Texts Less Traveled: Exploring Hebrews, the Catholic Epistles, and Revelation (Paulist Press, 2022) is the latest book by New Testament scholar Thomas D. Stegman, S.J., dean and professor of the BC School of Theology and Ministry. Fr. Stegman highlights some key, yet lesser known, New Testament passages, such as Letter to the Hebrews; James; 1 and 2 Peter; 1, 2, and 3 John; Jude; and Revelation. Unlike the Gospels and letters of Paul, these texts—the final nine writings in the New Testament—are rarely the subject of preaching in the Church’s Sunday Eucharistic liturgy. Fr. Stegman’s other publications include Written for Our Instruction: Theological and Spiritual Riches in Romans; Opening the Door of Faith: Encountering Jesus and His Call to Discipleship; and Paulist Biblical Commentary.
Texts Less Traveled
Redressing a legacy of abuse in Ireland
A new collection of interdisciplinary essays seeks to answer the question of how will Ireland remedy its legacy of institutional abuse. REDRESS: Ireland’s Institutions and Transitional Justice (University of College Dublin Press, 2022) focuses on the structures which perpetuated widespread and systematic abuses in the past and considers how political arrangements continue to exert power over survivors, adopted people and generations of relatives, as well as control the remains and memorialization of the dead. REDRESS explores what it might look like if survivors’ experiences and expertise were allowed to lead the response to a century of gender- and family separation-based abuses resulting from Magdalene Laundries, Mother and Baby Homes, County Homes, industrial and reformatory schools, and a closed and secretive adoption system. REDRESS is edited by Katherine O’Donnell (UCD School of Philosophy), Maeve O’Rourke (Irish Centre for Human Rights, School of Law, NUI Galway), and James Smith, an associate professor of English and Irish Studies at Boston College. Smith’s other publications include Ireland and the Magdalene Laundries: A Campaign for Justice; Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of Containment; and Children, Childhood and Irish Society: 1500 to the present. Read more about the book in this essay from National Catholic Reporter.
Posted in Boston College Authors
Tagged abuse, English Department, Ireland, Irish Studies, justice, transitional justice, trauma
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Understanding creativity and innovation
While some organizational decision makers focus their attention on capital and physical resources, a new book reveals that effective people management should take center stage in the innovation process. The Handbook of Research on Creativity and Innovation (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2021) co-edited by Jing Zhou, professor of management and psychology at Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business, and Elizabeth (Bess) Rouse, associate professor at Boston College’s Carroll School of Management, showcases some of the most advanced and interesting work in the creativity and innovation field. The handbook also analyzes the role of social influences/team culture in the processes of creativity and innovation, as well as how to make sense of and study creativity and innovation. Rouse and O’Connor Family Professor Michael Pratt of the Carroll School co-wrote a chapter for the volume. The editors hope the handbook offers a platform for idea exchange and stimulates future research.
Reading Anselm
New Readings of Anselm of Canterbury’s Intellectual Methods (Brill, 2022) presents essays that offer new readings of Anselm’s speculative and spiritual writings on topics including his relationship to Augustine, proofs for God’s existence, faith and reason, human freedom and the problem of evil, his spiritual meditations and prayers, as well as Anselm’s reception by 19th- and 20th-century thinkers, modernism, and feminism. These philosophical, theological, and literary analyses bring fresh perspectives on Anselm both in his historical context and in dialogue with contemporary questions. The papers in this volume were originally presented at the Boston College conference “Reading Anselm: Context and Criticism.” The volume is co-edited by John T. Slotemaker of Fairfield University and Eileen C. Sweeney, a professor of philosophy at Boston College. Sweeney also wrote an essay for the volume titled, “Anselm on Evil and Eudaimonism.” She is the author of Anselm of Canterbury and the Desire for the Word and Words in the Absence of Things: Logic, Theology and Poetry in Boethius Abelard and Alan of Lille.
Climate Lyricism
Boston College Professor of English Min Hyoung Song articulates a climate change-centered reading practice in his new book Climate Lyricism (Duke University Press, 2022). Song shows how contemporary poetry and fiction, especially by Black, Native American, Asian American, and Latinx writers, help people to better grapple with everyday encounters with climate change and its disastrous effects, which, he says, are inextricably linked to the legacies of racism, colonialism, and extraction. Works by Tommy Pico, Solmaz Sharif, Frank O’Hara, Ilya Kaminsky, Claudia Rankine, Kazuo Ishiguro, Teju Cole, Richard Powers, and others employ what Song calls climate lyricism—a mode of address in which a first-person “I” speaks to a “you” about how climate change thoroughly shapes daily life. Song contends this lyricism affects the ways readers comprehend the world, fostering a model of shared agency from which it can become possible to collectively and urgently respond to climate change. Song is also the author of The Children of 1965: On Writing, and Not Writing, as an Asian American and Strange Future: Pessimism and the 1992 Los Angeles Riots.
