Author: Courtney Jung File Type: pdf Breastfeeding has become a moral imperative in 21st century America. Once upon a time, this moral imperative made sense. Breastfeeding was believed to bring multiple health benefits, including increased resistance to many chronic and even fatal diseases, protection against Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), improved intelligence, and countless immunities. The irony now, however, is that breastfeeding continues to gain moral force just as scientists are showing that its benefits have been greatly exaggerated. In 2012, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention declared the failure to breastfeed a public health issue, thus placing bottle-feeding on par with smoking, obesity, and unsafe sex. Recently, politicians too have launched highly visible breastfeeding initiatives, such as former New York Mayor Michael Bloombergs well-publicized Latch On campaign. And, meanwhile, women who dont breastfeed their babies have found themselves with a lot of explaining to do. Physicians, public health officials, and other mothers are pressuring them to breastfeed even though the best science shows that the advantages of doing so are minimal at best. What is going on? In Lactivism, Courtney Jung offers the most deeply researched and far-reaching critique of the breastfeeding imperative to date. Drawing on a wide range of evidence, from rigorously peer-reviewed scientific research to interviews with physicians, politicians, business interests, activists, social workers, and mothers from across the social and political spectrum, Jung presents an eye-opening account of how a practice that began as an alternative to Big Business has become Big Business itself-- Is breast really best? Breastfeeding is widely assumed to be the healthiest choice, yet growing evidence suggests that its benefits have been greatly exaggerated. New moms are pressured by doctors, health officials, and friends to avoid the bottle at all costsoften at the expense of their jobs, their pocketbooks, and their well-being. In Lactivism, political scientist Courtney Jung offers the most deeply researched and far-reaching critique of breastfeeding advocacy to date. Drawing on her own experience as a devoted mother who breastfed her two children and her expertise as a social scientist, Jung investigates the benefits of breastfeeding and asks why so many people across the political spectrum are passionately invested in promoting it, even as its health benefits have been persuasively challenged. What emerges is an eye-opening story about class and race in America, the big business of breastfeeding, and the fraught politics of contemporary motherhood. **

Author: Bernhard Radloff File Type: pdf The question of being was integral to the philosophy of Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) and was a large factor in the development of his political and aesthetic thought. In Heidegger and the Question of National Socialism, Bernhard Radloff investigates the philosophical foundations and cultural context of Heideggers conception of being, focusing on the idea of gestalt as the guiding thread that determined German conservative thought throughout the 1930s. In doing so, Heideggers philosophy is related to the whole of German society at the time, a society in which gestalt was the guiding light and the ultimate aspiration of artists, technicians, and politicians.Throughout the book, Heideggers own understanding of gestalt is used as a window to his thoughts on being, which is conceived of as incorporated, finite, and historically situated in beings. Concentrating on the years between 1933 and 1942, Radloff seeks to capture the response of Heideggers philosophy to National Socialism, examining key works and relating them to the literature of the German conservative revolution. Heidegger and the Question of National Socialism is, therefore a thorough treatment of his political philosophy as it relates to the question of being.Adopting both a historical and phenomenological approach to the subject, this book is equally an examination of German conservative ideology, a critique of technological determinism, and a study of one of the most controversial philosophers of twentieth century.**

Author: Peter Dula File Type: pdf In recent decades, theologians and philosophers of religion have engaged in a vigorous debate concerning the status and nature of ecclesiology. Throughout this debate, they have found resources for their arguments in concepts of political philosophy, particularly communitarianism and political liberalism. In this groundbreaking study, Peter Dula turns instead to the work of philosopher Stanley Cavell, examining the ways in which Cavells understanding of companionship contributes to the debate over church and community. Since the 1960s, Stanley Cavell has been the most category-defying philosopher in North America, as well as one of the least understood. Philosophers did not know what to make of his deep engagement with literature and film, or, stranger yet, with his openness to theological concerns. In this, the first English study of Cavell and theology, Dula places Cavell in conversation with some of the philosophers most influential in contemporary theology Alasdair MacIntyre, Martha Nussbaum and John Rawls. He then examines Cavells relationship to Christian theology, shedding light on the repeated appearances of the figure of Christ in Cavells writings. Cavell, Companionship, and Christian Theology finds in Cavells account of skepticism and acknowledgment a transformative resource for theological discussions - not just of ecclesiology, but of sin, salvation and the existence of God. **

