Jonathan Ebel has long been interested in how religion helps individuals and communities render meaningful the traumatic experiences of violence and war. In this new work, he examines cases from the Great War to the present day and argues that our notions of what it means to be an American soldier are not just strongly religious, but strongly Christian. Drawing on a vast array of sources, he further reveals the effects of soldier veneration on the men and women so (...) often cast as heroes. Imagined as the embodiments of American ideals, described as redeemers of the nation, adored as the ones willing to suffer and die that we, the nation, may live—soldiers have often lived in subtle but significant tension with civil religious expectations of them. With chapters on prominent soldiers past and present, Ebel recovers and re-narrates the stories of the common American men and women that live and die at both the center and edges of public consciousness. (shrink)

Mary Livermore'sMy Story of the Waris a valuable piece of travel writing written from the point of view of a nurse who documented her unexpected personal and professional journey to administer the Sanitary Commission of the United States Union Army and provide nursing care during the American Civil War. Although Livermore's pre‐war background had not been solely limited to the domestic sphere, her wartime experience involved a public negotiation between the traditional domestic realm assigned to women and new nursing (...) professional functions that emerged during the war. In a context in which the general access of women to public writing was rather limited and in which nursing was not a formally regulated professional activity, Livermore's triumphal narrative reflects the increasing connection between progressively professional nursing functions that emerged in the context of war and a new women's rights leadership forged during her autobiographical journey. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:War and the American Difference: Theological Reflections on Violence and National Identity by Stanley HauerwasStephen M. VantasselWar and the American Difference: Theological Reflections on Violence and National Identity STANLEY HAUERWAS Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2011. 188 pp. $19.99Stanley Hauerwas continues his prodigious publishing schedule with a book exploring the complex idea of war and the formation of American identity. In his introduction, Hauerwas makes (...) three claims: (1) war has been abolished in Christ; (2) Christians, and likely others, do not recognize how war has taken on religious trappings and become a false liturgy; and (3) the church in its localized placement should embody—and not simply proclaim—an alternative to war. Hauerwas seems to assume the first point since he avoids discussing how war has been abolished in Christ and instead focuses on the second and third points.The book is divided into three sections. Part 1, “America and War,” surveys how Christian terms such as “sacrifice” and “redemption” were interwoven into the nation’s understanding of war. War, Hauerwas argues, has been elevated to an essential component of American identity. He notes that some have argued that war is necessary for democracy to be sustained and flourish since it unites Americans and defends our wealth. Hauerwas decries how Christians, and Protestants in particular, have allowed non-Christian ideas (i.e., notions of America’s use of war) to enter the church. In chapter 3, Hauerwas turns arguments in favor of just war theory on their head by stating that it is not as realistic as claimed. [End Page 243]Part 2, “The Liturgy of War,” engages the moral justification for war. Hauerwas disputes the notion that it is easy to morally separate the violence of war from other forms of violence (44). Although openly admitting his inability to provide an adequate definition of war, Hauerwas continues to believe that war should be abolished. He decries the idea that war-making is virtuous and a proper source for giving society its story and meaning.Part 3, “The Ecclesial Difference,” attempts to outline how the local church can embody principles of nonviolence and thereby show the world another way of living. The local church is critical to Hauerwas’s view because he questions the value of universal notions of justice. Justice, he argues, is identified and understood in the concrete display of a people (114). It is in the church’s diversity that it can model for the world how unity can be maintained without the use of violence.Hauerwas’s insights into the insidious ways war can be baptized in Christian thought and practice should cause all Christians to pause and consider how their allegiance to Christ might have been blurred by an improper allegiance to the state. His use of contemporary scholarship is thought provoking and raises serious questions regarding notions of justice, the Church, and how we understand and frame the use of violence. He rightly exhorts Christians not to make peace with the status quo because we have a down payment on the next age in our possession now. But I think Hauerwas’s suggestion that war is abolished is either an expression of an overrealized eschatology or moral supersessionism. Likewise, I would suggest that America’s use of the language of “sacrifice” and “higher purpose” in discussions about war is not just an attempt to harness the power of religious language but an attempt to moderate the glorification and triumphalism of war. One would only need to compare how America discusses war with that of the ancient Assyria or Egypt to understand the difference. In the end, I suspect readers will find Hauerwas’s arguments to be more evocative than demonstrative. [End Page 244]Stephen M. VantasselKing’s Evangelical Divinity SchoolCopyright © 2014 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Benson: Certain logical principles govern explanations of human behavior: alleged causes must actually occur before their effects; men must be aware of events that allegedly affect them; explanations must jibe with generalizations about behavior and have intrinsic plausibility. Historians often neglect these principles. The best example is analysis of public opinion. Comparison of Thucydides with the historiography of the American Civil War shows both must assess public feeling on specific issues at a given time and place; but historians lack (...) the tools to do this, and have recourse to dubious assumptions . Sometimes even the principle of chronological priority is violated. Consistent application of the four logical principles above would at least narrow the range of potentially verifiable explanations and consequent disagreement.Strout: Specification of a "fundamental cause" of the Civil War or other events is best construed as a retrospective observation that the cited 16cause" figures centrally in some reconstructed story. Historians explain through stories, narrations, which aim at comprehending the dramatic "logic" of a sequence of events rather than at scientific explanation. At worst general questions of causality are an irrelevant source of interminable disagreement, at best a stimulus to research, potentially resulting in a more coherent story and increased understanding. Causal accounts seem indispensable largely because explanations often involve purposes and reasons in causal disguise. (shrink)

The article analyzes the problems of in Charles W. Chesnutt’s stories ‘The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color-Line‘. The context of literary traditions at 19–20th centuries has been taken into account. Afro-American character is examined regarding the author’s new approach to race discourse in post-war American literature.

In terms of its impact on Britain, historians have long treated the American Revolution as the poor cousin of the French Revolution. Following E P Thompson's Marxist emphasis on the 1790s as the start of The making of the English working class (1963), scholars have devoted enormous amounts of time and energy to studying British popular politics and intellectual developments in the last decade of the eighteenth century. The American Revolution has traditionally attracted less attention outside American (...) national historiography.

In British history, the American war has been studied mostly as a problem of high politics. British historians have written many fine studies of the complex politics of the 1760s through to the war of 1775-83. While American historians have searched long and hard for long term social and economic causes of their revolution, British historians have tended to view the war as primarily a failure of politics. Ian Christie argued that 'the Revolution was a human tragedy, for which certain men were responsible, more particularly because, in Great Britain, the politicians who had the common sense and vision were out of power (owing to their own weakness and limitations) and those who were in power lacked the vision'. John Cannon has argued that Britain was little affected by the loss of America. Economic ties reconnected after 1783 and Britons moved on with their lives at the centre of an empire that was still strong in the West Indies and Canada, and expanding in the eastern hemisphere.

There have been some impressive studies of the impact of the American Revolution on British popular politics. H T Dickinson has written a number of influential studies of popular politics in the eighteenth century and edited an important volume of essays on _Britain and the American Revolution_ (1988). James E Bradley has analysed a wealth of empirical detail on Dissenting religion and political agitation during the American crisis. Eliga H Gould's _The persistence of empire: British political culture in the age of the American Revolution_ (2000) has provided an insightful study of the strength of loyalism. While of high quality, however, the quantity of such studies has long been dwarfed by the 1790s industry.

In recent years, however, scholars have begun to emphasise the importance of the period before the French Revolution. The impact of war on the development of state and society in the middle decades of the eighteenth century is now attracting attention. In _The British Isles and the War of American Independence_ (2000) Stephen Conway has detailed the significant impact the war had on state and society in Britain. In British history, according to Sarah Knott, 'where once the French Revolution, and its ricochets, was the fin-de-siècle story of transformation, now the years of the American war are the location of all manner of historical change.'. (shrink)

This volume of The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke continues the story of Edmund Burke, the Rockingham party in British politics, and the American crisis. By 1774 Burke was already recognized as a master of parliamentary debate and an accomplished writer. By 1780, however, his reputation was to have risen substantially. Probably the most important single reason was his Speech on Conciliation with America, which was presented to the House of Commons in March 1775, published, and circulated to (...) a wide audience on both sides of the Atlantic. In that speech, Burke used the full force of his intellect and eloquence to set out the Rockinghams' first comprehensive plan for achieving lasting peace in the Empire. The public commendation he received helped him to gain recognition for offerings such as his second conciliation proposal in November 1775, and his Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol in 1777. It also gave him some of the confidence he needed to announce the Whig party's historic conversion to a moderate reform programme in his celebrated speeches on economical reform in 1779 and 1780. Numerous writings and speeches in this volume are transcriptions of previously unpublished manuscripts from the collections at Sheffield and Northampton. These allow the reader new insights into the workings of Burke's mind not just in relation to the major political issues, but also to a multitude of engaging subjects such as education, capital punishment, religious dissent, and the return of the Rockingham Whigs to government power. (shrink)

