A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka
Posted in Alumni Authors, Lowell Humanities Series
Tagged immigration, memoir, refugee, Soviet Union
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Socio-environmental issues
Boston College sociologist Brian Gareau, along with Damian White and Alan Rudy, have published Environments, Natures and Social Theory (Palgrave MacMillan, 2015), a groundbreaking text that provides a definitive, cross-disciplinary mapping of the state of environmental social theory. The authors insist on the necessity of a critical but optimistic hybrid politics, arguing that a more just, egalitarian, democratic and sustainable anthropocene is within reach. Gareau was one of the organizers of BC’s recent conference, “Our Common Home,” which explored the spiritual and policy implications of Pope Francis’ encyclical on climate change.
Models of Christian service
Christians are called to loving service of one another and the wider world. In his book, A Step Along the Way: Models of Christian Service (Orbis, 2015), BC theologian Stephen Pope features six models of Christian service: Dorothy Stang, Dorothy Day, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, Jr., Oscar Romero and Pierre Claverie. According to Pope, these people show what it means to serve others in very distinctive and concrete ways, and he hopes the book will help readers think and talk about the Christian meaning of service. Pope also is the author of Human Evolution and Christian Ethics and editor of Hope and Solidarity: Jon Sobrino’s Challenge to the Christian Theology and The Ethics of Aquinas.
Richard Kearney debates God
What kind of faith, if any, can be proclaimed after the ravages of the Holocaust and the many religion-based terrors since? In the new book Reimagining the Sacred (Columbia University Press, 2015), Seelig Professor of Philosophy Richard Kearney debates God with a host of philosophers known for their work on the intersection of secularism, politics and religion. This work facilitates a fresh approach to issues of importance to all spiritually minded individuals and skeptics: how to reconcile God’s goodness with human evil, how to believe in both God and natural science, how to talk about God without indulging in fundamentalist rhetoric, and how to balance God’s sovereignty with God’s love. According to a review in Publishers Weekly, Reimagining the Sacred is a “rigorous, forward-thinking intellectual treatise [that] opens new space for religious humanism amid cacophonous secular, political, and religious debate.” Kearney is the author of more than 20 books, including Strangers, Gods, and Monsters, The God Who May Be, and Anatheism: Returning to God After God. Last year, he co-edited and contributed to Carnal Hermeneutics.
Oxford Handbooks
Oxford Handbooks, published by Oxford University Press, offer authoritative surveys of the current state of scholarship in a particular field of study. Specially commissioned essays from leading figures in the discipline give critical examinations of the key issues and major debates, as well as a foundation for future research. Carrol School of Management Associate Professor of Management and Organization Candace Jones is co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Creative Industries, which brings together many of the world’s leading scholars in the application of creativity in economics, business and management, law, policy studies, organization studies and psychology. Professor of Sociology Sharlene Hesse-Biber is co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Multimethod and Mixed Methods Research Inquiry. Topics include an overview of theory, paradigms, and scientific inquiry; a guide to conducting a multi- and mixed-methods research study from start to finish; current uses of multi- and mixed-methods research across academic disciplines and research fields; the latest technologies and how they can be incorporated into study design; and a presentation of multiple perspectives on the key remaining debates.
Posted in Boston College Authors
Tagged Carroll School of Management, creativity, research, Sociology Dept
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Waiting for America in Italian
Two chapters from BC Professor of Russian, English, and Jewish Studies Maxim D. Shrayer‘s memoir of emigration, Waiting for America, have appeared in Italian translation in a special issue of the Italian magazine eSamizdat. In Waiting for America, Shrayer writes of leaving Moscow with his family to head to a new life in America.
Disinherited majority
Thomas Piketty’s blockbuster 2014 book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, opened a new conversation not only about inequality, but about class, capitalism and social justice. In Disinherited Majority: Capital Questions-Piketty and Beyond (Routledge, 2015), BC sociologist Charles Derber shows that there are ‘two Pikettys’ – different voices of the author on the 1%, inheritance, and capitalism itself – that create a fascinating and unacknowledged hidden debate and conversation within the book. Drawing on Piketty’s discussion, Derber raises 14 ‘capital questions’ – with new perspectives on caste and class warfare, the Great Recession, the decline of the American Dream and the Occupy movement – that can guide a new conversation about the past and future of capitalism.
This Is Why I Came
Alumna Mary Rakow blends fable and theology in her new novel, This Is Why I Came (Counterpoint, 2015). The novel offers readers biblical stories reimagined by Bernadette, a lapsed Catholic who comes back to church on Good Friday after a 30-year absence. Oprah Magazine dubbed This Is Why I Came one of “16 Books To Start 2016 Right.” Rakow’s previous novel, The Memory Room, was shortlisted for the Stanford University Libraries International Saroyan Prize in Literature, a PEN USA/West Finalist in Fiction and was listed among the Best Books of the West by The Los Angeles Times. Reviews for This Is Why I Came: The Atlantic | Boston Globe | Washington Post.
Dead Letters Sent
Literary texts that address tradition and the transmission of knowledge often seem concerned less with preservation than with loss, recurrently describing scenarios of what Professor of English Kevin Ohi terms “thwarted transmission.” By exploring how transmission of a minority sexual culture is intertwined with the queer potential of literary and cultural transmission, Ohi builds a persuasive argument in his new book Dead Letters Sent: Queer Literary Transmission (University of Minnesota Press, 2105) for the relevance of queer criticism to literary study. Ohi’s book explores works by Plato, Shakespeare, Swinburne, Pater, Wilde, James and Faulkner. Ohi was a recipient of a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship.
Bits & Specks
Communication Associate Professor of the Practice Michael C. Keith has published a new short story collection, Bits, Specks, Crumbs, Flecks (Vraeyda Literary, 2015). Some of Keith’s other titles include, Radio Cultures: The Sound Medium in American Life; Voices in the Purple Haze: Underground Radio in the Sixties; Waves of Rancor: Tuning in the Radical Right (with Robert Hilliard), The Broadcast Century and Beyond (With Robert Hilliard), The Radio Station (now Keith’s Radio Station) and Talking Radio: An Oral History of American Radio in the Television Age, among many others.
BC Bookmarks 