The Impossible Imperative

The Impossible Imperative brings to life the daily efforts of child welfare professionals working on behalf of vulnerable children and families. Stories that highlight the work, written by child welfare staff on the front lines, speak to the competing principles that shape everyday decisions. The book shows that, rather than being a simple task of protecting children, the field of child welfare is shaped by a series of competing ideas. The text features eight principles that undergird child protection practice, all of which are typically in conflict with others. These principles guide practice and direct the course of policymaking, but when liberated from their aspirational context and placed in the real world, they are fraught with contradiction. The Impossible Imperative is designed to inspire a lively debate about the fundamental nature of child welfare and about the principles that serve as the foundation for the work. It can be used as a teaching tool for aspiring professionals and as motivation to those looking to social work to make a difference in the world.

The Command of Grace sets forth a bold new critical initiative in theological apologetics, one that advances a fundamental reassessment of theological self-understanding and method today, especially in its attentiveness to the present reality of God in revelation. Many recent, predominating trends have tended to treat theological truth as something cognitively self-guaranteeing ('tauto-theological') within doctrinal or other theoretical domains. Against this, and drawing on the philosophical heritage and Jewish thought, the book seeks to revive other basic modes of human attentiveness for fundamental theological questioning. These are: 'causal' attentiveness encountered through the faculties of bodily sensibility; and 'appetitive' or 'motive' attentiveness encountered in the faculty of desire. Especially crucial here is the rejuvenation of the primacy of 'motive reasoning' (reasoning with regard to motivations and desires) for theology's apologetical self-understanding, in addition to its normal engagement with 'cognitive reasoning' (reasoning with regard to percepts and concepts). If God in his transcendent 'Godness' meets us in revelation not at the margins of the speculative intellect in the form of a denotatum for cognitive apprehension, but rather at the very centre of embodied life in the form of a summons to motivated action, then theology must seek to be attentive to God through all the endowed faculties of embodied-rational life: cognitive, sensible, and motive-appetitive.

Limit Cinema explores how contemporary global cinema represents the relationship between humans and nature. During the 21st century this relationship has become increasingly fraught due to proliferating social and environmental crises; recent films from Lars von Trier's Melancholia (2011) to Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) address these problems by reflecting or renegotiating the terms of our engagement with the natural world. In this spirit, this book proposes a new film philosophy for the Anthropocene. It argues that certain contemporary films attempt to transgress the limits of human experience, and that such 'limit cinema' has the potential to help us rethink our relationship with nature. Posing a new and timely alternative to the process philosophies that have become orthodox in the fields of film philosophy and ecocriticism, Limit Cinema revitalizes the philosophy of Georges Bataille and puts forward a new reading of his notion of transgression in the context of our current environmental crisis. To that end, Limit Cinema brings Bataille into conversation with more recent discussions in the humanities that seek less anthropocentric modes of thought, including posthumanism, speculative realism, and other theories associated with the nonhuman turn. The problems at stake are global in scale, and the book therefore engages with cinema from a range of national and cultural contexts. From Ben Wheatley's psychological thrillers to Nettie Wild's eco-documentaries, limit cinema pushes against the boundaries of thought and encourages an ethical engagement with perspectives beyond the human.

This volume contains ten articles exploring a wide range of issues in the analysis of the imperative clause from a generative perspective. The language data investigated in detail in the articles come from Dutch, English, German, (old) Scandinavian, Spanish, and South Slavic; there is further significant discussion of data from other Germanic and Romance languages. The phenomena addressed (in several cases in more than one article, leading to some lively debate about contentious issues) include the following: the nature and interpretation of imperative subjects; the properties of participial imperatives; clitic behavior; restrictions on topicalization; word order; null arguments; negative imperatives; and imperatives in embedded clauses. The volume has a substantial introduction, sketching the results of earlier generative work on the topic (most of it scattered across disparate outlets), the issues left open by this earlier work, and the contribution to further insight and understanding made by the book's articles.

McGee explores the political significance of aesthetic analysis in the context of cultural studies, and asks how political responsibility can be reconciled with the concept of the university as a democratic institution.

This text offers a new concept of Social Work that is an inspiring and practical vision of what Social Work is and should be, placing rights at the heart of practice, enabling students and workers to become more confident dealing with the uncomfortable realities of practice.

What has happened to Russia since the collapse of communism in 1991 and where is the country going in the new century? Russia has escaped widespread social disorder or political collapse, but few observers would argue that the situation has stabilized. Seventeen distinguished scholars from the United States, Russia, and Europe analyze the institutions, social forces, and ideas that are transforming Russia and are, in turn, being transformed in Russia today. The first multidisciplinary assessment of the Yeltsin era, Russia in the New Century: Stability or Disorder? focuses on superpresidentialism, the Constitutional Court, the military, the virtual economy, the network society, organized crime, the new entrepreneurs, workers, survival networks, Russian political parties and nationalism, and the crisis in Dagestan. Thirteen essays and the editors' introduction offer new perspectives on Russia's prospects for stability and disorder in the twenty-first century.

A militant Marxist atheist and a “Radical Orthodox” Christian theologian square off on everything from the meaning of theology and Christ to the war machine of corporate mafia. “What matters is not so much that Žižek is endorsing a demythologized, disenchanted Christianity without transcendence, as that he is offering in the end (despite what he sometimes claims) a heterodox version of Christian belief.”—John Milbank “To put it even more bluntly, my claim is that it is Milbank who is effectively guilty of heterodoxy, ultimately of a regression to paganism: in my atheism, I am more Christian than Milbank.”—Slavoj Žižek In this corner, philosopher Slavoj Žižek, a militant atheist who represents the critical-materialist stance against religion's illusions; in the other corner, “Radical Orthodox” theologian John Milbank, an influential and provocative thinker who argues that theology is the only foundation upon which knowledge, politics, and ethics can stand. In The Monstrosity of Christ, Žižek and Milbank go head to head for three rounds, employing an impressive arsenal of moves to advance their positions and press their respective advantages. By the closing bell, they have not only proven themselves worthy adversaries, they have shown that faith and reason are not simply and intractably opposed. Žižek has long been interested in the emancipatory potential offered by Christian theology. And Milbank, seeing global capitalism as the new century's greatest ethical challenge, has pushed his own ontology in more political and materialist directions. Their debate in The Monstrosity of Christ concerns the future of religion, secularity, and political hope in light of a monsterful event—God becoming human. For the first time since Žižek's turn toward theology, we have a true debate between an atheist and a theologian about the very meaning of theology, Christ, the Church, the Holy Ghost, Universality, and the foundations of logic. The result goes far beyond the popularized atheist/theist point/counterpoint of recent books by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and others. Žižek begins, and Milbank answers, countering dialectics with “paradox.” The debate centers on the nature of and relation between paradox and parallax, between analogy and dialectics, between transcendent glory and liberation. Slavoj Žižek is a philosopher and cultural critic. He has published over thirty books, including Looking Awry, The Puppet and the Dwarf, and The Parallax View (these three published by the MIT Press). John Milbank is an influential Christian theologian and the author of Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason and other books. Creston Davis, who conceived of this encounter, studied under both Žižek and Milbank.