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This book explores the rhetoric and public communication of the Catholic Church in the United States in the wake of the sexual abuse scandals and offers a demonstration of how large organizations negotiate a loss of public trust while retaining political power. While the Catholic Church remains a major political force in the United States, recent scandals have undoubtedly had an adverse effect on both its reputation and moral authority. This has been exacerbated by the public responses of Catholic clergy, which have often left supporters of the Church, let alone critics, profoundly unsatisfied. Drawing on documents – voting guides, pastoral letters, sermons, press releases, and other mater...
The Routledge Handbook of Language and Science provides a state-of-the-art volume on the language of scientific processes and communications. This book offers comprehensive coverage of socio-cultural approaches to science, as well as analysing new theoretical developments and incorporating discussions about future directions within the field. Featuring original contributions from an international range of renowned scholars, as well as academics at the forefront of innovative research, this handbook: identifies common objects of inquiry across the areas of rhetoric, sociolinguistics, communication studies, science and technology studies, and public understanding of science; covers the four ke...
This book brings together a large and diverse collection of philosophical papers addressing a wide variety of public policy issues. Topics covered range from long-standing subjects of debate such as abortion, punishment, and freedom of expression, to more recent controversies such as those over gene editing, military drones, and statues honoring Confederate soldiers. Part I focuses on the criminal justice system, including issues that arise before, during, and after criminal trials. Part II covers matters of national defense and sovereignty, including chapters on military ethics, terrorism, and immigration. Part III, which explores political participation, manipulation, and standing, include...
It has been argued that the mystical Sufi form of Islam is the most sensitive to other cultures, being accommodative to other traditions and generally tolerant to peoples of other faiths. It readily becomes integrated into local cultures and they are similarly often infused into Sufism. Examples of this reciprocity are commonly reflected in Sufi poetry, music, hagiographic genres, memoires, and in the ritualistic practices of Sufi traditions. This volume shows how this often-side-lined tradition functions in the societies in which it is found, and demonstrates how it relates to mainstream Islam. The focus of this book ranges from reflecting Sufi themes in the Qur’anic calligraphy to movies...
This book explores the relational dynamic of religious and nonreligious positions as well as the tensions between competing modes of nonreligion. Across the globe, individuals and communities are seeking to distinguish themselves in different ways from religion as they take on an identity unaffiliated to any particular faith. The resulting diversity of nonreligion has until recently been largely ignored in academia. Conceptually, the book advances a relational approach to nonreligion, which is inspired by Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory. It also offers further analytical distinctions that help to identify and delineate different modes of nonreligion with respect to actors’ values, objecti...
In The Work of Rape Rana M. Jaleel argues that the redefinition of sexual violence within international law as a war crime, crime against humanity, and genocide owes a disturbing and unacknowledged debt to power and knowledge achieved from racial, imperial, and settler colonial domination. Prioritizing critiques of racial capitalism from women of color, Indigenous, queer, trans, and Global South perspectives, Jaleel reorients how violence is socially defined and distributed through legal definitions of rape. From Cold War conflicts in Latin America, the 1990s ethnic wars in Rwanda and Yugoslavia, and the War on Terror to ongoing debates about sexual assault on college campuses, Jaleel consid...
This book examines American popular culture to demonstrate that celebrities have superseded religious figures as moral authorities. As trust in religious institutions has waned over recent decades, the once frivolous entertainment fringe has become the moral center. Young people and voters increasingly take cues from actors and athletes. The book begins by offering a definition of celebrity and showing that the profile of celebrities has changed dramatically, particularly since the 1960s. They can now chart their own careers, manage their own personal lives and weigh in on pressing moral issues in a manner that hasn’t always been the case. This can be to the good, it is argued, for some co...
It has traditionally been accepted that one cannot derive how the world ought to be from the way the world is. The discipline of bioethics endeavors to respond to ethical issues as they arise in the world. For these issues to be analyzed, they must first be described. Redescribing Bioethics: How the Field Constructs Its Argument argues the descriptions bioethicists provide of the moral problems anticipate the proposed solution to these problems. To understand the rhetorical power of bioethics arguments, we need to reverse the structure of the argument, seeing the anticipated solution as driving the presentation of the problem. Arguing the story of bioethics is as much one of powerful redescriptions as of proposed solutions, Tod S. Chambers examines seven rhetorical strategies in how bioethics texts have steered readers toward a particular moral vision of the world: retrodiction, anagnorisis, imbalance, dissociation, metaphor, sources, and hypertextuality. Through these techniques, bioethicists construct a world in which their particular moral theory thrives, and alternative theories will struggle.
Any visitor to Belgium or the Netherlands is immediately struck by the number of convents and beguinages (begijnhoven) in both major cities and small towns. Their number and location in urban centres suggests that the women who inhabited them once held a prominent role. Despite leaving a visible mark on cities in Europe, much of the story of these women - known variously as beguines, tertiaries, klopjes, recluses, and anchoresses--remains to be told. Instead of aspiring to live as traditional religious, they transcended normative assumptions about religion and gender and had a very real impact on their religious and secular worlds. The sources for their tale are often fragmentary and difficu...