This collection of essays represents a sample of the work carried out on the various urgent issues arising from the contemporary "war in terror" by researchers in the Department of Politics and International Relations, Swansea University UK and/or who attended the 2005 conference on politics and ethics at the University of Southern Mississippi (Gulf Coast). Certain specific topics are obviously prompted by this general theme; others dealt with in this book are perhaps not as obviously connected to it - though (...) they are no less important for that. This book is therefore intended to cover some ground in both types of topic and it is to be hoped that its contents will stimulate further reflection and writing on the deep controversies that recent events in world politics have stoked. However misguided much of the debate has been, many have contended that the present era is witnessing a "clash of civilisations", in which fundamentally different value-systems confront each other with their mutually opposed and antagonistic views of the world. This position often undergirds a moral relativism, which denies that there are any universal values: all we have, according to this outlook, are the different values of different cultures seeking (insofar as they "clash") to impose themselves on others. In the first essay, James Beard counters this argument with a case for what he calls a "thin universalism", a relatively sparse but powerful set of fundamental values which can credibly be demonstrated to have universal application.Many who supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq now oppose it, not on the grounds that they were wrong at the outset but that hindsight and subsequent events have given them new reasons to revise their judgements. This has led some to think that arguments about whether a war is just, and justified, can very often only be satisfactorily made "down the line", thus excusing initial support for a conflict which thereafter goes badly wrong. In her article, Christine Stender reminds us of many of the considerations that were available in 2003 itself which readily led to just-war arguments against launching the invasion at the time. It may be easy for the passage of time to cause us to forget those factors. But, given that we can only become more adept at making just-war judgements by reflecting on past experience, it is crucial not to let them disappear in the morass of subsequent experience. Arguably, the Abu Ghraib scandal did more than any other single event to undermine what moral credibility the American occupation of Iraq ever had. It certainly raised acute questions about the conception of "virtue" that the role of combatant in war ought to necessitate and, in his essay, J. Joseph Miller subjects this issue to close philosophical scrutiny, with particular focus on the ethics of torture. Traditional just war theory has been composed of two elements: jus ad bellum, which sets out moral criteria which may sanction the resort to war, and jus in bello, which provides moral rules for its actual conduct. Recent events, and in particular the tragically chaotic situation of post-invasion Iraq, have helped to make the case for a third element: jus post bellum, which deals with the rights and responsibilities of just combatants with respect to the pursuit of a just peace once conflict has ended. This remains an under-researched area and, in their article, Mark Evans and Christine Stender introduce a wide-ranging set of considerations towards the construction of an adequate account of jus post bellum. A concept that has surged to the fore in recent times has been that of a "failed state", which has been invoked as part of arguments for "humanitarian intervention." (Afghanistan is perhaps the most obvious and pertinent example.) It is, however, a highly contentious concept and many think it has nothing other than ideological, polemical value. Whilst admitting that it is prone to such (mis)use, Mark Evans argues, in his essay, that it can be given a determinate and useful normative content, even if it does not necessarily sanction the kind of foreign policies which certain Western leaders have thought it does. Most liberal democracies have responded to the "terror threat" by introducing emergency legislation, or by otherwise suspending in some way what they would "ordinarily" have regarded as inviolable basic liberties and legal safeguards. Nazeer Patel argues that this dangerously undercuts the moral authority that these states claim for themselves and urges that we rethink how liberal democracy should appropriately respond to terrorism; it may take courage not to "overreact" against it, but he plausibly suggests a more measured and morally preferable attitude for it to take. Finally, in her essay, Claire Delisle focuses on one of the more bitter conflicts within a liberal democracy of recent times which has, it seems, been resolved in favour of peaceful accommodation: that between the Nationalist and Unionist communities in the north of Ireland/Ulster. The full story of how this peace became possible has yet to be fully told, and she adds a vital element to the tale, of how incarcerated combatants developed attitudes, strategies and a culture which built the foundations for a process that eventually brought "The Troubles" to what, it is to be hoped, is a permanent end. With the exception of the editor's contributions, the research which is published here is the product of the intellectual labours of scholars who are in the early stages of their careers. This volume is, therefore, a compendium of work in progress and the authors hope that this publication will help to further their reflections; certainly, the issues with which they engage are a long way indeed from being exhausted in terms of the scholarly attention they demand. Obviously, their appearance together in the same volume should not be taken to imply that any of the contributors endorse anything of what any of the others argue. (shrink)

Death is the destiny we all share, and this will not change. Yet the way we die, which had remained the same for many generations, has changed drastically in a relatively short time for those in developed countries with access to healthcare. For generations, if people were lucky enough to reach old age, not having died in infancy or childhood, in childbirth, in war, or by accident, they would take to bed, surrounded by loved ones who cared for them, and (...) fade into death. Most likely, they would have seen their parents and grandparents die the same way, and so this manner of dying would be familiar: it was part of the natural cycle of life. Now less than 25 per cent of Americans die at home, having reached much older ages than people would have dreamed of in past generations, often after surviving many illnesses and even diseases that would have been terminal for their grandparents. We are fortunate to live (and die) today, supported by myriad scientific, medical, and technological advancements, however we also face new problems as a result of the new way in which we die. We can no longer anticipate a peaceful waning at home with family. We know our lives will likely end in hospitals likely after we have endured grueling treatments to prolong life. We have to decide what decisions we want our loved ones, or care-givers, to make when we cannot choose for ourselves. We have to think about whether in any circumstances we would seek physician-assisted death. We know we face other questions as well, but we may not even know where to start. In the face of these decisions, we can feel daunted and afraid. The best remedy is information and planning. In this book, Gregory Eastwood - a physician who has cared for dying patients, served as an ethics consultant, and taught end of life issues to medical and other health profession students - draws from his substantial experience with patients and families to provide the information that will help us think clearly about the choices and issues we will face at the end of our own lives, and when faced with the deaths of our loved ones. With sensitivity and profound insight, Eastwood guides us through all the important questions about death and dying in straightforward, clear language, enhanced by real-life stories. Throughout, he shows us how we can take ownership of the way we want to die, when we must die, and feel more in control as death approaches. (shrink)

At the height of the Cold War, in the 1950s, the process of parallel invention of masers and lasers took place on the opposing sides of the Iron Curtain. While the American part of the story has been investigated by historians in much penetrating detail, comparable Soviet developments were described more superficially. This study aims at, to some extent, repairing this discrepancy by analyzing the Soviet path towards the maser from a comparative angle. It identifies, on the one hand, (...) significant differences between the two projects regarding their heuristics, the relationship between theory and experiment, grounding in different academic cultures, and the resulting conceptualization of the maser principle. At the same time, the case also illustrates more fundamental transformations in the practices of postwar research that can be characterized as a convergence between the Soviet and the American science of the period. (shrink)

Intellectual historian Andrew Jewett sets an enormous task for himself: to trace the history and context of science and values relations over the course of some hundred-odd years of U.S. history. He does this to further an argument that science was once explicitly connected to the study of human values, and that the story that explains how science became value neutral is a contingent one. It could have happened differently, he argues, and it should have. Furthermore, because that history is (...) contingent, we are free to still change our academic habits and to allow the social sciences to be sciences alongside the natural and physical sciences. The reason this would be worth doing, according to Jewett, is.. (shrink)

This fascinating study reveals the extensive influence of Cold War politics on academia, philosophical inquiry, and the course of intellectual history. From the rise of popular novels that championed the heroism of the individual to the proliferation of abstract art as a counter to socialist realism, the years of the Cold War had a profound impact on American intellectual life. As John McCumber shows in this fascinating account, philosophy, too, was hit hard by the Red Scare. Detailing the immense (...) political pressures that reshaped philosophy departments in midcentury America, he shows how the path of American philosophy was altered to follow a political agenda. McCumber begins with the story of Max Otto, whose appointment to the UCLA Philosophy Department in 1947 was met with widespread protest charging him as an atheist. Drawing on Otto’s case, McCumber details the conservative efforts that, by 1960, had all but banished existentialism and pragmatism—not to mention Marxism—from philosophy departments across the country. These paradigms were replaced with what McCumber calls Cold War philosophy, ideas that valorized scientific objectivity and free markets and which downplayed the anti-theistic implications of modern thought. As McCumber shows, the effects of this trend can still be seen at American universities today. (shrink)

The historical forces of war and migration impacted heavily on the disciplinary locations, practitioners, and structures of sexology and psychoanalysis that had developed in the first decades of the 20th century. By the late 1940s, the US was fast becoming the world centre of each of these prominent fields within the modern human sciences. During these years, the work of Alfred C. Kinsey and his team became synonymous with a distinctly North American brand of empirical sex research. This article (...) offers the most nuanced account to date of the shifting relationship between these two fields in the late 1940s to mid 1950s. It argues that this was more collaborative and mutually influential than previous historians have assumed, even as, following the publication of the first ‘Kinsey report’, tensions grew between the Indiana team and the conservative brand of psychoanalysis that by this stage dominated 1950s North American psychiatry. A keen sense of professional competitiveness accelerated the growing split between these two fields, as Kinsey’s team developed a distinctly modern, technologized brand of statistically oriented sexology that contrasted with the older patient case history, and assumed a very different approach to conservative analysts on ideas of homosexuality and ‘normal’ sexual behaviour. Yet this story of divergence is also tempered through consideration of other aspects of ‘situated knowledge’ such as religion and gender identity, even as accounts of cross-disciplinary competitiveness are expanded by contrasting Kinsey’s positions on psychoanalysis with those of contemporaries such as Harry Benjamin. (shrink)

The historiography on the concept of race in the post-war sciences has focused predominantly on the UNESCO campaign against scientific racism and on the Anglo-American research community. By way of contrast, this article highlights the history of the concept of race from a thus far unexplored angle: from Swiss research centres and their global interconnections with racial researchers around the world. The article investigates how the acceptance, resonance, and prestige of racial research changed during the post-war years. It analyses (...) what resources could be mobilised that enabled researchers to carry out and continue scientific studies in the field of racial research or even to expand them and link them to new contexts. From this perspective, the article looks at the dynamics, openness, and contingency of the European post-war period, which was less stable, anti-racist, and spiritually renewed than retrospective success stories often suggest. The pronounced internationality of Swiss racial science and its close entanglement with the booming field of human genetics in the early 1950s point to the ambiguities of the period’s political and scientific development. I argue that the impact of post-war anti-racism on science was more limited than is frequently assumed: it did not drain the market for racial knowledge on a continent that clung to imperialism and was still shaped by racist violence. Only from the mid 1950s onwards did a series of unforeseen events and contingent shifts curtail the importance of the race concept in various sectors of the human sciences. (shrink)

"I'll furnish the war": the making of a media myth -- Fright beyond measure? the myth of the war of the worlds -- Murrow vs. McCarthy: timing makes the myth -- The Bay of Pigs/New York Times suppression myth -- Debunking the "Cronkite moment" -- The nuanced myth: bra burning at Atlantic City -- It's all about the media: Watergate's heroic-journalist myth -- The "fantasy panic": the news media and the crack-baby myth -- "She was fighting to the death": mythmaking (...) in Iraq -- Hurricane Katrina and the myth of superlative reporting -- Conclusion. (shrink)

