Whose Middle Ages? is an interdisciplinary collection of short, accessible essays intended for the nonspecialist reader and ideal for teaching at an undergraduate level. Each of twenty-two essays takes up an area where digging for meaning in the medieval past has brought something distorted back into the present: in our popular entertainment; in ......
Winner, The Frantz Fanon Award for an Outstanding Book in Caribbean Thought We are in the fray of another signature moment in the long history of the United States as a project of anti Black and racial-colonial violence. Long before November 2016, white nationalism, white terrorism, and white fascist statecraft proliferated. Thinking across a ......
Christianity, Animism, and the Re-Enchantment of the World
2019 NAUTILUS GOLD WINNER In a time of rapid climate change and species extinction, what role have the world's religions played in ameliorating-or causing-the crisis we now face? Religion in general, and Christianity in particular, appears to bear a disproportionate burden for creating humankind's exploitative attitudes toward nature through ......
Recent neuroscience, in replacing the old model of the brain as a single centralized source of control, has emphasized "plasticity," the quality by which our brains develop and change throughout the course of our lives. Our brains exist as historical products, developing in interaction with themselves and with their surroundings. Hence there is a ......
Life on Earth is facing a mass extinction event of our own making. Human activity is changing the biology and the meaning of extinction. What Is Extinction? examines several key moments that have come to define the terms of extinction over the past two centuries, exploring instances of animal and human finitude and the cultural forms used to ......
Analyzing the Child in Nineteenth-Century Literature
Toy Stories: Analyzing the Child in Nineteenth-Century Literature explores the stakes of recurrent depictions of children's violent, damaging, and tenuously restorative play with objects within a long nineteenth century of fictional and educational writing. As Vanessa Smith shows us, these scenes of aggression and anxiety cannot be squared with ......
The Singularity of Being presents a Lacanian vision of what makes each of us an inimitable and irreplaceable creature. It argues that, unlike the "subject" (who comes into existence as a result of symbolic prohibition) or the "person" (who is aligned with the narcissistic conceits of the imaginary), the singular self emerges in response to a ......
Originally written for an exhibition Jean-Luc Nancy curated at the Museum of Fine Arts in Lyon in 2007, this book addresses the medium of drawing in light of the question of form-of form in its formation, as a formative force, as a birth to form. In this sense, drawing opens less toward its achievement, intention, and accomplishment than toward a ......
The Cloud of Unknowing was the work of an unknown 14th-century English writer with a powerful message of God's unconditional love in the face of despair. Johnston's theological treatment of this and other works by the same writer makes a conscious comparison with Oriental ways of contemplation.
