Bøger udgivet af Fordham University Press

An exiled professor's journey from inside and beyond academeIn the summer of 2014, Steven Salaita was fired from a tenured position in American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois for his unwavering stance on Palestinian human rights and other political controversies. A year later, he landed a job in Lebanon, but that, too, ended badly. With no other recourse, Salaita found himself trading his successful academic career for an hourly salaried job. Told primarily from behind the wheel of a school bus-a vantage point from which Salaita explores social anxiety, suburban architecture, political alienation, racial oppression, working-class solidarity, professional malfeasance, and the joy of chauffeuring children to and from school-An Honest Living describes the author's decade of turbulent post-professorial life and his recent return to the lectern.Steven Salaita was practically born to a life in academia. His father taught physics at an HBCU in southern West Virginia and his earliest memories are of life on campus and the cinder walls of the classroom. It was no surprise that he ended up in the classroom straight after graduate school. Yet three of his university jobs-Virginia Tech, the University of Illinois, and the American University of Beirut [AUB] -ended in public controversy. Shaken by his sudden notoriety and false claims of antisemitism, Salaita found himself driving a school bus to make ends meet. While some considered this just punishment for his anti-Zionist beliefs, Steven found that driving a bus provided him with not just a means to pay the bills but a path toward freedom of thought.Now ten years later, with a job at American University at Cairo, Salaita reconciles his past with his future. His restlessness has found a home, yet his return to academe is met with the same condition of fugitivity from whence he was expelled: an occasion for defiance, not conciliation. An Honest Living presents an intimate personal narrative of the author's decade of professional joys and travails.

A captivating memoir of New York's Historic Upper West Side at a time when community and unity defined the neighborhoodStep into the world of Just City and embark on a poignant journey to a time when ideals were woven into the very fabric of a neighborhood. Jennifer Baum's evocative storytelling brings to life an era in New York City's history where affordable housing wasn't just a concept, but a reality that defined the essence of community.Within the pages of this captivating memoir, you'll find yourself transported to the historic Upper West Side-a place where diversity flourished and a shared belief in the importance of a home for all bound the residents together. Through personal anecdotes and heartfelt accounts, Baum illuminates her own upbringing alongside the stories of those who shared her neighborhood. She describes how as an adult, she came to appreciate that being raised in an integrated collective was a unique and exceptional experience. As she moves around the world for school, a husband, and work, she tells the story of her search for a home that would embody the values and community she grew up with.Just City goes beyond the physicality of housing; it unveils the emotional tapestry of housing for an entire generation. As you immerse yourself in the stories of rallies, grassroots efforts, and the sense of kinship that defined this era, you'll witness a generation that stood united for justice and fairness. The book captures not just moments, but the ethos of a time when the city was a testament to the power of community.Celebrate the legacy of an era when a city was truly a home, when principles of social responsibility thrived. Just City isn't just a memoir-it's an invitation to revive the spirit of unity and create a city where everyone belongs. So open its pages and let its words rekindle the flame of a just and inclusive city once more.

UNTAPPED NEW YORK: THE BEST NYC BOOKS OF ALL TIMEThe neglected histories of 19th-century NYC's maligned working-class fortune tellers and the man who set out to discredit themUnder the pseudonym Q. K. Philander Doesticks, P. B., humor writer Mortimer Thomson went undercover to investigate and report on the fortune tellers of New York City's tenements and slums. When his articles were published in book form in 1858, they catalyzed a series of arrests that both scandalized and delighted the public. But Mortimer was guarding some secrets of his own, and in many ways, his own life paralleled the lives of the women he both visited and vilified. In Mortimer and the Witches, author Marie Carter examines the lives of these marginalized fortune tellers while also detailing Mortimer Thomson's peculiar and complicated biography.Living primarily in the poor section of the Lower East Side, nineteenth-century fortune tellers offered their clients answers to all questions in astrology, love, and law matters. They promised to cure ailments. They spoke of loved ones from beyond the grave. Yet Doesticks saw them as the worst of the worst evil-doers. His investigative reporting aimed to stop unsuspecting young women from seeking the corrupt soothsaying advice of these so-called clairvoyants and to expose the absurd and woefully inaccurate predictions of these "witches."Marie Carter views these stories of working-class, immigrant women with more depth than Doesticks's mocking articles would allow. In her analysis and discussion, she presents them as three-dimensional figures rather than the caricatures Doesticks made them out to be. What other professions at that time allowed women the kind of autonomy afforded by fortune-telling? Their eager customers, many of whom were newly arrived immigrants trying to navigate life in a new country, weren't as naive and gullible as Doesticks made them out to be. They were often in need of guidance, seeking out the advice of someone who had life experience to offer or simply enjoying the entertainment and attention.Mortimer and the Witches offers new insight into the neglected histories of working-class fortune tellers and the creative ways that they tried to make a living when options were limited for them.

