional notion of Natural Law has almost disappeared from the ethical and moral discourse of our time. For Thomas Aquinas, the author whose conception of Natural Law forms the foundation for the book, the ontological and ethical orders are not autonomous but inseparable-in effect, his ethical system is an "ontological morality." For Thomas, the ethical (practical wisdom) must be understood as an extension of the metaphysical (speculative wisdom).

Most modern philosophers, by contrast, consider these two orders to be entirely separate.
Here Luis Cortest shows how traditional Natural Law (the form Thomas Aquinas developed from classical and medieval sources) was transformed by thinkers like John Locke and Kant into a doctrine compatible with early modern and modern notions of nature and morality. In early Modern Europe one of the first of the great debates about moral philosophy took place in sixteenth-century Spain, as a philosophical dispute concerning the humanity of the Native Americans. This foreshadowed debates in later centuries, which the author reevaluates in light of these earlier sources. The book also includes a close examination of the recent work of scholars like John Finnis and Brian Tierney, who argue that traditional Natural Law theorists were defenders of a doctrine of positive rights. Rather than attempt to make the traditional doctrine compatible with modern rights theory, however, the author argues that traditional Natural Law must be understood as a form of pre-Enlightenment ontological morality that has survived the onslaught of modernity.

First published in 1957, The Legacy of German Jewry is a comprehensive rethinking of the German-Jewish experience. Goldschmidt challenges the elegiac view of Gershom Scholem, showing us the German-Jewish legacy in literature, philosophy, and critical thought in a new light.

Part One re-examines the breakthrough to modernity, tracing the moves of thinkers like Moses Mendelssohn, building on the legacies of religious figures like the Baal Shem Tov and radical philosophers such as Spinoza. This vision of modernity, Goldschmidt shows, rested upon a belief that “remnants” of the radical past could provide ideas and energy for reconceiving the modern world. Goldschmidt’s philosophy of the remnant animates Part Two as well, where his account of the political history of the Jews in modernity and the riches of Jewish culture as recast in German-Jewish thought provide insights into Leo Baeck, Hermann Cohen, and Franz Rosenzweig, among others. Part Three analyzes the post-Auschwitz complex, and uses the Book of Job to break through that trauma.

Ahead of his time and biblical in his perspective, Goldschmidt describes the innovative ways that German-Jewish writers and thinkers anticipated what we now call multiculturalism and its concern with the Other. Rather than destined to destruction, the German-Jewish experience is reconceived here as a past whose unfulfilled project remains urgent and contemporary—a dream yet to be realized in practice, and hence a task that still awaits its completion.

“I see this book as the story my father never got to tell,” John Toffey writes. And what a remarkable story it is that Lt. Col. Jack Toffey never got to tell.

In this moving account of a young man’s journey to know a father who went to war in 1942 and never came back, John Toffey weaves memory, history, and his father’s vivid letters home into a fascinating tale of a family, a war, and the threads that connect them.

John Toffey was nine when his father’s National Guard outfit was mobilized. For two years Toffey, his mother, and his sister moved from post to post before his dad shipped out—to North Africa, fighting the Vichy French in Morocco, then the Germans in Tunisia, where he was wounded. In July 1943 he went back to war, leading an infantry battalion in the invasions of Sicily and southern Italy. In January 1944 he landed his battalion at Anzio and was wounded again. After a long, bitter stalemate, Toffey’s regiment led Mark Clark’s push on Rome. On June 3, 1944, Jack Toffey was killed in the hill town of Palestrina, one day before the Allies marched into
Rome. In a brutal campaign, Jack Toffey had commanded a combat battalion longer than any other officer in the Mediterranean theater.

Only in 1996, when his father’s letters were discovered, did John Toffey begin to piece together what happened to his father. And he tells this contested story of Allied success and failure with drama, steely reserve, and balance, adding an invaluable perspective to the portrait of Jack Toffey created by Rick Atkinson in his bestselling Day of Battle.

This book is also a lovingly crafted portrait of home front Ohio, and how a young boy, his sister, and his mother waited out their war, scanning newspapers and magazines for news of Dad and devouring letters full of easy humor and expressions of love for and pride in his family and dreams of a good life after the war.

A comprehensive reading of Mark Twain's major work

At the end of his long life, Samuel Clemens felt driven to write a truthful account of what he regarded as the flaws in his character and the errors of his ways. His attempt to tell the unvarnished truth about himself is preserved in nearly 250 autobiographical dictations. In order to encourage complete veracity, he decided from the outset that these would be published only posthumously.

Nevertheless, Clemens’s autobiography is singularly unrevealing. Forrest G. Robinson argues that, by contrast, it is in his fiction that Clemens most fully—if often inadvertently—reveals himself. He was, he confessed, like a cat who labors in vain to bury the waste that he has left behind. Robinson argues that he wrote out of an enduring need to come to terms with his remembered experiences—not to memorialize the past, but to transform it.

By all accounts—including his own—Clemens’s special curse was guilt. He was unable to forgive himself for the deaths of those closest to him—from his siblings’ death in childhood to the deaths of his own children. Nor could he reconcile himself to his role in the Civil War, his part in the duel that prompted his departure from Virginia City in 1864, and—worst of all—his sense of moral complicity in the crimes of slavery.

Tracing the theme of bad faith in all of Clemens’s major writing, but with special attention to the late work, Robinson sheds new light on a tormented moral life. His book challenges conventional assumptions about the humorist’s personality and creativity, directing attention to what William Dean Howells describes as “the depths of a nature whose tragical seriousness broke in the laughter which the unwise took for the whole of him.”

Subversions of Verisimilitude focuses on the ways in which a number of French literary narratives written in the realist tradition show a dynamic balance between the desire of the author/narrator to present a verisimilar world and the need for aesthetic balance. While the works studied-narratives by Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Colette, Proust, and Sartre-range over the course of a century, from 1835 to 1938, they share a perspective on the relations between and the need to engage questions of realist verisimilitude and narrative interest and aesthetics.

The book discusses some of the subversive paths taken in realism and, specifically, in canonical narratives solidly anchored in the tradition. The goal here is to analyze these realist texts, regardless of the narrative mode chosen, in order to see the deviations and detours from realism, mostly for aesthetic ends.The book contributes to our understanding of nineteenth- and twentieth-century narrative and furthers our knowledge of the ways in which critical theory illuminates such canonical works.

Three of the most influential Catholic theologians of the twentieth century—Bernard Lonergan, John Courtney Murray, and Karl Rahner—were all born in 1904, at the height of the Church’s most militant rhetoric against all things modern. In this culture of suspicion, Lonergan, Murray, and Rahner grew in faith to join the Society of Jesus and struggled with the burden of antimodernist policies in their formation. By the time of their mature work in the 1950s and 1960s, they had helped to redefine the critical dialogue between modern thought and contemporary Catholic theology.

After the détente of the Second Vatican Council, they brought Catholic tradition into closer relationship to modern philosophy, history, and politics. Written by leading scholars, friends, and family members, these original essays celebrate the legacies of Lonergan, Murray, and Rahner after a century of theological development. Offering a broad range of perspectives on their lives and works, the essays blend personal and anecdotal accounts with incisive critical appraisals. Together, they offer an accessible introduction to the distinctive character of three great thinkers and how their work shapes the way Catholics think and talk about God, Church, and State.

