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This book offers a theological re-narration and interrogation of the late 18th-/early 19th-century German Bildung tradition, arguing that it yields vital resources for contemporary debates over humanism. Uncovering the roots of this tradition in Rhineland mysticism, Pietism, and earlier Christian humanisms, it articulates how Bildung ceased to mean passive formation or reformation at the hands of divine formative agency, and came to refer instead to active and autonomous human self-realization. At the same time, it argues that standard secularization narratives fail to account for the ways in which Bildung was conceived as an individual and collective task of ethical and political formation. Thinkers such as Herder, Humboldt, Goethe, Schiller and Hegel creatively transformed inherited theological understandings of humankind as created in the image of God and called to play a special role in the reditus of creation to God. With Karl Barth as critical theological interlocutor, the book exposes the complicity of Bildung tradition in the evils of bourgeois indifference, racism, colonial empire, and fascism, while arguing that it demands not repudiation but critical reappropriation, in service of a form of dialogical humanism.

On January 6, 2002 the Boston Globe published a reports on the Catholic Church cover up of sexual abuse by priests. The banner headline told a tragic story that would, in its basic plot, be repeated with disturbing regularity over the course of the next decade. As a result of these revelations many Catholics would leave the Church; many would remain staunchly faithful. Some Catholics would decide to keep their faith, but also to change the Church. Based on years of ethnographic research, Ewick and Steinberg studied one group of such Catholics—a chapter of Voice of the Faithful. In standing up to the Church, their project parallels that of many change seekers whose efforts face obstacles by the economic and cultural resources and organizational power they seek to change. In the case of the Church crisis, expectations of obedience, deference to hierarchy, and presumption of ecclesiastic immunity collided with individual conscience, liberty and democracy. Caught between their loyalty to the Church and their sense of justice, these Catholics reimagined the Church and their role in it. Over more than a decade they engaged in an ongoing process of collective identity through which they reimagined their place within the institutional order and the meaning of being faithful Catholics. Theirs is an all-too-familiar story about identities under stress and their reconfiguration as collective challengers; about institutional betrayal and the restoration of trust; and, about commitment and the meaning of justice.

Western society has never been more interested in interiority. Indeed, it seems more and more people are deliberately looking inward—toward the mind, the body, or both. Inward focuses on one increasingly popular channel for the introverted gaze: vipassana meditation, a Buddhist meditation of mindfulness that was revitalized and adapted for a secular audience. Based on a rich ethnographic account, Inward unravels the social dynamics that lie at the heart of meditation practice while simultaneously supplying a sociological framework for the study of the place of the human body in the enduring process of self-awareness. The book tracks the westward diffusion of meditation, enters the silent meditation retreats where people experience solitude in the presence of others, and follows practitioners’ interactions at work and home, as well as their relations with their significant others. It uncovers the multiple ways practitioners use the meditative focus on the inner-lining of embodied experience as a way to transcend the shocks and splits to the self that occur as they move between social relations and identities. At the close of this ethnographic journey, the reader will see how through communities, routines, and rituals, individuals turn their attention inward without stepping out of society, experience solitude without being isolated, and negotiate the tensions engendered by contemporary social life.

Archaeologists routinely interpret the archaeological record in terms of microscale processes – individual-level processes that operate within the human lifespan. In embracing this goal, archaeologists have borrowed an agenda designed by, and for, disciplines that study humans in the present-time and use data with a quality that is orders of magnitude different than archaeological data. By forcing such an agenda on the record, archaeologists are offering explanations for the human past that are merely consistent with the record, instead of being supported beyond a reasonable doubt by a smoking gun. As a result, their research suffers from an inordinate equifinality. This book addresses this problem by developing a theory of the various pathways leading to equifinality and underdetermination, that links them to various aspects of the quality of the archaeological record, and that articulates how these different aspects are shaped by various forces such as site formation processes. Using published literature, archaeological data are found to be dominated with sampling intervals and resolutions in the order of 102-3 years – too long for the study of microscale processes. The history of archaeology, archaeologists’ view of uniformitarianism, and the way they are trained to confirm hypotheses have allowed archaeologists to ignore the underdetermination problem that plagues their research. I argue that archaeologists should recalibrate their research program to the quality of the archaeological record by focusing primarily on cultural historical reconstruction and macroarchaeology, i.e. the search for macroscale patterns and processes in the global archaeological record.

This is a book about the institutions that organize interpretation and the conflict of interpretations. Through a series of four extended case studies, it explores a series of diverse but overlapping interpretive methodologies in the judicial reading of a US constitutional amendment; theatrical interpretations of a play; the judgments and emotions involved in iconoclasm and the validation of aesthetic objects by the art museum; and the simulation modeling of climate systems. In each of these domains, the book engages with the social structuring of interpretive conflict: conflict over gun control; conflict over anti-Semitism in The Merchant of Venice; conflict over the perception of demonic or affective presence in the work of art; and conflict over the validity of scientific knowledge. A long introduction develops the concept of the interpretive regime and its epistemological implications, and applies and develops the concept through each of the four intensive analyses. The book’s argument is not about the nature or the foundations of interpretation and judgment, and it is not concerned with the traditional hermeneutic question of how we should interpret correctly. Rather, it is about the frameworks that construct interpretable objects and enable and contain interpretation, and the conflict of interpretation. It is about the institutional and material machineries that sustain these frameworks and those conflicts.

