bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Using hydrologic landscape classification and climatic time series to assess hydrologic vulnerability of the Western U.S. to climate
Authors: Jones Chas E. , Leibowitz Scott G. , Sawicz Keith A. , Comeleo Randy L. , Stratton Laurel E. , Morefield Phillip E. , Weaver Chris P.
Published: January 2020

Abstract. We apply the hydrologic landscapes (HL) concept to assess the hydrologic vulnerability of the western United States (U.S.) to projected climate conditions. Our goal is to understand the potential impacts for stakeholder-defined interests across large geographic areas. The basic assumption of the HL approach is that catchments that share similar physical and climatic characteristics are expected to have similar hydrologic characteristics. We map climate vulnerability by integrating the HL approach into a retrospective analysis of historical data to assess variability in future climate projections and hydrology, which includes temperature, precipitation, potential evapotranspiration, snow accumulation, climatic moisture, surplus water, and seasonality of water surplus. Projections that are not within two-standard deviations of the historical decadal average contribute to the vulnerability index for each metric. This allows stakeholders and/or water resource managers to understand the potential impacts of future conditions. In this paper, we present example assessments of hydrologic vulnerability of specific geographic locations (Sonoma Valley, Willamette Valley, and Mount Hood) that are important to the ski and wine industries to illustrate how our approach might be used by specific stakeholders. The resulting vulnerability maps show that temperature and potential evapotranspiration are consistently projected to have high vulnerability indices for the western U.S. Precipitation vulnerability is not as spatially uniform as temperature. The highest elevation areas with snow are projected to experience significant changes in snow accumulation. The seasonality vulnerability map shows that specific mountainous areas in the West are most prone to changes in seasonality, whereas many transitional terrains are moderately susceptible. This paper illustrates how the HL approach can help assess climatic and hydrologic vulnerability across large spatial scales. By combining the HL concept and climate vulnerability analyses, we provide a planning approach that could allow resource managers to consider how future climate conditions may impact important economic and conservation resources.
A flood-risk-oriented, dynamic protection motivation framework to explain risk reduction behaviours
Authors: Weyrich Philippe , Mondino Elena , Borga Marco , Di Baldassarre Giuliano , Patt Anthony , Scolobig Anna
Published: January 2020

Abstract. Private risk reduction behaviours can significantly reduce the
negative impacts of flooding and flash floods. Over the past decades,
researchers have used various socio-cognitive models or threat and coping
mechanisms to explain individual protective behaviours. However, these
models ignore the fact that people are not equally ready to act upon a danger, and
they (the models) give limited insights into the effectiveness of communication
strategies to foster risk reduction behaviours. Therefore, we explored the
current state of homeowners' readiness to undertake risk reduction
behaviours in flood risk areas by applying a dynamic protection motivation
framework. We conducted a survey in an Italian municipality that experienced
severe flash flooding in September 2018. The results show that people are
motivated by different factors in prompting risk reduction behaviour based
on their chosen types of protective measures. For example, people that undertook
structural or avoidance measures are more likely to be motivated to protect
themselves by increased perceptions of vulnerability and response efficacy
and are less worried about expected flood losses compared to people that
undertook only basic emergency measures. In this paper, we argue how these
new insights contribute to targeting flood risk communication strategies to
groups of individuals characterized by different readiness stages and
motivations to protect themselves.
Whose Body, Whose Life, Whose Decision? A Wesleyan Reflection on Personal Autonomy, Interdependence, and Human Flourishing
Authors: McEwan David B.
Published: January 2020

The belief that human beings are rational, autonomous creatures, whose well-being is largely defined by their ability to make personal choices, dominates much of Western culture. Human dignity and the quality of life are largely seen in terms of individual rights and personal choice, valuing people's independence and freedom to act for their own welfare. This model negatively impacts those suffering from dementia. This paradigm is challenged by the Christian claim of being created in the image of God, defined within a Wesleyan framework of relational and interdependent connections. There is a solid body of evidence that persons flourish best in relationships that embody mutual care. The challenge for the church is to be involved in practical, quality care for all persons.
Small Collectivity and the Low Arts
Authors: Seitler Dana
Published: January 2020

This chapter analyzes the short stories of Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman and their emphasis on home craft (including sewing, quilting, and frame making) in their relation to an aesthetics of small collectivity.
Beyond Narcissistic Humanism: Or, in the Face of Anthropogenic Climate Change, Is There a Case for Voluntary Human Extinction?
Authors: Wood David
Published: January 2020