The technological transformation of the conduct of war, exemplified by the American employment of drones in Afghanistan and in Iraq, calls for a critical reflection about the fantasies that underpin, and are in turn animated by, the robotic revolution of the military. At play here is a fantasy of a “costless war" or a “sterile war", that is such act of military state violence against the other that is inconsequential for the self. In other words, the seductive appeal of (...) the “costless war’ fantasy rests on the desire to develop a self that is invulnerable in the face of violence. Importantly, it is a desire explicitly projected towards a particular American future (of an imagined warfare, or of a super-power status), but also one that is connected to a lacking critical reflection about the intersubjective aspects of violence in the debates about America’s post-9/11 military involvements. This article reflects critically about the fantasy of the “costless war" and about its underpinning politics of invulnerability from a perhaps unlikely angle of literature. In a close reading of a short story by Benjamin Percy called “Refresh, Refresh" (2008), it explores its narrative insights into how acts of violence, which are undertaken far from home, inevitably return to affect and damage, perhaps beyond repair, the subject at home. Importantly, the return of violence in Percy’s story occurs within the domain of the everyday and the mundane, not of the exceptional, and testifies to the despair experienced by young males “abandoned" by their military fathers. My interpretation draws also on theoretical explorations of the connection between violence, intersubjectivity and vulnerability, based on the ideas of Emmanuel Levinas on the subject's ethical captivity by the suffering of the other, and on Judith Butler's recent “uses" of the Levinasian ethical project in her writing about the post-9/11 America. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Asian American Christian Ethics: Voices, Methods, Issues eds. by Grace Y. Kao and Ilsup AhnAlex MikulichAsian American Christian Ethics: Voices, Methods, Issues Edited by Grace Y. Kao and Ilsup Ahn WACO, TX: BAYLOR UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2015. 355 PP. $44.95This volume opens new horizons in Christian ethics. Editors Grace Y. Kao and Ilsup Ahn suggest two ways of conceptualizing Asian American Christian ethics. They describe the (...) first as "agency- or advocacy-centered" and the second as "bringing Western and Asian philosophical, theological, and cultural traditions together in critical dialogue and for selective retrieval for Asian American Christian ethics" (11). While the contributors to this book rightfully develop agency and advocacy-centered approaches within complex histories of colonialism and oppression, they also emulate Michael Walzer's "connected critic" who is not naïvely or uncritically "neutral" or dispassionate. The contributors appropriately use co-critical approaches that make possible "new and creative 'traditioning'" that does not uncritically reinscribe some "purer" Asian past or "undefiled by Western contact" (15).Nearly every chapter unpacks the deeply problematic term "Asian American" that was originally employed by activists who sought a new identity as "self-determining subjects rather than as 'oriental objects' in the United States" (4). But the term obfuscates multiple diversities within richly divergent national, geographical, colonial, and cultural histories and traditions.Hoon Choi explores the complexity of gender and sexual identities through a richly textured intersectional approach, examines how these identities become intertwined in double and triple binds, and reinterprets Christ as the fullness of humanity against Western hegemony and Eastern sexism. Choi's vibrant reinterpretation of Jesus Christ is complemented by a wise and compassionate pastoral approach.Sharon M. Tan calls for a reinterpretation both of Christian and Asian traditions of marriage, family, and parenting that will "entail a bicultural approach to life" and "creative new ways of retelling their stories and imagining their futures" (42). Tan underscores the difficulty of describing a Pan-Asian approach to marriage, family, and parenting by exploring the complexities of "Tiger Mothers," multigenerational households, the "special case of refugees," transnational families, and biculturality and adaptation.Hannah Ka deconstructs a wide range of Christian approaches to environmental ethics and reinterprets Sallie McFague's Body of God ecological theology through a distinctive Asian American approach. Drawing on beautiful and challenging stories from her own family as well as Confucian and Taoist [End Page 215] thought, Ka suggests a reinterpretation both of existential and functional indebtedness between human beings and all living things. She contends that "humans cannot survive even a day without … all other inorganic and organic existents on earth, while [other existents] can flourish without humans. The life of the human species is not merely interdependent with, but utterly indebted to, all the other existents on earth, rendering humans more vulnerable than others" (221).These are only a few examples of how this volume exemplifies clear, cogent, and constructive Christian ethics. Chapters by Ilsup Ahn ("Virtue Ethics"), Keun-Joo Christine Pae ("Peace and War"), Christina A. Astorga ("Wealth and Prosperity"), Ki Joo (KC) Choi ("Racial Identity and Solidarity"), SueJeanne Koh ("Health Care"), Hak Joon Lee ("Immigration"), Irene Oh ("Education and Labor"), and Jonathan Tran ("Cosmetic Surgery") all expand the horizons of contemporary ethics. I highly recommend this text for scholars to engage new horizons of Christian ethics and to use for a wide variety of upper level undergraduate and graduate courses in Christian ethics as well as constructive and pastoral theology.Alex MikulichLoyola University New OrleansCopyright © 2017 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

The Birth of American Law: An Italian Philosopher and the American Revolution tells the forgotten, untold story of the origins of U.S. law. Before the Revolutionary War, a 26-year-old Italian thinker, Cesare Beccaria, published On Crimes and Punishments, a runaway bestseller that shaped the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and early American laws. America's Founding Fathers, including early U.S. Presidents, avidly read Beccaria's book--a product of the Italian Enlightenment that argued against tyranny and the death penalty. (...) Beccaria's book shaped American views on everything from free speech to republicanism, to "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness," to gun ownership and the founders' understanding of "cruel and unusual punishments," the famous phrase in the U.S. Constitution's Eighth Amendment. In opposing torture and infamy, Beccaria inspired America's founders to jettison England's Bloody Code, heavily reliant on executions and corporal punishments, and to adopt the penitentiary system. The cast of characters in The Birth of American Law includes the usual suspects--George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and James Madison. But it also includes the now little-remembered Count Luigi Castiglioni, a botanist from Milan who--decades before Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America--toured all thirteen original American states before the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. Also figuring in this dramatic story of the American Revolution: Madison's Princeton classmate William Bradford, an early U.S. Attorney General and Beccaria devotee; John Dickinson, the "Penman of the Revolution" who wrote of Beccaria's "genius" and "masterly hand"; James Wilson and Dr. Benjamin Rush, signers of the Declaration of Independence and fellow Beccaria admirers; and Philip Mazzei, Jefferson's Italian-American neighbor at Monticello and yet another Beccaria enthusiast. In documenting Beccaria's game-changing influence, The Birth of American Law sheds important new light on the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the creation of American law. This book is part of the Legal History Series, edited by H. Jefferson Powell, Duke University School of Law. The Birth of American Law was awarded the 2015 Scribes Book Award and the First Prize in the 2015 AAIS Book Award competition (in the 18th/19th century category). It was also named INDIEFAB's 2014 Gold Winner for History! (shrink)

Cool Characters tells the story of American political irony from World War II to the present: how irony came to seem politically subversive for American countercultural rebels; how mainstream culture allegedly co-opted countercultural irony; how irony became part of major critical theories of postmodernism; and how -- starting in the late 1980s -- innovative writers developed an idea of "postirony" with the hope of overcoming the political limitations of postmodern irony. To chart the shift from irony to postirony, (...) and show what relationship culture has to politics, the book offers intensive analyses of important American countercultural figures: the hipster, the punk, a figure the author calls "the believer," the coolhunter, and the occupier; and new interpretations of important works by Ralph Ellison, Thomas Pynchon, William S. Burroughs, Kathy Acker, Michael Muhammad Knight, David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers, Alex Shakar, William Gibson, Jennifer Egan, Jonathan Lethem, and Rachel Kushner."--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

