bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Mythologies Without End
Authors: Slater Jerome
Published: November 2020

Every nation has narratives or stories it tells itself about its history but which typically contain factually false or misleading mythologies that often result in devastating consequences for itself and for others. In the case of Israel and its indispensable ally, the United States, the central mythology is “the Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity,” as the Israeli diplomat Abba Eban famously said in a 1973 statement that has been widely quoted ever since. However, the historical truth is very nearly the converse: it is Israel and the United States that have repeatedly lost or deliberately dismissed many opportunities to reach fair compromise settlements of the Arab-Israeli and Israeli-Palestinian conflicts. The book reexamines the entire history of the conflict from its onset at the end of World War I through today. Part I begins with a reconsideration of Zionism and then examines the origins and early years of the Arab-Israeli state conflict. One chapter is devoted to the question of what accounts for the nearly unconditional US support of Israel throughout the entire conflict. Part II focuses on war and peace in the Arab-Israeli state conflict from 1948 through today, arguing that all the major wars—in 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973—could and should have been avoided. This section also includes an examination of the Cold War and its impact on the Arab-Israeli conflict. Part III covers the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from 1917 through today, and examines the prospects for a two-state or other settlement of the conflict.
Under the Puppet Ruler
Authors: Worthington Ian
Published: November 2020

This chapter discusses Athens in the early Hellenistic period, especially when subject to the rule of Demetrius of Phalerum. Alexander’s death also sparked the Wars of the Successors as his senior staff carved up his empire among themselves, but then went to war for even more territory. Athens was involved in these wars, especially when Antipater’s son Cassander won control of Greece, and established a puppet ruler in Athens by name of Demetrius of Phalerum. For ten years Athens was subject to Demetrius’ absolute rule. He introduced restrictive legislation including sumptuary laws, but he did allow Athenian culture, especially drama and philosophy, to flourish, as he himself was an intellectual. The Wars of the Successors eventually led to the execution of the surviving members of the Argead dynasty (Alexander the Great’s half-brother Philip III and Alexander’s son Alexander IV), and eventually also to the toppling of Demetrius of Phalerum by Demetrius Poliorcetes. But Athens was simply exchanging one Macedonian master for another.
Testing Macedonia
Authors: Worthington Ian
Published: November 2020

If the Athenians thought they were free after the departure and death of Poliorcetes, they were mistaken, although their statue to the patriot and Classical orator Demosthenes might indicate they did not understand their reality. They continued their amicable relations with other Greek cities and with Hellenistic kings such as the Ptolemis, but still faced economic woes. Then in the 270s a major invasion of Greece by the Galatians was repelled by Antigonus Gonatas, who went on to claim the Macedonian throne. At first relations between Gonatas and Athens were amicable, but then the city went to war against him in the Chremonidean War. It ended in Athens’ total defeat and Gonatas’ punitive measures against the city. Athens was again firmly under Macedonian control.
Augustus and Athens
Authors: Worthington Ian
Published: November 2020

Chapter 12 moves to so-called era of Roman Athens, though this term can also be applied to the city from a century earlier. Augustus and Athens had a rocky relationship at the outset, with the city angering the emperor and having to work to ingratiate itself. Augustus then showed a tolerant attitude toward the city, giving it money to complete the Roman Agora, and Athens was also able to draw on wealthy individuals to fund other projects, with Agrippa also building an odeum in the Agora. Roman visitors continued traveling and studying in the city. After an economic slump there was a rise in prosperity, evidenced by a rise in exports and the flourishing of the port of Piraeus. Culture continued, as did Romans availing themselves of it. But a clear sign of Roman mastery was the introduction of the imperial cult into the city, and the building of a temple to the goddess Roma and Augustus on the Acropolis, the home of the patron deity Athena. One wealthy patron was Julius Nicanor, who acted as some sort of liaison between Athens and Augustus.
Flexible Bodies
Authors: Kedhar Anusha
Published: November 2020

Flexible Bodies charts the emergence of British South Asian dance as a distinctive dance genre. Analyzing dance works, dance films, rehearsals, workshops, and touring alongside immigration policy, arts funding initiatives, citizenship discourse, and global economic conditions, author Anusha Kedhar traces shifts in British South Asian dance from 1990s Cool Britannia multiculturalism to fractious race relations in the wake of the July 7, 2005, terrorist attacks to economic fallout from the 2008 global financial crisis, and, finally, to anti-immigrant rhetoric leading up to the Brexit referendum in 2016. Drawing on more than a decade of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with dancers, in-depth choreographic analysis of major dance works, and the author’s own lived experiences as a professional dancer in London, Flexible Bodies tells the story of British South Asian dancers and the creative ways in which they negotiate the demands of neoliberal, multicultural dance markets through an array of flexible bodily practices, including agility, versatility, mobility, speed, and risk-taking. Attending to pain, injury, and other restrictions on movement, it also reveals the bodily limits of flexibility. Theorizing flexibility as material and metaphor, the book argues that flexibility is both a tool of labor exploitation and a bodily tactic that British South Asian dancers exploit to navigate volatile economic and political conditions. With its unique focus on the everyday aspects of dancing and dance-making Flexible Bodies honors the lives and labor of dancers and their contributions to a distinct and dynamic sector of British dance.
Assimilation
Authors: Kedhar Anusha
Published: November 2020

