The latest volume of Culture and Civilization gathers contemporary exponents of critical theory, specifically those based in the Frankfurt School of social thinking. Collectively, this volume demonstrates the continuing intellectual viability of critical theory, which challenges the limits of positivism and materialism. We may question how the theoretical framework of Marxism fails to coordinate with the conditions that defined labor forces, as did Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, or deliberate on the conditions that justify the claims we make through public discourse, as did Jurgen Habermas. Or, like Axel Honneth, we may reflect on recognition theory as a means of addressing social problems. Whatever our objective, the focus of critical theory continues to be the consciousness of established "positive" interests that, without debate, may sustain injustices or conditions which the public may not have chosen to impose. Throughout the hardship of punitive dismissal and exile in the 1930s and 40s, and the shock of the New Left in the 1960s and 70s, and finally the later linguistic and pragmatic turn, the Frankfurt School has sustained the idea that people escape disaffection and alienation when their knowledge of the social and political world is dialectically mediated through creative interaction. This new volume in the Culture and Civilization series continues the tradition of critical thought.

Value, Capital and Growth was written as a mark of honor to Sir John Hicks on the occasion of his retirement as Drummond Professor of Political Economy at the University of Oxford. As the title implies, most of the essays are directed to the development of the three great topics of modern economic theory to which he contributed--Value, Capital, and Growth. More specifically, there are important papers on general equilibrium, aggregation, and index numbers-- all topics of deep interest in international economics.The volume is particularly noteworthy for a number of papers exploring hitherto unrealized implications of general equilibrium models. There are also several papers dealing with mathematical economics as they relate to trade and development, which will be of great interest to students of those fields. Few theorists possessed Hicks catholicity in economics and his interest in and appetite for all branches of applied economics, and especially comparative economic history. His interests ranged from Italian Renaissance banking to academic publishing and the export and import of scholarly works,The international eminence of the contributors and the quality of their work ensure that this volume is a fitting tribute to a great economist and that it will be studied carefully for many years. No effort was spared to present the work in a style and format worthy of the subject and of the occasion. The volume includes masterful contributions by Kenneth Arrow, Jagdish Bhagwati, Roy Harrod, Paul A. Samuelson, Robert M. Solow, and Alan A. Walters among others, and contains a full biographical and bibliographical data base on Hicks.J.N. Wolfe was professor of economics at the University of Edinburgh until his retirement.

This latest volume in the Culture & Civilization series gathers interdisciplinary voices to present a collection of essays on travel and travel narratives. The essays span a range of topics from iconic ancient travel stories to modern tourism. They discuss travel in the ancient world, modern heroic travels, the literary culture of missionary travel, the intersection of fiction and travel narratives, modern literary traditions and visions of Greece, personal identity, and expatriation. Essays also address travel memoirs, the re-imagining of worlds through travel, transformed landscapes and animals in travel narratives, diplomacy, English women travel writers, and pilgrimage and health in the medieval world. The history of travel writing takes in multiple pursuits: exploration and conquest, religious pilgrimage and missionary work, educational tourism and diplomacy, scientific and personal discovery, and natural history and oral history. As a literary genre, it has enhanced a wide range of disciplines, including geography, ethnography, anthropology, and linguistics. Moreover, twenty-first-century interests in travel and travel writing have produced a global framework that promises to expand travel's theoretical reach into the depths of the Internet, thus challenging our conventional concept of what it means to travel. The fact that travel and travel writing have a prehistory that is embedded in foundational religious texts and ancient narratives of journey, like the Odyssey and the Epic of Gilgamesh, makes both travel and travel writing fundamental and essential expressions of humanity. Travel encourages writing, particularly as epistolary and poetic chronicling. This is clearly a history and tradition that began with human communication and which has kept pace with our collective development.

Travel, Tourism and Identity addresses the psychological and social adjustments that occur when people make contact with others outside their social, cultural, or linguistic groups. Whether such contact is the result of tourism, seeking exile, or relocating abroad, the volume's contributors demonstrate how one's identity, cultural assumptions, and worldview can be brought into question. In some cases, the traveller finds that bridging the social and cultural gap between himself and the new society is fairly easy. In other cases, the traveller discovers that reorienting himself requires absorbing a new cultural history and traditions. The contributors argue that making these adjustments will surely enhance the traveller's or tourist's experience; otherwise the traveller or tourist will be at risk of becoming a marginalized figure, one disconnected from the society that surrounds him. This latest volume in the Culture & Civilization series features a collection of essays on travel and tourism. The essays cover a range of topics from historical travels to modern social identities. They discuss ancient travels, contemporary travels in Europe, Africa and sustainable eco-tourism, and the politics of tourism. Essays also address experiences of Grenada's "Spice Island" identity, and the effects of globalization and migrations on personal identity.