War and Nature is an important, cogent, and timely book about the double‐edged nature of technology. Edmund Russell, through meticulous research, establishes a key nexus between the increased use of chemicals in war and peace during several key decades of the twentieth century and the generalized backlash against technology and its unintended consequences that occurred beginning in the mid‐1960s. He clearly places pesticides, rodenticides, herbicides, and chemical warfare agents alongside atomic energy, electronics, massive water harnessing and diversion projects, and other (...) prime examples of America's romance with progress. Thus, he joins his work with a significant body of research examining the United States's headlong plunge to embrace technology, along with sometimes belated efforts to grapple with its effects.The idea of progress has always been a distinctive factor in American identity. However, the fascination with progress was perhaps never so intense, so unreserved, and so naive as in the fifty years from 1914 to the early 1960s. During these years, as Russell points out, the pace of change was accelerated by two world wars that spawned the growth of powerful government agencies as well as commercial companies whose new products benefited richly from government‐funded research. Wartime imperatives hastened development of “miracle chemicals” that preserved the health of American soldiers, as when DDT was widely employed in the Pacific theater of war to kill malaria‐bearing mosquitoes. The result was what President Dwight D. Eisenhower, as he left office, termed the “military‐industrial complex.”Russell uses well‐chosen examples from the archives of chemical manufacturers to illustrate how defense contractors supplying electronics, atomic expertise, and other forms of technological expertise useful in warfare softened their public images by touting beneficent peacetime applications of their products. “Better Living Through Chemistry” along with “Progress Is Our Most Important Product” and other slogans familiar to citizens of the 1950s appealed not just to America's love of convenience and gadgetry. They also appealed to a fundamental U.S. belief that “modern science” would solve age‐old problems, erase perennial blights, and free people to live on a higher plane than any previously experienced by humankind.However, because defoliants, flame‐throwers, poison gases, and other chemical weapons that aided the war effort almost always conjured up negative images in the public mind, manufacturers used analogies of “victory” in war to victory over man's environment to retain a reputable and lucrative place in peacetime society.Perhaps most striking are the parallels between chemicals and atomic energy during the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s in the United States. Both chemicals and atomic energy proved their awesome power in hastening victory in World War II, and both needed softer images after the war ended. The promises of disease‐free fields and enormously increased crop yields appealed to the American public, just as did the hope of electricity “too cheap to meter” and nuclear medicine that might cure cancers.When chemicals began to poison birds, fish, and other species recognized as valuable and desirable to man, when fields lost their productivity, and when illnesses arose in certain occupations that could be linked to chemical exposure, the downsides of progress became evident. America recoiled and reevaluated. Russell weaves congressional testimony together with advertisements, popular cartoons, and other ephemera to bring to life this uniquely American story. He compels the reader to ask striking questions about a nation maturing and itself asking complex questions about one of its most cherished ideals.The final irony of Russell's book may lie in the fact that it was written before the World Trade Center attack on 11 September 2001 but published just afterward, in the midst of America's anthrax episodes in the fall of the same year. The world focus on chemical and biological warfare should now provide a whole set of additional readers for this valuable book. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Surviving American Culture:On Chuck PalahniukEduardo MendietaIn an age in which American culture has become the United States' number one export, along with its weapons, low intensity conflict, carcinogenic cigarettes, its "freedom," and pornography, it is delightful and even a sign of hope that there are writers who have taken on the delicate and perilous task of offering a prognosis of what ails this culture. In the following (...) essay I argue that Chuck Palahniuk's works ought to be read as a mortician's report on American culture. Chuck Palahniuk broke into the literary world by way of the movie version of his first novel: Fight Club (1995). He has gone on to write six other novels: Survivor (1999), Invisible Monsters (2000), Choke (2001), Lullaby (2002), and Diary (2003). He also has published an interesting travel book, Fugitives and Refugees; A Walk in Portland, Oregon (2003), but since this is not properly fiction, I will not discuss it in this essay.1Clearly, Palahniuk has already produced a corpus worthy of careful consideration and analysis. Yet, as a west coast writer, far from the literary circles and brokers of the east coast, indeed far away from the clubs of self-promotion and self-monitoring that censure and hold in tight grip the monopoly of criticism that highlights "worthy literature," Palahniuk has not attracted a lot of critical attention. It is only with his most recent work Choke that he has began to be widely reviewed and commented on. In the following I provide a thematic reconstruction of each one of the six published novels, in chronological sequence. I will argue that Palahniuk is not trying to write the "great American novel," although he is profiling himself as a quintessential "American" writer in the midst of post–Cold War megalomania and celebrated Pax Americana. He has taken on a culture that has become so gargantuan, [End Page 394] fragmented, and differentiated but at the same time so rich, so self-reflexive, so historicized and also so mimicked that one novel cannot tell its story in one narrative with one dramatic thread. Many novels, many short cuts, many vignettes, are necessary: one polyphonic, asynchronous, temporally bi-directional, hyper-textual, and cyber-encyclopedic novel made up of individual novels, where each novel is the Bildungsroman of an American hero but told in reverse. These heroes, I will argue, are testimonies to the resilient power of individuals to resist even the most invasive and persistent onslaughts by culture on the physic life of freedom and individuality. I will also argue that he is neither a commercial nor academic writer; that is, he is not the kind of writer who writes either in order to maintain a living or secure tenure. He is a writer with a mission, a vision, and a very distinctive style. The stories that Palahniuk tells are stories that begin at the end, and end at the beginning: they are turned around Bildungsromans. They are, in other words, about unmaking, uncoupling, and disentangling our selves from the normal self into which we have been socialized. These stories are, thus, about the discovery of moral resources that lay dormant in the very simplicity of human solidarity and trust in our will to survive morally untainted, or at least redeemable. I will conclude by arguing that Palahniuk's novels are about surviving American Culture, and about how deviance is the health of the individual in a sick society.One could characterize Fight Club as the intelligent man's response to Robert Bly's Iron John (1990),2 or the fictionalized version of the Michael Kimmel's Manhood in America: A Cultural History (1996).3 Alternatively, one could argue that Fight Club is the fin-de-sieclé response to Barbara Ehrenreich's prognosis in her The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (1983) of 1970s and 1980s narcissistic and hedonistic masculinity.4 Chuck Palahniuk's first novel is a biting and poignant look at men in American culture after the end of affluence and the simultaneous "feminization" of masculinity. It is at the same time about the struggle for a viable sense of masculinity in an age in... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:War and Remembrance: Aeneid 12.554–60 and Aeneas’ Memory of TroyNetta BerlinIn its barest outline, Vergil’s Aeneid is the story of how Aeneas survives the Trojan War and finds his way to Italy where, before establishing a new home as destined, he is launched into a second war. Such an outline unjustly obscures the substance of the story—how loss and labor on the one hand, pietas and furor on the (...) other, define the personal experience of the hero—and, admittedly, disregards the poem’s discourse about Augustan imperium and pax. Nevertheless the outline highlights a theme whose significance is articulated with the poem’s first word (arma), and it calls attention to the structuring of the poem into two halves, each having a war as a focal point. The Sibyl’s prophecy to Aeneas, which recalls the past war in Troy by identifying it with the future war in Latium (6.86–94), initiates a thematic and structural relationship between the two conflicts: 1 the narrative of the war in Latium in books 7–12 recalls, often through inversion, that of the attack upon Troy’s capital in book 2.In developing this relationship, Vergil exploits the fact that the fall of Troy, which precedes the present time frame of the poem, is represented as a story within the Aeneid, with Aeneas as narrator recalling (meminisse) the event for the Carthaginians (2.12). Furthermore, Vergil links the mnemonic experience of the poem’s external audience to that of its internal narrator, creating a causative chain of narration and memory: the poet’s story of the war in Latium constructs the reader’s memory of the battles in Troy, whose earlier narration by the poem’s hero is constructed through his memory of the event. This causative chain is circumscribed by the tenet that the genesis of epic poetry resides, at divine initiative, in the poet’s memory: Musa, mihi causas memora... (1.8). It [End Page 11] also constitutes one facet of Vergil’s complex narrative strategy and has its own thematic and structural counterpart in the narrative technique of prophecy circumscribing the teleology of the epic. The Aeneid both embodies the deep sense of destiny that the poet’s contemporary audience had about its empire and constructs a kind of collective memory which, for that audience, would have been especially vivid in the wake of recent wars abroad and at home. Within and without, this epic is motivated by and motivates memory and in its genesis and generative force epitomizes the idea that memory is constructed.The thematic and structural dynamic of war and remembrance is especially forceful for the hero and especially subtle for the reader at the pivotal moment when Aeneas undertakes the attack upon the Latin capital in the last book of the poem:hic mentem Aeneae genetrix pulcherrima misit iret ut ad muros urbique adverteret agmen ocius et subita turbaret clade Latinos. ille ut vestigans diversa per agmina Turnum huc atque huc acies circumtulit, aspicit urbem immunem tanti belli atque impune quietam. continuo pugnae accendit maioris imago.(12.554–60)First Venus prompts Aeneas to attack; then Aeneas sees (aspicit, 558) the capital, not as yet a locus for battle. Imago (560) ends what begins with mens (554), linking the sight of the capital, from which it proceeds, to the influence of Venus on the hero’s thinking. One critic has suggested that Vergil was inconsistent when he gave Venus a part to play in initiating the attack, since Aeneas has the idea on his own in the ensuing verses. 2 That both divine and human impulse govern an action is hardly unusual in this poem and need not of its own invite scrutiny. However, an element of ambiguity in 12.560 suggests that this case of double determination warrants closer attention. If we take imago strictly in the sense of “a representation to the imagination” or “mental picture” (OLD 6), our inclination is to equate it, as delimited by pugna, with the idea generated by Venus and articulated in 12.555–56. In this, the conventional reading, the battle envisioned by Aeneas refers to the imminent attack. Or so... (shrink)

This essay deals with American fiction between the early 1850s, when Hawthorne and Melville produced their best work, and the first novels of Howells and James in the early 1870s. The familiar notion that this was the period of transition from pre-Civil War Romanticism to postwar Realism tells us nothing in particular about it. Yet we need some historical frame in which to place both of the later efforts of Hawthorne and Melville and the apprentice work of the next (...) generation of novelists. To this end, I propose to examine a few examples of the popular fiction that held at least quantitative dominance of the field. Hawthorne and Melville believed that the unprecedented sales of a new kind of stories by women writers contributed significantly to the loss of audience they both suffered in the early 1850s; and not only Howells and James but also Mark Twain showed in their early careers an unacknowledged attraction toward the procedures of the popular novelists along with a conscious effort to escape from them...the type of best-seller that appeared in the 1850s was an accidental creation rather than the result of conscious contrivance on the part of either authors or publishers. In fact, it caught the publishers by surprise. According to the author's sister , Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World was rejected by "almost all the leading book firms in New York," and the manuscript was returned with the comment "Fudge!" written on it by a reader for Harper's. Miss Warner, a thirty-one-year-old spinster, was the daughter of a once prosperous New York lawyer who had fallen into financial difficulties. The story resembles Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre to the extent that its heroine is an orphan exposed to poverty and psychological hardships who finally attains economic security and high social status through marriage. But the American writer places much more emphasis on the heroine's piety, and the book sets an all-time record for frequency of references to tears and weeping.Henry Nash Smith, professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley, received the John H. Dunning prize and the Bancroft Award for hisVirgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. He has also written Mark Twain: The Development of a Writer, and Popular Culture and Industrialism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:322 BOOK REVIEWS the Holy Office, who in the early 1800s recognized that empirical demonstrations of the earth's motion had finally been given and convinced Pope Pius VII to revoke the longstanding decree against Copernicanism. Unfortunately his greatest opponent turned out to be another Dominican, Father Filippo Anfossi, Master of the Sacred Palace at the time, who had views similar to those voiced by Cardinal Bellarmine in 1615 (pp. (...) 473-475). The story is told in great detail by Walter Brandmiiller and Johannes Griepl, Copemico, Galilei e la Chiesa: Fine delta controversia (1820), gli atti del Sant'Uffizio, Vatican City 1992-summarized in my notice in The Catholic Historical Review 80 (1994): 380-83. It is ironic, of course, that the battle was fought out by two Thomists, the one a progressive and the other a traditionalist, but it is indeed fortunate that it was the progressive Thomist who won out in the end. The Catholic University ofAmerica Washington, D.C. WILLIAM A. WALLACE, O.P. Love Your Enemies: Discipleship, Pacifism and Just War Theory. By LISA SOWLE CAHILL. Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 1994. Pp. xii + 252. $17.00 (paper). Lisa Cahill's Love Your Enemies: Discipleship, Pacifism and Just War Theory provides an excellent introduction to questions of peace-making and war-making in the history of Western Christianity. Cahill canvasses the standard sources for her history: the generally pacifist period of the New Testament and the early church (chapters two and three); the emergence of the just war tradition with Augustine and Aquinas (chapters four and five); just war, crusade, and pacifist responses during the Reformation period (chapters six through eight); and just war and pacifist responses in the twentieth -century American debate (chapters nine and ten). Love Your Enemies is relatively comprehensive, even-handed, and well-written. Beyond its general competence, Love Your Enemies provides rich theological fare, situating questions on war and peace in the context of Christian discipleship as a whole. One result of using discipleship as the organizing motif is that pacifism gets an unusually sympathetic and fair hearing. Cahill serves as an excellent reporter on these contentious questions. While often intimating her sympathies, she consistently avoids taking decisive positions or closing avenues of exploration. The title of her final chapter -the "Fragility of the Gospel"-reflects this approach. In this chapter Cahill emphasizes that Christian communities must continuously challenge themselves and their society to live out the gospel of peace (239-44). BOOK REVIEWS 323 What does it mean to live as a follower of Jesus today (ix)? This is Cahill's central question. To this end she asks two further questions. First, what is the way of discipleship established by Jesus with regard to doing violence? Second, to what extent can Christians hope to apply this ethic of discipleship to the wider civil society (40)? These questions arise in a variety of forms throughout the book. For instance, Cahill elegantly shows how a Christian's eschatological commitments (i.e., beliefs about the extent to which God's peaceful rule can be established by a community of believers and/or the extent to which this can be realized in "the world") can affect her response to the possibility of doing violence. While setting as one's task the attempt to find a way to combine Christian discipleship with public responsibility has many strengths, it is not without possible pitfalls. Typically, "Christian responsibility" is contrasted with "the evangelical imperative of non-violence" (see 55-56). But this notion of "responsibility" often begs the central question-i.e., for the Christian, can the most "responsible" stance be anything but what Cahill proclaims to be the evangelical stance of non-violence? While Cahill does acknowledge the strength of the argument by advocates of "responsibility" (i.e., those ~ho set up the non-violent stance in opposition to the faithful following of Jesus), she does not explicitly endorse their move. From her self-professed Catholic context, Cahill strives fo harmonize a neo-Thomist understanding of natural law-that there is "an objective moral order, knowable by reason, that yields universal moral laws by which all human persons and communities should abide" (3)-with a more particularistic... (shrink)