Chapter 2 theorizes the flexibility of, specifically, male British South Asian dancers in relation to debates about assimilation and citizenship that (re-)emerged in the wake of the July 7, 2005, terrorist attacks in London. In neoliberalism, assimilation is required to participate in globalized capitalist markets; otherness must either be integrated or eliminated. The 7/7 bombings, carried out by four British citizens, called into question the allegiance of Britain’s South Asian/Muslim communities, which led to hotly contested debates about the perceived failures of multiculturalism to assimilate Britain’s “Others.” The bombings ossified stereotypes of the British Asian/Muslim man as “rigid” and “inflexible” (in beliefs and ideologies), unable or unwilling to assimilate. Analyzing works by three choreographers, zero degrees (2005) and Abide with Me (2012) by Akram Khan, Faultline (2007) by Shobana Jeyasingh, and Quick! (2006) by Nina Rajarani, this chapter examines how British South Asian choreographers countered popular (mis)conceptions of British Asian/Muslim men as rigid and inflexible in the post-7/7 national imaginary by staging more fluid, flexible, and, thus, more assimilable British Asian masculinities. It also foregrounds the onstage and offstage experiences of some of the male dancers in these works and how they navigated increased surveillance, racism, and restrictions on movement in the aftermath of the bombings.
Mobility
Authors: Kedhar Anusha
Published: November 2020

Chapter 3 theorizes the flexibility of migrant South Asian dancers in Britain in relation to neoliberal demands for the transnational mobility of labor, on the one hand, and restrictive British immigration and citizenship policies, on the other. The artistic contributions of migrant South Asian dancers have been integral to the aesthetic development of British South Asian dance but have gone largely unacknowledged. This chapter tracks the various legal, economic, cultural, and political factors that both facilitated and hindered the mobility of transnational dance labor from India and the Indian diaspora to Britain between the 1990s and 2010s. In particular, it examines how immigration policies have choreographed the movement of transnational dance labor across borders, both speeding it up and slowing it down and, sometimes, stopping it altogether. Keeping the lives of transnational South Asian dancers and their experiences of migration at the forefront, the chapter takes an intimate look at how dancers negotiated volatile economic and political conditions. It argues that transnational dancers present a unique case in the study of flexibility insofar as they are hyperflexible: versatile (across dance forms), but also agile (across borders) and adaptable (across cultures). Focusing on these three aspects of flexibility, the chapter explores how hyperflexibility was demanded of and cultivated by migrant dancers to various ends and effects, and with varying degrees of stretch-ability.
Risk
Authors: Kedhar Anusha
Published: November 2020

Chapter 4 theorizes flexibility in relation to neoliberal discourses of risk. The beginnings of neoliberalism in the 1970s are marked by a significant shift in capital’s relationship to risk, from risk-aversion to risk-seeking. The emergence of British South Asian dance in the 1980s roughly aligns with this late twentieth-century rise in risk-taking. This chapter examines how neoliberal demands for risk echo and intersect with British multiculturalism’s expectations on South Asian dancers to display virtuosity, speed, and versatility. Together, they create conditions of physical pain and economic precarity for racialized dancing bodies. Dancers’ bodies, however, are not merely inscribed by neoliberalism and multiculturalism. South Asian dancers use choreographic tools and other bodily tactics to gain creative control over their bodily labor and continue to circulate within a competitive British dance economy in ways that are safe and pleasurable. Drawing on Talal Asad’s notion of “pain as action,” this chapter demonstrates how British South Asian dancers intentionally and strategically respond to demands for risk-taking and flexibility through small, seemingly insignificant corporeal tactics, such as enduring pain, modifying choreographic tasks, and practicing care of self and care of others.
Against Egalitarianism
Authors: Vallier Kevin
Published: November 2020

Highly redistributive taxation and left-wing regimes like property-owning democracy and liberal socialism cannot create trust for the right reasons. They are either likely to reduce social and political trust or cannot be publicly justified, or both. For example, property-owning democracy and liberal socialism are likely to sacrifice economic growth, violating the principle of sustainable improvements, and undermining the economic bases for political trust in particular. However, liberal societies can probably increase trust for the right reasons by adopting coercion-reducing policies aimed at compressing economic inequalities, such as reducing local control over residential zoning. The market may also be restricted to protect workers from workplace coercion. This chapter addresses important work on the matter from John Rawls, Thomas Piketty, and Martin Gilens.
Epilogue
Authors: Vallier Kevin
Published: November 2020

