The Fracture Of Good Order

Whether picketing outside abortion clinics, speaking out at school board meetings, or attending anti-death penalty vigils, many Americans have publicly opposed local, state, or federal government policies on the basis of their religious convictions. In The Fracture of Good Order, Jason Bivins examines the growing phenomenon of Christian protest against civil authority and political order in the United States. He argues that since the 1960s, there has been a proliferation of religious activism against what protesters perceive as government's excessive power and lack of moral principle. Calling this phenomenon "Christian antiliberalism," Bivins finds at its center a belief that American politics is based on a liberal tradition that gives government too much social and economic influence and threatens the practice of a religious life. Focusing on the Catholic pacifism of Daniel and Philip Berrigan and the Jonah House resistance community, the Christian Right's homeschooling movement, and the evangelical Sojourners community, Bivins combines religious studies with political theory to explore the common ground shared by these disparate groups. Despite their vast ideological and institutional differences, Bivins argues, these activists justify their actions in overtly religious terms based on a rejection of basic tenets of the American political system. Analyzing the widespread dissatisfaction with the conventional forms of political identity and affiliation that characterize American civic life today, Bivins sheds light on the complex relations between religion and democratic society.

Writings on Disobedience and Democracy A huge compendium of the writings of the US's most lauded radical historian whose 'A People's History of the United States' has gone into 25 printings and sold over 400,000 copies. What can I say that will in any way convey the love, respect, and admiration I feel for this unassuming hero who was my teacher and mentor, this radical historian and people-loving 'trouble maker', this man who stood with us and suffered with us.' - Alice Walker'

In the last quarter of the twentieth century, the ideas that most Americans lived by started to fragment. Mid-century concepts of national consensus, managed markets, gender and racial identities, citizen obligation, and historical memory became more fluid. Flexible markets pushed aside Keynesian macroeconomic structures. Racial and gender solidarity divided into multiple identities; community responsibility shrank to smaller circles. In this wide-ranging narrative, Daniel Rodgers shows how the collective purposes and meanings that had framed social debate became unhinged and uncertain. Age of Fracture offers a powerful reinterpretation of the ways in which the decades surrounding the 1980s changed America. Through a contagion of visions and metaphors, on both the intellectual right and the intellectual left, earlier notions of history and society that stressed solidity, collective institutions, and social circumstances gave way to a more individualized human nature that emphasized choice, agency, performance, and desire. On a broad canvas that includes Michel Foucault, Ronald Reagan, Judith Butler, Charles Murray, Jeffrey Sachs, and many more, Rodgers explains how structures of power came to seem less important than market choice and fluid selves. Cutting across the social and political arenas of late-twentieth-century life and thought, from economic theory and the culture wars to disputes over poverty, color-blindness, and sisterhood, Rodgers reveals how our categories of social reality have been fractured and destabilized. As we survey the intellectual wreckage of this war of ideas, we better understand the emergence of our present age of uncertainty.

The culture wars have as much to do with rhetorical style as moral substance. Cathleen Kaveny focuses on a powerful stream of religious discourse in American political speech: the Biblical rhetoric of prophetic indictment. It can be strong medicine against threats to the body politic, she shows, but used injudiciously it does more harm than good.

Geodynamics is an old science. Most of the basic theories have been conceived in principle during the 19th century and not many fundamen tal ideas have been added since. Some progress has been made in the following-up of these concepts and, in some instances, in the deter mination of some important facts about the Earth. Nevertheless, geo dynamics has been a highly speculative subject for about a hundred years and it is not likely that this situation will change during the next hundred. It is also unlikely that many basic new ideas will be added in that time interval. The reason for this lies in the extreme difficulty of obtaining really relevant data about the mechanics of the Earth, partly due to the impossibility of probing into the depths of the Earth by direct means to any considerable extent and partly due to the fact that the time in tervals in which" something happens" are ofthe order of millions of years, which is much too long for any human being to wait and experiment with. The situation in geodynamics is therefore much akin to that which existed when the ancient Greek philosophers were speculating about the possibly atomic structure of matter: there was, at that time, absolutely no hope to either confirm or to reject the hypothesis.

These are the stories of 365 women, men and children worldwide who have acted as peacemakers during the last 2500 years. They include human rights and antiwar activists, scientists and artists, educators and scholars, songwriters and poets, film directors and authors, diplomats and economists, environmentalists and mystics, prophets and policymakers. All sacrified for the dream of peace, some even died for it.

From time to time the International Journal of Fracture has presented special matters thought to be of interest to its readers. In previous issues, for example, Dr. H.W. Liu as Guest Editor assembled a series of review papers dealing with fatigue processes and characteristics in metals and non-metals (December 1980 and April 1981). Five years ago Guest Editor W.G. Knauss collected works dealing with dynamic fracture (March and April 1985). Continuing this policy, Dr. W.G. Knauss and Dr. A.J. Rosakis of the California Institute of Technology as Guest Editors have now organized an extensive set of papers concerning the influence of non-linear effects upon the mechanics of the fracture process. This collection is based upon contributions to a relatively small international Symposium on Non Linear Fracture Mechanics held under the auspices of the International Union of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (IUTAM) and convened at the California Institute of Technology in March 1988. It should be noted that although the description of non-linear fracture inherently encompasses a strong material science component, this aspect is not heavily emphasized in the ensuing papers due to the intentional focus upon mechanics. Volume 42 of the International Journal of Fracture will therefore, in successive issues, deal respectively with topics in (1) Damage, (2) Interfaces and Creep, (3) Time Dependence, and (4) Continuum Plasticity. On behalf of the editors and publishers, I wish to express our appreciation to Dr. Knauss, Dr. Rosakis, and their colleagues for their collective efforts.

Since the advent of formal biblical criticism, many have come to see the crucifixion as merely one event in the process of religious development. Yet for the New Testament writers it was so much more, representing a radical break that forever affected their perception of God and the world. In this book Roy Harrisville examines the thought worlds of the New Testament writers, showing how the cross fractured their previously held ideas, causing a profound reorientation centered on the story of the cross. Focusing chronologically on Paul, the Synoptic writers, John, and the authors of Hebrews and 1 Peter, Harrisville demonstrates changes in the writers' understanding of sacrifice, law, Hellenism, apocalyptic, and other areas -- changes that created the new values of the radically different Christian community. An insightful work of careful critical scholarship, Harrisville's "Fracture" will appeal to anyone interested in reviewing the New Testament's witness to that which lies at the heart of earliest Christian confession and which has provoked such bitter conflict in history.