What does Martin Buber mean, in I and Thou, by the claim that the one thing that matters is full acceptance of presence? An attempt to answer this question led the author on a journey of exploration through Buber's early writings, to reach a clarification of Buber's predialogical concept of God. She examines Buber's first major philosophical work: Daniel: Dialogues in Realization, drawing attention to inaccuracies in the available English translation. Buber's desire for presence, she finds, began with an overwhelming experience of absence. His search is for a presence that will not let him down, that will not be a "mis-encounter"--that is, for a presence that will ensure that there is meaning.

This book will be an invaluable text for the student looking for a readable guide to Buber's early writings. It will help readers to understand the rich depth and many layers of thought in Buber's masterpiece, I and Thou, and to appreciate the radical change that took place in Buber's concept of God prior to its publication in 1923.

Costica Bradatan proposes a new way of looking at the influential 18th-century Anglo-Irish empiricist and idealist philosopher. He approaches Berkeley's thought from the standpoint of its roots, rather than from how it has come to be viewed since his time. This book will interest scholars working in a wide variety of fields, from philosophy and the history of ideas to comparative literature, utopian studies, religious and medieval studies, and critical theory.

This other Berkeley read and wrote alchemical books, daydreamed of "Happy Islands" and the "Earthly Paradise" and depicted them carefully, designed utopian projects and spent years trying to put them into practice. Bradatan discovers a thinker deeply rooted in Platonic, mystical, and sometimes esoteric traditions, who saw salvation as philosophy and practiced philosophy as a way of life. This book uncovers a richer Berkeley, a more profound and spectacular one, and, it is hoped, a more truthful one.

The Vatican Mythographers offers the first complete English translation of three important sources of knowledge about the survival of classical mythology from the Carolingian era to the High Middle Ages and beyond. The Latin texts were discovered in manuscripts in the Vatican library and published together in the nineteenth century. The three so-called Vatican Mythographers compiled, analyzed, interpreted, and transmitted a vast collection of myths for use by students, poets, and artists. In terms consonant with Christian purposes, they elucidated the fabulous narratives and underlying themes in the works of Ovid, Virgil, Statius, and other poets of antiquity. In so doing, the Vatican Mythographers provided handbooks that included descriptions of ancient rites and customs, curious etymologies, and, above all, moral allegories. Thus we learn that Bacchus is a naked youth who rides a tiger because drunkenness is never mature, denudes us of possessions, and begets ferocity; or that Ulysses, husband of Penelope, passed by the monstrous Scylla unharmed because a wise man bound to chastity overcomes lust. The extensive collection of myths illustrates how this material was used for moral lessons.

To date, the works of the Vatican Mythographers have remained inaccessible to scholars and students without a good working knowledge of Latin. The translation thus fulfills a scholarly void. It is prefaced by an introduction that discusses the purposes of the Vatican Mythographers, the influences on them, and their place in medieval and Renaissance mythography. Of course, it also entertains with a host of stories whose undying appeal captivates, charms, inspires, instructs, and sometimes horrifies us.

The book should have wide appeal for a whole range of university courses involving myth.

Fifty years after his death, the thought of the French scientist and Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955) continues to inspire new ways of understanding humanity’s future. Trained as a paleontologist and philosopher, Teilhard was an innovative synthesizer of science and religion, developing an idea of evolution as an unfolding of material and mental worlds into an integrated, holistic universe at what he called the Omega Point. His books, such as the bestselling The Phenomenon of Man, have influenced generations of ecologists, environmentalists, planners, and others concerned with the fate of the earth.

This book brings together original essays by leading experts who reflect on Teilhard’s legacy for today’s globalized world. They explore such topics as: the idea of God and the person; quantum reality and Teilhard’s vision; spiritual resources for the future; politics and economics; and a charter for co-evolution.

In the 1930s, Georges Bataille proclaimed a "ferociously religious" sensibility characterized by simultaneous ecstasy and horror. Ecce Monstrum investigates the content and implications of this religious sensibility by examining Bataille's insistent linking of monstrosity and the sacred.

Extending and sometimes challenging major interpretations of Bataille by thinkers like Denis Hollier and Rosalind Krauss the book reveals how his writings betray the monstrous marks of the affective and intellectual contradictions he seeks to produce in his readers. Charting a new approach to recent debates concerning Bataille's formulation of the informe ("formless"), the author demonstrates that the motif of monstrosity is keyed to Bataille's notion of sacrifice--an operation that ruptures the integrality of the individual form.

Bataille enacts a "monstrous" mode of reading and writing in his approaches to other thinkers and artists--a mode that is at once agonistic and intimate. Ecce Monstrum examines this monstrous mode of reading and writing through investigations of Bataille's "sacrificial" interpretations of Kojève's Hegel and Friedrich Nietzsche; his contentious relationship with Simone Weil and its implications for his mystical and writing practices; his fraught affiliation with surrealist André Breton and his attempt to displace surrealism with "hyperchristianity"; and his peculiar relations to artist Hans Bellmer, whose work evokes Bataille's "religious sensibility."

With its wide-ranging analyses, this book offers insights of interest to scholars of religion, philosophers, art historians, and students of French intellectual history and early modernism.

Nothing says more about a culture than the way it responds to deeply traumatic events. The Reign of Terror, America's Civil War, the Holocaust, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Kennedy assassination, September 11th-watershed moments such as these can be rich sounding boards for the cultural historian patient enough to tease out the traumatic event's complex cultural resonances.

This book is about one such moment in the history of modern France. The so-called Terrible Year began with the French army's crushing defeat at Sedan and the fall of the Second Empire in September of 1870, followed by the Prussian occupation of France and first siege of Paris in the fall and winter of that year. But no event of the period proved so deeply traumatic as the Paris Commune of 1871 and the bloody reprisals that attended its demise.

Commemorating Trauma engages the rich body of recent scholarly work on cultural trauma to examine a curious conundrum. Why do French literary, historical and philosophical texts written in the aftermath of the Paris Commune so often employ the trope of confusion (in both the phenomenal and cognitive senses of that term) to register and work through the historical traumas of the Terrible Year? And how might these representations of confusion both reflect and inflect the confusions inherent to an ongoing process of social upheaval evident in late nineteenth-century France-a process whose benchmarks include democratization and the blurring of social classes, a persistent and evolving revolutionism, radical reconfigurations of the city as lived environment, and the development of specifically capitalist logics of commerce? These are the two principal questions addressed in this important study of cultural memory.

Understanding Evil seeks to articulate the evil that happened in Bosnia within the context of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Its analysis centers on the question of whether it is possible to understand evil as action. Since the foundations of the social are found in human action, evil's assault on these foundations results in the demise of the social. While evil simulates the outer form of action, ultimately evil belies itself as action. Can someone act with an evil end? Socrates says no, no one willingly does evil. Although, with a mixture of reason and empiricism, the author tries hard to overcome the Socratic position—searching for evil's agency, purpose, means, conditions, and ethos—in the end, the search fails. The author concludes by accepting the Socratic position: action whose end is evil is unthinkable. This tack provides an alternative to recent theorizing about evil by philosophers such as Richard Bernstein and Jeffrey Alexander.