The epilogue reviews the argument of the book and explores how to restore trust and contain polarization. We can interrupt the negative feedback loop between distrust and partisan divergence through policies firmly within the liberal democratic toolkit. Freedom of association, markets, the welfare state, democratic governance, and elections have all been shown to promote trust for the right reasons. The epilogue also argues against right-wing and left-wing populism on the grounds that departures from liberalism are likely to make matters worse; the trust-generating properties of liberal institutions may be lost in a transition to a more populist regime, be it left-wing or right-wing.
The Task
Authors: Olson Kristi A.
Published: November 2020

Chapter 1 introduces the main question of the book: What is a fair income distribution? The empirical literature seems to assume that equal income would be fair. Consider, for example, the Gini coefficient. The reason researchers report the deviation from equality is presumably because they take equal income to have normative significance. Yet the equal income answer faces two objections. First, equal income is likely to be inefficient. This book sets aside efficiency concerns as a downstream consideration. The second objection—pointed out by both leftist political philosopher G. A. Cohen and conservative economist Milton Friedman—is that equal income is unfair to the hardworking. The question that needs answering, then, is: If equal income is unfair, what distribution of income would be fair?
Van Parijs’ Minimal Undominated Diversity
Authors: Olson Kristi A.
Published: November 2020

Chapter 6 examines Philippe Van Parijs’ requirement of minimal undominated diversity. According to the requirement of minimal undominated diversity, if one person’s bundle dominates another person’s bundle—that is, if everyone prefers the first bundle to the second—then goods must be redistributed to the dominated bundle. Yet once the bundle is no longer dominated—that is, once at least one individual weakly prefers the previously dominated bundle—redistribution must end. The solidarity solution, in contrast, would continue to redistribute goods until all bundles could be simultaneously chosen. Minimal undominated diversity thus permits less redistribution. Nonetheless, the bundles to which Van Parijs applies minimal undominated diversity are different from those to which the solidarity applies. Undominated diversity applies to comprehensive endowments; the solidarity solution, in contrast, applies to labor-income bundles. Chapter 6 rejects each of Van Parijs’ four justifications for minimal undominated diversity as applied to labor-income bundles.
Fair Pay and the Gender Wage Gap*
Authors: Olson Kristi A.
Published: November 2020

Chapter 8 uses the solidarity solution to address the gender wage gap. The chapter first lays to rest a common conservative argument by showing that, even if the gender wage gap were entirely attributable to individual choice, choice alone does not justify inequalities. The chapter then speculates on ways in which the state’s choice of regulatory regime could potentially bias wages in favor of men, resulting in an unfair option set. Finally, after explaining why the solidarity solution does not justify the existing gender wage gap, the chapter concludes by arguing that proponents of pay equity or comparable worth are in fact implicitly relying on the solidarity solution—or something very much like it.
Freedom and Taxation
Authors: Olson Kristi A.
Published: November 2020

Chapter 9 invokes the solidarity solution to explain why some taxes are morally permissible while others are not. Take, for example, the endowment tax. Unlike the traditional earnings tax based on the individual’s actual income, the endowment tax is based on the individual’s maximum potential income. Although, intuitively, the endowment tax impermissibly interferes with freedom of occupational choice, it is difficult to explain why it impermissibly interferes while other taxes do not. After showing that the well-known attempts of John Rawls, Liam Murphy, and Thomas Nagel fail, chapter 9 puts forward a new solution: the endowment tax is impermissible not because it forecloses more options but rather because it forecloses options to which individuals have a stronger moral claim. The solidarity solution identifies these options.
Tracing Windblown Seeds
Authors: Katsanis Sara H.
Published: November 2020

This chapter explores how genetic information supersedes other technologies as a biometric for migrants lacking proof of identity. It also examines the inherent privacy and societal issues of using genetic evidence as a substitute for human identity. As concerns about border security increase around the world, policymakers are turning to genetic information as a biometric for tracing individuals entering the country, processing refugee claims, and screening for human trafficking. Since many migrants travel without proof of identity, genetic information is useful for establishing identity, particularly for verifying family relationships. The United States has had the authority to collect DNA of immigrant detainees for the criminal database since 2009, in large part to detect repeat border crossers and immigrants who commit crimes in the United States. In addition, recent efforts to thwart immigration fraud and human trafficking include use of DNA relationship testing to verify claims. In the future, immigration courts might consider DNA testing for ancestral origin to verify refugees’ ethnicity claims—an approach that might help a stateless person seeking refuge to provide evidence of country of origin. Each of these expanded uses of genetic information beyond traditional criminal investigations could result in stigmatization of individuals or entire populations if applied broadly. Moreover, the geneticization of families and individuals undermines the social constructs that underlie human relations and self-identity and could lead to discrimination against nontraditional families or revelation of unintentional family secrets that could endanger individuals.
Preventing a Third Death
Authors: Katsanis Sara H. , Spradley Katherine M.
Published: November 2020