Adualism between man and nature has been a persistent feature of Western thought and spirituality from ancient times to the present. The opposition of mind and body, consciousness and world has tended to obscure the ways in which humans are ecologically part of interconnected systems, some of which are obvious while others operate in hidden but life-sustaining ways. Cultural Landscapes explores the physical ways in which we are intimately linked to the land and the intellectual and aesthetic connections human consciousness has with the landscape. Following the editor's introductory essay, the lead article by Jame Schaeffer, "Quest for the Common Good: A Collaborative Public Theology for a Life-Sustaining Climate," assesses the lightning rod issue of global warming in the context of a public and ecumenical theology and sets the tone for this normative assessment of our relationship with nature. Likewise, David Kenley's essay, "Three Gorges be Dammed: The Philosophical Roots of Environmentalism in China," reveals the traditional philosophical and cultural values that can sustain a vital environmentalism in the East. David Brown's historical insights into the use of the American landscape to define historical writing complement Patricia Likos-Ricci's historical treatment of nineteenth-century landscape painting and the first call to preserve wilderness in the United States. Matt Willen, "An Feochszn," and David Martinez, "What Worlds are Made of: The Lakota Sense of Place," both demonstrate how space is transformed into place through song and mythic tales. On a metaphysical note, Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopolos' essay "On the Line of the Horizon, Anxiety in de Chirico's Metaphysical Spaces," provides the reader with psychological and existential insights into the disorienting paintings of de Chirico, and Gabriel Ricci's concluding essay tours the landscape that underpins Heidegger's ontological speculations. The contributions to this volume are posited on the belief that culture, society, and human history are ultimately rooted in the natural world. This integration may explain why humanity has always looked to nature for moral and ethical guidelines. Gabriel R. Ricci is associate professor of humanities and the chair of the Department of History at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania. He is the author of Time Consciousness: The Philosophical Uses of History, published by Transaction.

This volume of Culture and Civilization focuses on cosmopolitanism, the global polity, and political ramifications of globalization. The introduction by Gabriel R. Ricci establishes context and provides an overview of the entire work. Topics include the history of globalization, climate change policy, ecological consequences of development, concepts of civilization, human rights, Eastern thought and economics, global citizenship, and travel writing. Within this collection, Carl J. Strikwerda argues that the first era of globalization in modern times was marked by global migrations patterns. Pablo Iannone's history of the Andean oil rush and its ecological consequences looks at the processes of development. Brett Bowden argues that civilization entails both progress and war. J. Baird Callicott provides a philosophical analysis of a moral theory that accommodates spatial and temporal scales of climate change, Sanjay Paul analyzes the United Nations Global Compact, and Ed Chung discusses the role of economic theory in business schools. Colin Butler reflects on E. F. Schumacher's "Buddhist Economics," while Taso Lagos relates parallel polis to the idea of global citizenship. Tony Burns examines the ways in which Aristotle, Hegel, and Kant have been interpreted. Finally, Adam Stauffer explores Charles Warren Stoddard's work South-Sea Idyls. This volume of Culture and Civilization, the first under Ricci's editorship, follows the tradition of the previous four volumes - developing critical ideas intended to produce a positive intellectual climate, one that is prepared to confront challenges and alert us to the opportunities, for people in all fields and of all faiths, of the twenty-first century.

The latest volume of Culture and Civilization gathers contemporary exponents of critical theory, specifically those based in the Frankfurt School of social thinking. Collectively, this volume demonstrates the continuing intellectual viability of critical theory, which challenges the limits of positivism and materialism. We may question how the theoretical framework of Marxism fails to coordinate with the conditions that defined labor forces, as did Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, or deliberate on the conditions that justify the claims we make through public discourse, as did Jurgen Habermas. Or, like Axel Honneth, we may reflect on recognition theory as a means of addressing social problems. Whatever our objective, the focus of critical theory continues to be the consciousness of established "positive" interests that, without debate, may sustain injustices or conditions which the public may not have chosen to impose. Throughout the hardship of punitive dismissal and exile in the 1930s and 40s, and the shock of the New Left in the 1960s and 70s, and finally the later linguistic and pragmatic turn, the Frankfurt School has sustained the idea that people escape disaffection and alienation when their knowledge of the social and political world is dialectically mediated through creative interaction. This new volume in the Culture and Civilization series continues the tradition of critical thought.

