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Drawing on tools from linguistics and theology, this book argues that Biblical reflexes in the Qur'an are not inherited, but repurposed to serve the Qur'an's own distinctive theological vision.

This book examines the critical role that teachers play in supporting at-risk student populations to stay in school and successfully complete their graduation requirements. Thompson addresses how high schools may support marginal students in achieving success by the implementation of teacher self-efficacy and a positive classroom environment.

This book argues that social business, in order to sustain its vital distinctiveness in democratic societies, must shift from an informative to a performative model of communication, especially regarding organizational storytelling, awareness-raising, and social problem-solving.

This book provides an abridged translation of the writings of Ervin Sinko, the Hungarian writer and intellectual, during his visit to the Soviet Union in 1935-37. It describes his initial sympathy for the Soviet project and his eventual disillusionment after witnessing what he considered to be Stalinism's betrayals of socialist ideals.

Communication Studies and Feminist Perspectives on Ovarian Cancer examines the embodied experience of ovarian cancer by critically analyzing impacts of normative social and medical discoursesincluding discourses of risk, choice, early detection, lack of reliable screening tests for ovarian cancer, feminine beauty, and self-advocacyon women's communicative responses to the disease and treatments. It argues that these discourses help discredit some ovarian cancer experiences, encourage a one-dimensional perspective on the disease, and divert attention from larger issues such as society's disregard for women's complaints about disease symptoms. Blanket promotion of these discourses essentializes women's experiences of the disease, pointing out how normative beliefs about women's health and illness are often flipped and repackaged as standard language to discuss women's experiences.Using interview data and scholarly work from communication studies, feminist studies, critical/cultural studies, anthropology, critical psychology, and other disciplines, this book suggests we give equal importance to personal experiences and medical/scientific research to advance knowledge about ovarian cancer. Ovarian cancer is a disease specific to women; as such, women's experiences cannot be minimized in attempts to understand the disease.

In Practicing Psychotherapy in Constructed Reality: Ritual, Charisma, and Enhanced Client Outcomes, Stephen Bacon charts a radical and provocative new direction forward for psychotherapy. Based on the research finding that techniques have no inherent power, and the insights of constructionism, Bacon explores new ways of understanding therapeutic rituals, therapist charisma, and client-centered therapy. Special emphasis is given to an analysis of the work of master therapists, and all of the concepts are illustrated with numerous clinical examples. Finally, Bacon develops a geography of constructed reality which pragmatically supports deliberate practice and therapist mindfulness.

This book draws on the life of Presbyterian minister and diarist Archibald Simpson (17341795) to examine the history of evangelical Protestantism in South Carolina and the British Atlantic during the last half of the eighteenth century. Although he grew up in the evangelical heartland of Scotland in the wake of the great mid-century revivals, Simpson spurned revivalism and devoted himself instead to the grinding work of the parish ministry. At age nineteen he immigrated to South Carolina, where he spent the next eighteen years serving slaveholding Reformed congregations in the lowcountry plantation district. Here powerful planters held sway over slaves, families, churches, and communities, and Simpson was constantly embattled as he sought to impose an evangelical order on his parishes. In refusing to put the gospel in the pockets of planters who scorned itand who were accustomed to controlling their parish churcheshe earned their enmity. As a result, every relationship was freighted with deceit and danger, and every practicesermons, funerals, baptisms, pastoral visits, death narratives, sickness, courtship, friendship, domestic concernswas contested and politicized. In this context, the cause of the gospel made little headway in Simpson's corner of the world. Despite the great midcentury revivals, the steady stream of religious dissenters who poured into the province, and all the noise they made about slave conversions, Simpson's story suggests that there was no evangelical movement in colonial South Carolina, just a tired and frustrating evangelical slog.

The Declaration of Independence claims that individuals need liberty to pursue happiness, but provides little guidance on the ';what' of happiness. Happiness studies and liberal theory are incomplete guides. Happiness studies offer insights into what makes people happy but happiness policy risks becoming doctrinaire. Liberal theory is better on personal liberty, but weak on the ';what' of happiness. My argument is that American novelists are surer guides on the pursuit of happiness. Treated as political thinkers, my book offers a close reading of four American novelists, Tom Wolfe, Walker Percy, Edith Wharton, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and their critique of the pursuit of happiness. With a critical and friendly eye, they present the shortcomings of pursuing happiness in a liberal nation but also present alternatives and correctives possible in America. Our novelists point us toward each other in friendship as our greatest resource to guide us towards happiness.