This chapter examines the challenges of identification of migrant remains at the US-Mexico border, highlighting the logistical and ethical considerations for cross-border identifications. Each year hundreds of human remains are found along the southern US border. Migrants fleeing violence and poverty are increasingly forced by US immigration policy to cross the border through treacherous terrain, risking death from exposure or violence. The infrastructure for DNA identification developed for missing persons is inadequate for migrant families, who might be residing in another country or living in the United States undocumented. Fear of US immigration and law enforcement authorities complicates the normal processes for reporting missing migrant cases and thereby limits family reference DNA collection. Many remains are buried without identification, some are buried without collection of DNA, some are buried without a marker to enable future identification, and some are cremated. Both governmental and nongovernmental efforts to collect DNA from relatives of missing migrants are further complicated by questions of sovereignty, privacy, and national security. International missing persons databases are underdeveloped and disconnected, and the informed consent process for relatives of the missing is inadequate for migrant families. The challenges of identification at the US-Mexico border underscore the systemic biases that exclude migrant populations from access to law enforcement processes that would enable identification of their family members and repatriation of their remains for respect and burial. Addressing these challenges at the US-Mexico border can inform cross-border policies for other migrant populations around the world.
Admissibility of DNA Evidence in Court
Authors: Roth Andrea
Published: November 2020

Chapter 13 offers an overview of the legal rules governing the admissibility of forensic DNA typing results in US court cases. It begins with the basic evidentiary and constitutional rules governing admissibility of DNA typing results, including the Frye and Daubert tests for reliability of expert methods, confrontation clause and hearsay limitations on offering a DNA interpretation based in part on the analysis of a nontestifying expert, and Fourth Amendment case law related to DNA results stemming from nonconsensual DNA sampling from a criminal suspect. It then explores the status of reliability challenges to various forms of DNA evidence, setting forth both areas of consensus, in which the reliability of DNA typing results will not likely be disputed, and areas of controversy. Finally, it explores the status of constitutional challenges to DNA evidence under the confrontation clause and Fourth Amendment and concludes with a view of DNA admissibility issues related to emerging issues such as phenotyping, next generation sequencing, and Rapid DNA.
Introduction
Authors: Epstein Charlotte
Published: November 2020

This introduction discusses the wide spectrum of approaches concerned with analysing processes of social construction, broadly known as ‘constructivism’. It is interested not merely in ‘the construction of’, but properly in the ‘constitution’ of the modern political, and in how this implicates a specific form of creative political agency. The variant of radical constructivism developed in this book is termed ‘constitutive constructivism’. The chapter then elucidates the book’s recourse to the body as an optic and situates it in relation to other somatic enquiries. It explains the different ways in which the body features in the book. The book considers the body as a catalytic object of modern science, as the privileged organ of this new knowledge, and as a crucial historical vehicle for the work of naturalisation. It also distinguishes between ‘the body’ in the singular and multiple ‘bodies’. The chapter shows where the body-as-optic maps onto feminist theories of embodiment and the works of Michel Foucault. Finally, it presents three key themes running throughout the book that help circumscribe the specific juncture of the scientific and the political the book explores. These are, first, the passage from a medieval-Aristotelian notion of ‘place’ to the modern concept of ‘space’, via the new understanding of ‘motion’; second, the early modern scientific problematization of difference and identity and how it played political questions of hierarchy and equality; third, the varieties of forms of reason that were taking shape in the midst of the scientific revolution, and their relations to both the early modern practice of ‘critique’ and to the question of authority.
Jacques Maritain and Human Rights
Authors: Vatter Miguel
Published: November 2020

This chapter discusses the connection between Christian political theology and human rights in the thought of Jacques Maritain. It argues that Maritain understood universal human rights as part and parcel of a new ‘democratic’ Christian political theology centred on the struggle between multitude and empire and on the rejection of state sovereignty. The chapter shows that Maritain’s philosophical foundation of the universality of human rights is not based on a ‘metaphysics’ of the human person as much as it offers a biopolitical account of rights and adopts ideas of governmentality that parallel emerging neoliberal critiques of sovereignty. It ends with a discussion of Maritain’s turn to human rights in the context of his own struggle with anti-Semitism and establishes a comparison with Alain Badiou’s adoption of Paul’s political theology as the foundational discourse of egalitarian universalism.
Introduction
Authors: Stangl Rebecca
Published: November 2020