Travel, Tourism and Identity addresses the psychological and social adjustments that occur when people make contact with others outside their social, cultural, or linguistic groups. Whether such contact is the result of tourism, seeking exile, or relocating abroad, the volume's contributors demonstrate how one's identity, cultural assumptions, and worldview can be brought into question. In some cases, the traveller finds that bridging the social and cultural gap between himself and the new society is fairly easy. In other cases, the traveller discovers that reorienting himself requires absorbing a new cultural history and traditions. The contributors argue that making these adjustments will surely enhance the traveller's or tourist's experience; otherwise the traveller or tourist will be at risk of becoming a marginalized figure, one disconnected from the society that surrounds him. This latest volume in the Culture & Civilization series features a collection of essays on travel and tourism. The essays cover a range of topics from historical travels to modern social identities. They discuss ancient travels, contemporary travels in Europe, Africa and sustainable eco-tourism, and the politics of tourism. Essays also address experiences of Grenada's "Spice Island" identity, and the effects of globalization and migrations on personal identity.

Faith, War, and Violence analyzes the age-old links between religion and violence perpetrated in the name of God, and the role religion performs in politically infusing the state with romantic spiritualism. The volume examines instances of this phenomenon from ancient Rome to the modern day; it finds that religion-inspired violence is not restricted to Abrahamic faiths or to one geographic region.

The fact that symbolically charged religious violence has destructive consequences is not lost on contributors to Faith, War, and Violence. Among the subjects tackled are: the ideological and religious foundations that inspired the founders of Al-Qaeda and its role in the Arab Spring; the long history of religious conflict in Ireland known as the Troubles; Sikh extremism; and the evolution of the Christian approach to war.

As the contributors demonstrate, in Western societies, the unity of religious fervor and warmongering stretches from Constantine's incorporation of Christian symbols into Roman army flags to slogans like Gott mit uns (God is with us), which appeared on the belt buckles of German soldiers in World War I. In recent years, George W. Bush declared the war on terror a "crusade," and his speechwriter, David Frum, coined the religiously inspired term "Axis of Evil," to describe Iraq and other countries opposing the United States.

This latest volume in the Culture & Civilization series gathers interdisciplinary voices to present a collection of essays on travel and travel narratives. The essays span a range of topics from iconic ancient travel stories to modern tourism. They discuss travel in the ancient world, modern heroic travels, the literary culture of missionary travel, the intersection of fiction and travel narratives, modern literary traditions and visions of Greece, personal identity, and expatriation. Essays also address travel memoirs, the re-imagining of worlds through travel, transformed landscapes and animals in travel narratives, diplomacy, English women travel writers, and pilgrimage and health in the medieval world.

The history of travel writing takes in multiple pursuits: exploration and conquest, religious pilgrimage and missionary work, educational tourism and diplomacy, scientific and personal discovery, and natural history and oral history. As a literary genre, it has enhanced a wide range of disciplines, including geography, ethnography, anthropology, and linguistics. Moreover, twenty-first-century interests in travel and travel writing have produced a global framework that promises to expand travel's theoretical reach into the depths of the Internet, thus challenging our conventional concept of what it means to travel.

The fact that travel and travel writing have a prehistory that is embedded in foundational religious texts and ancient narratives of journey, like the Odyssey and the Epic of Gilgamesh, makes both travel and travel writing fundamental and essential expressions of humanity. Travel encourages writing, particularly as epistolary and poetic chronicling. This is clearly a history and tradition that began with human communication and which has kept pace with our collective development.

This volume of Culture and Civilization focuses on cosmopolitanism, the global polity, and political ramifications of globalization. The introduction by Gabriel R. Ricci establishes context and provides an overview of the entire work. Topics include the history of globalization, climate change policy, ecological consequences of development, concepts of civilization, human rights, Eastern thought and economics, global citizenship, and travel writing.