This concluding chapter examines an enlightened anthropocentrism, one aligned with a certain biocentrism from which it is claimed to be inseparable. What would an enlightened anthropocentrism look like? Such an anthropocentrism would draw upon what may well be uniquely human attributes to construct an account of, or a conversation about, man's place in nature or options for a sustainable future. As proof that this would no longer be vulgar anthropocentrism, it must be possible for enlightened anthropocentrism to conclude, perhaps sadly, that despite being uniquely gifted analytically and imaginatively in being able to understand the situation, there is a dark side to this and/or allied capacities, which renders human presence toxic to the planet. Moreover, it must be possible that such an analysis would recommend the termination of the human project, its modification, or its posthuman redirection.
The Wild Life of Law: Domesticating Nature in the Bering Sea, c. 1893
Authors: McLennan Rebecca M.
Published: January 2020

During the fur seal wars of the 1880s and 1890s, the contested territory of the Bering Sea was the site of international disputes over commercial access to the sealing trade. These conflicts were based upon long-standing international concerns about the status of unincorporated territories, including open seas, and nonhuman animals, whether wild or domestic. The legal questions generated by the fur seal wars laid the ground for a new legal discourse regarding the use, access, ownership, and care of natural resources. This discourse relates to new, globally conscious ways of thinking about nature, wildness, nonhuman animals, and the relationships among ecology, commerce, and empire.
Murderous Consent
Authors: Crépon Marc
Published: January 2020

This book details our implication in violence we do not directly inflict but in which we are structurally complicit: famines, civil wars, political repression in far-away places, and war, as it's classically understood. It insists on a bond between ethics and politics and attributes violence to our treatment of the two as separate spheres. We repeatedly resist the call to responsibility, as expressed by the appeal—by peoples across the world—for the care and attention that their vulnerability enjoins. But the book argues that this resistance is not ineluctable, and it searches for ways that enable us to mitigate it, through rebellion, kindness, irony, critique, and shame. In the process, it engages with a range of writers, from Camus, Sartre, and Freud, to Stefan Zweig and Karl Kraus, to Kenzaburō Ōe, Emmanuel Levinas and Judith Butler. The resulting exchange between philosophy and literature enables the book to delineate the contours of a possible/impossible ethicosmopolitics—an ethicosmopolitics to come. Pushing against the limits of liberal rationalism, the book calls for a more radical understanding of interpersonal responsibility. Not just a work of philosophy but an engagement with life as it's lived, the book works to redefine our global obligations, articulating anew what humanitarianism demands and what an ethically grounded political resistance might mean.
Introduction
Authors: Crépon Marc , Martel James
Published: January 2020

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the concept of “murderous consent.” The term “murderous consent” refers to any accommodation with violent death, any habituation to murder, any compromise—in reality untenable—with principles that should forbid even the slightest exception, regardless of who the victims are. How does one judge the compromise between violence and silence, or indifference? Is closing one's eyes and plugging one's ears not also a way of “participating” in murder? In taking up these questions, one becomes aware of a twofold temptation. The first is unconditional pacifism, which ignores the reasons that might make war necessary. The second is the rejection of any moral and political engagement against violence because one feels discouraged and weary in the face of all the world's atrocities. Doing nothing, saying nothing, or refusing all feelings because nothing will ever change is always to consent to murder a little bit. This book thus seeks to formulate a hypothesis regarding what ethical obligation means if its conditions are placed in doubt by the problematic of murderous consent.
Justice
Authors: Crépon Marc , Martel James
Published: January 2020

This chapter argues that the problem of consent is the line of separation that it draws. On one side are those who will never be touched, shaken, or worried by it, who will always judge the scruples it engenders unreasonable, excessive, “idealistic,” and who will even find good reasons to avoid resisting consent so that it does not trouble their comfortable lives. On the other side are those who experience consent as an injustice that is tolerated—if not encouraged—and that dwells at the heart of their lives. But how does one escape the legitimate desire to eradicate, through violence, the causes and reasons, real or supposed, of violence and injustice? How can victims, biased by their own plight, abstain from punishing those responsible for their suffering? The refusal of violence and the consent to violence are inextricably linked, and no ethicopolitical question has proven more difficult to resolve. If one says and does nothing, one consents. But is it possible to speak and act against injustice and the many forms that violence takes without violence? This is the paradox that haunts the thought of Albert Camus. The chapter then reveals the importance of the question of whether murder can be justified in the name of rebellion and justice in Camus's thought.
The Interpreter, the Scientist, and the Analyst
Authors: Schroeder Jeanne L.
Published: January 2020

Stanley Fish and Bernhard Schlink agree that there can be no rule for finding a correct legal interpretation. Each, however, offers a negative rule to recognize incorrect interpretations. Schlink asserts that incorrect interpretations can be eliminated through the scientific method of falsification. Fish claims that any interpretation not concerned with the author’s state of mind must be rejected. Unfortunately, Fish’s insistence on authorial intent could be read as downplaying the role of the interpreter. Although interpretation is objective in that it involves the examination of an object, it is not merely objective. Communication is collaboration; interpretation needs an interpreter. It is intersubjective. But interpretation cannot be relegated entirely to the intersubjective “symbolic” order where language and law is located. The symbolic can never be disentangled from the orders of the “imaginary” and the “real” that are its logical boundaries. Interpretation has a subjective aspect because it requires the creative act of the interpreter’s imagination. Schlink recognizes that a subjective moment of hypothesis formation is essential to interpretation but tries to distinguish it from a subsequent objective or intersubjective testing process. There is no rule that can disprove our legal interpretations. This is why judging is always a moral act.
A Postmodern Hetoimasia—Feigning Sovereignty during the State of Exception
Authors: Diamantides Marinos
Published: January 2020

