A Predicament

Celebrated novelist Shani Mootoo, author of the award-winning Cereus Blooms at Night, turns her hand to poetry in a nuanced and lively exploration of desire, identity and personal exile. In haunting and astonishing language, shot through with the speech and rhythms of her native Trinidad, Mootoo walks a breathtaking tightrope-between cultures and identities, between geographical locations, between memory and desire. In a set of bittersweet love poems, she tenderly exposes the contradictions in loving another woman; in a series of exhilarating riffs on language and the effects of colonization, she marries English words to Trinidadian intonation. Here are poems equally lush and philosophical, sensual and startling, spilling forth meaning from experience like blood-red seeds from a pomegranate.

Christianity, Politics, and the Predicament of Evil overcomes a defining divide in contemporary Protestant political ethics created by two contrasting conceptions of politics. The first, exemplified in the work of Reinhold Niebuhr, construes politics as a matter of statecraft that utilizes the power of government to secure the greatest possible order and justice for society as a whole. The second, most prominently articulated by Stanley Hauerwas, maintains that politics concerns itself with the cultivation of virtue; consequently, it finds not the “well-ordered state” but the church to be the exemplar of politics. Not only illuminating the divide between politics-as-statecraft and politics-as-soulcraft but also redeveloping the conceptual space between them, this book reconceives politics within a theological framework in which the eschatological City of God, rather than the well-ordered state or the faithful church, functions as the paradigm of political life. At the same time, it simultaneously recognizes that the existence of evil, which corrupts individual wills and social structures, inhibits human beings from building the City of God in this world. Analyzing, criticizing, and drawing resources from Niebuhr and Hauerwas, as well as looking beyond to Augustine, Martin Luther King, Jr., and others, this book specifies the respective roles of soulcraft and statecraft in a political ethic capable of guiding Christians as they witness to God’s eschatological intention to establish the City of God in a world currently mired in the predicament of evil.

The Predicament of Culture is a critical ethnography of the West in its changing relations with other societies. Analyzing cultural practices such as anthropology, travel writing, collecting, and museum displays of tribal art, James Clifford shows authoritative accounts of other ways of life to be contingent fictions, now actively contested in post-colonial contexts. His critique raises questions of global significance: Who has the authority to speak for any group’s identity and authenticity? What are the essential elements and boundaries of a culture? How do self and “the other” clash in the encounters of ethnography, travel, and modern interethnic relations? In chapters devoted to the history of anthropology, Clifford discusses the work of Malinowski, Mead, Griaule, Lévi-Strauss, Turner, Geertz, and other influential scholars. He also explores the affinity of ethnography with avant-garde art and writing, recovering a subversive, self-reflexive cultural criticism. The surrealists’ encounters with Paris or New York, the work of Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris in the Collège de Sociologie, and the hybrid constructions of recent tribal artists offer provocative ethnographic examples that challenge familiar notions of difference and identity. In an emerging global modernity, the exotic is unexpectedly nearby, the familiar strangely distanced.

In this book, Patty Gray explores why the 'indigenous rights movement' of the Chukotko people has been unsuccessful.

Are our lives meaningful, or meaningless? Is our inevitable death a bad thing? Would immortality be an improvement? Would it be better, all things considered, to hasten our deaths by suicide? Many people ask these big questions -- and some people are plagued by them. Surprisingly, analytic philosophers have said relatively little about these important questions about the meaning of life. When they have tackled the big questions, they have tended, like popular writers, to offer comforting, optimistic answers. The Human Predicament invites readers to take a clear-eyed and unfettered view of the human condition. David Benatar here offers a substantial, but not unmitigated, pessimism about the central questions of human existence. He argues that while our lives can have some meaning, we are ultimately the insignificant beings that we fear we might be. He maintains that the quality of life, although less bad for some than for others, leaves much to be desired in even the best cases. Worse, death is generally not a solution; in fact, it exacerbates rather than mitigates our cosmic meaninglessness. While it can release us from suffering, it imposes another cost - annihilation. This state of affairs has nuanced implications for how we should think about many things, including immortality and suicide, and how we should think about the possibility of deeper meaning in our lives. Ultimately, this thoughtful, provocative, and deeply candid treatment of life's big questions will interest anyone who has contemplated why we are here, and what the answer means for how we should live.

What is the meaning of blackness in Africa? This title tackles the question of race in West Africa through its post-colonial manifestations. Pierre examines key facets of contemporary Ghanaian society, from the pervasive significance of 'whiteness' to the practice of chemical skin-bleaching to the government's active promotion of Pan-African 'heritage tourism'.

Instead of suppressing doubts about religious claims, what if we engage them head-on? Imagine theologians who welcome the uncomfortable questions rather than immunizing their proposals from criticisms. What happens when discussions of the deepest issues—God and science, faith and doubt, suffering and evil, death and resurrection—are guided by the real-life challenges of believing and living in today’s world? The probing queries and constructive replies published here for the first time invite you into the living experience of doubt and faith, the spiritual quest of our age. They invite readers to consider not only what they believe, but also how they hold their beliefs . . . and what they do with them in everyday life.

Does it make sense - can it make sense - for someone who appreciates the explanatory power of modern science to continue believing in a traditional religious account of the ultimate nature and purpose of our universe? This book is intended for those who care about that question and are dissatisfied with the rigid dichotomies that dominate the contemporary debate. The extremists won't be interested - those who assume that science answers all the questions that matter, and those so certain of their religious faith that dialogue with science, philosophy, or other faith traditions seems unnecessary. But far more people today recognize that matters of faith are complex, that doubt is endemic to belief, and that dialogue is indispensable in our day. In eight probing chapters, the authors of The Predicament of Belief consider the most urgent reasons for doubting that religious claims - in particular, those embedded in the Christian tradition - are likely to be true. They develop a version of Christian faith that preserves the tradition's core insights but also gauges the varying degrees of certainty with which those insights can still be affirmed. Along the way, they address such questions as the ultimate origin of the universe, the existence of innocent suffering, the challenge of religious plurality, and how to understand the extraordinary claim that an ancient teacher rose from the dead. They end with a discussion of what their conclusions imply about the present state and future structure of churches and other communities in which Christian affirmations are made.