Within this collection, Carl J. Strikwerda argues that the first era of globalization in modern times was marked by global migrations patterns. Pablo Iannone's history of the Andean oil rush and its ecological consequences looks at the processes of development. Brett Bowden argues that civilization entails both progress and war. J. Baird Callicott provides a philosophical analysis of a moral theory that accommodates spatial and temporal scales of climate change, Sanjay Paul analyzes the United Nations Global Compact, and Ed Chung discusses the role of economic theory in business schools. Colin Butler reflects on E. F. Schumacher's "Buddhist Economics," while Taso Lagos relates parallel polis to the idea of global citizenship. Tony Burns examines the ways in which Aristotle, Hegel, and Kant have been interpreted. Finally, Adam Stauffer explores Charles Warren Stoddard's work South-Sea Idyls.

This volume of Culture and Civilization, the first under Ricci's editorship, follows the tradition of the previous four volumes--developing critical ideas intended to produce a positive intellectual climate, one that is prepared to confront challenges and alert us to the opportunities, for people in all fields and of all faiths, of the twenty-first century.

This new volume examines the relationship between religion and politics from a historical perspective. Contributors address specific moments in which political governance intersects with religious ideals in dramatic ways. These moments question the relationship between religious sentiments and political solutions and threaten to reorder the geopolitical landscape.

These essays discuss the tensions produced by secularism in an Islamic culture, the influence of Catholic theology in workers' political movements, and how Hinduism has been transformed by the political process. Also featured are essays that emphasize how civil religion coincides with constitutional order, and how the drama of religious tolerance and legitimization of the power of Christian hierarchy originated in the political power of the Roman emperor.

This volume is an interdisciplinary effort from up-and-coming and cutting-edge scholars. Contents include: "Something as Yet Unfinished," Adam Stauffer; "Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and the Necessity of Political Theology," Grant N. Havers; "Escape from Theology," Peter Grosvenor; "The Persistence of Civil Religion in Modern Canada," John von Heyking; "The Politicization of Hinduism and the Hinduization of Politics," Jeffery D. Long; "Ontology, Plurality, and Roman Catholic Social Teaching," Roland Boer; "The Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals and Church-State Conflict," Mary Sommar; "Thomas Aquinas on Providence, Prudence, and Natural Law," Christopher S. Morrissey; "The Mystical Body of Christ and French Catholic Action, 1926-1949," W. Brian Newsome; and "Secularism in Turkey," Oya Dursun-Ozkanca.

In a letter to Boccaccio, Petrarch extolled the virtue of poetry and letters for promoting an understanding of both human nature and morals. The letter was designed to console him after hearing a prediction that he was soon to die and that he ought to renounce poetry. The prophecy came from an elder renowned for his piety, but Petrarch admonished that too often dishonesty and fraud are couched in religious sentiments. Nothing, not even death, according to Petrarch, ought to divert us from literature. For Petrarch, Virgil was the source for understanding how literary studies not only promote eloquence, but enhance morals. If anything, literature dispels the fear of death. The claims of this volume is that it may be the case that the virtuous life can be achieved by those ignorant of letters but a more direct and certain route is guaranteed by a devotion to literature.

The collected works in this new volume of the Transaction series "Religion and Public Life" heeds Petrarch's advice that literature not only orients us to life's developmental stages, it can provide us with a more complete understanding of the human character while artfully advancing morals. To this end, Michelle Darnell's opening chapter entitled "A New Age of Reason" explains how existentialism is an argument for how literature can take on philosophical form, not as formal argument, but as persuasive narrative. Over the objections of even those who study Sartre, Darnell uses Sartre's "The Age of Reason" as a model and shows how his literary output was a legitimate philosophical inquiry.

In addition to the Darnell piece, the volume boasts a series of outstanding and innovative works by scholars in the field. Taken together as a whole, these authors not only illustrate the moral consequences of an original choice, but oblige the reader to explore the ramifications of such a choice in one's own life.

"Gabriel R. Ricci" is professor of humanities and the chair of the Department of History at Elizabethtown College. He is the author of "Time Consciousness: The Philosophical Uses of History" and the editor of Transaction's much-admired "Religion and Public Life" series.