This introduction contrasts two different pictures of the relationship of virtue to human imperfection. On the first sort of picture, the only real virtue is perfect virtue, and the only right actions are perfectly virtuous ones. Any failure to meet the exacting standards of perfect virtue will amount to vice, and any less than perfectly virtuous actions will be wrong. On the second sort of picture, there can be actions that are right even if they are not maximally virtuous and there can be people who are profoundly virtuous even if they are not perfect. This book urges the attractions of a virtue ethics committed to the second sort of picture. Doing so allows it to make two major innovations: First, it will construct and defend neo-Aristotelian accounts of supererogation and suberogation. Second it will show that self-improvement itself can be morally excellent, and that the disposition to seek and engage in it, where appropriate, can itself be a virtue. The introduction lays out the plan of the book, previewing the argument for these claims.
Neo-Aristotelian Suberogation
Authors: Stangl Rebecca
Published: November 2020

This chapter develops and defends the following account of neo-Aristotelian suberogation: an action is suberogatory iff it fails to hit the target of a relevant virtue, but is not overall vicious. This account implies that all true instances of suberogation are only trivially bad. Thus, pace influential defenders of suberogation, there are no instances of truly villainous suberogation. This chapter argues that this implication counts in favor of the account insofar as the supposed cases of villainous suberogation offered by those who defend its existence are, unlike those offered in defense of trivial suberogation, wholly unconvincing. So the account correctly identifies just those actions that are suberogatory as suberogatory, and gives a plausible explanation of their suberogatory status.
On the Very Idea of a Virtue of Self-Cultivation
Authors: Stangl Rebecca
Published: November 2020

This chapter begins with the observation that there is something about a virtue of self-cultivation that is, in Christine Swanton’s apt phrase, “seemingly paradoxical.” This seeming paradox calls for an explanation, and in this chapter, I take on this explanatory task. That is, I show as clearly as possible why it might seem paradoxical, or even impossible, to recognize a virtue concerned with self-improvement, and I argue that, nonetheless, this seeming is a mere seeming. The key issue for the neo-Aristotelian, I argue, is whether a disposition to self-cultivation can be an excellence for human beings. And, contrary to appearances, it can. Thus, there can be such a virtue after all.
Introduction
Authors: Allen Barry
Published: November 2020

The work begins with a look at the tabletop experiment Richard Feynman performed before a presidential commission investigating the space shuttle Challenger disaster. The case introduces the work’s leading questions—what do good experiments accomplish? What is the relation between experiments and experience, or between experience and knowledge? A distinction between two versions of empiricism plays a thematic role in the work. One version is “problematic,” another “theorematic,” using terms from Euclid for a difference in what these empiricisms expect from experience. For theorematic empiricism experience is ultimate evidence, its value probative (proof, demonstration, verification). Problematic empiricism eschews the idea of ultimate evidence, and from experience expects superior performance and a successful solution to a problem of knowledge. It is this problematic empiricism that is associated with scientific experimentation (the argument of Part I), as well as with the so-called radical empiricists (the argument of Part II).
Anti-contiguity
Authors: Kandybowicz Jason
Published: November 2020

This book develops a theory of wh- prosody according to which wh- expressions must avoid forming prosodic constituents with overt complementizers at the level of Intonational Phrase. The theory is inspired by Richards’s (2010, 2016) Contiguity Theory and is based empirically on asymmetries in the distribution of wh- items in five West African languages: Krachi (Kwa: Ghana), Bono (Kwa: Ghana), Wasa (Kwa: Ghana), Asante Twi (Kwa: Ghana), and Nupe (Benue-Congo: Nigeria). The observations and analyses stem from original fieldwork on all five languages and represent some of the first prosodic descriptions of the languages. The theory is shown to successfully derive a number of famous and less well-known asymmetries in wh- in-situ distribution in a variety of languages unrelated to those the theory was originally designed to analyze. Against the backdrop of data from eighteen languages, the theory is parameterized to account for wh- item distribution across typologically diverse languages.
Arguments over Ends
Authors: Rushing Sara
Published: November 2020

In the United States, vast resources are put into end-of-life care and there is resistance to wider reliance on hospice, not to mention physician-assisted dying. How does dying get managed, and how do decisions about death get produced, within the logics that pervade contemporary healthcare? This chapter explores this question by considering how dispositions of humility and impulses toward autonomy operate both for dying persons and the caregivers attending to them in death. It argues that a relationally supported process of emotionally preparing for dying provides an experience through which we can learn about humility, autonomy, and other dispositions important for critical democratic citizenship: self-knowledge, self-determination, intellectual courage, generosity toward self and others, openness to uncertainty, and the will to persevere in our aspirations despite undeniable fragility.
Competition
Authors: Miller William Ian
Published: November 2020

