In earlier times, a woman knew she was pregnant when she experienced "quickening"--she felt movement within her. Today a woman relies on what she sees in a test result or a digital sonogram image to confirm her pregnancy. A private experience once mediated by women themselves has become a public experience interpreted and controlled by medical professionals. In "Disembodying Women" Barbara Duden takes a closer look at this contemporary transformation of women's experience of pregnancy. She suggests that advances in technology and parallel changes in public discourse have refrained pregnancy as a managed process, the mother as an ecosystem, and the fetus as an endangered species.

Drawing on extensive historical research, Duden traces the graphic techniques-from anatomists' drawings to woodcuts to X rays and ultrasound-used to "flay" the female body and turn it inside out. Emphasizing the iconic power of the visual within twentieth-century culture, Duden follows the process by which the pregnant woman's flesh has been peeled away to uncover scientific data. Lennart Nilsson's now famous photographs of the embryo published in "Life" magazine in the mid-1960s stand in stark contrast to representations of the invisible unborn in medieval iconography or sixteenth-century painting. Illumination has given way to illustration, ideogram to facsimile, the contemplative intuition of the body to a scientific analysis of its component parts.

New ways of seeing the body produce new ways of experiencing the body. Because technology allows us to penetrate that once secret enclosure of the womb, the image of the fetus, exposed to public gaze, has eclipsed that of woman in the public mind. Society, anxious about the health of the global environment, has focused on protecting "life" in the maternal ecosystem, in effect, pitting fetus against mother.

Duden's reading of the body lends a unique historical and philosophical perspective to contemporary debate over fetal rights, reproductive technologies, abortion, and the right to privacy. This provocative work should reinvigorate that debate by calling into question contemporary certainties and the policies and programs they serve to justify.

Synopsis: Dying Is Not Death examines from a traditional humanistic position the act of dying. The author views death as a universal experience that can and perhaps should force us to explore various technological intrusions upon it. Each chapter is an independent narrative, and some chapters tell stories of those struggling to die when confronted with the medical system's technological artifacts. Recounting different persons' experiences of death, Lee Hoinacki suggests that the medical system's conventional approaches to dying and death can distort our preparation for this most important experience. Borrowing from Jacques Ellul and Ivan Illich, Hoinacki acknowledges technology as an all-embracing system with powerful symbolic effects on the human condition and argues to a conflict between faith and technology. Indeed, with Ellul, he holds that in order to criticize technology, one must find some "place" outside the technological milieu that would act as a kind of Archimedean lever. One must somehow get to the Beyond to judge where one stands in the world. Author Biography: Lee Hoinacki is the author of 'El Camino: Walking to Santiago de Compostela' and 'Stumbling Toward Justice: Stories of Place'. He is the editor, with Carl Mitcham, of 'The Challenges of Ivan Illich'.

"I have been privileged to live in a queer time; I have witnessed the possibilities of both transcendence and horror. Beneath the melange of comely and loathsome, I found a hope hidden in contemporary existence: one can set out on a quest, a search for the truth of the whole, the good of one's life. In spite of the stumbling, the errors, the moral lapses, indeed, because of the disarray, I came to see that only a teleological odyssey makes sense, quiets the need for meaning. The end not only illumines the journey, it also permits one to live with the shame of failure."

--from the Preface

Stumbling Toward Justice is a collection of stories of one man's odyssey through the darkness of the modern world. His journey takes him through the United States, Venezuela, Mexico, Spain, Germany, and India. In each place he stumbles for ground on which he can stand, on which he can seek an honorable life and practice.

Lee Hoinacki's goal, he tells us, is to illustrate a fundamental insight: "The promise of progress is a lie, a terrible and cruel trap. My words can have only one justification: they sow doubt." He questions contemporary belief in the goods offered by mainstream or conventional practices of child rearing, education, health care, industrial farming, and offers a critique of economic growth and technological advances. Each chapter relates a story in one of these areas from Hoinacki's experience, an experience that inspires him to critical reflection.

Hoinacki's underlying assumption is that a narrative relating one's personal experience may introduce the reader to a wider and more incisive understanding than that provided by the investigative and reporting methods of the social and natural sciences. He suggests that one comes to see the physical world, the self, and others better through the language of poetry than through that of science. Stumbling Toward Justice is a fitting sequel to his earlier book, El Camino: Walking to Santiago de Compostela. In this account, Hoinacki is writing not about a single pilgrimage but about a series of journeys over the course of his life. He speaks with the greatest possible directness and authenticity, and the truths he draws are powerful because his right to speak them has been earned along the way. "I must discover and improvise my own story as I go along," he writes.

El Camino (Spanish for "the way") is a day-by-day account of a modern American pilgrim's solitary walk from St. Jean Pied de Port in France, across the Pyrenees and northern Spain, to Santiago de Compostela, believed since medieval times to be the burial place of Saint James. During thirty-two days in 1993, Lee Hoinacki trod the 500-mile route followed by Europeans for over a thousand years, stopping each evening at pilgrim hospices, some centuries-old, to write in his diary. His reflections range from the historical examination of religious sensibility to analyses of modern developments in architecture and technology, from the theological understanding of place to the mentality of mountain bike riders. Readers share in the personal religious growth of a traditional Roman Catholic who, toward the end of his life, finds himself in the welcome company of those who walked the same camino during the past centuries. The constant interplay between pertinent anecdotes from well-chosen fellow pilgrims, both ancient and modern, and Hoinacki's experiences of contemporary Spanish customs and behavior gives the book a captivating timelessness and spiritual insight rarely found in other modern chronicles of the pilgrimage to Santiago.