Adualism between man and nature has been a persistent feature of Western thought and spirituality from ancient times to the present. The opposition of mind and body, consciousness and world has tended to obscure the ways in which humans are ecologically part of interconnected systems, some of which are obvious while others operate in hidden but life-sustaining ways. "Cultural Landscapes" explores the physical ways in which we are intimately linked to the land and the intellectual and aesthetic connections human consciousness has with the landscape. Following the editor's introductory essay, the lead article by Jame Schaeffer, "Quest for the Common Good: A Collaborative Public Theology for a Life-Sustaining Climate," assesses the lightning rod issue of global warming in the context of a public and ecumenical theology and sets the tone for this normative assessment of our relationship with nature. Likewise, David Kenley's essay, "Three Gorges be Dammed: The Philosophical Roots of Environmentalism in China," reveals the traditional philosophical and cultural values that can sustain a vital environmentalism in the East. David Brown's historical insights into the use of the American landscape to define historical writing complement Patricia Likos-Ricci's historical treatment of nineteenth-century landscape painting and the first call to preserve wilderness in the United States. Matt Willen, "An Feochn," and David Martinez, "What Worlds are Made of: The Lakota Sense of Place," both demonstrate how space is transformed into place through song and mythic tales. On a metaphysical note, Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopolos' essay "On the Line of the Horizon, Anxiety in de Chirico's Metaphysical Spaces," provides the reader with psychological and existential insights into the disorienting paintings of de Chirico, and Gabriel Ricci's concluding essay tours the landscape that underpins Heidegger's ontological speculations. The contributions to this volume are posited on the belief that culture, society, and human history are ultimately rooted in the natural world. This integration may explain why humanity has always looked to nature for moral and ethical guidelines. "Gabriel R. Ricci" is associate professor of humanities and the chair of the Department of History at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania. He is the author of "Time Consciousness: The Philosophical Uses of History," published by Transaction.

Value, Capital and Growth was written as a mark of honor to Sir John Hicks on the occasion of his retirement as Drummond Professor of Political Economy at the University of Oxford. As the title implies, most of the essays are directed to the development of the three great topics of modern economic theory to which he contributed--Value, Capital, and Growth. More specifically, there are important papers on general equilibrium, aggregation, and index numbers-- all topics of deep interest in international economics.

The volume is particularly noteworthy for a number of papers exploring hitherto unrealized implications of general equilibrium models. There are also several papers dealing with mathematical economics as they relate to trade and development, which will be of great interest to students of those fields. Few theorists possessed Hicks catholicity in economics and his interest in and appetite for all branches of applied economics, and especially comparative economic history. His interests ranged from Italian Renaissance banking to academic publishing and the export and import of scholarly works,

The international eminence of the contributors and the quality of their work ensure that this volume is a fitting tribute to a great economist and that it will be studied carefully for many years. No effort was spared to present the work in a style and format worthy of the subject and of the occasion. The volume includes masterful contributions by Kenneth Arrow, Jagdish Bhagwati, Roy Harrod, Paul A. Samuelson, Robert M. Solow, and Alan A. Walters among others, and contains a full biographical and bibliographical data base on Hicks.

J.N. Wolfe was professor of economics at the University of Edinburgh until his retirement.

Memory is not a mere repository for past events. This was Henri Bergson's fundamental claim about consciousness. In distinguishing our psychic constitution by its sense of the past, Bergson differentiates our perception of time from a process in which one instant merely replaces another. While Bergson cast his ideas in terms of the biological sciences, his analysis did not neglect the moral impulse that accompanies the condensation of history with which we continuously live. Classifying human existence in this way bears on ethical and political questions. How such questions can plague the memory of a people and the entire human community is addressed in Justice and the Politics of Memory. The contributors explore the manner in which cultural and psychic violation undermine collective identity, and destroy traditions. They raise troubling questions on how recompense and reconciliation is possible after abominable wrongs have been systematically perpetrated against a community. Faced with the burden of memory, those committed to the righting of wrongs are faced with pursuing an elusive justice that sometimes includes levying reparations and memorializing horrific historical episodes. Guided by the muse of forgiveness, restoration and a more harmonious future are likely to be rooted in the sources of spirituality that had been previously eclipsed by the conquering and homogenizing historical processes. This volume includes Heribert Adam's "Collective Reckoning with a Criminal Regime," Jeffrey Olick's "Lessons from and for Germany," James Hatley's "Levinas, Witness and Politics," James E. Young's "Germany's Holocaust Memorial Problem--and Mine," Tim Giago's "Killing the Indian to Save the Child: The Near Death of Spirituality," Jordan B. Peterson's and Maja Djikic's "Running Ahead: You Can Neither Remember Nor Forget What You Do Not Understand," Derick Wilson's "Where Religion Confuses yet Faith Gives Hope: Conflict Resolution in Northern Ireland," and Leonard Kaplan's "Justice Perfected: Cinematic Exemplifications," and an introduction, "Morality and Memory," by the editor. Gabriel R. Ricci is associate professor in the department of philosophy at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania. He is the author of Time Consciousness: The Philosophical Uses of History, published by Transaction.