This chapter discusses the unavoidability of competition, even among those who renounce the more common forms of competitions for honor, wealth, and so forth. It starts with a discussion of the Garden of Eden and conditions of zero scarcity therein, with but one scarce item: the forbidden fruit. Then the chapter goes on to positional goods, rank-ordering people, which leads to a discussion of seating arrangements, musical chairs, and the failure of King Arthur to resolve the matter with a round table. It then provides a treatment of Christian attempts to avoid honor competitions by elevating humility to the status of one of the chief virtues. But that ends in humility contests and we are back to square one. The chapter ends with a sublime text from Gregory of Tours about a truly humble miracle-working young monk and the efforts to keep him humble despite his miracle-working powers.
Vile Jelly
Authors: Miller William Ian
Published: November 2020

This chapter reproduces some of the claims in darkly comic form of the author’s Anatomy of Disgust. The presentation is new, but the ideas are much the same. At issue is a less than celebratory view of human embodiment. The chapter uses the Duke of Cornwall’s sickening description of the human eye as a starting point: People are something of a goopy pond held together by skin that can itself be a site of horror. People are a feeding tube that connects them to a longer tube built at taxpayer expense to send their food remade down to a sunless sea when they flush the toilet. Submerged imagery from Hamlet oozes through the discussion to justify the positions and show their well-attested commonplaceness.
Evading History
Authors: Kane Ross
Published: November 2020

This chapter provides an intellectual history of syncretism in Christian theology during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It engages three prominent instances of writing on syncretism that represent wider theological trends during this time. The first two perspectives are those of theologians Adolf von Harnack and Hendrik Kraemer, writing in the early to mid-twentieth century. The third perspective on syncretism is more contemporary. Rather than a single writer, it is a grouping of synonymous terms that have become stand-ins for positive syncretism—“inculturation,” “indigenization,” and “contextualization.” Each of these perspectives, in differing ways, exhibits a theological method that sidesteps difficult questions of syncretism and material history, which inadvertently defers to existing Western white forms of Christianity.
Between Celebration and Ambivalence
Authors: Kane Ross
Published: November 2020

This chapter’s intellectual history of syncretism examines the field of religious studies from the 1960s to the present. Religious studies’ engagement with syncretism shows its struggles with race and colonialism, since the designation “syncretism” has worked within the framing of a center and periphery that sees white European and North American cultures as central and other regions as peripheral. Its engagement with syncretism also shows the field’s tensions over ways one might responsibly interpret other cultures. In particular, is a social scientific approach to research or a humanist approach more respectful of informants’ cultures? Finally, the chapter explores disagreements about whether to use the term “syncretism” at all.
The Perils and Promise of Tradition
Authors: Kane Ross
Published: November 2020

This chapter contends that an adequate account of syncretism requires its pairing with the concept of tradition. Drawing from multiple contextualized encounters in the sixteenth century—from Ethiopian and Portuguese Christians to Jesuit José Acosta and Andean peoples to Matteo Ricci and Confucian scholars—it portrays tradition as a moving continuity that is constantly syncretizing as traditions are handed on in new contexts. Syncretism and tradition, held together, balance the tension between cultural construction on the one hand and cultural continuity on the other. Traditions are not substance-like materials that remain the same over time, nor are their boundaries static. Rather, receivers interpret a tradition afresh, generating new perspectives and pushing it in unforeseen directions. The account of tradition is dialogical, drawing from examples in the encounters just listed, from Alasdair MacIntyre’s account of tradition—which is unduly defensive at times—and from Africanist historians’ careful treatment of the concept.
Ancestors and Sacrifice
Authors: Kane Ross
Published: November 2020

This chapter takes the arguments built over the last two chapters and applies them to two contemporary syncretisms in African Christianity. It argues in favor of Christian ancestor reverencing as a practice that enhances understandings of the divine Logos at work in all human cultures, long before people in a culture consider themselves Christian. It then argues that a Dinka bovine sacrifice ritual, described based on the author’s ethnographic work, enhances understandings of Christian atonement insofar as it challenges individualized and transactional views of sacrifice. It also discusses considerations that inform theological judgments about which syncretisms might be incorporated into Christian tradition and which might not. It does so by examining two syncretisms in Africa that ultimately prove too challenging to incorporate into Christianity—Afrikaner nationalism in the early twentieth century and the Friday Masowe apostolics’ rejection of the Bible.
Conclusion
Authors: Kane Ross
Published: November 2020

The period of late antiquity provides an example of how syncretism’s use has changed over recent decades as scholars increasingly probe the usefulness of categories like religion or syncretism when applying them to non-Western cultures. Recent scholarship like David Frankfurter’s indicates that the term “syncretism” can remain a useful designation in religious studies when used reflexively. The term’s history can be folded into its present usage, such that the power dynamics behind its negative usage can be turned around. Concluding and summarizing the book’s claims for Christian theology, I argue that some syncretisms can be seen as means of the body of Christ growing in history, which the Swahili language calls umwilisho, or body-making.
Introduction
Authors: Peterson Anna L.
Published: November 2020