"My energies for near a lifetime have been used almost entirely to win such prominence as I could in outdoor photography."--H. H. Bennett Henry Hamilton Bennett became a celebrated photographer in the half-century following the American Civil War. Bennett is admired for his superb depictions of dramatic landscapes of the Dells of the Wisconsin River and also for his many technical innovations in photography, including a stop-action shutter and a revolving solar printing house that is now housed at the (...) Smithsonian Institution. With his instantaneous shutter, he gained recognition for his striking images of moving subjects, such as lumber raftsmen shooting the river rapids and his son Ashley leaping in midair from a bluff to the craggy pillar of Stand Rock. Less well-known are Bennett's splendid urban photographs of nineteenth-century Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul. This engaging biography of H. H. Bennett tells his life story, illustrated throughout with his remarkable photographs, some of them rarely viewed before. It draws on the photographer's own letters and journals, along with other family documents, to portray the sweep of his career and personal life. An important figure in the history of photography, he also contributed to the growth of American tourism: his nationally distributed stereoscopic views of Dells rock formations and his portraits of local Ho-Chunk Indians played a significant role in creating the Wisconsin Dells as the popular tourist destination it is today. Despite personal challenges--a crippling Civil War injury, the death of his first wife, and continual financial worries--Bennett produced an extensive portfolio that captures the midwestern culture of his time. He accepted commissions in the 1890s to document Chicago's modern skyscrapers, grand residences of Milwaukee's entrepreneurs and sailing ships in its harbor, enormous scenic panoramas along the routes of Wisconsin railroads, and sparkling ice palaces lit by fireworks at the St. Paul Winter Carnival. Finalist, Midwest Regional Interest, Midwest Book Awards. (shrink)

The Second World War put an end to America's historical isolationism. Three American thinkers--Reinhold Niebuhr, Hans Morgenthau, and Kenneth Waltz--developed a modern strategic framework that sought to introduce Americans to the harsher realities of international politics. Yet even as the United States began to embrace this new Realism, atomic weaponry threatened to make it absurd. This engrossing story of how the three chief architects of a powerful ideology struggled with the implications of their own creation offers crucial context for (...) contemporary debates about the resort to war and weapons of mass destruction. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Michael’s Story or the Paradox of NormalcyMichael KreuzerI was born in Montreal in 1974. My parents were both “older.” My mother was almost 45; my father was in his 50’s. I have a sister who is six years older than me. What I know about my mother’s prenatal care is that it was quite basic.I was premature. My mother’s due date was in mid–August, however I showed up about (...) three weeks earlier. I know that initially upon my birth I was declared male. However, upon closer examination, a few “abnormalities” of my genitals were found. I urinated through a small hole at the base of my penis; adjacent to this hole was another opening, barely big enough for a Q–tip. My scrotum was empty; my gonads had not descended.The doctors who examined me decided that they could not assign a gender without further testing. They told my mother I would need to remain in the hospital until such testing was completed. Apparently not being able to determine sex/gender is a life–threatening condition that requires hospitalization.It was determined that I had a uterus and it was presumed that my undescended gonads were ovaries (not verified by biopsy). There was a small vaginal opening behind my small urethral opening. Structures such as the labia were not developed. I found out later my vagina had fistulated into both my urethra and my perineum. Karyotyping was performed resulting in 46,XX with a diagnosis of female pseudo–hermaphroditism. My parents were informed that in spite of my external genitalia I was female and I would never develop as a male. I would require “corrective surgeries” which should be performed as soon as possible so I would not have any issues with my gender identity. They were even told that I would be able to become pregnant if I had the surgeries. In fact, I never ovulated and I have a small unicornuate uterus.My father refused all surgeries on my behalf most likely because he was a full–blooded Navajo who had suffered from abuse in an Indian boarding school during his childhood in New Mexico. His family was traditional, and because they didn’t adapt to prevailing Christian values, he and several of his siblings were removed from their parents. My dad was the oldest of 12 children and by the time his youngest siblings were born, the practice to take children away from their families had been changed.I think my father was deeply traumatized by his childhood and did not associate much with his family, nor did he want to visit the reservation. He spoke the language but never encouraged us to learn it. He did teach us some of the traditions. He told me about the nadleh, which is the other gender besides male and female in the Navajo tradition. There are two kinds of nadleh, which are almost like male–to–female and female–to–male transsexuals. Mostly I educated myself later and learned about the Navajo belief system in which the creation story is an important part. In the Navajo tradition, the creation story tells of First Man and First Woman; the first children born to them are the Hermaphrodite Twins. [End Page E7]My father was a US Army Master Sergeant, which was an unusual career for a man of his origins; he was a veteran of the Second World War. After he left the army he took his family to Montreal where he had a job in security. I think he preferred to live outside the U.S. He used to say that in Germany, where he had managed to stay for a long time while serving in the Army, he was just another American soldier. In spite of his career, he had a deep mistrust for “white people.” I remember he used to say that he was in the Army because this was his country long before the white people came and he loved it. He did not love the people who governed it. All this very much played into the decision not to listen to the doctors’ recommendations about surgery. My... (shrink)

In this book, Steve Gronert Ellerhoff explores short stories by Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut, written between 1943 and 1968, with a post-Jungian approach. Drawing upon archetypal theories of myth from Joseph Campbell, James Hillman and their forbearer C. G. Jung, Ellerhoff demonstrates how short fiction follows archetypal patterns that can illuminate our understanding of the authors, their times, and their culture. In practice, a post-Jungian ‘mythodology’ is shown to yield great insights for the literary criticism of short fiction. Chapters (...) in this volume carefully contextualise and historicize each story, including Bradbury and Vonnegut’s earliest and most imaginatively fantastic works. The archetypal constellations shaping Vonnegut’s early works are shown to be war and fragmentation, while those in Bradbury’s are family and the wholeness of the sun. Analysis is complemented by the explored significance of illustrations that featured alongside the stories in their first publications. By uncovering the ways these popular writers redressed old myths in new tropes—and coined new narrative elements for hopes and fears born of their era—the book reveals a fresh method which can be applied to all imaginative short stories, increasing understanding and critical engagement. Post-Jungian Psychology and the Short Stories of Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut is an important text for a number of fields, from Jungian and Post-Jungian studies to short story theoriesand American studies to Bradbury and Vonnegut studies. Scholars and students of literature will come away with a renewed appreciation for an archetypal approach to criticism, while the book will also be of great interest to practising depth psychologists seeking to incorporate short stories into therapy. (shrink)

I was optimistic of a new beginning in an open society when I came to America in 1999. Since then, I have indeed benefited from many aspects of American life. I have learned a lot – especially through my experience with small farms and farmers. But now, it's time to move on. And it was reading Debt and Dispossession, a book about American agriculture and human values, that crystallized in me why I wanted to leave. By telling the (...) story of the 1980s farm crisis through the words of the residents of a Minnesota town, the book prizes open many of the contradictions of American society. The 1970s were boom times for mid-western farms; farmers took advantage of “easy” farm credit to finance expansion. By the 1980s, the boom burst and slump loomed. Lenders wanted their money back and thousands of farmers were dispossessed. Debt and Dispossession probes beneath the surface of a community apparently united in protest against the dispossessions. Underneath, it finds a tangled picture of a society at war with itself, pitting farmer against farmer in a fratricidal struggle. The book let me glimpse the paradox of American individualism, all-American contradictions centering on government and consumerism, frugality and morality. Just like my experience of American agriculture and farmers as a whole, Debt and Dispossession helped me see the best side of America, but also revealed the fragility of life in a one-on-one society. (shrink)