The book understands evil via a neologism—as sociocide, the murdering of society. In Bosnia, not only were families destroyed, but their homes as well. Not only were bridges, libraries, schools, mosques, and churches demolished, but towns and cities were obliterated. Bosnian Muslims were murdered behind the mindless rhetoric of "ethnic cleansing," and their history and collective memory were viciously attacked. In the first case, the social violence is called "domicide," in the second, "urbicide," and in the third, "genocide." In Bosnia, however, war took on a truly twisted orientation. Not only were social structures and institutions attacked, but society itself became the target. The book develops the significance of sociocide as the consequence of evil in order to understand the suffering and tragedy of people and communities in Bosnia.

The focus of this book is morals—how human beings should live their lives. For Dewan (and Thomas Aquinas) “morals” is “the journey of the rational creature toward God.”

While philosophical considerations are central here, Christian revelation and its truth constitute an enveloping context. These essays treat the history of philosophy as a development that proceeds by deepening appreciation of basic questions rather than the constant replacement of one worldview by another. Thus, the author finds forebears in Plato and Aristotle, in Augustine and Boethius, and especially in Aquinas.

Written over a period of more than thirty years, the essays collected here treat both perennial issues in philosophy and such current questions as suicide as a weapon of war, the death penalty, and lying. Above all, they present the wisdom, the sapiential vision, that makes morals possible.

"Every other is truly other, but no other is wholly other." This is the claim that Aspects of Alterity defends. Taking up the question of otherness that so fascinates contemporary continental philosophy, this book asks what it means for something or someone to be other than the self.

Levinas and those influenced by him point out that the philosophical tradition of the West has generally favored the self at the expense of the other. Such a self-centered perspective never encounters the other qua other, however. In response, postmodern thought insists on the absolute otherness of the other, epitomized by the deconstructive claim "every other is wholly other." But absolute otherness generates problems and aporias of its own. This has led some thinkers to reevaluate the notion of relative otherness in light of the postmodern critique, arguing for a chiastic account that does justice to both the alterity and the similitude of the other. These latter two positions—absolute otherness and a rehabilitated account of relative otherness—are the main contenders in the contemporary debate.

The philosophies of Emmanuel Levinas and Gabriel Marcel provide the point of embarkation for coming to understand the two positions on this question. Levinas and Marcel were contemporaries whose philosophies exhibit remarkably similar concern for the other but nevertheless remain fundamentally incompatible. Thus, these two thinkers provide a striking illustration of both the proximity of and the unbridgeable gap between two accounts of otherness.

Aspects of Alterity delves into this debate, first in order understand the issues at stake in these two positions and second to determine which description better accounts for the experience of encountering the other.


After a thorough assessment and critique of otherness in Levinas's and Marcel's work, including a discussion of the relationship of ethical alterity to theological assumptions, Aspects of Alterity traces the transmission and development of these two conceptions of otherness. Levinas's version of otherness can be seen in the work of Jacques Derrida and John D. Caputo, while Marcel's understanding of otherness influences the work of Paul Ricoeur and Richard Kearney.

Ultimately, Aspects of Alterity makes a case for a hermeneutic account of otherness. Otherness itself is not absolute, but is a chiasm of alterity and similitude. Properly articulated, such an account is capable of addressing the legitimate ethical and epistemological concerns that lead thinkers to construe otherness in absolute terms, but without the "absolute aporias" that accompany such a characterization.

Kurt Frank Korf’s story is one of the most unusual to come out of World War II. Although German-Americans were America’s largest ethnic group, and German-Americans—including thousands of native-born Germans—fought bravely in all theaters, there are few full first-person accounts by German- Americans of their experiences during the 1930s and 1940s.

Drawing on his correspondence and on oral histories and interviews with Korf, Patricia Kollander paints a fascinating portrait of a privileged young man forced to flee Nazi Germany in 1937 because the infamous Nuremburg Laws had relegated him to the status of “second-degree mixed breed” (Korf had one Jewish grandparent).

Settling in New York City, Korf became an FBI informant, watching pro-Nazi leaders like Fritz Kuhn and the German-American Bund as they moved among the city’s large German immigrant community. Soon after, he enlisted in the U.S. Army, serving in Germany as an intelligence officer during the Battle of the Bulge, and as a prisoner of war camp administrator. After the war, Korf stayed on as a U.S. government attorney in Berlin and Munich, working to hunt down war criminals, and lent his expertise in the effort to determine the authenticity of Joseph Goebbels’s diaries. Kurt Frank Korf died in 2000.

Kollander not only draws a detailed portrait of this unique figure; she also provides a rich context for exploring responses to Nazism in Germany, the German-American position before and during the war, the community’s later response to Nazism and its crimes, and the broader issues of ethnicity, religion, political ideology, and patriotism in 20th-century America.

Patricia Kollander is Associate Professor of History at Florida Atlantic University. She is the author of Frederick III: Germany’s Liberal Emperor. “I Must Be a Part of This War” is part of her ongoing research into the experiences of some fifteen thousand native-born Germans who served in the U.S. Army in World War II.

John O'Sullivan was Professor of History at Florida Atlantic University.

Intrigues: From Being to the Other examines the possibility of writing the other, explores whether an ethical writing that preserves the other as such is possible, and discusses what the implications are for an ethically inflected criticism. Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot, whose works constitute the most thorough contemporary exploration of the question of the other and of its relation to writing, are the main focus of this study. The book's horizon is ethics in the Levinasian sense: the question of the other, which, on the hither side of language understood as a system of signs and of representation, must be welcomed by language and preserved in its alterity. Martin Heidegger is an unavoidable reference, however. While it is true that for the German philosopher Being is an immanent production, his elucidation of a more essential understanding of Being entails a deconstruction of onto-theology, of the sign and the grammatical and logical determinations of language, all decisive starting points for both Levinas and Blanchot.

At stake for both Levinas and Blanchot, then, is how to mark a nondiscursive excess within discourse without erasing or reducing it. How should one read and write the other in the same without reducing the other to the same?

Critics in recent years have discussed an "ethical moment or turn" characterized by the other's irruption into the order of discourse. The other becomes a true crossroads of disciplines, since it affects several aspects of discourse: the constitution of the subject, the status of knowledge, the nature of representation, and what that representation represses (gender, power). Yet there has been a tendency to graft the other onto paradigms whose main purpose is to reassess questions of identity, fundamentally in terms of representation; the other thus loses some of its most crucial features.

Through close readings of texts by Heidegger, Levinas, and Blanchot the book examines how the question of the other engages the very limits of philosophy, rationality, and power.

This rare and important contribution to the field of Islamic studies, philosophy, and comparative religion achieves a twofold objective. First, it draws from a broad and authoritative well of sources, especially in the domain of Sufism, or Islamic mysticism. The scholarship is impeccable. Second, it is an in-depth meditation on the relationship between love and knowledge, multiplicity and unity, the example of the Prophet Muhammed viewed as Universal Man, spiritual union, heart and intellect, and other related themes--conveyed in fresh, contemporary language.

The book is as much a work of Sufism as it is a book about Sufism. Many of these themes have a universal appeal for students of mysticism; consequently, there are distinct resonances with other traditions, especially within certain schools of Christian mysticism dominated by the language of love.

In our day, when the divisions between many Muslims and many Christians have broadened into chasms of suspicion and fear, books such as this one are especially important for the help they can offer in bridging these rifts. The capacity of scholars to understand these two religions, which stem from the same Abrahamic source, is of the utmost significance, and the best approach to better understanding may be through the mystical traditions, which tend to reflect more tolerance and to recognize a potential for seeing unity in a multiplicity of perspectives. This work conveys the beauty at the heart of the Islamic tradition in a language devoid of technical terminology.