Author: Joshua Weiner File Type: pdf Song for Thom GunnThere is no east or westin the wood you fear and seek,stumbling past a gate of mossand what you would not take.And what you thought you had(the Here that is no rest)you make from it an aidto form no east, no west.No east. No west. No needfor given map or bell,vehicle, screen, or speed.Forget the house, forget the hill.Taking its title from a set of writings found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, From the Book of Giants retunes the signal broadcast from these ancient fragments, transmitting a new sound in the shape of a Roman drain cover, in imitations of Dante and Martial, in the voice of a cricket and the hard-boiled American photographer Weegee, in elegies both public and personal, and in poems that range from the social speech of letters to the gnomic language of riddles. Out of poetrys complex of complaint and praise, Joshua Weiner discovers, in one poem, his own complicity in Empire during his sons baseball game at the White House. In another, an embroidered parrot sings a hermetic nursery rhyme to an infant after 911. From Publishers WeeklyThe most powerful poems in Weiners second collection combine narrative and lyric elements and range across subjects and kinds of speech, as in an account of a sons baseball game on the White House lawn that somehow connects the dots between Pol Pot, Cal Ripken, our current president and the Wild Cherry refrain play that funky music, white boy... till you die. A later long poem riffs on Berkeley in the 90s and intertwines the stories of a local life-artist called the Polka Dot Man and an overzealous activist killed by an overzealous cop. These poems arent political in any easy way, but have politics, memory and language at their center in a manner that recalls former poet laureate Robert Hasss work. When the lines arent tensed enough, or when Weiner (The Worlds Room, 2001) loses himself in reverie without pitting reason against it, the poems can edge toward cliche. But these moments are relatively fewWeiners formal and lyric gifts both soothe and shock in these poems. (Oct.) Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. ReviewJoshua Weiners new book is a wonderful example of how politics and art can come together in a way that is wholly unexpected. In a strange, bold amalgam of domestic narrative, political allegory, and lyric inventiveness, Weiner looks at politics from the vantage of a disaffected householder who has bizarre, visionary tendencies. The public and private spheres have completely collapsed into each other, and every attempt at solace, honest communication, or honorable action is being relentlessly undermined by the threat of death, by public lies, and by wholly inflexible ideologies that are always and everywhere diametrically opposed. But these poems in their prescience also transcend the category of political poems they are works of original perception, poetic skill, and genuine strangeness. This is a wonderfully mature and original book. (Tom Sleigh) Joshua Weiners From the Book of Giants begins and begins again in memory. Here elegy enacts its proximity to this world. While rhyming this life with the next, these stunning poems show us how the quotidian married itself to an everlasting. A piercingly moving and memorable achievement.(Claudia Rankine) In this unusually daring and wakeful blend of plainness and poetic complexity, Joshua Weiner sends a new charge through old song. Here we find controlled lavishness of techniquethe queries of dream, Joycean pun, surprising abstractions and the heartless wink of rhymecarried forward along the open themes of grief and chagrin. Rhetorically, the voice may be that of Horace as the poet pulls the knife through the surface of his own (Horatian) equanimity. Or the voice may resemble Randall Jarrells as the poems unfold the map of childhood, while at other times it calmly shows Weiners understanding of poetry as the language of difficult virtue, an insinuation of spirit curving round conventional goods.(Mary Kinzie) The most powerful poems in Weiners second collection combine narrative and lyric elements and range across subjects and kinds of speech, as in an account of a sons baseball game on the White House lawn that somehow connects the dots between Pol Pot, Cal Ripken, our current president and the Wild Cherry refrain play that funky music, white boy... till you die. A later long poem riffs on Berkeley in the 90s and intertwines the stories of a local life-artist called the Polka Dot Man and an overzealous activist killed by an overzealous cop. These poems arent political in any easy way, but have politics, memory and language at their center in a manner that recalls former poet laureate Robert Hasss work. When the lines arent tensed enough, or when Weiner (The Worlds Room, 2001) loses himself in reverie without pitting reason against it, the poems can edge toward cliche. But these moments are relatively fewWeiners formal and lyric gifts both soothe and shock in these poems. (Publishers Weekly 2006-10-16)