Michael Robillard and Bradley Strawser’s Outsourcing Duty: The Moral Exploitation of the American Soldier (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022) is outstanding. The arguments in it are important, new, and powerful, and it is extremely well-written. It is accessibly written, including eye-opening personal stories (including the authors’ stories), an interesting array of economic and sociological studies, and colorful illustrative quotes from The Bourne Legacy, The Handmaid’s Tale, and Rudyard Kipling’s poem, Tommy. It also includes colorful-and-caustic comments on the Bush- (...) and Obama-administrations’ decisions regarding going to war and staying at war that nicely highlight what is at stake. In short, the book is a tour de force. (shrink)

This is a fun, chatty little book that also manages to say, comprehensibly, much that is profound about technology. This trifecta is an embarrassment to those of us phlegmatic of mind and turgid of prose, but more about that presently. First, the book.For any kid who ever doodled his way through junior high school American history—and therefore for most of our countrymen—the “victory” of the Union ironclad Monitor over the CSS Virginia preserved the Union blockade, assured Northern victory in (...) the Civil War, and signaled both a technological revolution in naval warfare and the advent of American technological preeminence. As David Mindell shows, however, none of the above. Moreover, these historical myths resulted not from fond recollections of a remote, more heroic time and place but, rather, from the carefully orchestrated real‐time machinations of interested historical actors: designers and allied contractors and politicians , navy bureaucrats and officers, cabinet‐level officials, newspaper propagandists, and earnest intellectuals, including Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville.The Monitor barely made it to her famous pas de deux with the Virginia in Hampton Roads, and while she achieved tactical stalemate, Virginia, by her continued existence, strategically checkmated the Monitor, the Union Navy, and the Army of the Potomac in the Peninsula Campaign. Even after the Virginia was scuttled by the retreating Confederates, Monitor continued to swelter in futility, anchored for most of the summer of 1862 up the James River, just short of Richmond. But by then she was a sacred icon: in the telling phrase of the major source for this book, the ship's paymaster, Lt. William Keeler, she was “an iron ship in a glass case,” too valuable to Union morale to risk in combat.The six months of idle futility did give Keeler and his compatriots more than ample time for surprisingly deep ruminations on the nature of war and technology: on what classic military virtues such as “heroism” or “courage” or “honor” could possibly mean for those invulnerable behind iron armor; on whether “casualty‐free war” would be morally acceptable either to the now “machine operators” of the Monitor or to her victims; on the irony of life in a ship that was really a submersible, dependent on sealed hatches, often inadequate and unreliable ventilation blowers, and bilge pumps for life support; on the disjuncture between the “public” Monitor and life on the James; presciently, on what death might be like in an iron coffin. Nathaniel Hawthorne, who visited the ship soon after the engagement in Hampton Roads, made perhaps the most chilling observations for those of us fed a steady diet of “smart bombs,” cruise missiles, UACVs , and the happy prospect of war by remote control: “human strife is to be transferred from the heart and personality of man into cunning contrivances of machinery, which by‐and‐by will fight our wars with only the clank and smash of iron, strewing the field with broken engines, but damaging nobody's little finger except by accident” . Not then; probably not yet.Mindell probes and explores these weighty issues with a grace and aplomb that virtually indict more ponderous efforts. Yet therein lies a sublime reflexive paradox: Could this argument, so clearly expressed, have been thought, much less understood, without the twenty‐five years of scholarship comprised by EPOR , SCOT , or actor network theory? Happily, none of the jargon of any of these schools intrudes in this story. But the narrative, so clearly written, and the side comments within the narrative, so cleverly phrased, evoke a whole analytical structure, laboriously, if often murkily, assembled by tedious writers and tendentious theorists. Like the Monitor herself in her glass box, the history told here reflects as much as it reveals. Elegant and understandable historical narrative and theoretically animated inquiry are not, it would seem, mutually exclusive antagonists, but the warp and weft of collective intellectual endeavor. If some see farther or more clearly than others, it may be because, sometimes, they stand on the shoulders of industrious moles. (shrink)

Palace of the End is a dense triptych of monologues exploring alternative narratives - albeit based in real facts - behind the events and the headlines surrounding the war in Iraq. Borrowing its title from the former royal palace where Saddam Hussein’s torture chamber was located, Thompson’s docudrama is structured as a chain of monologues telling three real-life stories set in the context of the war in Iraq. The play conveys three unconventional interpretations of the realities of war: that of (...) a young American soldier convicted for her misconduct at Abu Ghraib, the prison that stands as one of the most controversial symbols of the American-led Iraq invasion; a British scientist and weapons inspector who denounces what he understands as the false arguments given by his country’s leaders for engaging in a distant war; and an Iraqi mother whose life was shattered firstly by Saddam Hussein’s authoritarian regime, and later by the American first Gulf War. Each story is an enthralling and gut-wrenching reflection of one of the contemporary world’s most studied and controversial conflicts. The play gives voice to three different kinds of war victims, insofar as their political subjectivities and their moral conundrums are concerned. (shrink)

Palace of the End is a dense triptych of monologues exploring alternative narratives - albeit based in real facts - behind the events and the headlines surrounding the war in Iraq. Borrowing its title from the former royal palace where Saddam Hussein’s torture chamber was located, Thompson’s docudrama is structured as a chain of monologues telling three real-life stories set in the context of the war in Iraq. The play conveys three unconventional interpretations of the realities of war: that of (...) a young American soldier convicted for her misconduct at Abu Ghraib, the prison that stands as one of the most controversial symbols of the American-led Iraq invasion; a British scientist and weapons inspector who denounces what he understands as the false arguments given by his country’s leaders for engaging in a distant war; and an Iraqi mother whose life was shattered firstly by Saddam Hussein’s authoritarian regime, and later by the American first Gulf War. Each story is an enthralling and gut-wrenching reflection of one of the contemporary world’s most studied and controversial conflicts. The play gives voice to three different kinds of war victims, insofar as their political subjectivities and their moral conundrums are concerned. (shrink)

The chief difficulty with most social and psychological studies of violence lies in their assumption that violence is essentially a simple act of aggression that can be treated outside of a more complex moral and dramatic context. This may be the case with news reports of war, murder, assault, and other forms of violent crime, but it is certainly not a very adequate way to treat the fictional violence of a western, a detective story, or a gangster saga. It is (...) true that one can count and catalog the number of violent acts that occur in a day or a week of television and produce distressing statistics about the number of murders and assaults per minute on the typical television show. One can, like the redoubtable Dr. Wertham, amass specific instances where a young person has imitated or thinks he has imitated an act of violence he saw on television, though we should not forget that it can also be said without much fear of contradiction that the literary work which has directly caused more violence in the history of Western civilization than any other is the Bible. One can also construct laboratory experiments in which various groups are shown short films of violent acts and demonstrate that in certain circumstances this experience will cause further aggressive behavior. With procedures such as this, the evidence of a correlation between media violence and aggressive behavior becomes more and more persuasive. But do such studies tell us anything more than that this is a violent age and that there is probably some connection between the violence of actuality and the representation of violence in the media? John G. Cawelti, author of Apostles of the Self-made Man, Six-Gun Mystique, and Focus on Bonnie and Clyde, is professor in the Department of English and chairman of the Committee on General Studies in the Humanities at the University of Chicago. (shrink)

During the years leading up to World War I, America experienced a crisis of civic identity. How could a country founded on liberal principles and composed of increasingly diverse cultures unite to safeguard individuals and promote social justice? In this book, Jonathan Hansen tells the story of a group of American intellectuals who believed the solution to this crisis lay in rethinking the meaning of liberalism. Intellectuals such as William James, John Dewey, Jane Addams, Eugene V. Debs, and W. (...) E. B. Du Bois repudiated liberalism's association with acquisitive individualism and laissez-faire economics, advocating a model of liberal citizenship whose virtues and commitments amount to what Hansen calls cosmopolitan patriotism. Rooted not in war but in dedication to social equity, cosmopolitan patriotism favored the fight against sexism, racism, and political corruption in the United States over battles against foreign foes. Its adherents held the domestic and foreign policy of the United States to its own democratic ideals and maintained that promoting democracy universally constituted the ultimate form of self-defense. Perhaps most important, the cosmopolitan patriots regarded critical engagement with one's country as the essence of patriotism, thereby justifying scrutiny of American militarism in wartime. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Individual in Relation to the Sangha in American Buddhism:An Examination of "Privatized Religion"Kenneth K. TanakaIn his celebrated book Bowling Alone (2000), Robert Putnam noted the increased level in the phenomenon of "privatized religion" within the previous thirty-five years. Many of the Baby Boomer generation left churches in the late 1960s and the 1970s. Some sought out new religious movements and religious therapies, but most simply "dropped out" (...) of organized religion altogether. He cites Wade Clark Roof and William McKinney, specialists in American religion, who describe the outcome of this trend in American religious behavior: "[The consequence was a] tendency toward highly individualized religious psychology without the benefits of strong supportive attachments to believing communities. A major impetus in this direction in the post-1960s was the thrust toward greater personal fulfillment and quest for the ideal self.... In this climate of expressive individualism, religion tends to become "privatized," or anchored in the personal realms."1 Putnam observes that although privatized religion may be "morally compelling and psychologically fulfilling," it involves less social capital than environments in which individuals are connected to other individuals in shared faith commitment.Interestingly, American Buddhism may be one of the beneficiaries of this trend, for the recent growth of Buddhism in the United States is partly attributable to the climate of "privatized" religion. Nowhere is this symbolized more than by the so-called Nightstand Buddhists.2The Nightstand Buddhists derive their name from their practice of placing a Buddhist meditation book on the nightstand after reading it before they go to sleep. They get up the next morning and practice to the best of their ability the meditation they had read about the night before. Further, they may frequently attend lectures at the local university and visit a Buddhist center's web-page or participate in an online Buddhist discussion group. And if we were to visit them, we might find their homes decorated with Buddhist artifacts.But these Nightstand Buddhists do not show up in any statistics on the [End Page 115] American Buddhist population because they would not identify themselves as Buddhists. According to Thomas Tweed, who coined the term Nightstand Buddhists, "Sympathizers (= Nightstand Buddhists) are those who have some sympathy for Buddhism but do not embrace it exclusively or fully. When asked, they would not identify themselves as Buddhists. They would say they are Methodists, or Jewish, or unaffiliated."3 However, they have been an important part of the story of Buddhism in America from its beginning and continue to be so today.Among the three million Buddhists currently estimated to be in the United States, I believe there are Buddhists who exhibit many of the same characteristics as the Nightstand Buddhists. And this number is significant, particularly among those converts to Buddhism whose main practice is meditation. This group of convert Buddhists is one segment of the larger Buddhist community in the United States, which I have categorized into four groups.41. New Asian American Buddhists (those who have mostly arrived in the United States since the 1960s: Vietnamese, Thai, Korean, Cambodian, Myanmar, Laotian, and Sri Lankan).2. Old-line Asian American Buddhists (those who were established before World War II: Chinese and Japanese).3. Convert Buddhists whose main practice is meditation (predominately Euro-Americans practicing in the Zen, Vipassanā, and Tibetan traditions).4. Convert Buddhists whose main practice is chanting (Sōkagakkai International–USA, a sizable percentage of whom are African and Hispanic Americans).In this paper, I wish to focus on a Jōdo Shinshū temple from the second group (old-line Asian American Buddhists) and on several centers collectively that belong to the Zen, Vipassanā, and Tibetan traditions from the third group (convert Buddhists whose main practice is meditation), looking at the manner in which individuals relate to their respective institutions and traditions, with special attention given to the phenomenon of "privatized religion."For purposes of this paper, my definition of "privatized religion" is based on the observation of Roof and McKinney, cited above, as "a tendency for individuals (1) to emphasize practicing at home over religious centers, and (2) to value the subjective and the inward." The homebound orientation is connected... (shrink)