Inspired by images from Greece during its sovereign debt crisis—including of a dog that ended up on the Hellenic President’s throne!—this chapter both illustrates Agamben’s notion of a Christian economic-political theology, for which the sovereign’s glory is never affected by his impotence, and nuances it as specifically occidental. Contrasting it with the earlier, embarrassingly incoherent political theology during the era of Byzantine “game of thrones”—when no reasons were offered for why a religion that claimed to be a fraternity of equals was in bed with a coercive state—the chapter shows how the anomie of oikonomia has been repressed in the Occidental constitutional imagination that obsesses over the so-called paradox of constituent/constituted sovereign power. The chapter further speculates on how this repressed sense of embarrassment can be recuperated together with an ethical sense of responsibility.
Contra Iurem
Authors: de Sutter Laurent
Published: January 2020

Giorgio Agamben’s celebrated research in the field of legal ontology has led him to devise a distinction between an ontology of being and an ontology of command—two traditions he divided that Western philosophy has always presented as united. But, behind this division and the supersedence of one ontology over the other, Agamben has himself fallen into the trap he wanted to avoid and actually given back to philosophy what it wanted to take from law but had always been a part of philosophy. Another path should be chosen: a path away from “being” as well as “ought-to-be”—the path of maybe. This is what this chapter will argue.
Receiving Divine Action
Authors: Lerner Ross
Published: January 2020

This introduction reconstructs how the meaning of fanaticism evolved in relation to theories of state and mind in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from Luther to Locke. In the radical German Anabaptist claim that self-annihilation could turn an individual into an instrument of God’s violence can be located a primal scene for fanaticism that has been overlooked by recent studies, even those that begin with the Anabaptist example. Fanaticism raised the specter of a human being who had been emptied of self and transformed into a vessel of a divinity not bound to any earthly law or hierarchy. The special inspiration of fanatics threatened to spread like a contagion. In the wake of the Peasant Revolt of the 1520s, fanaticism’s unruly fusion of religious violence and anarchic mysticism drew political fear and poetic attention.
Lyric Fanaticism
Authors: Lerner Ross
Published: January 2020

Chapter 2 argues that Donne uses the sonnet to experiment formally with the self-annihilation required for the performance of God’s violent will. Fanaticism reveals to Donne that poetic making itself may prepare for, but also necessarily postpones, the self-loss required for violent martyrdom. A new reading of two Holy Sonnets demonstrates that Donne, typically thought of as vigorously dismissive of such sacrifice, developed a sophisticated theory of passive martyrdom free from any human will. This theory of the human transformed into divine organ underwrote his analysis of Samson and violent actions undertaken against a state in his Pseudo-Martyr and Biathanatos even as it protected against the possibility that such actions might be imitated. What Donne called “passive action” defines the paradox of Samson’s inimitable fanaticism, an insight that Milton inherits in his own engagement with Samson.
Readerly Fanaticism
Authors: Lerner Ross
Published: January 2020

Chapter 3 provides a case study for what the poets of fanaticism were resisting: polemics that foreclosed rather than dwelled within the questions opened up by fanaticism. The greatest Renaissance philosopher of state sovereignty, Hobbes took fanaticism to be the constant threat at the “outworks” of his theory of the state and human personhood—a threat that needed to be destroyed by state violence. Hobbes offered a new concept of fanaticism as a product of passionate reading and cognitive breakdown in order to drain both religious value and political significance from beliefs that do not encourage obedience to the state. In contrast to Donne, Hobbes reinterpreted Samson and Christ to exclude religious justifications of rebellion or self-sacrifice. Yet Hobbes’s battle against the fanatics led him into a supreme difficulty: his belief in self-preservation as the foundation of both human being and natural law made it impossible for him to see Jesus as anything but a self-annihilating fanatic.
Schools of Life
Authors: McCance Dawne
Published: January 2020

Derrida, teaching at the time of this seminar as an agrégé-répetiteur at the ENS in Paris, suggests that François Jacob’s interpretation of the DNA reproductive program transfers easily to the philosophical institution where teaching, under the direction of state authorities, takes place as auto-reproduction. Derrida questions the fate of the body and of academic freedom in this context of teaching as mechanical reproduction of sameness.
The Movement of a Pas
Authors: McCance Dawne
Published: January 2020