Memory is not a mere repository for past events. This was Henri Bergson's fundamental claim about consciousness. In distinguishing our psychic constitution by its sense of the past, Bergson differentiates our perception of time from a process in which one instant merely replaces another. While Bergson cast his ideas in terms of the biological sciences, his analysis did not neglect the moral impulse that accompanies the condensation of history with which we continuously live. Classifying human existence in this way bears on ethical and political questions. How such questions can plague the memory of a people and the entire human community is addressed in Justice and the Politics of Memory. The contributors explore the manner in which cultural and psychic violation undermine collective identity, and destroy traditions. They raise troubling questions on how recompense and reconciliation is possible after abominable wrongs have been systematically perpetrated against a community. Faced with the burden of memory, those committed to the righting of wrongs are faced with pursuing an elusive justice that sometimes includes levying reparations and memorializing horrific historical episodes. Guided by the muse of forgiveness, restoration and a more harmonious future are likely to be rooted in the sources of spirituality that had been previously eclipsed by the conquering and homogenizing historical processes. This volume includes Heribert Adam's "Collective Reckoning with a Criminal Regime," Jeffrey Olick's "Lessons from and for Germany," James Hatley's "Levinas, Witness and Politics," James E. Young's "Germany's Holocaust Memorial Problem--and Mine," Tim Giago's "Killing the Indian to Save the Child: The Near Death of Spirituality," Jordan B. Peterson's and Maja Djikic's "Running Ahead: You Can Neither Remember Nor Forget What You Do Not Understand," Derick Wilson's "Where Religion Confuses yet Faith Gives Hope: Conflict Resolution in Northern Ireland," and Leonard Kaplan's "Justice Perfected: Cinematic Exemplifications," and an introduction, "Morality and Memory," by the editor.

There is growing academic interest in addressing the relationship of religion and science. There are also very generous funding sources that encourage scientists to demonstrate the reality of purpose in the world. Still, there are organizations offering support to community groups dedicated to discussing religion and science. Contributors explore this development in Faith in Science. The intellectual initiatives analyzed here seem far removed from the deep religious and cultural divisions that dominate the contemporary geopolitical landscape. This emerging industry, however, originates in a cultural debate that set the evolutionary view of Nature against revelation's conception of Nature as the fulfillment of God's creation. The two worldviews are hopelessly mismatched, although scientific creationism purports to have uncovered scriptural evidence that invites another look. Along the way, the imposition of theological themes onto the geological record became a tendency for many naturalists. Peter Medawar's scathing review of Teilhard de Chardin's The Phenomenon of Man in 1961 remains as a warning for those who mix Darwinian orthodoxy and theological parlance. The challenge, Medawar would have us believe, is not to abandon the exacting methods and logic of science in favor of a poetic dream of how consciousness is a manifestation of energy. But does this mean that science and religion are only methodologically demarcated? Must we insist on the traditional boundaries instituted by scientific conventions and religious beliefs? From various historical, religious, and scientific vantage points, contributors to this volume, who include Guy Consolmagno, Donald Kraybill, David Ray Griffin, Gerald L. Schroeder, Robert Pollack, Robert Pennock, Carol Wayne Wright, Bill Durbin, Kathleen Duffy, and Anthony Matteo, take up these challenges.

This is the thirty-first volume in Religion and Public Life, formerly This World, a series on religion and public affairs. This ongoing series seeks to provide a wide-ranging forum for differing views on religious and ethical considerations. The essays grouped together in Culture and Consumption discuss the phenomenon of consumption, an identifiable and pervasive feature of American culture that distinguishes it from other national cultures. The lead article provides an insight into the long-standing pattern of consumption that has been progressively elevated into social policy in America. This is a balanced analysis of the history of the consumption cultural ethos beginning with the undermining of the Native American Culture and ending with Wilsonian Liberal-Internationalism and the demise of the moral authority of organized labor. This commercialization of culture has always competed with the funding vision of a dispassionate social order in which custom, deferential politics, and continuation of traditional hierarchal values would be the constitutional agenda. Another contributor argues that the emergence of the democratic-consumer state in America was anticipated in de Tocqueville's observation that "in democracies nothing has brighter luster than commercea." Other contributor essays treat issues such as the New Class and the consumer state; technology's triumph at the expense of the social and natural worlds; and argue against the materialist perspective in addiction. Culture and Consumption includes the following major contributions: "The Dialectic of Consumption: Materialism and Social Control" by David Brown; "Religion, Social Science and the Ironies of Parasitic Modernity" by Guy Alchon; The Dilemma of Hypermodernity" by Mark Wegierski; "Toward an Epistemology of Addiction" by Leonard Kaplan and Vince Rinella. Also included are book reviews by Martha Davis and Conrad Kanagy. In a concluding essay, Gabriel Ricci reviews Jerome Bruner's The Culture of Education. Culture and Consumption is part of an annual survey of religion and public life that provides relevant information and ideas about significant issues of the day.