This chapter provides an introduction to the main themes and arguments of the book. It briefly explains the lack of attention to practice in many influential religious and philosophical moral theories, including Kantian and certain Christian models, due to their focus on interior mental states as the source of value. The chapter introduces some key themes in the book’s challenge to this idealist approach and points to some of the alternative traditions, such as pragmatism, Marxism, and religious pacifism, which provide alternative understandings of the role of practice in ethics. The chapter also defines the book’s key terms, including practice, and explains the contributions of social ethics as a subfield within religious ethics. Finally, the chapter provides an overview of the book’s organization.
Pragmatism and Ethics
Authors: Peterson Anna L.
Published: November 2020

This chapter looks at pragmatism, which conceives of a particular form of practice—problem-solving in concrete circumstances—as the core ethical task. Pragmatism has much to offer a practice-based ethics, beginning with its robust challenges to the static, idealist, and dualistic approach of dominant theories. Especially helpful is the pragmatist emphasis on open-ended, fallibilistic inquiry, which offers promising models for working around or through polarized ways of thinking about moral issues, which often prevent effective action. The chapter also highlights William James’s notion of cash value, which points to the meaning of moral ideas in real life, and John Dewey’s concept of ends-in-view, which challenges both linear models of action and the possibility of absolute, once-and-for-all goals.
The Lives That Matter
Authors: Peterson Anna L.
Published: November 2020

This chapter examines the moral problems raised by the “campus tour” of white nationalist Richard Spencer. This provides a way to reflect on some of the issues raised in and by moral dilemmas as a strategy within ethical theory, including their helpfulness for addressing real-life challenges. It also shows the power of practice to put familiar moral dilemmas in a new light. In the case of Spencer, and hate speech generally, a practice-focused approach enables us to see beyond the tension between two competing values of racial equality and free speech. That familiar framing leaves out the lived experience of people who are concretely threatened by white supremacists, the actual practices of those supremacists, and the relationships and structures of the society in which both racists and their victims live.
Conclusion
Authors: Peterson Anna L.
Published: November 2020

The concluding chapter explores some of the features of a practice-based approach to ethical theory. It contends that rather than being isolated in one or another compartment or ignored completely, practice should be, and in fact is, integral to all aspects of ethical theory. Because dominant models do not and cannot take practice seriously, we cannot foreground practice within the usual theoretical confines. To understand practice, we have to reshape ethical theory, and vice versa. We will not find real alternatives unless we put practice front and center. Beginning with practice makes it possible to rethink our vision of ethics at the same time as it demands such a rethinking.
Music Downtown Eastside
Authors: Harrison Klisala
Published: November 2020

Music Downtown Eastside explores how human rights are at play in the popular music practices of homeless and street-involved people who feel that music is one of the rare things that cannot be taken away of them. It draws on two decades of ethnographic research in one of Canada’s poorest urban neighborhoods, Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Klisala Harrison takes the reader into popular music jams and therapy sessions offered to the poorest of the poor in churches, community centers and health organizations. There she analyzes the capabilities music-making develops, and how human rights are respected, promoted, threatened, or violated in those musical moments. When doing so, she also offers new and detailed insights on the relationships between music and poverty, a type of social deprivation that diminishes people’s human capabilities and rights.
The book contributes to the human rights literature by examining critically how human rights can be strengthened in cultural practices. Harrison’s study demonstrates that capabilities and human rights are interrelated. Developing capabilities can be a way to strengthen human rights.
Who Has “Skin in the Game”?
Authors: Blankshain Jessica D.
Published: November 2020

This chapter examines how the changing role of the reserve component in the post–Cold War era has affected US civil-military relations. It argues that as the reserve component has transitioned from strategic to operational reserve, the part-time service members of the reserve component have become less distinct from their active-duty counterparts. The blurring of the distinction between citizen-soldier and professional soldier has important implications for key issues in civil-military relations. Policymakers previously assumed the societal disruption caused by mobilizing the reserve component would impose significant political costs on presidents who conduct overseas military operations, but this does not appear to be the case today. In addition, political activity—including serving in Congress—by members of the reserve component who simultaneously publicize their ongoing military service may exacerbate concerns about the politicization of the military.
Cyber Operations, Legal Secrecy, and Civil-Military Relations
Authors: Rudesill Dakota S.
Published: November 2020