This chapter follows Derrida’s reading of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle as an “athetic” text that offers a “logic of reproduction” quite unlike François Jacob’s. Derrida’s reading of Freud, undertaken in the last four sessions of his La vie la mort seminar, is both radical and of enormous importance for all the disciplines.
Mochlos or Makhlokes: JS and the Humanities
Authors: Newton Adam Zachary
Published: January 2020

“Makhlokes” (Ashkenazi pronunciation) connotes “dissensus,” “separation,” “faction,” “dispute” (like German “Streit” in Kant’s Conflict of the Faculties). Its trilateral root חלק‎ HLK can signify either “to divide” or “to be smooth or viscous.” How, in light of this Mishnaic concept, does JS position itself with respect to academic humanities: as a mode or leverage, or at a node of energetic conflict and contestation? A conservative, polemical answer to that question was posed thirty years ago by the late and prodigious scholar of rabbinic Judaism Jacob Neusner in several books about the disciplines, research methodologies, and modes of Jewish Studies in specific relation to the “new Humanities.” A wealth of reformulation has accrued to the latter term in the last decade or so. This chapter reopens and reorients Neusner’s presentation of the case vis-à-vis a contemporaneous deployment of the same term by Derrida.
Knotted thread, middle game: an envoi
Authors: Newton Adam Zachary
Published: January 2020

The epilogue weaves a conceit into a set of final reflections about Jewish Studies in its counterlived aspect as un fil renoué, a motif from Emmanuel Levinas’s late philosophy. It also returns to a formulation from one of his earlier essays we have briefly touched upon by reconsidering the question of affiliative belonging. A brief reflection on Bruce Robbins’s notions of secular vocation and professional identity segues to a final section, the most conventionally manifesto-like portion of the book. We return full circle to Sacvan Bercovitch, whose Emersonian reflections on the “alternative possibilities” discoverable in chess’s middle game, alongside those of Stanley Cavell, offer a final heuristic for JS.
Levels of Organic Life and the Human
Authors: Plessner Helmuth , J. M. Bernstein
Published: January 2020

Phenomenology, biology, and the human sciences combine in this work to support an original systematic philosophy of nature, organic life, and human existence. A sequence of increasingly complex modes of boundary relations—or relations between the insides and outsides of a thing—is presented and analyzed. The sequence supports distinctions between living and nonliving things, plants and animals, lower animals and higher ones, and nonhuman animals and humans. “Organic life” is defined and its characteristic features—the “organic modals”—are elucidated. The boundary relations of living things can be understood as “positionality”—that is, orientation to and within an environment. Human positionality is both centric (as in many animals) and excentric insofar as the relation between inside and outside is something to which the human being is “positioned.” This excentric positionality enables human beings to stand outside of the boundaries of their own body, a possibility with significant implications for human knowledge, culture, religion, and technology. Through articulation of the essential features of organic life, its distinction from and relation within nonliving nature, and the distinctions among living things, including between the nonhuman and human, the work provides foundations for a philosophical anthropology.
The Inheritance of the Constellation
Authors: Richter Gerhard
Published: January 2020

This chapter devotes itself to the complex relation between Adorno and Hegel via the question of inheritance and the constellative form itself. To refine our understanding of Adorno’s critical gesture of the uncoercive gaze in relation to certain aspects of Hegelian thought, the chapter focuses in particular on Adorno’s understanding of Hegel’s masterful early work, the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), a text without which Adorno’s practice of negative dialectics hardly would be graspable. By focusing on the question of an uneasily “inherited” intellectual tradition—an inheritance with which it is ultimately impossible fully to come to terms and that continues to remain something of an unhealed wound—Adorno’s uncoercive gaze here is exposed and enriched in terms of its genealogical and historical substrata. In works such as Hegel: Three Studies, Adorno not only grapples with the “with” when he thinks “with Hegel,” he also theorizes his own intellectual project in terms of a spectral inheritance, a legacy that is enigmatic and demands to be interpreted always one more time, rather than being taken for granted as a stable system of precepts, dialectical or otherwise.
Judging by Refraining from Judgment
Authors: Richter Gerhard
Published: January 2020

This chapter focuses on Adorno’s understanding of the category of judgment. Proceeding from Adorno’s apodictic interpretation of a poem by the German Biedermeier writer Eduard Mörike, it reconstructs what it might mean for Adorno to argue for the critical practice of judging by refraining from judgment. Mörike’s children’s poem “Mousetrap Rhyme” is the only poem that Adorno chooses to quote in its entirety in his Aesthetic Theory. His surprising choice reveals how the uncoercive gaze can never be reduced to a set of ideological operations or a priori correspondences but rather must confront, in the space of the work of art, the question of its judgment—and the typically unspoken premises and presuppositions of any judgment—always one more time. Here, the uncoercive gaze fastens upon the artwork in a way that allows art to become world without reducing the art to the condition of being merely that which already is the case or that which already claims to be world. The artwork keeps alive the singular form of judgment as judgment without judging, in which the ultimate arrest of judgment remains deferred in virtue of another judgment, based on a future critical engagement, that is always still to come.
The Literary Artwork between Word and Concept
Authors: Richter Gerhard
Published: January 2020