Contrary to most academic commentary on The Federalist, this book contends that the most significant teachings of the work did not have to do with the institutions of government so much as with the non-institutional features of American constitutionalism, specifically its advocacy for greater union, the development of an unparalleled culture of enterprise, and provision for war. Key to understanding why these features were so critical to The Federalist is the work's rejection of classical liberalism's orthodoxy that commercial republics were moderate or pacific in nature rather than spirited, enterprising, and warlike. Using the ancient historian Thucydides account of the daring, innovation, and restlessness of ancient commercial Athens as an interpretive guide for the commercial republican theory that The Federalist embraces, this book provides a sweeping reinterpretation of American constitutionalism. At the heart of The Federalist's teaching, Peacock contends, is the intention to create an innovative and spirited culture of enterprise that will not only inform America's civil character post-1787 but its military character as well. No scholarship has considered the significance of Thucydides to the The Federalist. This book does in a comprehensive reconstruction of the work that concludes that The Federalist anticipates as well as any text on American constitutionalism what many consider to be the most definitive features of American character today: its spirit of enterprise and its qualified willingness to engage in war for both reasons of national interest and republican principle.

This book traces the evolution of the speechwriting process for presidents in the White House from the administration of Franklin Roosevelt to the present. While institutionalization of the speechwriting process has often been blamed for bland presidential rhetoric, this book draws out the many varied consequences of institutionalization on the speechwriting process. Ultimately, it concludes that the institutionalization of the process has actually served the presidency well by helping presidents avoid the adverse effects of poorly chosen words.

Conflict, Bargaining, and Kinship Networks in Medieval Eastern Europe takes the familiar view of Eastern Europe, families, and conflicts and stands it on its head. Instead of a world rife with civil war and killing, this book presents a relatively structured environment where conflict is engaged in for the purposes of advancing one's position, and where death among the royal families is relatively rare. At the heart of this analysis is the use of situational kinship networksrelationships created by elites for the purposes of engaging in conflict with their own kin, but only for the duration of a particular conflict. A new image of medieval Eastern Europe, less consumed by civil war and mass death, will change the perception of medieval Eastern Europe in the minds of readers. This new perception is essential to not only present the past more accurately, but also to allow for medieval Eastern Europe's integration into the larger medieval world as something other than an aberrant other.

This volume contains the key philosophical writings of maverick Enlightenment philosopher Andre-Pierre Le Guay de Premontval (1716-1764). Premontval was a prolific member of the Berlin Academy of Sciences, and in his career as academic he wrote a series of essays and books on a range of core philosophical topics, such as necessity and contingency, free will, sufficient reason, personal identity, the nature of the mind and its relationship with the body, optimism, and the existence of God. Premontval's philosophy, shaped by his opposition to key philosophers such as Descartes, Leibniz, and Wolff, is notable for a number of original and often provocative positions on key philosophical issues of the time, which he supported by inventive critiques and a raft of novel arguments. In addition to developing a highly original proof for the existence of God based on the principles of atheism, Premontval argued that all possible beings exist, and do so necessarily and therefore eternally; he insisted that the universe unfolded through an interplay of chance and necessity, its direction influenced by God but not under God's direct control; and he considered free will a curse and the main impediment to the realization of the only aim fitting for God, which was to make all beings happy and holy as quickly as possible. His writings are notable for anticipating modern developments such as open theism, process theology, and animal theodicy. In this volume, Lloyd Strickland makes Premontval's key philosophical writings available in English for the first time. In making these translations, Stricklanda well-respected translator of Leibniz's workhas consulted the original manuscripts to ensure the greatest accuracy, and as befits a scholarly edition, the texts are meticulously documented with copious annotations. Accompanying the texts is a substantial and informative introduction.

Imagination and Environmental Political Thought: The Aftermath of Thoreau seeks to correct oversimplified readings of Henry David Thoreau's political thought by elucidating a key tension within his imagination. With the celebration of Thoreau's two-hundredth birthday now past, this study outlines, and builds on, his own understanding of imagination and considers its implications for environmental politics.Despite the use of the word, ';aftermath,' Thoreau's legacy for environmental political thought is primarily constructive and foundational for modern environmentalism. Thoreau's virtues and vices have been inherited by his environmentally-conscious readers. The author of Walden's preference for an abstract, ahistorical ';higher law,' his radical concept of autonomy, and his frustration with government and community foster an impractical political thought characteristic of an idyllic imagination. Nevertheless, Thoreau demonstrates a more prudential and moral imagination by emphasizing the inescapable relationship between the moral order of individuals and the order of political communities and by pioneering the central questions of humanity's relationship to non-human nature. Can this tension of imaginations be resolved? What are the consequences of this tension? Thoreau's overall vision ultimately creates significant problems with which environmentalists still struggle. While Thoreau's emphasis on freedom and the immaterial aspects of human and non-human nature are of considerable value, his abstract political morality, misanthropy and escapism must be resisted both for the sake of environmental well-being and human dignity.In addition, this book is an exercise in re-thinking how the humanities may provide scholars critical insights to better diagnose and respond to the environmental challenges of our time.