What civil-military challenges will arise from the virtual world of cyber warfare? Congress and the president have grown increasingly comfortable with permissive grants of authorities and decentralized delegations—including via classified documents with legal force (secret law)—, allowing military commanders to operationalize cyber tools in both defensive and offensive modes with greater ease and frequency. These cyber tools are unusually complex in their variety, design, and potential uses, at least relative to more traditional and conventional weapons. Their technical attributes render them difficult to monitor and regulate because those responsible for decisions to use such weapons—civilian officials—are often least likely to have experience or familiarity with them. The relatively low-cost, rapid-effect nature of cyberwar also encourages not just use in armed conflict, but also below the standard threshold of war. Cyber operations initiated without careful inter-agency planning, decision process, and presidential review drive up operational risk and undermine civil-military norms. To foster more effective civilian oversight and control of the nation’s military’s cyber sword, and to encourage more deliberative application of ever-evolving technologies, Congress should use its constitutional authorities over “the [cyber] land and naval Forces” to craft better decision processes and better civil-military and legal transparency balances.
Conclusion
Authors: Brooks Risa
Published: November 2020

The concluding chapter synthesizes insights from the individual chapters, identifying six overarching lessons: civilian control of the US military is complex and understudied; norms are essential for healthy civil-military relations; the relationship between society and the military is less than healthy; partisanship is corroding civil-military relations; public scrutiny of the military is essential to military effectiveness; and the fundamental character of civil-military relations is changing. In turn, it proposes several questions for future research, suggesting that more could be known about public accountability of military activity; the nature and measurement of military politicization; and changing actors and roles in civil-military relations.
Staying in Bounds
Authors: Livermore Michael A. , Revesz Richard L.
Published: November 2020

The Obama administration was remarkably successful in mitigating intraparty conflict while moving forward with major rulemakings. When challenged in court, many of these rules were upheld, and have proven difficult to reverse, because they were supported by rigorous analysis. Over the course of its eight years, the administration pursued rulemakings on a large number of subjects. Political considerations and the demands of party constituencies no doubt influenced the direction of policy, but so too did evidence, analysis, and expertise, in keeping with the practices of prior administrations. President Obama and senior officials showed considerable respect for the system of governance that they inherited, with its established methods for incorporating analysis and evidence into regulatory decision making. Their personal policy preferences and perspectives were tempered by these long-standing practices, which ultimately led to better decision making.
Retreating from Reason
Authors: Livermore Michael A. , Revesz Richard L.
Published: November 2020

After the election of Barack Obama, Republican politicians and elites largely adopted a strategy of wholesale opposition to the new president. This included attacking policy tools, such as cost-benefit analysis and the use of market-based mechanisms to control pollution, that had long been core Republican Party orthodoxy. The rise of the Tea Party and the 2010 midterm results only exacerbated the oppositional tendency of the Republican Party. With the financial crash-induced recession continuing to bite, a major talking point of Republican politicians was to accuse the administration of pursuing “job-killing regulations,” among other hyperbolic criticism of regulations that had strong cost-benefit justifications. In the aftermath of the 2016 election, the Trump administration accelerated the trend toward disregard for cost-benefit analysis. Agencies under Trump have engaged in absurd distortions, ignored evidence, and obviously twisted the methodology to achieve pre-desired outcomes.
Erasing Public Health Science
Authors: Livermore Michael A. , Revesz Richard L.
Published: November 2020

The Trump administration has called into question the scientific studies supporting the most significant health benefits of regulations, principally from reductions in air pollution. By seeking to ignore validly conducted and well-respected peer-reviewed studies, the Trump administration is not just placing a light thumb on the scale against regulation—it is pressing down hard. This effort is part of an overarching strategy by the Trump administration to erase the significant benefits of regulation in general and of environmental regulation in particular. Some of the most serious risks posed by pollution could go unregulated if the administration has its way.
Ignoring Indirect Benefits
Authors: Livermore Michael A. , Revesz Richard L.
Published: November 2020

Established and well-accepted practices for conducting cost-benefit analysis require the consideration not only of the direct consequences of rules but also of their indirect consequences. Such indirect effects must be considered whether they are negative (indirect costs) or positive (indirect benefits, also referred to as ancillary benefits or co-benefits). The Trump administration is now calling into question the longtime reliance on the indirect benefits of regulation while at the same time urging that the indirect costs of regulation must be taken into account and interpreted expansively. Arguing, as the administration does, that the indirect consequences of regulation must be taken into account if they are negative and must be ignored if they are positive is a hallmark of irrationality.
Improving the Guardrails
Authors: Livermore Michael A. , Revesz Richard L.
Published: November 2020

Future administration can begin undoing the mistakes of the Trump administration by reinstating prior norms concerning cost-benefit analysis and meaningful regulatory review. Several reforms can go even further and improve the regulatory system. One reform involves rethinking the role of ex-post analysis of regulation, to focus resources on identifying and addressing cross-cutting areas of uncertainty in regulatory decision making. A second area where improvements can be made is improving the quantification of costs and benefits that are currently left unquantified. A third area for improvement involves developing general guidelines for examining and weighing the distributional effects of regulatory decisions.