This chapter investigates another set of problems with which the uncoercive gaze must contend when it fastens upon a work: the relationship of speculative thought to the work of art and the ways in which the chasm between literal and figurative speech bears upon that relationship. One of the themes that a reading of Kafka’s The Trial should emphasize is the way in which a literary text both calls for philosophical interpretation and resists such interpretation at the same time. One problem that arises out of this constellation concerns the question of the relationship between the literal and the figurative nature of a text’s rhetorical operations. If Kafka’s novel, by causing the relation between the literal and the figural to enter a space of indeterminacy, enacts a situation in which, as Adorno characterizes it, “a sickness means everything [eine Krankheit alles Bedeuten],” no reading of Kafka—at least no reading informed by the sensibilities of the uncoercive gaze—can afford to ignore the precise conceptual terms of this sickness. Finally, to cast Adorno’s reflections on Kafka into sharper relief, the chapter also considers them in relation to Giorgio Agamben’s recent interpretation of The Trial as Kafka’s commentary on the imbrication of law and slander.
The Artwork without Cardinal Direction
Authors: Richter Gerhard
Published: January 2020

Chapter 6 marks a transition from the uncoercive gaze as it finds expression in other aspects of Adorno’s work to the problem of orientation, understood both as an intellectual phenomenon and as a problem to be considered in relation to the work of art. This chapter adds another case study to the examination of Adorno’s critical practice of the uncoercive gaze by complicating the concept of orientation and supposed “cognitive maps” provided by the artwork and by theoretical discourse. Tracing Adorno’s abiding engagement with the problem of orientation back to Kant’s essay on what it might mean to orient oneself in thinking, the chapter interrogates how Adorno’s engagement with the problem of orientation and the attendant specter of disorientation inflects a broader set of concerns that traverse his writing throughout its various periods.
Traumatic Temporalities
Authors: Rottenberg Elizabeth
Published: January 2020

This chapter addresses the question of temporal unlocatability in trauma. It connects Sigmund Freud’s early emphasis on the accidental factor in hysteria in Studies on Hysteria to his notoriously controversial speculation on the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The chapter is magnetized by two questions: (1) the question of temporal unlocatability: what does it mean for an event to be missed? (2) the structural question: are we all traumatizable? And if the answer is no, as Freud thinks it is, must we not rethink the question of structure through the accident? Can a structure, namely, that which makes possible a trauma, simply be an accident?
Ideas of Kingship in the Preambles of Alfonso VIII’s Charters
Authors: O’Callaghan Joseph F.
Published: January 2020

This chapter examines the surviving royal charters of Alfonso VIII of Castile, focusing on those preambles and other ancillary components that express ideas of kingship. The preambles to his charters—some short formulaic statements, others displaying rhetorical flourishes—emphasized certain aspects of his manifold responsibilities. Notable among them was the administration of justice summarized in the principle “to render to each one his due.” That task was carried out in the royal court, employing a variety of legal procedures, including the inquest. As the leader of a society that was professedly Christian, the king was also expected to provide moral and financial support to the Church and its institutions. By doing so, the community was assured of God's continuing favor and a life of peace and prosperity. That tranquility was threatened, however, by the Almohad menace that loomed ever larger. Thus, it was the king's task to defend the patria and, by extension, the whole of Christendom (Christianitas), against the possibility of Muslim conquest.
A Wall and a Shield: Alfonso VIII and the Military Orders
Authors: Sam Zeno Conedera S.J.
Published: January 2020

This chapter assesses how the military orders had an important place in Alfonso VIII's Castile as defenders and settlers of the frontier with Islam, as well as contingents in major campaigns and rapid response forces in smaller engagements. They also acted as caretakers of the sick and liberators of captives; occasional keepers of the peace between quarreling Christians; and as intercessors before the heavenly court. Their mission—and the structure of life that was meant to fulfill it—came from the hierarchical Church, but Alfonso VIII's mediating role between the hierarchy and the orders meant that royal prerogative was normally decisive for how that mission was carried out. Alfonso VIII's patterns of giving show a clear preference for Calatrava and Santiago over their “universal” counterparts, the Hospital and the Temple. The king saw the Iberian orders as a wall and a shield of Christendom, a view that the orders themselves shared, but within the framework of their particular type of religious life.
Exterranean
Authors: Usher Phillip John
Published: January 2020

