Not in the Heavens: The Tradition of Jewish Secular Thought
Author: David Biale Not in the Heavens traces the rise of Jewish secularism through the visionary writers and thinkers who led its development. Spanning the rich history of Judaism from the Bible to today, David Biale shows how the secular tradition these visionaries created is a uniquely Jewish one, and how the emergence of Jewish secularism was not merely a response to modernity but arose from forces long at play within Judaism itself. Biale explores how ancient Hebrew books like Job, Song of Songs, and Esther downplay or even exclude God altogether, and how Spinoza, inspired by medieval Jewish philosophy, recast the biblical God in the role of nature and stripped the Torah of its revelatory status to instead read scripture as a historical and cultural text. Biale examines the influential Jewish thinkers who followed in Spinoza's secularizing footsteps, such as Salomon Maimon, Heinrich Heine, Sigmund Freud, and Albert Einstein. He tells the stories of those who also took their cues from medieval Jewish mysticism in their revolts against tradition, including Hayim Nahman Bialik, Gershom Scholem, and Franz Kafka. And he looks at Zionists like David Ben-Gurion and other secular political thinkers who recast Israel and the Bible in modern terms of race, nationalism, and the state. Not in the Heavens demonstrates how these many Jewish paths to secularism were dependent, in complex and paradoxical ways, on the very religious traditions they were rejecting, and examines the legacy and meaning of Jewish secularism today.
Author: Martin Burckhardt
In the beginning was the Zero, and the Zero was with God, and God was the One. -- All and NothingIn 1854, the British mathematician George Boole presented the idea of a universe the elements of which could be understood in terms of the logic of absence and presence: 0 and 1, all and nothing -- the foundation of binary code. The Boolean digits 0 and 1 do not designate a quantity. In the Boolean world, x times x always equals x; all and nothing meet in the formula x = xn. As everything becomes digitized, God the clockmaker is replaced by God the programmer. This book--described by its authors as a theology for the digital world -- explores meaning in a digital age of infinite replication, in a world that has dissolved into information and achieved immortality by turning into a pure sign. All and Nothing compares information that spreads without restraint to a hydra -- the mythological monster that grew two heads for every one that was cut off. Information is thousand-headed and thousand-eyed because Hydra's tracks cannot be deleted. It shows that when we sit in front of a screen, we are actually on the other side, looking at the world as an uncanny reminder of the nondigitized. It compares our personal data to our shadows and our souls, envisioning the subconscious laid out on a digital bier like a corpse. The digital world, the authors explain, summons forth fantasies of a chiliastic or apocalyptic nature. The goal of removing the representative from mathematics has now been achieved on a greater scale than Boole could have imagined.
Author: By Dorle Hellmuth
Dorle Hellmuth argues that the nature of state responses to terrorism is shaped by the particular governmental framework and process within which counterterrorism measures are decided. Using four Western democracies as case studies, Hellmuth measures effects of government structures on counterterrorism decision-making processes and outcomes. In doing so, she examines how similar or different the responses have been in four parliamentary and presidential systems, and clears up common misperceptions about domestic counterterrorism efforts on both sides of the Atlantic.Each of Hellmuth's four case studies reviews the official constitutional powers and informal relationships between executive and legislative branches, outlines decision-making processes leading to counterterrorism policies and reforms since 9/11, and summarizes how structural factors influenced those processes. By measuring and comparing structural effects, and by going beyond the common U.S. and British focus to include counterterrorism decision-making in Germany and France, Hellmuth shows that there are important similarities between those governments designed to constrain executive power (Germany and the United States) and those that facilitate executive power (France and Great Britain). Her analysis further demonstrates that in presidential systems executive and legislative branches have incentives to produce a steady stream of reforms, that presidents have more opportunities than leaders of parliamentary systems to expand their unilateral powers during times of crisis, and that choices designed to strengthen presidential positions influence the direction, nature, and scope of institutional reform.Understanding the nature, scope, and trends of national decision-making processes in Western democracies, Hellmuth contends, is imperative to identifying new mechanisms for containing transnational terrorist networks beyond national borders.
Author: Christopher Howard
Despite costing hundreds of billions of dollars and subsidizing everything from homeownership and child care to health insurance, tax expenditures (commonly known as tax loopholes) have received little attention from those who study American government. This oversight has contributed to an incomplete and misleading portrait of U.S. social policy. Here Christopher Howard analyzes the hidden welfare state created by such programs as tax deductions for home mortgage interest and employer-provided retirement pensions, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and the Targeted Jobs Tax Credit. Basing his work on the histories of these four tax expenditures, Howard highlights the distinctive characteristics of all such policies. Tax expenditures are created more routinely and quietly than traditional social programs, for instance, and over time generate unusual coalitions of support. They expand and contract without deliberate changes to individual programs. Howard helps the reader to appreciate the historic links between the hidden welfare state and U.S. tax policy, which accentuate the importance of Congress and political parties. He also focuses on the reasons why individuals, businesses, and public officials support tax expenditures. The Hidden Welfare State will appeal to anyone interested in the origins, development, and structure of the American welfare state. Students of public finance will gain new insights into the politics of taxation. And as policymakers increasingly promote tax expenditures to address social problems, the book offers some sobering lessons about how such programs work.