Faith, War, and Violence analyzes the age-old links between religion and violence perpetrated in the name of God, and the role religion performs in politically infusing the state with romantic spiritualism. The volume examines instances of this phenomenon from ancient Rome to the modern day; it finds that religion-inspired violence is not restricted to Abrahamic faiths or to one geographic region. The fact that symbolically charged religious violence has destructive consequences is not lost on contributors to Faith, War, and Violence. Among the subjects tackled are: the ideological and religious foundations that inspired the founders of Al-Qaeda and its role in the Arab Spring; the long history of religious conflict in Ireland known as the Troubles; Sikh extremism; and the evolution of the Christian approach to war. As the contributors demonstrate, in Western societies, the unity of religious fervor and warmongering stretches from Constantine's incorporation of Christian symbols into Roman army flags to slogans like Gott mit uns (God is with us), which appeared on the belt buckles of German soldiers in World War I. In recent years, George W. Bush declared the war on terror a "crusade," and his speechwriter, David Frum, coined the religiously inspired term "Axis of Evil," to describe Iraq and other countries opposing the United States.

Traditional metaphysics is hostile to the world of the senses. From Plato to Kant, philosophers have demanded that the sensuous and corporeal aspects of existence be circumscribed by rational conditions and properties. Without these, the sensuous is unintelligible. This elevation of the ability to reason as quintessentially human has obscured efforts to acknowledge the pivotal role the historical imagination has in grounding experience. In The Philosophical Uses of History, Gabriel Ricci explores the opposite tendency, from Vico to Heidegger, to emphasize temporal and historical foundations of human consciousness.Ricci's goal is to demonstrate the reciprocity of history and philosophy. He challenges the epistemological construction of the subject-object relationship and the facile dualism originating from Descartes. Arguing that consciousness must be defined in time and space, he shows how Vico's philosophy of humanity, with its historical epistemology, resurrects the practical implications of ancient philosophy's demand that knowledge and truth derive from a productive process. Ricci analyzes Heidegger's philosophy as the modern embodiment of the temporality of consciousness, and he demonstrates the origins of his particular interpretation of human existence in Rickert's and Windelband's delineation of the historical and natural sciences.Ricci links their influence to Heidegger's dissent over Ranke's objectivist methodology, which ended with Heiddegger's emphasis of the historical character of human existence. Finally, the author argues for the compatibility of Heidegger's early existential analytic and his later investigation of poetry and his critique of the technological idiom which had colonized philosophy. In doing so, Ricci highlights the metaphoric and figurative predisposition of mind as synthetic functions of historical consciousness.In offering a thoroughly temporal interpretation of mind, Ricci illuminates the relationship between philosophy and history, poetry, the cognitive sciences, and the natural sciences. This work will be of interest to philosophers, literary scholars, and cultural historians.

The present work is a study in the history of an enduring idea that defines the inner life of the mind and also supplied a substratum for the twentieth-century literary imagination and substance for philosophical thinking, producing a unique alliance between philosophy and literature. This special union was forged by a new holistic conception of time which supplemented, and even supplanted, the conventional sense of chronological time. This temporal turn animated the existential insights of Husserl, Heidegger, and Bergson, but it was grounded in nineteenth-century advances in the biological sciences, the hegemony of Hegelianism, and even stretched back to Augustine's early meditation on time in Book XI of his Confessions. In linking together a set of thinkers who addressed this form of temporal consciousness, Gabriel R. Ricci illuminates a common intellectual preoccupation from the vantage point of a concept. The authors do not together assemble the thought; it is the thought that produced a collective voice. This voice appears in the episodes outlined in each chapter, and they are framed by an introduction, which explores Joseph Frank's insights into the new spatial forms in literature, and an epilogue, which resurrects J.W. Dunne's peculiar dream experiments and theory of precognition. Ricci employs Frank's seminal essay to draw comparisons between literature's adaptation of the new time sense and philosophy's expression of the new compatibility between space and time. Dunne's theory serves to demonstrate the continuity between literary form and philosophical speculation.