Exterranean is a book about the extraction of stuff from the Earth, a process in which matter goes from being sub to exterranean. By opening up a rich archive of specifically nonmodern texts and images, this work offers a bracing riposte to several critical trends in ecological thought. Eschewing the self-congratulatory claims of posthumanism, instead engineering conceptual clashes between the materially situated homo of nonmodern humanism and the abstract and aggregated anthropos of the Anthropocene, arguing against the omnipresence of Earthrise-like globes in attempts to think at planetary scales, and shifting emphasis from emission to extraction, this book pleads for an alertness to the material and immaterial connections between the Earth from which we extract, the human and nonhuman agents of extraction, and the extracted matter with which we live daily. Divided into three sections (“Terra Global Circus,” “Welcome to Mineland,” and “Hiding in Exterranean Matter”), each of which approaches this entanglement from a different perspective, this book gives shape to a sense of the exterranean via readings of authors from France, Germany, Poland, and elsewhere as well as via discussion of mines, objects, engravings, and architecture. In dialogue with Michel Serres, the recent thought of Bruno Latour, and the interdisciplinary turn to the Environmental Humanities more generally, both historicist and speculative in approach, Exterranean lays the groundwork for a comparative ecocriticism that reaches across and untranslates theoretical affordances between periods and languages.
Dying Communally
Authors: Vinter Maggie
Published: January 2020

This chapter argues that Ben Jonson’s Volpone uses the situation of the deathbed to consider how communal obligations are created and broken. Volpone’s fraud transforms the value-creating spiritual and material economies that ars moriendi texts imagine to operate at the good communal deathbed into unending, life-threatening obligations best understood through Roberto Esposito’s notion of the munus. Gatherings of onlookers at Volpone’s couch superficially resemble the traditional deathbed communities supposed to offer comfort and spiritual support to the dying. But in fact, divergent economic interests separate Volpone and his visitors from one another. The play investigates how natural biological processes and traditional understandings of interpersonal relations can be refigured as willed actions that entitle their performers to profit and promise them immunity from community obligations. In the process, it uncovers affinities between dying and theatrical playing and asks what kind of value-creating or value-destroying community the commercial theater might be.
The Shifting Landscape of US Catholic Parishes, 1998–2012
Authors: Adler Gary J.
Published: January 2020

Employing data from the National Congregations Study, this chapter charts parish trends in key areas of organizational life across a dynamic fifteen-year period of recent history. Parishes’ organizational composition is becoming older and more Hispanic, both among priests and among people in the pews. Meanwhile, local parish cultures are becoming more theologically conservative, but also less charismatic in worship style. Catholic parishes are also seeing large increases in political activity, suggesting a “new politicization” of local Catholic life. Finally, parishes have heightened their participation boundaries against women and gays and lesbians. While briefly suggesting possibilities for why these changes are taking place, this chapter provides an accurate descriptive view of contemporary U.S. parishes and suggests how best to study trends in the years ahead.
Conclusion
Authors: Adler Gary J. , Bruce Tricia C. , Starks Brian
Published: January 2020

This chapter highlights the importance of revitalizing parish studies. Parishes occupy the embedded middle of American Catholicism. Parishes mediate between Catholicism as an aggregate of individuals and Catholicism as a global, hierarchical institution. Employing an embedded field approach, this chapter (and book) illuminates the meso level in sociological studies of Catholicism. Parishes are embedded in and are intimately shaped by social forces of community, geography, and authority. To say that parishes inhabit the middle of Catholicism is to recognize that parishes sit at the intersection of these (and many other) social forces. The chapter identifies three important lessons learned: (1) Seeing parishes sociologically means comparing assumptions with reality. (2) The sociology of parishes must work in conversation—and tension—with the study of congregations. (3) The sociology of parishes requires methodological breadth and strength. The chapter concludes by identifying next steps in a revitalized sociology of American parishes.
From Refugee Relief to Family Reunification
Authors: Battisti Danielle
Published: January 2020

This chapter examines ACIM’s attempts to continue to circumvent National Origins quotas through lobbying for further refugee legislation after the expiration of the Refugee Relief Act. The Refugee Relief Program proved to be a politically palatable way to both increase Italian immigration opportunities and to whittle away at the effectiveness of the National Origins System. This chapter looks at the varying degrees of success Italian Americans had with these campaigns, the eventual unsustainable nature of their arguments, and their turn toward advancing arguments to regulate immigration on the basis of family unification by the turn of the decade. That pivot was part of a broader shift among liberals who similarly had begun to advance family reunification legislation as a more egalitarian and moral way to regulate immigration than the National Origins System. This chapter shows that Italian American immigration reformers took part in this shift because of a combination of genuine ideological convictions but also did so opportunistically when previous strategies for achieving immigration opportunities via special legislation for Italians failed. It argues for the self-interested nature of Italian American lobbying and suggests the limitations of white ethnic liberalism.
The Problem of Psychologism and the Idea of a Phenomenological Science
Authors: Rinofner-Kreidl Sonja
Published: January 2020

