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A bold and open-ended text of comparative religion, this refreshing analysis of the Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam sorts the strands which link these great religions together.
Our Constitution speaks in general terms of liberty and property, of the privileges and immunities of citizens, and of the equal protection of the laws--open-ended phrases that seem to invite readers to reflect in them their own visions and agendas. Yet, recognizing that the Constitution cannot be merely what its interpreters wish it to be, this volume's authors draw on literary and mathematical analogies to explore how the fundamental charter of American government should be construed today.
The Qing dynasty office purchase system (juanna), which allowed individuals to pay for government appointments, was regarded in traditional Chinese historiography as inherently corrupt and anti-meritocratic. Lawrence Zhang's groundbreaking study of a broad selection of new archival and other printed evidence contradicts this widely held assessment.
In this unusually wide-ranging study, spanning more than a century and covering such diverse forms of expressive culture as Shakespeare, Central Park, symphonies, jazz, art museums, the Marx Brothers, opera, and vaudeville, a leading cultural historian demonstrates how variable and dynamic cultural boundaries have been and how fragile and recent the cultural categories we have learned to accept as natural and eternal are. For most of the nineteenth century, a wide variety of expressive forms—Shakespearean drama, opera, orchestral music, painting and sculpture, as well as the writings of such authors as Dickens and Longfellow—enjoyed both high cultural status and mass popularity. In the n...
Challenging the ruling premises underlying many of the Supreme Court's positions on fundamental issues of government authority and individual rights, Tribe shows how the Court is increasingly coming to resemble a judicial Office of Management and Budget, straining constitutional discourse through a managerial sieve to defend its constitutional rulings. Tribe explains how the Court's "calculus" systematically excludes basic concerns about the distribution of wealth and power and conceals fundamental choices about the American polity. Calling for a more candid confrontation of those choices, Tribe exposes what has gone wrong and suggests how the Court can reclaim the historic role entrusted to it by the Constitution. ISBN 0-674-16538-1: $29.95.
“A powerful and extraordinarily important book.” —James P. Comer, MD “A marvelous personal journey that illuminates what it means to care for people of all races, religions, and cultures. The story of this man becomes the aspiration of all those who seek to minister not only to the body but also to the soul.” —Jerome Groopman, MD, author of How Doctors Think Growing up in Jim Crow–era Tennessee and training and teaching in overwhelmingly white medical institutions, Gus White witnessed firsthand how prejudice works in the world of medicine. While race relations have changed dramatically since then, old ways of thinking die hard. In this blend of memoir and manifesto, Dr. White d...
Pigeonholed in popular memory as a Jazz Age epicurean, a playboy, and an emblem of the Lost Generation, F. Scott Fitzgerald was at heart a moralist struck by the nation’s shifting mood and manners after World War I. In Paradise Lost, David Brown contends that Fitzgerald’s deepest allegiances were to a fading antebellum world he associated with his father’s Chesapeake Bay roots. Yet as a midwesterner, an Irish Catholic, and a perpetually in-debt author, he felt like an outsider in the haute bourgeoisie haunts of Lake Forest, Princeton, and Hollywood—places that left an indelible mark on his worldview. In this comprehensive biography, Brown reexamines Fitzgerald’s childhood, first lo...
An incisive argument for the relevance of political philosophy and its possibility of effecting change. The appeal of political philosophy is that it will answer questions about justice for the sake of political action. But contemporary political philosophy struggles to live up to this promise. Since the death of John Rawls, political philosophers have become absorbed in methodological debates, leading to an impasse between two unattractive tendencies: utopians argue that philosophy should focus uncompromisingly on abstract questions of justice, while pragmatists argue that we should concern ourselves only with local efforts to ameliorate injustice. Agents of Change shows a way forward. Ben ...