Reviews the book, The Metaphysical Club: A story of ideas in America by Louis Menand . In this highly entertaining and readable history, Menand examines the lives and thinking of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey, members of an informal discussion group that met in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1872 that called itself the Metaphysical Club. Beginning with the Civil War and ending in 1919 with the Supreme Court decision in U.S. v. Abrams, this insightful (...) and thought-provoking book tells a story of the creation of the ideas and values that have shaped how Americans think and how we live. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Statius’ Thebaid and the Poetics of Civil WarMark MastersonCharles McNelis. Statius’ Thebaid and the Poetics of Civil War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. x + 203 pp. Cloth, $90.In this well-focused study, Charles McNelis gives what is due both to the poetics of Statius’ epic and to what John Henderson has called its “political intelligence” (PCPS 37 [1991]: 52). Regarding the poem as a product of its time (...) both in terms of poetics and politics, McNelis shows that Statius uses the considerable arsenal of the Latin poets’ ability to be intertextual to create a work that addresses [End Page 436] the particular situation of post–civil wars Flavian Rome. McNelis finds that Statius proposes that the epic teleology of the Golden Age’s reestablishment under Augustus that Virgil presents (albeit with some ambiguity) “has been thwarted and/or challenged, thus suggesting the fragile nature of any claim—even claims that define a society—to have brought an end to civil war” (177). Instead, Statius suggests that while it is possible for a particular civil conflict to come to an end, the results of it are ever with us and, further, that resolution comes in the form of clementia which is available to all on an individual basis from an entity that takes no blood sacrifice and is aniconic (163; Theb. 12.487–88, 493–94). A multifaceted challenge to the Virgilian/Augustan narrative of communal imperium sine fine guaranteed by Jove is manifest here.In order to make the case that Augustan/Virgilian teleology does not fit Flavian Rome, Statius’ particular strategy is a resort to Callimachus whose criticism of the epic genre had already made frequent appearances in Latin poetry. McNelis sees Statius restaging over the course of the epic the conflict that Callimachus (in Aetia 1 and elsewhere) presents between finely worked poetry and overdone epic. This conflict then reflects the presence of civil war in the literary-generic contouring of the poem. The presence of this conflict also ensures, in McNelis’ estimation, that the Thebaid is most emphatically not the “one continuous song” (Aetia 1.1.3: ) that Callimachus presents as the undesirable goal of epic composition and instead “replicate[s]” civil war “in the very fibres of the poem” (1).After the introduction, McNelis presents in the first chapter (“Gods, Humans and the Literary Tradition”) a discussion of Thebaid 1 with special attention paid to the story of Coroebus and the particularly malevolent Apollo therein. McNelis underscores in this story (significantly an aetion) the essentially hostile nature of the gods in the poem and the blending of them with chthonic forces, exemplified by Apollo’s killing of Python and his revenge, via a baby-eating monster, for the death of a baby born to a young woman he had raped. This story promises—and it is a promise that the epic delivers—that humans can hardly expect a settled existence with Jove as beneficent ruler.The second chapter (“Beginning”) foregrounds discussion of the necklace made by Vulcan, the Cyclopes, and the Telchines for Harmonia. McNelis sees in the necklace a product from the god of the forge’s workshop that comments on this epic in as serious a manner as the shields of Achilles and Aeneas comment on their respective epics. It is here that McNelis makes a key connection to the Aetia, for it is the Telchines whom Callimachus takes to task at 1.1.1. While at times he overstates the power of the necklace to cause things to happen (e.g., 51), McNelis is right to emphasize its significance. The necklace promises communal dissolution from the hands of the gods just as surely as the shield of Aeneas promises reintegration, likewise overseen by divine forces. Too, it is fitting that the poet of the Silvae would focus on a luxurious item such as this.In the third chapter (“Nemea”), McNelis sees the Callimachean aspects of the plot derail the warlike plan of Vulcan and the Telchines in the famous [End Page 437] digression at Nemea. McNelis draws the reader’s attention to the fact that the great body of water that is epic has been reduced to but... (shrink)

Monument or memorial? Defeat or withdrawal? The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC pays tribute to more than 58,000 Americans who died fighting an unpopular war. Yet today the ‘Wall’, as it is known to most Americans, is the most visited site managed by the US National Park Service. Weekend visitors will happen upon an almost festive place as thousands of people pass by looking at the names – what do they think, imagine? This chapter discusses not only the story (...) and controversy behind the building of the ‘Wall’, but also how it reflects the collective memory of a society and its values, and how these are constructed. (shrink)

A personal final work by the Pulitzer Prize- and Presidential Medal of Freedom-winning author of The Story of Civilization, found decades after his death, shares counsel on the pursuit of a meaningful life based on his research into world philosophies, religions and sciences. 30,000 first printing.

Each year since 1983 the American Council of Learned Societies has invited one of America's leading scholars to deliver the Haskins Lecture, in honor of Charles Homer Haskins, a distinguished scholar and teacher who was instrumental in the founding of the ACLS. In this volume, which commemorates the 75th anniversary of the ACLS, Douglas Greenberg and Stanley Katz bring together the lectures presented by ten of America's most distinguished scholars. Each lecture is a personal and intellectual glimpse into the (...) "life of learning" of such leading scholars as Maynard Mack, Annemarie Schimmel, and John Hope Franklin. The lectures focus on self-reflection of lives dedicated to learning, rather than on scholarship in the usual sense of the term. Ranging from being forced to learn Latin to painful memories of war and racism, the lecturers all recount stories from their eventful lives. Each offers thoughts on the body of work he or she has produced and the forces, personal and intellectual, that have shaped it. The scholars bring something of their disciplines to the lecture, sharing not only personal anecdotes but their love of learning. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Vitoria Las Casas References Further Reading.

Abstractabstract:This article focuses on the 1954 short story “Frozen Foods 2000 A.D.,” which predicted that frozen meals and microwave cooking would ensure global cooperation and reduce domestic labor, “emancipating” women and inspiring new technologies. This frozen fantasy both reflects the structure of earlier utopian motifs and challenges their essential arguments, particularly when examined alongside Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel Looking Backward and medieval Cockaigne stories of abundant food and feasting. “Frozen Foods 2000 A.D.” also describes the culinary transformations in the United (...) States in subsequent decades, making it a remarkably prescient utopian text, and its vision of the future was largely (though not completely) realized by the end of the twentieth century. Because frozen meals and kitchen conveniences have proliferated since its publication, “Frozen Foods 2000 A.D.” no longer seems utopian. Instead, American kitchens, and eaters, now view Williams’s futuristic vision as commonplace and expected. (shrink)

A dramatic retelling of the story of the Transcendentalists, revealing them not as isolated authors but as a community of social activists who shaped progressive American values. Conflagration illuminates the connections between key members of the Transcendentalist circle—including James Freeman Clarke, Elizabeth Peabody, Caroline Healey Dall, Elizabeth Stanton, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Theodore Parker, and Margaret Fuller—who created a community dedicated to radical social activism. These authors and activists laid the groundwork for democratic and progressive religion in America. In the (...) tumultuous decades before and immediately after the Civil War, the Transcendentalists changed nineteenth-century America, leading what Theodore Parker called “a Second American Revolution.” They instigated lasting change in American society, not only through their literary achievements but also through their activism: transcendentalists fought for the abolition of slavery, democratically governed churches, equal rights for women, and against the dehumanizing effects of brutal economic competition and growing social inequality. The Transcendentalists’ passion for social equality stemmed from their belief in spiritual friendship—transcending differences in social situation, gender, class, theology, and race. Together, their fight for justice changed the American sociopolitical landscape. They understood that none of us can ever fulfill our own moral and spiritual potential unless we care about the full spiritual and moral flourishing of others. (shrink)

Prologue: autumn aroma -- What's left? -- Arts of noticing -- Contamination as collaboration -- Some problems with scale -- Interlude: smelling -- After progress : salvage accumulation -- Working the edge "freedom" -- Open ticket, Oregon -- War stories -- What happened to the state? : two kinds of Asian Americans in translation -- Between the dollar and the yen -- From gifts to commodities and back -- Salvage rhythms : business in disturbance -- Interlude: tracking -- Disturbed beginnings (...) : unintentional design -- The life of the forest : coming up among pines -- History -- Resurgence -- Serendipity -- Ruin in gaps and patches -- In science as translation -- Flying spores -- Interlude: dancing -- In the middle of things -- Matsutake crusaders -- Ordinary assets -- Anti-ending : some people I met along the way -- Spore trail: the further adventures of a mushroom -- Notes -- Index. (shrink)