This book is a major new study of the doctrines of productivity and interest in Romanticism and classical political economy. The author argues that the widespread contemporary embrace of cultural historicism and the rejection of nineteenth-century conceptions of agency have hindered our study of aesthetics and politics. Focusing on the difficulty of coordinating paradigms of intellectual and material labor, Mieszkowski shows that the relationship between the imagination and practical reason is crucial to debates about language and ideology.

From the Romantics to Poe and Kafka, writers who explore Kant's claim that poetry "sets the imagination free" discover that the representational and performative powers of language cannot be explained as the products of a self-governing dynamic, whether formal or material. A discourse that neither reflects nor prescribes the values of its society, literature proves to be a uniquely autonomous praxis because it undermines our reliance on the concept of interest as the foundation of self-expression or self-determination. Far from compromising its political significance, this turns literature into the condition of possibility of freedom.

For Smith, Bentham, and Marx, the limits of self-rule as a model of agency prompt a similar rethinking of the relationship between language and politics. Their conception of a linguistic labor that informs material praxis is incompatible with the liberal ideal of individualism. In the final analysis, their work invites us to think about social conflicts not as clashes between competing interests, but as a struggle to distinguish human from linguistic imperatives.

The Mosque is an extended meditation on a dimension of Islam unfamiliar to most Western readers. The mosque, Rusmir Mahmut´cehaji´c argues, is not an analogue of the Christian church, not least because in Islam there is no priesthood and no institutionalized hierarchy. Rather, every Muslim is his or her own priest, and
most religious obligations are performed in the home. The function of the mosque is thus dispersed throughout society and, indeed, throughout the natural world as well. The Arabic word from which English mosque derives means literally “place of prostration”—the place one performs the daily ritual prayer of submission to God, so as to become a guest at the table God has sent down to manifest himself. That table is also the world’s mosque, the world as mosque.

Among the many tragic victims of the Bosnian genocide are its mosques; more than a thousand were destroyed. A part of the essential fabric of Bosnian life was changed. With this book, Rusmir Mahmut´cehaji´c seeks to rebuild the spirit and majesty of each mosque that was destroyed, the spiritual grace it lent the Bosnian landscape.

“Beautifully composed, elegantly written and constructed, this is a primary text of Islamic spirituality, by one of the most significant Muslim European voices of our age . . . . A book to be returned to again and again.”—Adam B. Seligman, Boston University

“This work by one of the leading intellectual figures of Bosnia is one of the finest written in the English language on the spiritual significance of the mosque. It speaks the language of universal spirituality and is able to open a door for Western readers to the relationship between the mosque, as understood outwardly, and the inner mosque, which is the heart. The book also reflects in most elegant language the reality of a land where mosques, churches, and synagogues have stood side by side over the centuries, each bearing witness in its own way to the Presence of the One.”—Seyyed Hossein Nasr, George Washington University

Eighteenth-century France witnessed the rise of matter itself—in forms ranging from atoms to anatomies—as a privileged object of study. Voluptuous Philosophy redefines what is at stake in the emergence of an enlightened secular materialism by showing how questions of figure—how should a body be represented? What should the effects of this representation be on readers?—are tellingly and consistently located at the very heart of 18th-century debates about the nature of material substance. French materialisms of the Enlightenment are crucially invested not only in the development of a sophisticated theoretical apparatus around the notion of matter but in the production of specific relationships between readers and the "matter" of the texts that they consume.

How, the book asks, did the period's fascination with a markedly immaterial and ephemeral event—the reading of works of fiction—come to coincide with what appears to be a gradual materialization of human subjects: men and women who increasingly manage to envision themselves transfigured, as the century wears on, into machines, animals, and even, in the work of the Marquis de Sade, tables and chairs? In what way did the spread of new philosophies of matter depend upon the ability of readers to perceive certain figures of speech as literally and immediately true—to imagine themselves as fully material bodies even as they found themselves most deeply compelled by disembodied literary forms? More broadly, in what sense does the act of reading literature alter and transfigure our perceptions of what is, and can be, real?

Voluptuous Philosophy articulates the gradual coming into being of literature as a distinct arena of textual production with the rise of an enlightened reader who remains abstracted from the bodily symptoms that any given piece of writing may induce in him. The very definition of "the literary" as an autonomous field, this book suggests, may, ironically, be dependent upon the simultaneous construction of a material world that remains fully immune to its effects.

Based on careful work with rare archival sources, this book fills a gap in the history of New York Catholicism by chronicling anti-Catholic feeling in pre-Revolutionary and early national periods.

Colonial New York, despite its reputation for pluralism, tolerance, and diversity, was also marked by severe restrictions on religious and political liberty for Catholics. The logic of the American Revolution swept away the religious barriers, but Anti-Federalists in the 1780s enacted legislation preventing Catholics from holding office and nearly succeeded in denying them the franchise. The latter effort was blocked by the Federalists, led by Alexander Hamilton, who saw such things as an impediment to a new, expansive nationalist politics.

By the early years of the nineteenth century, Catholics gained the right to hold office due to their own efforts in concert with an urban-based branch of the Republicans, which included radical exiles from Europe. With the contributions of Catholics to the War of 1812 and the subsequent collapse of the Federalist Party, by 1820 Catholics had become a key part of the triumphant Republican coalition, which within a decade would become the new Democratic Party of Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren.

Jason K. Duncan is Assistant Professor of History at Aquinas College.

This innovative book charts what has been a largely unexplored literary landscape, looking at the work of such diverse writers as the gens de couleur libre poets of antebellum New Orleans, Kate Chopin, Mark Twain, Carson McCullers, Margaret Mitchell, Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon, Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, and John Kennedy Toole. Haddox shows that Catholicism and its Church have always been a presence, albeit in different ways, in the southern cultural tradition.

For some, Catholicism has been associated with miscegenation and with the political aspirations of African-Americans; for others, it has served as the model for the feudal and patriarchal society that some southern whites sought to establish; for still others, it has presented a gorgeous aesthetic spectacle associated with decadence and homoeroticism; and for still others, it has marked a quotidian, do-it-yourself "lifestyle" attractive for its lack of concern with southern anxieties about honor.

By focusing on the shifting and contradictory ways Catholicism has signified within southern literature and culture, Fears and Fascinations contributes to a more nuanced understanding of American and southern literary and cultural history.

The philosopher John J. McDermott comes out of the long American tradition that takes the aim of philosophical inquiry to be interpretation of the open meanings of experience, so that we might all live fuller and richer lives. Here, the authors of these nine essays explore his highly original interpretations of philosophy's various questions about our shared existence. How are we to understand the nature of American culture and to carry forward its important contributions? What is the personal importance of embodiment, of living in the realization of death? How does our physical and personal environment nourish bodies and spirits? What does the deliberate pursuit of a morality offer us? How can we carry forward the fundamental tasks of education to enable those who follow us to use our shared past to address their civic and spiritual problems? What are the possibilities for community?

Together, these essays offer a clear, multi-layered understanding of the compelling vision that McDermott has presented over the years. In an Afterword, McDermott responds to the authors' queries and concerns, offering a restatement of his understanding of the American philosopher's task. These essays indicate, and McDermott's response confirms, that for him philosophy is not a purely cerebral activity. Philosophy is, rather, an intellectual means of exploring the fullness of human experience, and it functions best when it operates in the context of the broad sweep of the humanities. Similarly, for McDermott the self is no given substantial entity. On the contrary, it is relational, rooted geographically and socially in its place and its fellows, and damaged when these life-giving processes fail. Further, McDermott does not accept any ultimate canopy of meaning. The human journey is a personal project within which provisional meanings must be created to sustain our advance.