Transnational Organized Crime in Latin America and the Caribbean: From Evolving Threats and Responses to Integrated, Adaptive Solutions provides a comprehensive overview of and introduction to transnational organized crime in Latin America for the student and practitioner. It addresses the geography of illicit activities, including relationships between source, transit, and consumption zones, as well as illicit activities beyond narcotrafficking, such as illegal mining, contraband, human smuggling, and money laundering. It applies a typology of cartels, intermediate groups, gangs, and ideological groups to examine specific criminal organizations and the relationships between them. It makes a comparative assessment of government approaches to combatting transnational organized crime in the region, including discussions of interagency coordination, interdiction, targeting of criminal group leaders, the use of the military in law enforcement, law enforcement reform efforts, prison control, and international cooperation. It concludes by applying these thorough analyses to make concrete recommendations for both Latin American and United States policymakers.

Games Girls Play examines the role that video games play in girls' lives, including how games structure girls' leisure time, how playing video games constitutes different performances of femininity, and what influences girls to play or not play video games. Through interviews, focus groups, and qualitative content analyses, this book analyzes girls' involvement with video games. It also examines different contexts in which discourses of girls and video games occur, including girl-oriented video games, activist efforts to change the video game industry, and informal education programs that teach girls video game design.

In modern world politics, there exists a dynamic of change, and an observable pattern of phenomena. These phenomena consist of driving forces, of new paradigms that their exigencies induce, of new epochs that such exigencies provoke, of adjustments made by states (who may be initiators, new comers, late comers, or inactive), and of shifts in the hierarchy of world powers that the differentiated rate of their adjustment success produces, causing what power shift theory refers to as hegemonic transition. This book examines the conditions under which such change occurs, the recurrence of such change in various epochs of the modern era, and the pattern that such recurrence displays in order to explain the recurrent shift in the hierarchy of wealth, status and power among peer states.

Rhetoric at the Non-Substantialistic Turn: The East-West Coin presents a unique theory of rhetoric that encompasses both Eastern and Western approaches. Based on the Field-Being philosophy founded by Lik Kuen Tong, this theory gives an account of the ontological foundations of both kinds of rhetoric. Beginning with an exposition of the nature of Field-Being rhetoric as Eastern and Western, this book presents chapters on Eastern and Western rhetoric over history as power, ethics, art, creativity, politics, and communication. It acknowledges the thinking of many philosophers and rhetoricians who have contributed to East-West comparative studies in both fields and argues that both understandings of rhetoric are necessary for global communication.

This book presents the background that led to Kosovo's success in separating from Serbia and explains the reasons for its failure to achieve uncontested statehoodboth internally and externally. It sheds light to the process of Kosovo's secession starting from its first unsuccessful attempt to secede in 1991and continuing to the present day. It shows how long and at the same time how lucky its secession was: Kosovo was eventually at the right place and the right time, being geographically located in Europe and having secured the support of the US at the time of its absolute supremacy in the international affairs. However, as this supremacy declined, Kosovo's progress in international affairs declined too. Ten years after its unilateral declaration of independence, it has yet to achieve UN membership and uncontested statehood, and Kosovo also faces shortcomings in its internal function as a state. This book provides a holistic approach towards Kosovo's secession from an international relations point of view. It takes into consideration events that happened in different times and different places and shows that secession is not merely an act that takes place in one specific time and place. It is rather a process that spans over time and events at different levels of analysis shape its outcome.

The question of the a priorican an adequate epistemology be developed without appeal to a non-empirical source of justification?is a core issue running throughout the history of philosophy, and recent decades have seen some provocative and potentially epochal work on the issue. Arthur Sullivan provides a clear-headed evaluation of the upshot of these developments. He argues that the notion of the constitutive a priori provides the best means, all things considered, of accommodating these recent developments into a coherent, compelling view.The constitutive a priori is most commonly known as a position within the philosophy of science, holding that one of Kant's signature moves provides the means to incorporate unforeseen drastic shocks into existing theory. This book shows that this notion of the constitutive a priori provides not merely a satisfactory epistemological framework, but, further, a compelling way to accommodate and integrate some of the most significant lessons learned in twentieth century philosophy. Its distinctive contribution lies in the case it builds for taking this constitutive a priori orientation as a good means of integrating and consolidating certain epochal insights of Wittgenstein, Carnap, Quine, Kripke, and Kaplan.

In this book, Jeremy Kirby analyzes Book Gamma of Aristotles Metaphysics and introduces the debates (or paradoxes as he refers to them) such as relativism versus the idea of a ready-made world, the possibility of true contradictions, the nature and possibility of metaphysics, the limits of thought, and logic.

