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Lifemaking offers a fresh frame for analyzing contemporary African politics and imagining its future. Rooted in the indigenous political philosophy of lifemaking of the Kalabari-Ijo people of the Niger Delta, this work is a counterpoint to the necropolitics that dominates African political practice. For practitioners and analysts for whom Africans and their polities are caught in the TINA (There Is No Alternative) syndrome, this book offers inspiration for an alternative to the current necropolitics. Because the book's thesis is an unreserved celebration of lifemaking, it identifies collective human flourishing as essential to politics.
At the end of his landmark 1994 book, The Soul of the American University, historian George Marsden asserted that religious faith does indeed have a place in today’s academia. Marsden’s contention sparked a heated debate on the role of religious faith and intellectual scholarship in academic journals and in the mainstream media. The contributors to Confessing History: Explorations in Christian Faith and the Historian’s Vocation expand the discussion about religion’s role in education and culture and examine what the relationship between faith and learning means for the academy today. The contributors to Confessing History ask how the vocation of historian affects those who are also f...
Russia is not only vast, it is also culturally diverse, the core of an empire that spanned Eurasia. In addition to the majority Russian Orthodox and various other Christian groups, the Russian Federation includes large communities of Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, and members of other religious groups, some with ancient historical roots. All are in a state of ferment, and securing formal state recognition for specific communities is often daunting. This collection provides entry into the diversity of Russia's religious communities. Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer's introduction to the volume illuminates major political, social, and cultural-anthropological trends. The book is organized by religious tr...
Despite postmodernism's skepticism about narrative, the dialogue with contemporary fiction, drama, music and film demonstrates that the Christian story can engender and sustain hope.
In Living with War, Robert Teigrob examines how war is experienced and remembered on both sides of the 49th parallel.
This book disturbs the 'normal' and depoliticized meaning of virtue through a genealogical reading of the debates, conceptual struggles, and ambiguities that were cleansed by virtue ethicists to produce today's conception of excellence. This approach provides the narrative raw material to craft a new meaning of excellence as a creative actualization of the potentials for human prosperity. The fundamental question asked and addressed about excellence is how communities can use excellence as the organizing principle for political and economic development. The author explores how large-scale modern societies can be better administered in environments characterized by contingency and possibiliti...
Metaphor and identity. The discursive personality -- Stuck in the middle with you -- A double edged sword -- Anxiety and discourse. Theology and duality -- Mediated deliverance -- Faith. Wheel within a wheel -- Faith as core and structure -- Silence fraught with meaning.
California matters, both as a place and as an idea. What famed historian Kevin Starr has called "the California Dream" is a vital part of American self-understanding. Just as America was meant to be a place of renewal, even redemption, for Europe, so too California was intended as a place of renewal for America. Therefore, California--place and idea--provides a fertile ground for scholars to think deeply about what it means to articulate "the promise of American life." This book follows in the train of George Marsden's classic The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship--believing that people of faith have a contribution to make to scholarship--and of Jay Green's more recent book, Christian Historiography: Five Rival Views--believing that scholars of faith should engage in moral inquiry. In this book, eight authors inquire into the moral questions that emerge from studying California.
The meditations in this collection originated from a series of questions about suffering, death, and eternal life put to the author by a friend who was dying from cancer. These questions included: How do we wait upon God and cancer at the same time? What do we know of the God to whom we go when we experience only the silence of God in our suffering? How do we long for heaven when what we want most is to continue on with our families and loved ones in this life? Is heaven removed from this world? Does the joy associated with it depend on ignorance of the suffering of those we leave behind? And so on. The meditations themselves are not intended primarily as answers to these questions so much a...
The cross is central to understanding Christian theology. But is it possible that our postmodern setting requires a new model of understanding the cross? Hans Boersma's Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross proposes an understanding of the atonement that is sensitive both to the Christian tradition and to the postmodern critiques of that tradition. His fresh approach draws on the rich resources of the Christian tradition in its portrayal of God's hospitality in Jesus Christ.