Author: Susan Johann
In 1989 Susan Johann was hired to photograph Christopher Durang for a magazine article about his play Naomi in Her Living Room. The playwright was known for his outrageous comedy, so Johann anticipated a session with a rather wild, young eccentric. To her surprise, the man who came to her studio was mild mannered and buttoned down. Johann found this twist captivating, and it was then that this project was born. Over the ensuing twenty-year period, she photographed more than ninety playwrights, including many winners of the Pulitzer Prize and other prestigious awards. Johann photographed Wendy Wasserstein, Anna Deavere Smith, August Wilson, and Nilo Cruz in the weeks after they won the Pulitzer. Tony Kushner sat for his portrait between the productions of part 1 and part 2 of Angels in America. Eve Ensler came to Johanns studio during the week she was previewing her famous one-woman show, The Vagina Monologues, and George C. Wolfe sat for her the morning after his play Spunk opened at the Public Theater. Each playwright was photographed in Johanns studio using the same film, a single light, and a plain backdrop, creating a portrait that captures and distills something essentialan intimate view. Her interviews explore the writers personal and creative journeys including their inspirations, roadblocks, and obsessions, which influenced their work on paper and on the stage. Even those who know Edward Albees plays intimately, for example, may be surprised by his incisive wit and inimitable voice as revealed in his interview with Johann. Beyond the book, Focus on Playwrights is also a live, multimedia presentation in which Johann narrates an inside look at creativitythe theater and photography. It has been given at such venues as the New Dramatists in New York, the Eugene ONeill Theater, the Tryon Fine Arts Center and at the Photo Expo in New York.
Author: Carol Shields
Le Carnaval du quotidien, version francaise de Dressing up for the Carnival, est le troisieme et dernier recueil de nouvelles de Carol Shields. Les nouvelles de Shields devoilent le cote ludique et limagination feconde de cette grande dame de la litterature canadienne. Une greve de meteorologistes provoque une suspension totale du climat (Acclimatement). Le gouvernement instaure une taxe sur les fenetres qui incite la population a se replier dans la noirceur en recouvrant toutes les surfaces vitreuses des demeures (Fenetres). Stop! aborde la reclusion dune reine qui est allergique a tout, meme a la marche du temps. Reportage porte sur la decouverte dun amphitheatre romain au Manitoba qui transforme leconomie locale. On rencontre egalement Titus, un berger de lAntiquite, qui invente la reverie dans la nouvelle intitulee Invention. Dune nouvelle a lautre, le lecteur est invite dans lunivers de Shields ou la vie est synonyme de spectacle et le quotidien nest ni banal ni ordinaire.
Author: Nancy J. Hirschmann
In Gender, Class, and Freedom in Modern Political Theory, Nancy Hirschmann demonstrates not merely that modern theories of freedom are susceptible to gender and class analysis but that they must be analyzed in terms of gender and class in order to be understood at all. Through rigorous close readings of major and minor works of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and Mill, Hirschmann establishes and examines the gender and class foundations of the modern understanding of freedom. Building on a social constructivist model of freedom that she developed in her award-winning book The Subject of Liberty: Toward a Feminist Theory of Freedom, she makes in her new book another original and important contribution to political and feminist theory. Despite the prominence of state of nature ideas in modern political theory, Hirschmann argues, theories of freedom actually advance a social constructivist understanding of humanity. By rereading human nature in light of this insight, Hirschmann uncovers theories of freedom that are both more historically accurate and more relevant to contemporary politics. Pigeonholing canonical theorists as proponents of either positive or negative liberty is historically inaccurate, she demonstrates, because theorists deploy both conceptions of freedom simultaneously throughout their work.
Author: Jesse Oak Taylor
The smoke-laden fog of London is one of the most vivid elements in English literature, richly suggestive and blurring boundaries between nature and society in compelling ways. In The Sky of Our Manufacture, Jesse Oak Taylor uses the many depictions of the London fog in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novel to explore the emergence of anthropogenic climate change. In the process, Taylor argues for the importance of fiction in understanding climatic shifts, environmental pollution, and ecological collapse. The London fog earned the portmanteau smog in 1905, a significant recognition of what was arguably the first instance of a climatic phenomenon manufactured by modern industry. Tracing the path to this awareness opens a critical vantage point on the Anthropocene, a new geologic age in which the transformation of humanity into a climate-changing force has not only altered our physical atmosphere but imbued it with new meanings. The book examines enduringly popular works--from the novels of Charles Dickens and George Eliot to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dracula, and the Sherlock Holmes mysteries to works by Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf--alongside newspaper cartoons, scientific writings, and meteorological technologies to reveal a fascinating relationship between our cultural climate and the sky overhead.
Author: W. Andrew Achenbaum
Drawing on a wide range of sources from social, intellectual, and political history, W. Andrew Achenbaum analyzes the changing fates and fortunes of America's elderly in the course of its history. By providing a historical perspective on society's conceptions of agingand its effects on human livesAchenbaum's work offers valuable insights for historians, sociologists, gerontologists, and others interested in the graying of America.
Author: Edited by Michael Maniates and John M. Meyer
The concept of sacrifice has been curiously unexamined in both activist and academic conversations about environmental politics, and this book is the first to confront it directly.