"Explores four centuries of colonization, land divisions, and urban development around this historic landmark neighborhood in West Harlem. It was the neighborhood where Alexander Hamilton built his country home, George Gershwin wrote his first hit, a young Norman Rockwell discovered he liked to draw, and Ralph Ellison wrote Invisible Man. Through words and pictures, Hamilton Heights and Sugar Hill traces the transition of this picturesque section of Harlem from lush farmland in the early 1600s to its modern-day growth as a unique Manhattan neighborhood highlighted by stunning architecture, Harlem Renaissance gatherings, and the famous residents who called it home." --

This volume brings together texts of the twelfth-century Hildegard of Bingen and the early-thirteenth-century Francis of Assisi to represent religious spirituality after the Gregorian Reform and just prior to or simultaneous with the formation of universities in Western Europe. In an extraordinary way, Hildegard embodies monastic theology and spirituality and provides a contrast to the new thing that would be created with the study of theology in the new Aristotelian idiom of the universities. But equally in contrast to the Benedictine Hildegard, the thirteenth century witnessed a renewed enthusiasm for a more literal following of Christ in a life of penitence and poverty. This is a life of dependence, not on a superior and enclosed community but on the compassion of society at large. Francis would join this movement on his own terms, attract a following, and gradually formulate a spirituality that sent signals of the need to reform individual lives and the institutions of the Church. These two authors, then, are not joined here because of any shared similarity but to help illustrate two quite different spiritualities that animated the lively European twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

This volume directs attention to the teaching of Jesus; it introduces the question of how the imagination has to work in order to retrieve the teaching of Jesus and apply it to actual life in our day. Teachers and preachers are engaged in this work all the time, but upon examination it involves a process that bears reflection. We live in a world that is so different from the world in which Jesus taught that many ask about its practicability relative to our complex everyday lives. The volume turns to three authors who work at this, have thought through present-day theory of interpretation, and respond to basic questions that explain the adjustments that allow us to apply Jesus' teaching to our dilemmas with interpretation that remain faithful to the content that he proposed. Sandra Schneiders turns to modern hermeneutics, the theory of interpretation, and explains what is going on in the human mind that allows us to say that present-day interpretation, while different from Jesus because our "worlds" are different, corresponds to what Jesus communicated in the past relative to his world. William Spohn pushes the same idea further to concrete examples of how analogy, sameness and difference together, both binds the imagination to Jesus and frees us to see new relevance for Jesus' actual teaching. And Lisa Sowle Cahill takes the spirit of the other two into the social order to show how Jesus' teaching has a real relevance for the highly complex societies in which we live today. The logics of these three authors offer models for what is going on in all of the Past Light on Present Life volumes as they represent different historical periods and distinct themes in Western Christian spirituality.

This volume presents the spirituality of John Calvin in three short texts drawn from his Institutes of the Christian Religion. Many consider Calvin the most influential thinker of the sixteenth century. His ideas flowed from Geneva into northern Europe, to the English-speaking lands of Britain, and through the Puritans to North America. The prolific writings of Calvin across several genres open up many aspects of Christian living, and each one offers an entrée to his spirituality. On the supposition that "spirituality" refers to the way people or groups lead their lives in relation to ultimacy, three texts have been chosen to form the axis for this interpretation of Calvin's contribution. These texts deal with his theological view of law, a definition of sanctification, and a short treatise on the Christian life. The portrait of Calvin's spirituality that emerges from these texts and the larger framework of his theology, his ecclesiology, and his career as church leader and civic organizer can be summarized in the following phrase: a practical spirituality of sanctification by participation in society. One cannot find all of that in these texts, but they establish a platform on which the pieces fall into place. The story of his early life and formation, along with several key ideas that characterize the man and his vision, will help to draw a sharper, more distinctive picture of at least this influential aspect of Calvin's spirituality. It is one that bears direct relevance, with appropriate adjustments, to life today.

During his days in prison in Berlin, Dietrich Bonhoeffer had time to read and reflect on the Enlightenment and to ask the question of how Christians might live in a world come of age. One can interpret Karl Rahner's theological and pastoral writing as addressing that question. Born in 1904, he lived through both World Wars to a ripe age of 80 and wrote 1651 published works. Although his writing had a unique historical genesis and intellectual setting, along with a technical vocabulary, he consistently wrote out of pastoral concern in an effort to make Christian faith and belief credible in his Western European culture and the new post-WWII context. Probably his most important student was Johann Baptist Metz who was born in Germany 1928, conscripted into the army as a teenager, and after it, turned to the seminary and to theology. He studied with Rahner in Innsbruck and received his doctorate in theology in 1961 and taught at the University of Münster for thirty years. As Dorothee Soelle converted Bultmann's existential analysis into social commitments, so did Metz give new social meaning to Rahner's "transcendental" theology in a time of social cataclysm. Thus, together, Rahner and Metz, not in competition but as complementary, offer a distinctive response to the spiritual question of finding God in the present-day secular world.

This volume presents reflections on the nature of Christian spirituality in the light of Immanuel Kant's work Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals. It also contains two short comments on Kant's work: Paul Tillich directly engages Kant's moral philosophy, and Reinhold Niebuhr indirectly addresses him with his reflections on the role of conscience in religious experience. The whole volume rests on the constituent role that morality, and hence ethics, plays in a comprehensive understanding of Christian spirituality. Kant adds to that discussion by introducing the voice of the Enlightenment into the conversation. His work serves as a bridge between the spirituality displayed in the Medieval and Reformation periods and what may be called modern Western culture. Christians who are socialized into twenty-first century Western intellectual culture may be relatively unfamiliar with the cultures that spawned the characteristic accents of the spiritual languages that are learned in the churches today. When they move into the world of higher education, they will learn a whole series of ideas from science and critical modern thought that directly challenge the ordinary spiritual conceptions of church traditions. The critical discussion between intellectual culture and Christianity during the period of the Enlightenment was deep and serious, and it helps to explain how the churches in the West relate to present-day intellectual culture. Kant's text on the metaphysics of morals presents in an exemplary way the deep questions that Christian spirituality faces today with almost laboratory precision. The two commentators neatly draw the conversation into contexts that are closer to life in the world of our time.