In a letter to Boccaccio, Petrarch extolled the virtue of poetry and letters for promoting an understanding of both human nature and morals. The letter was designed to console him after hearing a prediction that he was soon to die and that he ought to renounce poetry. The prophecy came from an elder renowned for his piety, but Petrarch admonished that too often dishonesty and fraud are couched in religious sentiments. Nothing, not even death, according to Petrarch, ought to divert us from literature. For Petrarch, Virgil was the source for understanding how literary studies not only promote eloquence, but enhance morals. If anything, literature dispels the fear of death. The claims of this volume is that it may be the case that the virtuous life can be achieved by those ignorant of letters but a more direct and certain route is guaranteed by a devotion to literature. The collected works in this new volume of the Transaction series Religion and Public Life heeds Petrarch's advice that literature not only orients us to life's developmental stages, it can provide us with a more complete understanding of the human character while artfully advancing morals. To this end, Michelle Darnell's opening chapter entitled "A New Age of Reason" explains how existentialism is an argument for how literature can take on philosophical form, not as formal argument, but as persuasive narrative. Over the objections of even those who study Sartre, Darnell uses Sartre's The Age of Reason as a model and shows how his literary output was a legitimate philosophical inquiry. In addition to the Darnell piece, the volume boasts a series of outstanding and innovative works by scholars in the field. Taken together as a whole, these authors not only illustrate the moral consequences of an original choice, but oblige the reader to explore the ramifications of such a choice in one's own life.

This new volume examines the relationship between religion and politics from a historical perspective. Contributors address specific moments in which political governance intersects with religious ideals in dramatic ways. These moments question the relationship between religious sentiments and political solutions and threaten to reorder the geopolitical landscape. These essays discuss the tensions produced by secularism in an Islamic culture, the influence of Catholic theology in workers' political movements, and how Hinduism has been transformed by the political process. Also featured are essays that emphasize how civil religion coincides with constitutional order, and how the drama of religious tolerance and legitimization of the power of Christian hierarchy originated in the political power of the Roman emperor. This volume is an interdisciplinary effort from up-and-coming and cutting-edge scholars. Contents include: "Something as Yet Unfinished," Adam Stauffer; "Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and the Necessity of Political Theology," Grant N. Havers; "Escape from Theology," Peter Grosvenor; "The Persistence of Civil Religion in Modern Canada," John von Heyking; "The Politicization of Hinduism and the Hinduization of Politics," Jeffery D. Long; "Ontology, Plurality, and Roman Catholic Social Teaching," Roland Boer; "The Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals and Church-State Conflict," Mary Sommar; "Thomas Aquinas on Providence, Prudence, and Natural Law," Christopher S. Morrissey; "The Mystical Body of Christ and French Catholic Action, 1926-1949," W. Brian Newsome; and "Secularism in Turkey," Oya Dursun-Ozkanca.

The present work is a study in the history of an enduring idea that defines the inner life of the mind and also supplied a substratum for the twentieth-century literary imagination and substance for philosophical thinking, producing a unique alliance between philosophy and literature. This special union was forged by a new holistic conception of time which supplemented, and even supplanted, the conventional sense of chronological time. This temporal turn animated the existential insights of Husserl, Heidegger, and Bergson, but it was grounded in nineteenth-century advances in the biological sciences, the hegemony of Hegelianism, and even stretched back to Augustine's early meditation on time in Book XI of his Confessions.

In linking together a set of thinkers who addressed this form of temporal consciousness, Gabriel R. Ricci illuminates a common intellectual preoccupation from the vantage point of a concept. The authors do not together assemble the thought; it is the thought that produced a collective voice. This voice appears in the episodes outlined in each chapter, and they are framed by an introduction, which explores Joseph Frank's insights into the new spatial forms in literature, and an epilogue, which resurrects J.W. Dunne's peculiar dream experiments and theory of precognition. Ricci employs Frank's seminal essay to draw comparisons between literature's adaptation of the new time sense and philosophy's expression of the new compatibility between space and time. Dunne's theory serves to demonstrate the continuity between literary form and philosophical speculation.