Posted in Boston College Authors
Tagged climate change, English Department, literature, poetry
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Ada Limón
Ada Limón will give a reading from her acclaimed poetry collection, The Carrying, on April 20 at 7:00 p.m. in Gasson Hall, room 100. The Carrying won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and was named one of the year’s best books of poetry by Publishers Weekly and Chicago Review of Books. Limón is the author of six books of poetry, including The Hurting Kind, which will be published next month. She also is host of the poetry podcast, “The Slowdown.” Limón’s talk is sponsored by the Lowell Humanities Series and co-sponsored by the Poetry Days Series and the English Department.
Posted in Guest Authors, Lowell Humanities Series
Tagged English Department, poet, poetry
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“Female Genius” in the Age of the Constitution
In her new book, Female Genius: Eliza Harriot and George Washington at the Dawn of the Constitution (University of Virginia Press, 2022), Boston College Law School Founders Professor of Law Mary Sarah Bilder recounts the life of a pioneering educator whose ideas likely inspired the gender-neutral language of the U.S. Constitution. Eliza Harriot Barons O’Connor came to the United States and promoted the concept of “female genius”—the belief that women had equal capacity to men, that they should be educated, and that their education would make them capable of participating in politics, in representation, in holding office, and of being fully involved in the constitutional state. A lecture Harriot delivered at the University of Pennsylvania was attended by George Washington as he and other Constitutional Convention delegates gathered in Philadelphia. Bilder used digital technology to trace Harriot’s influence and expand the understanding of women and gender in connection with the framing period of the Constitution. Bilder’s previous book, Madison’s Hand: Revising the Constitutional Convention, earned the Bancroft Prize in American History and Diplomacy, and was a finalist for the George Washington Book Prize. Read more about Female Genius in this Q&A from BC Law Magazine.
Posted in Boston College Authors
Tagged American history, biography, Boston College Law School, feminism, government
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A theology of life with depression
Boston College graduate Jessica Coblentz considers the realities of life with depression from a Christian theological perspective in her new book, Dust in the Blood: A Theology of Life with Depression (Liturgical Press, 2022). In conversation with popular Christian theologies of depression that justify why this suffering exists and prescribe how people ought to relate to it, Coblentz offers another Christian approach to this condition: she reflects on depression as a wilderness experience. Weaving first-person narratives of depression, contemporary theologies of suffering, and ancient biblical tales of the wilderness, Coblentz argues for and contributes to an expansion of Christian ideas about what depression is, how God relates to it, and how Christians should understand and respond to depression in turn. Coblentz is an assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies and Theology at Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana. She earned a Ph.D. in systematic theology from Boston College in 2017. Listen to Coblentz discuss her book in this podcast from BYU.
International tax
Introduction to United States International Taxation is an ideal reference source for tax practitioners, tax professors, students, and others in the tax community. The authors—Kenealy Professor James Repetti, Interim Dean Diane Ring, and Paulus Endowment Senior Tax Fellow Stephen Shay—are all faculty members in the Boston College Law School. The latest edition of Introduction to United States International Taxation was published at the beginning of this year. It provides an introduction to the application of the U.S. international taxation system to taxpayers investing or transacting business in the U.S. and other countries, and sets forth the principles adopted by the U.S. in taxing American or foreign individuals and corporations as they invest, work, or carry on a trade or business in the U.S. or abroad.
Posted in Boston College Authors
Tagged Boston College Law School, international, tax
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After Genocide
How can any population move on from the experience of genocide? How can such events be memorialized in a way that is productive and even healing for survivors? The Center for Human Rights and International Justice will host a talk by Nicole Fox who took up such questions in her new book After Genocide: Memory and Reconciliation in Rwanda (University of Wisconsin Press). Fox’s talk will take place on April 7 at 12 noon in Campion Hall, room 139. Through extensive interviews with survivors’ decades after mass violence has ended, Fox reveals the relationship survivors have to memorial spaces and uncovers those voices silenced by the dominant narrative—arguing that the erasure of such stories is an act of violence itself. Fox is a professor of criminal justice at California State University Sacramento and serves on the United Nations Economic and Social Council. Register for the event at tinyurl.com/Fox0407.
Posted in Guest Authors
Tagged Center for Human Rights and International Justice, genocide, trauma, violence
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