What I suggest we can see in this brief overview of the literature is an extensive interpenetration on both sides of these debates between scientific, political, and social values. Important shifts in political and social values were of course occurring over the same period, some of them in parallel with, and perhaps even contributing to, these transitions I have been speaking of in evolutionary discourse. The developments that I think of as at least suggestive of possible parallels include the progressive (...) encroachment of public values into the private domain of post-World War II American life, the cold war, the rise of consumerism, and the flowering of what Christopher Lasch calls a “narcissistic individualism.”35 In popular language, the 1960s gave birth to the “me” generation. Perhaps the most tantalizing analogue is suggested by Barbara Ehrenreich's argument for the emergence of a new meaning of masculinity — an ideal of masculinity measured not by commitment, responsibility, or success as family provider, but precisely by the strength of a man's autonomy in the private sphere, his resistance to the demands of a hampering female.36 It is tempting to speculate about possible connections between changes in scientific discourse and developments in the social and political spheres, but such connections, however suggestive, would clearly have to be demonstrated.For now, however, I want to focus on another kind of change —a transformation not so much in the social or political sphere as in the scientific sphere. I make this turn, or return, in support of a more complex account of scientific change that incorporates reverberations within the scientific communty along with social and political changes.In the 1960s, all of biology was undergoing a major transformation in direct response to the dramatic successes of molecular biology. These successes seemed to completely vindicate the values on which the molecular revolution was premised — namely, simplicity and mechanism. Following the victory of Watson and Crick, and of others after them, the fever of that endeavor swept through biology leaving in its wake a new standard of science, and of scientific discourse — one predicated on clarity, simplicity, and analyzability; on the definition of legitimate questions as those capable of clear and unambiguous answers. Every biological discipline felt it — even evolutionary biology, which in some respects was at the furthest pole. Perhaps precisely because it seemed conceptually so remote, evolutionary biology may have felt it most of all. Lewontin inadvertently provides us with some direct support for this view. Indeed, he begins his introduction to Population Biology and Evolution with the following remarks: The twenty years since World War II have seen a vindication in biology of our faith in the Cartesian method as a way of doing science. Some of the most fundamental and interesting problems of biology have been solved or are very nearly solved by an analytic technique that is now loosely called “molecular biology.” But it is not specifically the “molecular” aspect of biology of the last twenty years that has led to its success. It is, rather, the analytic aspect, the belief that by breaking systems down into their component parts, by simplifying them or using simpler organisms, one can learn about more complex systems. As it happens, the problems that were attacked and are being attacked by this method lead to answers in terms of molecules and cell organelles.... There is a host of problems in biology, however, that has been much neglected in these twenty exciting years, because the answers to them cannot be meaningfully framed in molecular and cellular terms.37Lewontin is referring, of course, to problems in evolution. The remainder of his remarks is devoted to an argument for the applicability of the method, if not the content, of molecular biology to these problems. He writes, “It is not the case that molecular biology is Cartesian and analytic while population biology is holistic. Population biology is properly analytic and operates, within the framework of its own problems, by the process of simplification, analysis, and resynthesis.”38 With these remarks, he leads into the criticism of the “holists” who have “held up progress.”This new ethic of simplicity, clarity, and mechanism — embodying the very virtues lauded by Williams — was explicitly carried into evolutionary biology in the name of scientific progress. As it happened, the values implied also fit conveniently well with other values — each set of values providing crucial support for the other.However substantive the scientific gains may have been in some respects, the net effect of this ethic has also been a systematic “perceptual bias” — a bias with profound practical consequences for the entire program of methodological individualism in evolutionary biology, if not elsewhere as well. It may well be that the whole is equivalent to the reconstituted aggregate of its parts, if, in the process of aggregation or summation, all possible interactions among the parts are included. But if certain kinds of interactions are systematically excluded, our confidence in that program necessarily founders. My claim here is that such systematic exclusion does occur, and that it occurs on a number of different levels. To briefly review the interlocking kinds of “bias” that I see occurring in practice, I suggest the following schematic listing:On the most general level: The ethic of simplicity — the privileging of certain values, even certain methodologies, as having an a priori superior claim to scientific credibility.Only slightly less general, and crucially related, is the equation of “scientific” with “tractible”: Given the techniques of analysis available, the equation of science with what we can do inevitably leads to a systematic technical bias favoring simplicity. That is, because we don't know how to model complex dynamics, nonlinear interactions are systematically biased against because of the limitations of our technical know-how. The consequences of this equation of the scientific with the tractible are greatly compounded by the additional equation between what we can do and what is — that is, by our temptation to confuse tractibility with reality.Finally, and also closely related, a further kind of elision occurs even within the confines of tractibility. This kind of elision — taking the form almost of inferring tractibility from one's prior assumptions of what is real — is exemplified by the history of a mathematical ecology of mutualism. Even when mutualism can be introduced into the same technical machinery, it is still not pursued. The basic assumption is that competition is what is real, not because it is easier to model, but because it is what we expect. When the actual difficulties of modeling competition are then in turn suppressed, as in the Robert May story, what we have, given the temptation to equate the tractible with the real, is the possibility of a truly self-fulfilling prophecy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Zen War StoriesSteven HeineZen War Stories. By Brian Daizen Victoria. London and New York: Routledge-Curzon, 2003. Pp. xviii + 268. Hardcover $124.95. Paper $34.95.Brian Daizen Victoria's Zen War Stories, following his highly acclaimed but also highly provocative Zen at War (Weatherhill, 1997), continues his withering attack on the embracing of wartime ideology by leading Zen masters and practitioners in Japan. Victoria seeks to show that the attitude characteristic (...) of numerous examples of prominent Zen monks and scholars was not simply a matter of benignly resisting, or even passively accepting, the rhetoric of Imperial Way Buddhism by clergy who were under pressure and powerless to stand up to the authorities. Nor was it an example of innocently recognizing historical and ideological affinities between Zen monastic discipline and military training.On the contrary, the Zen masters discussed here eagerly and enthusiastically endorsed some of the most excessive and reprehensible aspects of imperial ideology in the name of a corrupted vision of spiritual realization as a tool to spread the doctrine of the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere. They also used Zen wedded to hyper-nationalism and imperialism as a tool to misread the historical records of their own tradition and to help transport Japanese supremacy to China and Korea, while refusing to acknowledge or repent for their actions with the defeat of Japan. This outlook also infected numerous politicians and military figures, who turned to Buddhism as a way of explaining away or masking their roles leading up to, as well as during and after, World War II.In part 1 of Zen War Stories Victoria documents several masters who have become icons in the West for their apparent adherence to a Zen tradition linked with an ability to address contemporary culture. After showing in chapter 4 that Ōmori [End Page 345] Sōgen, praised for his prowess in swordsmanship and other arts, had a fascistic, "Mr. Hyde" side as manifested in the founding in 1932 of the Kinnō Ishin Dōmei (League for Loyalty to the Emperor and the Restoration), Victoria turns to the case of Yasutani Haku'un. In chapter 5, "Zen Master Dōgen Goes to War," we find that Yasutani, known as the teacher of Philip Kapleau and the inspiration for The Three Pillars of Zen, wanted to smash all universities for being traitors. He was a fanatical militarist who "transformed the life and thought of Zen Master Dōgen (1200-1253), the thirteenth-century founder of the Sōtō Zen sect in Japan, into a propaganda tool for Japanese militarism" (p. 68).In particular, Yasutani tried to argue that Dōgen's famed pilgrimage to Song China in 1223 was triggered not by a longing for the Buddhist Dharma but by a disgust with the new shogunate and an infatuation with preserving the Imperial House. According to Victoria, Yasutani's corrupted spirituality did not end with a support for militarism. He was also even more "ethnic chauvinist, sexist, and anti-Semitic" (p. 68) than his teacher Harada Daiun Sōgaku, whose "most memorable wartime quote is: '[If ordered to] march: tramp, tramp, or shoot: bang, bang. This is the manifestation of the highest Wisdom [of enlightenment]"' (pp. 66-67).After discussing in chapter 7, "Zen 'Selflessness' in Japanese Militarism," how Zen's historical relation to the samurai was misinterpreted to support the imperial ideology concerning the acceptance of death by D. T. Suzuki and other prominent representatives of Zen, including former Eiheiji temple abbot Kumazawa Taizen, part 2 takes up examples of the involvement with Buddhist thought by military and political leaders. While this section is less devastating as a critique of Zen than of Japanese Buddhism and society in general, Victoria explains in chapter 10, "Buddhism-The Last Refuge of War Criminals," how easily the moral basis of religion can be distorted and subverted. For example, as recollected by Buddhist studies scholar Hanayama Shinshō, seven Class A war criminals who had been condemned to death continued, while on death row, to cling hypocritically to Buddhism to find some feeling of solace. For instance, Hirota Kōki never abandoned his attachment to Zen and the warrior class and... (shrink)

Slovenian epistemology is characterised by an idiosyncratic canon, based on three fundamental authors: Gaston Bachelard, Alexandre Koyré, and Thomas Kuhn. What binds this canon together is the attitude that the history of science should be viewed as a history of radical breaks or revolutions in scientific thought. The drawback of such an anthology of authors is not only that it is outdated, but that, from the position of this canon, it is difficult to discern the problems stemming from the approach (...) to history of science it endorses. In order to highlight the blind spots of Slovenian epistemology, I examine a different interpretative trajectory of the notion of scientific revolution in the United Kingdom and the United States. The methodological program, which focuses on revolutionary breakthroughs in scientific ideas, is thus re-evaluated by considering its strategic role in the institutionalisation of the history of science as a discipline. The event that marked the translation of French epistemology into English history of science were the lectures of the delegates from the Soviet Union at the Second International Congress of the History of Science and Technology in 1931. In post-war Anglo-American history of science, the concept of scientific revolution was adopted as a means of excluding Marxist studies of science – which had spread under the influence of the Soviet delegation – from the realm of acceptable discourse. I demonstrate how the Cold War historiography of science introduced a divide between the “internal” and “external” factors of scientific development, and their supposed synthesis in the work of Thomas Kuhn. Finally, I review the critiques that the sociology of scientific knowledge levelled at the story of the Scientific Revolution and point out the importance of these controversies for current epistemological research. (shrink)