How do contemporary critical thinkers find a way to work between the doubt that grounds their thinking and the knowing needed to ground emancipatory political struggles? In this overview of four contemporary thinkers'Timothy Morton, Peter Sloterdijk, Slavoj Zizek, and Bruno Latourapproaches to critique and climate change, communication scholar Murdoch Stephens discusses and analyses the fissures, elisions, and paradoxes that inform critical theory. This book delves into how critical theory offers important insights for those interested in climate change, but also how critical theory faces challenges to its constitution when faced with issues that are both urgent and yet require a scientific rigour that is not the specialty of critique. Written from the perspective of the interdisciplinary field of environmental communication, Critical Environmental Communication: How Does Critique Respond to the Urgency of Climate Change? argues for re-orienting the field towards the tensions and possibilities drawn from these four authors.

Critiquing the valorization of democracy as a means of containing violence and stabilizing political contestation, this book draws links between the democratization process and sexual/gendered violence observed against women during electioneering periods in Kenya. The book shows the contradictory relationship between democracy and gendered violence as being largely influenced in the first instance by the capitalist interests vested in the colonial state and its imperative to exploit laboring women; secondly, in the nature of the postcolonial state and politics largely captured by ethnic, bourgeois class interests; and third, influenced by neoliberal political ideology that has remained largely disarticulated from womens structural positions in Kenyan society. It argues that colonial capitalist interests established certain patterns of gender exploitation that extended into the postcolonial period such that the indigenous bourgeoisie took the form of an ethnicized elite. Ethnicity shaped politics and neoliberal political ideology further blocked women's integration into politics in substantive ways. It concludes that it is not so much the norms and values of liberal democracy that assist in understanding women's exclusion, but rather the structural dynamics that have shaped women's experiences of democratic politics. In this way, gender violence in the context of democratization and electoral violence with its gendered manifestation can be fully understood as deeply embedded in the history of the structural dynamics of colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchalism in Kenya.

Governing Disaster in Urban Environments: Climate Change Preparation and Adaption after Hurricane Sandy is a comprehensive account of relevant debates, conceptualizations, and practical considerations for the governance of disaster at multiple scales. In this interdisciplinary work, Julia Nevrez uses the example of Hurricane Sandy to analyze the complex phenomenon of climate change and its effects on flood-prone areas. Drawing on the notion of the anthropocene and discourse on resiliency, Nevrez discusses alternative methods of recovery after climate-induced disasters. Nevrez analyzes international climate agreements and neoliberal policies based on austerity measures to highlight the need to secure cooperation from the international community in order to ensure environmental security on a global scale, including communities of solidarity.

A Communication Perspective on Margaret Thatcher: Stateswoman of the Twentieth Century represents broad analysis of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's communicative appeals, rhetorical efforts, and campaign and media strategiesviewed within an historical contextas symbolic acts intended to induce and enact political, social, and economic change in the United Kingdom during the latter quarter of the twentieth century. Janet Fallon focuses on the aggregate of Thatcher's life experiences including family background, education, years in the House of Commons, and other key biographical and historical influences that informed her world of ideas and her articulation of words, and marked her ascent both to premiership as Britain's first Madam Prime Minister in 1979 and further to her international status as a stateswoman. Margaret Thatcher's voice from the mid-1970s into the early 1990s and even beyond was the primary voice communicating a vision of a new reality and a new order for Britain.

From Sign to Symbol describes emerging approaches to the unconscious experience and the development of emotional meaning in intersubjective, implicit relationships. The book presents strategies that utilize symmetrical, impactful interventions in psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, and psychotherapy supervision.

This book analyzes America's crusade against Jihadism. It addresses the successes and failures of Washington's counter-Jihadist strategy before and after September 11, and explores whether the United States should stay the course or cut its losses in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.

This book analyzes contemporary Russian food policy, covering the structure and operation of the food system and how the government policy affects production and distribution of food. It examines international food trade policies, with special attention to Russia's food embargo, the politization of food trade, and an increase in protectionism.

This book examines advertisements in Life magazine during World War II and how the cultural values of service, thrift, and utility were framed in those ads to promote both patriotism and consumption.

This book works within the neo-Aristotelian ethical framework to make the case that moral philosophers ought to see detective fiction as a source of ethical insight and as a tool to spark the moral imagination. It also critiques contemporary moral philosophy and proposes what autonomy might look like if understood in neo-Aristotelian terms.

This book reads nineteenth-century American literature in the context of emerging technologies, laws, and industries. By engaging ideas about risk and vulnerability, literature showed a shift in America's cultural ethos from lauding autonomy and mastery to promoting a sympathetic state and encouraging new forms of cultural recompense.