This chapter is a detailed discussion of the nature of psychologism and the efficacy of Husserl’s critique thereof. It argues, first, that the critique of logical psychologism in the “Prolegomena” reveals that the problem raised by psychologism is fundamentally one of determining the proper philosophical standpoint and, second, that this critique played a central and decisive role in the development of Husserl’s phenomenology. The proper standpoint incorporates a commitment to the presuppositionless description of essential structures of experience, and from this perspective, Husserl saw that his initial response to psychologism was inadequate insofar as it focused on the consequences of psychologism rather than its presuppositions.
Intentionality and the Intentional Object in the Early Husserl
Authors: Schuhmann Karl
Published: January 2020

This chapter challenges the widely held view that Husserl’s early account of intentionality was a simple and direct development of Brentano’s theory. Husserl’s theory developed as a response to the account of intentionality in Twardowski’s On the Content and Object of Presentations. The chapter argues that Twardowski thought Brentano’s theory inadequate to address Bolzano’s problem of objectless presentations and that Husserl’s account, which differs from both Brentano’s and Twardowski’s, satisfactorily addressed this problem. Later developments in Husserl’s theory, he concludes, were the result of attempting to address problems other than the Bolzano problem.
A Queer Redemption
Authors: Escolar Marisa
Published: January 2020

Chapter 4 examines how the conventional gendering and sexualization of redemption is revised in John Horne Burns’s internationally beloved novel The Gallery (1947) as Naples—long described in terms of “porosity”—becomes a queer, trans-national space. The Gallery rejects the heteronormative encounter culminating in reproduction, dismissing it as the basis of a nationalistic egotism that lays the groundwork for war. Instead, the novel favors a momentary communion between Allies and Italians as the Dantean narrator’s rebirth culminates in an orgasmic encounter with a genderless Italian. Moreover, I show how the narrator’s redemption depends on a trans-national dimension that crisscrosses the Mediterranean, moving between the U.S., North Africa, and Naples, and a metonymic slippage between the Galleria Umberto I, Naples, Italy, and the universe. As it dehistoricizes Naples versus colonial Africa and materialist America, The Gallery erases all local identities, including the queer spaces and bodies that preface his redemption.
Being is Said in Many Ways
Authors: LaZella Andrew
Published: January 2020

Chapter 1 introduces the main topics of univocity, equivocity, and analogy, in general and more specifically with respect to being. What does it mean to say that being is univocal with respect to God and creatures and between each of the categories? After setting up these terms in the first section, the second section takes up standard arguments against the univocity of being. These include Parmenides’s quandary of how to divide being and the introduction of real commonality into the divine essence. The third section then turns to the argument for analogy of being made by Thomas Aquinas and Henry of Ghent. Given these strong arguments against univocity, the fourth section asks why Scotus would defend such a problematic view. It focuses on two interrelated arguments: our lack of cognition of substance and our lack of cognition of God without a univocal concept of being. The fifth section concludes with one of Scotus’s proofs for being as a univocal concept. Scotus argues that a philosopher such as Thales was certain that water was a being, yet incorrect as to its determination (i.e., he believed it to be primary). If being were not univocal, Scotus shows, such would not be possible.
The First Cut—The Intrinsic Modes of Being
Authors: LaZella Andrew
Published: January 2020

Chapter 4 argues for the intrinsic modes of being (e.g., infinite/finite, necessary/contingent) as ultimate differences in Scotus’s expanded sense of the term. The first section begins with an account of what Scotus means by an intrinsic mode and the modal distinction. This is followed up in the second section with a discussion of the modes of being finite and infinite. Whereas Scotus identifies other modes, the chapter argues why these are his preferred terms. The third section links the modes of finite and infinite to what Scotus, following Augustine and others, calls “a transcendental magnitude.” The fourth section explains how Scotus understands the categories as finite transcendental magnitudes and infinitumas the transcendental magnitude of the divine essence. The chapter then establishes the connection between transcendental magnitudes and intensity and argues for a uniquely “non-additive” account of intensity (the fifth section). The chapter shows the diversity of differential degrees of being, which can nevertheless be measured on a scale of intensity reaching to, but never touching, the infinite degree.
Ultimate Specific Differences
Authors: LaZella Andrew
Published: January 2020