The title Translating Investments, a manifold pun, refers to metaphor and clothing, authority and interest, and trading and finance. Translation, Latin translatio, is historically a name for metaphor, and investment, etymologically a reference to clothing, participates both in the complex symbolism of early modern dress and in the cloth trade of the period. In this original and wide-ranging book, Judith Anderson studies the functioning of metaphor as a constructive force within language, religious doctrine and politics, literature, rhetoric, and economics during the reigns of the Tudors and early Stuarts. Invoking a provocative metaphorical concept from Andy Clark's version of cognitive science, she construes metaphor itself as a form of scaffolding fundamental to human culture. A more traditional and controversial conception of such scaffolding is known as sublation-Hegel's Aufhebung, or "raising," as the philosophers Jacques Derrida and Paul Ricoeur have understood this term. Metaphor is the agent of raising, or sublation, and sublation is inseparable from the productive life of metaphor, as distinct in its death in code or cliché. At the same time, metaphor embodies the sense both of partial loss and of continuity, or preservation, also conveyed by the term Aufhebung.

Anderson's study is simultaneously critical and historical. History and the theory are shown to be mutually enlightening, as are a wide variety of early modern texts and their specific cultural contexts. From beginning to end, this study touches the present, engaging questions about language, rhetoric, and reading within post-structuralism and neo-cognitivism. It highlights connections between intellectual problems active in our own culture and those evident in the earlier texts, controversies, and crises Anderson analyzes. In this way, the study is bifocal, like metaphor itself.

While Anderson's overarching concern is with metaphor as a creative exchange, a source of code-breaking conceptual power, each of her chapters focuses on a different but related issue and cultural sector. Foci include the basic conditions of linguistic meaning in the early modern period, instantiated by Shakespeare's plays and related to modern theories of metaphor; the role of metaphor in the words of eucharistic institution under Archbishop Cranmer; the play of metaphor and metonymy in the writings of Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin and in John Donne's Devotions; the manipulation of these two tropes in the politics of the controversy over ecclesiastical vestments and in its treatment by John Foxe; the abuse of figuration in the house of Edmund Spenser's Busirane, where catachresis, an extreme form of metaphor, is the trope du jour; the conception of metaphor in the Roman rhetorics and their legacy in the sixteenth century; and the concept of exchange in the economic writing of Gerrard de Malynes, merchant and metaphorist in the reigns of Elizabeth and James. What emerges at the end of this book is a heightened critical sense of the dynamic of metaphor in cultural history.

This book is the first biography in 42 years of the priest and educator whom
historians have called “the most important anticommunist in the country.”
Edmund A. Walsh, as dean of Georgetown College and founder in 1919 of its
School of Foreign Service, is one of the most influential Catholic figures of the
20th century. Soon after the birth of the Bolshevik state, he directed the Papal
Relief Mission in the Soviet Union, starting a lifelong immersion in Soviet and
Communist affairs. He also established a Jesuit college in Baghdad, and served
as a consultant to the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal.
A pioneer in the new science of geopolitics, Walsh became one of Truman’s most
trusted advisers on Soviet strategy. He wrote four books, dozens of articles, and
gave thousands of speeches on the moral and political threat of Soviet Communism
in America. Although he died in 1956, Walsh left an indelible imprint on the
ideology and practical politics of Cold War Washington, moving easily outside the
traditional boundaries of American Catholic life and becoming, in the words of one
historian, “practically an institution by himself.” Few priests, indeed few Catholics,
played so large a role in shaping American foreign policy in the 20th century.

This book provides philosophical grounds for an emerging area of scholarship: the study of religion and dance.

In the first part, LaMothe investigates why scholars in religious studies have tended to overlook dance, or rhythmic bodily movement, in favor of textual expressions of religious life. In close readings of Descartes, Kant, Schleiermacher, Hegel, and Kierkegaard, LaMothe traces this attitude to formative moments of the field in which philosophers relied upon the practice of writing to mediate between the study of “religion,” on the one hand, and “theology,” on the other.

In the second part, LaMothe revives the work of theologian, phenomenologist, and historian of religion Gerardus van der Leeuw for help in interpreting how dancing can serve as a medium of religious experience and expression. In so doing, LaMothe opens new perspectives on the role of bodily being in religious life, and on the place of theology in the study of religion.

This book studies the use of biblical quotations in Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous works, as well as Kierkegaard’s hermeneutical methods in general. Kierkegaard’s mode of writing in these works—indeed, the very method of indirect communication—consists in a certain appropriation of the Bible. Kierkegaard thus becomes God’s “plagiarist,” repeating the Bible by reinscribing it into his own texts, where it becomes a part of his philosophical discourse and relates to most of his conceptual constructions.

The Bible might also be called a gift, but a gift that does not belong to Kierkegaard, one he merely passes along to his reader. The invisible omnipresence of God’s Word in the pseudonymous works, as opposed to the signed ones, forces us to revisit the entire distinction between the religious and the aesthetic.

Winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, Don Whitehead delivered battlefield dispatches that were classics of frontline reporting. One of the legendary reporters of World War II, Whitehead covered almost every important Allied invasion and campaign in Europe-from landings in Sicily, Salerno, and Anzio on the Italian front to Normandy, where he went ashore with the First Army Division.

Writing for the Associated Press, he covered the brutal beachhead fighting and followed the Allied sweep to victory across France, Belgium, and Germany. Daring, valiant, and fearless, "Beachhead Don" was one of sixteen correspondents awarded the Medal of Freedom by Harry S Truman.

Collected here for the first time, his dispatches are classics of war journalism. This book, long overdue, will help a new generation discover Whitehead's vivid, powerful, and unforgettable stories of men at war. John Romeiser provides a richly detailed introduction and background to the man, his work, and his world.

This book, at the intersections of political sociology,
political philosophy, and theology, reads the legacy
of Bosnia as both a paradigm and an antiparadigm for
the human condition. The adjective Bosnian sums up an
acceptance of the diversity of human attitudes toward
the world and toward God. Yet the Bosnian tradition of
accepting the inevitability of, and thus the right to, differing
Christologies among people who speak the same
language and share the same history has been reduced to
the antiparadigms of confessionalism, ethnicism, and
ultimately nationalism, which seeks either to expel or to
subordinate to the majority everything that is other.

Plato's chora as developed in the Timaeus is a creative matrix in which things arise and stand out in response
to the lure of the Good. Chora is paired with the Good, its polar opposite; both are "beyond being" and the metaphors hitherto thought to disclose the transcendent. They underlie Plato's distinction of a procreative gap between being and becoming. The chiasmus between the Good and chora makes possible their mutual participation in one another. This gap makes possible both phenomenological and cosmological interpretations of Plato.

Metaphor is restricted to beings as they appear in this gap through the crossing of metaphor's terms, terms that dwell with, rather than subulate, one another. Hermeneutically, through its "is" we can see something being engendered or determined by that crossing.

Bigger's larger goal is to align the primacy of the Good in Plato and Christian Neoplatonism with the creator God
of Genesis and the God of love in the New Testament.

Bill O'Shaughnessy's back. Here's the third big book of interviews, editorials, essays, commentaries, and observations, and just plain good talk from an authentic American voice.