For most readers, the literature of World War II is a literature of trauma: think Catch–22 or “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner.” For many, war is itself synonymous with trauma, typically understood through the myth of the trauma hero, a figure who confronts death and brings back deep truths about existence. But from the 1940s through the 60s, writers concerned with World War II explored a range of approaches attempting to make sense of industrialized warfare, collective sacrifice, race, and America’s military-commercial empire. This book uncovers the lost history of American World War II literature obscured behind the myth of the trauma hero and explores the range of efforts made by authors attempting to understand some of the very problems that plague us today: the limits of empire, the contradictions of capitalism and nationalism, political identity, and the struggle between democracy and militarism. Considering often overlooked work by major American novelists and poets alongside cartoons, films, and journalism, the book investigates the role of the hero in totalized industrial wartime, and shows how trauma took hold in the American political imagination as an ideological solution to the problems of political violence. In so doing, it substantially revises the way we read World War II literature, American war literature, and postwar American culture.

Targeted towards a general audience, this book explains the science of wetland ecology through the real-world stories of those who wade into the muck. The book is organized by generalized wetland types based on dominant vegetation, focusing on most of the major wetland types in North America with emphasis on the Midwest and Northeast United States. Freshwater marshes, wet meadows, beaver-dominated wetlands, bogs and fens, vernal pools, wet forests, and salt marshes are described. Tales of mighty efforts to protect rare turtles, restore salt marshes, and preserve sedge meadows become portals through which the reader visits major wetland types and discovers their secrets, while also learning critical ecological lessons. The reader learns that the flora, fauna and functions of all wetlands are determined by climate, hydrology, and soils. The major force that structures the ecological and evolutionary processes in wetlands is hydrology, which often creates low oxygen conditions. The book uncovers the mysteries of wetlands, including valuable “ecosystem services” they provide, such as pollutant removal, flood control, climate change mitigation, etc. The final chapter of the book is about the people who have devoted their lives to understanding and protecting wetlands. Over half of the wetlands in the lower forty-eight U.S. states have been drained, filled, or irrevocably altered, and their stories bring a deeper understanding of how humans come to understand and reverse the negative impacts of human development on wetland ecosystems.

The title of the book, The Patchwork City, refers to the fragmentation of Manila into a “patchwork” of classed spaces, particularly slums and upper- and middle-class enclaves. The book is not just about urban fragmentation, however, but about its effects on class relations and politics. It argues that the proliferation of slums and enclaves and their subsequent proximity have intensified class relations. Class boundaries clarify along the housing divide and the urban poor and middle class emerge as class actors—not as labor and capital but as squatters and “villagers” (in Manila residential subdivisions are called villages). The first part of the book traces the emergence of class identities defined by experiences of spatial discrimination and siege. The second part shows these identities to be politically consequential. They shape the political thinking of the urban poor and middle class and help account for dissensus over the populist president Joseph Estrada. The book does not just tell us something new about segregation, class relations, and democracy, it shows these things to be connected. It spells out how they are connected, and thus helps us make similar connections in other cases. It makes clear, ultimately, that class as a social structure is as indispensable to the study of Manila—and of many other Global South cities—as race is to the study of American cities. In scope and approach, The Patchwork City expands the boundaries of both urban and political sociology.

Emerging Infectious Diseases in humans, livestock and crops currently cost the world 1 trillion dollars a year in production losses and treatment costs, more than the GDP of all but 15 countries. Evolutionary analysis of this crisis, based on what is called the Stockholm Paradigm, links the potential for emerging infectious disease outbreaks directly to climate change. Highly specialized pathogens evolve in localized settings in association with one or a few hosts. Climate change and ecological disruption alters geographic distributions, bringing those pathogens into contact with susceptible but previously unexposed hosts. This has been true throughout the history of life on this planet. Human activities during the past 15,000 years, including domestication and agriculture, population growth, conflict and migration, urbanization and globalization have all increased the risk. Technological humanity now faces an existential crisis in global climate change and emerging infectious disease. The time is short, the danger is great, and we are largely unprepared. But we can change that. The very evolutionary specializations that make pathogens a threat for widespread emergence also provide insights into how we can find them before they find us. The DAMA (document - assess - monitor - act) protocol links activities from neighborhood gardens to global surveillance systems that can allow us to anticipate to mitigate emerging disease. We can lower costs to society, limiting the global impact of pathogens and slowing the expanding and accelerating crisis, while buying time for traditional efforts to medicate, vaccinate and eradicate.

This book is a historiographic exploration of the first wave of films made as a part of the consolidation of gay liberation movement politics and philosophy in the U.S. between the mid 1940s and the late 1970s. It looks at how numerous kinds of film, movie-going contexts and industrial materials (advertisements, posters, reviews) operated in relation to gay liberationist discourse. A primary consideration is how this body of 200+ films—including home movies, avant-garde and experimental films, feature length independent dramas, and hardcore porn—moved beyond representational concerns to offer complex elaborations of what it might mean to be a participant in gay life. The book weaves together an expansive range of archival materials and case studies, exploring how proto gay and gay liberation era cinema took form through discourses both dominant and countercultural, how specific places and moments fostered censorship-challenging, antinormative cinema and cinema-going practices, and how gay cinema facilitated new and emergent publics. Through four chapters, the book charts changes in film and promotion as the sociopolitical organization of male-desiring men moved from a discourse of homosexuality to one of gay liberation, showing how both were taken up as self-reflexive zones of cultural production and performance.