Chapter 5 turns to ultimate specific differences and explains what makes a specific difference ultimate, a characterization that Scotus reserves for only some, but not all, of them. The first section begins with a discussion of the formal distinction. This is a more real distinction than its modal counterpart. The second section shows how Scotus deepens the standard Aristotelian account of ultimate difference. It is argued that an ultimate specific difference conceives an irresolvable formality or reality as distinct from other formalities or realities within one and the same thing. The third section compares Scotus’s account of ultimate difference to its more standard treatment. Here Aristotle, Aquinas, and Olivi are considered as points of contrast. The fourth section discusses Scotus’s technical understanding of the reality of essences and their modality of community apart from either individuation in reor universalization in intellectu. Here the work of the formal distinction is made clear. The fifth section responds to the challenge that Scotus’s metaphysics dissolves unity into a disordered heap without any organizing principle. Against such a charge, the chapter concludes by showing how certain differences might terminate a quidditative order and thereby constitute real essences, whereas others do not.
Introduction
Authors: Winn Christian T. Collins , Moore-Keish Martha L.
Published: January 2020

The introduction to this volume sets this project in the wider field of comparative theology and Barth studies, seeking to introduce scholars in each field to each other in order to facilitate mutual learning. The editors acknowledge that Barth has usually been interpreted as hostile to interreligious learning, but they note a number of recent works that have sought to engage Barth as a fruitful source for theologies of religious pluralism, including J. A. DiNoia, Garrett Green, Paul Chung, Glenn Chestnutt, Tom Greggs, and Sven Ensminger. Collins Winn and Moore-Keish then situate this project as the next step: drawing on Barth’s own sharp theological thinking not to justify comparative theology, but simply to engage in it. Following a brief explication of the most relevant passages in Barth’s Church Dogmatics on the topic of religion and the religions, the introduction then offers a description of the volume and its array of comparative experiments in theological reflection. They conclude with the hope that scholars both comparative and Barthian will find fodder for further reflection, with conversation partners they never expected to find.
Barth’s Theology of Religion and Dōgen’s Nondualism
Authors: Farwell James
Published: January 2020

James Farwell begins by challenging the now-common classification of Barth’s theology of religions as “exclusivism,” calling his position rather a “kerygmatically generated inverse pluralism.” Arguing that Barth’s project is a rejection of any theology of religions, Farwell goes on to engage Barth as a partner in comparative theology, particularly in conversation with the Zen teacher Dōgen, who founded the Soto Zen school of Japanese Buddhism. Despite Barth’s own quick rejection of Zen Buddhism as a religion that seeks salvation in human striving, Farwell finds in Dōgen a critique of religion very similar to Barth’s own. That surprising convergence is itself a worthwhile fruit of comparative theological study. Coupled with this critique, however, Dōgen offers an illuminating nondualism that makes no ultimate distinction between practice and realization, between the path and the goal of “salvation.” This offers a new insight that may helpfully temper Barth’s own emphasis on God’s revealing Word as over against human effort.
Karl Barth and Parousia in Comparative Messianism
Authors: Richardson Kurt Anders
Published: January 2020

Kurt Richardson compares similar eschatological perspectives in Barth and in Shi’a Islam. He discusses Barth’s complex understanding of Christ’s parousia as both present and future, and he suggests that there is a parallel understanding in Shi’a Islam, with the first and second occultations of the Twelfth Imam and the expected return of Jesus and the Mahdi at the end of time. Richardson attends to both the synchronic and diachronic dimensions of the God-world relation, in which the synchronic refers to the role of the Mahdi and the risen Christ now, while the diachronic refers to the eschatological expectation of their return. He notices striking parallels between the two formulations, both of which have a cosmos filled with the hidden presence of a saving figure who comes from the future to rectify all things. Considering the personal presence of the hidden holy one in both Barth and Shi’a theology, Richardson suggests that community life in the here and now is determined by presence and expectation.
Conclusion: Barth’s Dreams
Authors: Heim S. Mark
Published: January 2020

This concluding chapter to the collection of experiments with Karl Barth and comparative theology explores the two great moments in Barth’s relationship to religions: critique of all religion as idolatry and affirmation that God is free to act in and through religions without restraint. Heim leads with reflection on how his own theological work has been shaped both by interreligious engagement and Barth’s confessional theology. He points out the particular usefulness of Barth’s critique of religion in a time when much recent scholarship has highlighted the problems with the history and use of that term. In addition, Barth is a valuable conversation partner for other religions because of his fierce commitment to the particularity of divine revelation. Late in life, Barth affirmed that God may employ a variety of “parables of the kingdom of heaven,” which opens the possibility that other religious traditions may work in this way. Heim concludes with the suggestion that the “first act of Barth’s insistence on God’s free choice and promise to be present to us in Christ (coupled with recognition that the Christian religion deserves no presumption of that presence) could be balanced by a second act that affirmed God’s freedom to be present and active without restriction.”
Response to Part I
Authors: Ochs Peter
Published: January 2020

In response to chapters 1 and 2, Jewish scholar Peter Ochs offers comparative theology “raised to the ninth degree.” In nine (sometimes subdivided) moves, he offers summaries of Boesel and Rashkover’s work, offers his own constructive observations informed by “scriptural theology,” and then compares the two essays with each other. Finally, he rereads them in light of his own model of scriptural theology.