From the "bully pulpit" of his radio stations, O'Shaughnessy's in the middle of it all-politics, local and national; culture, high and low and in-between; the media; and, above all, the rich flow of ideas and opinion that from what the Wall Street Journal calls "the quintessential community station in America."

For this compelling and fascinating collection, O'Shaughnessy gathers interviews with everyone from Tony Bennett on the singer's art to Ed Koch on the art of politics. Essays and talks from luminaries ranging from Henry Kissinger to Larry King, Rudolph Giuliani to Tim Russert and Dan Rather. There are moving pieces on the impact of September 11, vivid sketches of movers and shakers, and provocative, deeply felt calls for protecting freedoms of the First Amendment. And Mario Cuomo's moving thoughts on how to restore justice and wisdom to America's political culture.

From color sketches of local pols to intimate conversations with great writers and artists, Again! Again! Is an endlessly fascinating portrait our time and place-marked as always by Bill O'Shaughnessy's intelligence, insight, and eloquence.

"Bill O'Shaughnessy's editorials make his New York TV counterparts look like so much mish-mash." -The New York Times

Red Tail Captured, Red Tail Free is a rare gift detailing the experience of Lt. Col. Alexander Jefferson, who was one of 32 Tuskegee Airmen from the 332nd Fighter Group to be shot down defending a country that considered them to be second-class citizens. In this vividly detailed, deeply personal story, Jefferson writes as a genuine American hero about what it meant to be an African American pilot in enemy hands, fighting to protect the promise of freedom. The book features the sketches, drawings, and other illustrations Jefferson created during his nine months as a POW, and Lewis Carlson’s authoritative background to the man, his unit, and the fight Alexander Jefferson fought so well.

This revised edition covers the story of Jefferson’s continuing outreach and education work, as he brings the story of the Tuskegee Airmen to communities and schools across the country, and the presentation of the Congressional Gold Medal to the Airmen in 2007.

Red Tail Captured, Red Tail Free is perhaps the only account of the African American experience in a German prison camp.

Frank and Albert Dietrich were identical twins whose lives took very different directions during World War II. Drafted into the Army Air Corps and trained as a radio operator, Frank was shipped to the Philippines in 1945, where as a sergeant in the Fifth Air Force he prepared for the invasion of Japan. Albert, a pacifist, struggled mightily to become a conscientious objector and spent two years building dams, saving farmland, and helping the poor at Civilian Service Camps in South Dakota, Iowa, and Florida.

Raised in a close, religious, Pittsburgh family, Frank and Albert were inseparable as boys, sharing a strong social conscience. Divided by war, they kept in touch by writing hundreds of letters to each other. The correspondence concerns everything from the daily drudgery of service—loneliness, lousy food—to heartfelt debates about war, peace, and patriotism.

This absorbing selection of letters offers fresh perspectives on the American experience during World War II. The first published correspondence between GI and CO brothers, the letters are an uncommonly articulate chronicle of military service and life on the home front, including GI marriage and parenthood. Back and forth, Frank and Albert also argued about the uses of armed force and pacifist nonviolence in the face of fascism and Nazism.

Frank Dietrich’s letters from Manila are vivid descriptions of a liberated city under an uneasy occupation. Albert provides an insider’s view of the pacifist experience, especially the protracted efforts pacifists often had to wage to obtain CO status. Together, the letters bring to life different ways Americans chose to serve their country during one of its most dangerous and demanding times.

St. Francis of Assisi (c. 1181-1226) and Jacopone da Todi (c.1236-1306) were but two exemplars of a rich school of mystical poets writing in Umbria in the Franciscan religious tradition. Their powerful creations form a significant corpus of medieval Italian vernacular poetry only now being fully explored.

Drawing on a wide range of literary, historical, linguistic, and anthropological approaches, Vettori crafts an innovative portrait of the artists as legends and as poets. He investigates the essential features of emerging Franciscan tradition, in motifs of the body, metaphors of matrimony, and musical harmony. Vettori also explores the relationship of Francis's poetic mission to Genesis, the relationship between erotic love and ecstatic union in both poets' work, and the poetics of the sermon.

Granville Hicks was one of America's most influential literary and social critics. Along with Malcolm Cowley, F. O. Matthiessen, Max Eastman, Alfred Kazin, and others, he shaped the cultural landscape of 20th-century America.

In 1946 Hicks published Small Town, a portrait of life in the rural crossroads of Grafton, N.Y., where he had moved after being fired from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute for his left-wing political views. In this book, he combines a kind of hand-crafted ethnographic research with personal reflections on the qualities of small town life that were being threatened by spreading cities and suburbs. He eloquently tried to define the essential qualities of small town community life and to link them to the best features of American culture. The book sparked numerous articles and debates in a baby-boom America nervously on the move.

Long out of print, this classic of cultural criticism speaks powerfully to a new generation seeking to reconnect with a sense of place in American life, both rural and urban. An unaffected, deeply felt portrait of one such place by one of the best American critics, it should find a new home as a vivid reminder of what we have lost-and what we might still be able to protect.

In this fresh, provocative account of the American philosophical tradition, Roger Ward explores the work of key thinkers through an innovative and counterintuitive lens: religious conversion. From Jonathan Edwards to Cornel West, Ward threads the history of American thought into an extended, multivalent encounter with the religious experience. Looking at Dewey, James, Peirce, Rorty, Corrington, and other thinkers, Ward demonstrates that religious themes have deeply influenced the development of American philosophy.

This innovative reading of the American philosophical tradition will be welcomed not only by philosophers, but also by historians and other students of America's religious, intellectual, and cultural legacy.

Conversion in American Philosophy: Exploring the Practice of Transformation is available from the publisher on an open-access basis.

Freedom, Union, and Power analyzes the beliefs of the Republican Party during the Civil War, how those beliefs changed, and what those changes foreshadowed for the future. The party's pre-war ideology of "free soil, free labor, free men" changed with the Republican ascent to power in the White House. With Lincoln's election, Republicans faced something new-responsibility for the government. With responsibility came the need to wage a war for the survival of that government, the country, and the party. And with victory in the war came responsibility responsibility for saving the Union-by ending slavery-and for pursuing policies that fit into their belief in a strong, free Union.

Michael Green shows how Republicans had to wield federal power to stop a rebellion against freedom and union. Crucial to their use of federal power was their hope of keeping that power-the intersection of policy and politics.

This innovative book investigates "being Jewish” not as a sectarian religiosity but as a way of being-in-the-world particularly suited to understanding Heidegger's early phenomenology. At its core is an intimate engagement with “sacred texts,” which grounds “being Jewish” in a way of life constituted as a way of reading—a way of reading transmitted to succeeding generations as a passionate teaching.

Allen Scult argues that Heidegger was similarly involved in a passionate attempt to introduce his students to philosophical practice through a personal engagement with the words of Aristotle. Scult traces the hermeneutical affinity— even intimacy—between Judaism as a way of life, grounded in an intense interpretive relationship to the Torah; and Heidegger's view of philosophical practice, as a similarly intense interpretive relationship to the founding texts of Western philosophy.

In tracing the dynamics of this relationship in Heideggerian and Jewish hermeneutics, Scult not only finds mutually enlightening points of contact between the two, but also uncovers new ways of understanding how Heidegger’s fundamental ontology is grounded in the lived experience of religion.
Allen Scult is National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of Philosophy and Rhetoric at Drake University. He is co-author of Rhetoric and Biblical Interpretation.

Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger ponders what it means to read Heidegger on his own terms, that is, to read him from the place where one is, in Heidegger’s language, in and from the facticity of one’s own Being... To be Jewish, according to Scult, is to be entexted with Torah. Scult argues that this notion of binding one’s being with a textual tradition underlies Heidegger’s theory of Dasein. He uses Heidegger’s lectures on Aristotle’s Rhetoric to illustrate how Heidegger ‘reads Aristotle’ and, in doing so. . . teach[es] the Jew how to be-Jewish-in-the-world through an engagement with a textual tradition (Torah). .Shaul Magid, The Jewish Theological Seminary of America

“a compelling account of how being-Jewish enacts the sort of concrete, revealing relationship to a text and a world that makes meditation on being, as Heidegger - early and late - understands it, possible. Only someone with Allen Scult's trained ear for the subtle interplay of rhetoric and hermeneutics could make us see the remarkable parallels between the Rabbis' reading of the Torah and Heidegger's reading of Aristotle….he makes a trenchant case for ‘a reading of Heidegger not as prophet, but as Rabbinic sage’.”--Daniel O. Dahlstrom, Boston University

Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-1988) was one of the most prolific and influential theologians of the twentieth century. This book, the first English-language study of Balthasar, seeks to show the fruitfulness of his thought by drawing out its philosophical implications for the question of truth.

D. C. Schindler argues that a "dramatic" approach, shaping both the form and content of philosophy, enables a new conception of being, of human consciousness, and of their coming together to satisfy both traditional concerns about unity and postmodern calls for difference-while avoiding the pitfalls of a one-sided emphasis on either.

“It was then, sometime in February 1996, that Lois stopped trying to read and told me: ‘I do believe I have Alzheimer’s.’ She said it in the way she might say, ‘I think I’ll buy a new dress.’ She didn’t say how she came by her belief, nor did I ask. I just put my arms around her.”

And for the next five years, Ed Bliss’s arms were always around his beloved Lois. In this rare book of remembrance and love and loneliness, Ed Bliss chronicles Lois’s six-year journey into darkness. Spare, gentle, restrained, Bliss’s account of Lois’s struggle with Alzheimer’s is an unforgettable account of loss—whether of the ability to speak and write or even to eat—and helplessness in the face of a disease that knows no cure.

Ed Bliss captures not just the terrible course of the disease, but the small moments that marked each stage of their last years together, from the last time Lois legibly wrote her name or went shopping to an unexpected joy because her Red Sox had won a game. Ed and Lois, in love for 60 years, only deepened their affections as they faced each new challenge.

Lois Bliss died in 2001, at home, surrounded by family. Part memoir, part diary, this book conveys what all caregivers face in dealing with Alzheimer’s. But it is more than a tale of pain. “In the end, grief turned to gratitude,” Ed Bliss writes. “What was cruel was no match for love.”

In this portrait of Dubuque, Iowa, Russell Johnson combines personal narratives with social, political, and economic analysis to shed new light on what the War meant for one city and for the rapidly growing north.

Johnson examines the experiences of Dubuque’s soldiers and their families to answer crucial questions: What impact did the Civil War have on the economic and social life of Dubuque? How did military service affect the social mobility of veterans? And how did army service, as a form of industrial organization, help create a modern workforce?

Warriors into Workers makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the formation of American industrial society, and addresses key issues in labor history, military history, political culture, and gender.

In this innovative book, Kyle Sinisi explores a little-known chapter in the history of American politics—the struggle between states and the federal government over the costs of fighting the Civil War. At stake was the disposition of some 8 million.

Focusing on Kansas, Kentucky, and Missouri, Sinisi explores the process by which states were reimbursed by Washington in the most expensive intergovernmental contact of the 19th century. Recasting our understanding of governance, he shows that traditional sources of influence—courts and political parties—were less important in settling claims than adjutants general and private agents who fought for cash bonanzas. These power brokers helped shape the federal bureaucracy—and the process of state building.

Over the past two decades, the world has witnessed alarming environmental degradation—climate change, the loss of biodiversity, and the pollution of natural resources—together with a failure to implement environmental policies and an ever-widening gap between rich and poor. As this new volume of his writings reveals, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew has continually proclaimed the primacy of spiritual values in determining environmental ethics and action. For him, the predicament we face is not primarily ecological but in fact spiritual: The ultimate aim is to see all things in God, and God in all things.

On Earth as in Heaven demonstrates just why His All Holiness has been dubbed the “Green Patriarch” by former Vice President Al Gore (recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize for his environmental activism) and the media.
This third and final volume of the spiritual leader’s selected writings showcases his statements on environmental degradation, global warming, and climate change. It contains numerous speeches and interviews in various circumstances, including ecological symposia, academic seminars, and regional and international events, over the first twenty years of his ministry. This volume also encompasses a selection of pastoral letters and exhortations—ecclesiastical, ecumenical, and academic—by His All Holiness for occasions such as Easter and Christmas, honorary doctorates, and academic awards.

On Earth as in Heaven is a rich collection, essential for religious scholars, those looking for a deeper understanding of Orthodox Christianity, and anyone concerned with the environmental and social issues we face today.

On Earth as in Heaven is available from the Knowledge Unlatched on an open-access basis.

In this powerfully argued book, Knasas engages a debate at the heart of the revival of Thomistic thought in the twentieth century. Richly detailed and illuminating, his book calls on the tradition established by Gilson, Maritain, and Owen, to build a case for Existential Thomism as a valid metaphysics.

Being and Some Twentieth-Century Thomists is a comprehensive discussion of the major issues and controversies in neo-Thomism, including issues of mind, knowledge, the human subject, free will, nature, grace, and the act of being. Knasas also discusses the Transcendental Thomism of Maréchal, Rahner, Lonergan, and others as he builds a carefully articulated case for completing the Thomist revival.

On his first day in basic training in 1942, Lawrence Cane wrote his wife Grace from Fort Dix, New Jersey. "I'm in the army now?really!" he wrote, complaining, "I don't have enough time to write a decent letter."


Three years later, Capt. Lawrence Cane went home from World War II. He'd landed at Utah Beach on D-Day, helped liberate France and Belgium, and survived the Battle of the Bulge. He won a Silver Star for bravery. And he still managed to write 300 letters home to Grace. This book is a different kind of war story--both an powerful chronicle of life in battle and a unique portrait of courage fueled by a life-long passion for political justice.


Cane's fight for freedom began well before D-Day. In 1937, joined the Abraham Lincoln Battalion and got wounded fighting for democracy in Spain. In 1942, at age 30, he enlisted in the new war against fascism, and as an officer with the 238th Combat Engineer Battalion, went ashore in Normandy to clear mines, destroy fortifications, and open roads from Normandy to the Siegfried Line. Of the 400 Spanish Civil War veterans in World War II, Cane was the only one to go ashore on D-Day.


After the war, Lawrence Cane fought for civil rights and peace until his death in 1976. Discovered in 1995 by Cane's son David, his letters are not only classic accounts of war and unforgettable expressions of love for family. They are the fiercely patriotic words of a left-wing, working-class New York Jew (and one-time Communist Party member) who knew exactly why we fought---to create a better world by destroying all forms of fascism, one battle at a time.


With a fascinating introduction by David Cane, detailed notes, and much additional material, these letters add a new dimension to the meaning of American patriotism and an invaluable chapter to the history of "the greatest generation."

Rabbi, writer, teacher, activist, and organizer, Marc H. Tanenbaum was for more than three generations at the center of the struggle for religious understanding and human rights. As a pioneer in ecumenical dialogue, Tanenbaum left an inedible mark on many communities of faith.

This rich collection of Tanenbaum’s most influential writings underscores his contributions to civil and human rights, international affairs and—above all—the development of Jewish-Christian understanding and mutual respect. Special features of this book include a biographical essay and introductions to the major issues and the essays.

Compelling and prophetic, Dorothy Day is one of the most enduring icons of American Catholicism. In the depths of the Great Depression and guided by the Works of Mercy, Day, a journalist at the time, published a newspaper, the Catholic Worker, and co-founded a movement dedicated to the poorest of the poor, while living with them and sharing their poverty.

In 1955, Vivian Cherry, a documentary photographer known for her disturbing and insightful work portraying social issues, was given unprecedented access to the Catholic Worker house of hospitality in New York City, its two farms, and to Day herself. While much has been written about Day, the portrait that emerges from Cherry’s intimate lens is unrivaled. From the image of the line of men waiting for soup outside St. Joseph’s on Chrystie Street to pictures of Day and others at work and in prayer, Cherry’s photographs offer a uniquely personal and poetic glimpse into the life of the movement and its founder.

In this beautiful new book, more than sixty photographs—many published here for the first time—are accompanied by excerpts of Day’s writings gleaned from her column “On Pilgrimage” and other articles published in the Catholic Worker between 1933 and 1980. The result is a powerful visual and textual memoir capturing the life and times of one of the most significant and influential North American Catholics of the twentieth century. The aptly paired images and words bring new life to Day’s political and personal passions and reflect with clarity and simplicity the essential work and philosophies of the Catholic Worker, which continue to thrive today. The Introduction and additional commentary by Day’s granddaughter Kate Hennessy
provides rich contextual information about the two women and what she sees as their collaboration in this book.

In 2000, twenty years after her death, Archbishop of New York John J. O’Connor of New York City opened the cause for Dorothy Day’s canonization, and the Vatican conferred on her the title of Servant of God. The Catholic Worker continues to flourish, with more than 200 affiliated houses in the United States and overseas. The miracle of this enduring appeal lies in Day’s unique paradigm of vision, conscience, and a life of sacrifice that is one not of martyrdom but of joy, richness, and generosity—vividly portrayed through these photographs and excerpts.

Centering on cross-fertilization between the writings of Shakespeare and Donne, the essays in this volume examine relationships that are broadly cultural, theoretical, and imaginative. They emphasize the intersection of physical dimensions of experience with transcendent ones, whether moral, intellectual, or religious. They juxtapose lyric and sermons interactively with narrative and plays.

The essays are grouped under four headings: “Time, Love, Sex, and Death” (Matthias Bauer and Angelika Zirker, Catherine Gimelli Martin, Jennifer Pacenza), “Moral, Public, and Spatial Imaginaries” (Mary Blackstone and Jeanne Shami, Douglas Trevor), “Names, Puns, and More” (Marshall Grossman, David Lee Miller, Julian Lamb), and “Realms of Privacy and Imagination” (Anita Gilman Sherman, Judith H. Anderson).

Genealogies of Fiction is a study of gender, dynastic politics, and intertextuality in medieval and renaissance chivalric epic, focused on Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso. Relying on the direct study of manuscripts and incunabula, this project challenges the fixed distinction between medieval and early modern texts and
reclaims medieval popular epic as a key source for the Furioso.

Tracing the formation of the character of the warrior woman, from the Amazon to Bradamante, the book analyzes the process of gender construction in early modern Italy. By reading the tension between the representations of women as fighters, lovers, and mothers, this study shows how the warrior woman is a symbolic center for the construction of legitimacy in the complex web of fears and expectations of the
Northern Italian Renaissance court.

In his nearly 50-year career teaching philosophy and theology at Fordham and other distinguished universities, Avery Cardinal Dulles wrote and traveled extensively, writing 25 books and more than 800 articles, book reviews, forewords, introductions, and letters to the editor, translated into at least 14 languages and distributed worldwide. This work serves as a companion to the previous volume of McGinley Lectures, published as Church and Society (Fordham, 2008), and also provides an independent research guide for scholars, theologians, and anyone interested in American Catholicism in the decades immediately before and following the Second Vatican Council.

From his poems and reflections composed in prep school, where he first crossed paths with John Fitzgerald Kennedy (with whom he would graduate from Harvard in 1940), to a private meeting in his last days arranged at Pope Benedict XVI’s personal request, the book explores a theological topography that includes truly monumental figures and events of the modern era. As the product of perhaps the most influential American Catholic theologian in history, Dulles’s writings continue to inspire and shape the way theology has been studied and practiced in academic institutions throughout the United States and the world.

Having worked closely with Cardinal Dulles, the editors have compiled an exhaustive bibliography of his works and have included a series of essays that shed light on the twilight of his life, one that intersects with ecclesiastical, theological, philosophical, and political leaders of every stripe and worldview. Contributions include Dulles’s farewell lecture as McGinley Professor of Religion and Society with a stirring response by Robert Imbelli; a reflection on the cardinal’s last days by longtime research assistant Anne-Marie Kirmse, O.P.; and the moving homily given at his funeral by Edward Cardinal Egan. The book also chronicles Cardinal Dulles’s relationship with Fordham University, where he began his academic career as a Jesuit regent, teaching philosophy (1951–53), and where, for the last twenty years of his life, he held an endowed chair named in honor of a former president of Fordham, Laurence J. McGinley, S.J. This text will serve as a liminal passageway into the splendid mansion of Dulles’s thought for theologians, scholars, believers, and all thinking men and women of goodwill.

An exceptionally timely book by a leading European exponent of Muslim intellectual tradition, On the Other: A Muslim View is a concise and accessible exploration of the foundations of Islamic thought on human nature, our place in the cosmos, and our proper relationship to the divine, based on peace, knowledge, love, beauty, humility, and respect for and acceptance of others and difference.

Applying sound linguistic and historical scholarship and a profound knowledge of the Qur'anic sources, the author analyzes the key Arabic terms to show that Islam is a religion of peace, rather than of irrational submission to some higher instance.

Having demonstrated how poor cultural translation of core terms has contributed to a distorted picture of Islam in the West and among some Muslims, the author provides systematic explication of the most important concepts and beliefs of the Muslim tradition, as well as interpretation of the symbolism underlying its most important practices as one of the paths through which God calls us to Himself. In doing so, he tackles directly the claim that the Holy Qur'an enjoins hatred, violence, bigotry, and racism, particularly against the Jews. By clear exposition and contextualization of some of the most controversial and most frequently cited verses, he demonstrates how they have been misunderstood and misapplied, misrepresenting a message of profound respect for the multiple paths to God and the multitude of his prophets and for the variety and radical difference that is constitutive of humanity. The author shows that in reality these misunderstood verses represent a plea for the recognition of and respect for difference, one that is timelier now more than ever.

On the Other: A Muslim View provides an excellent introduction to the Muslim intellectual tradition for those who wish to penetrate beyond the stereotypes put forward by ideologists on both sides of the East-West divide, an introduction that reveals the rational, tolerant, and fundamentally peaceful faith of the vast majority of practicing Muslims.