A new book co-authored by Boston College graduate Damian Paletta and fellow Washington Post journalist Yasmeen Abutaleb offers a detailed account of the White House’s actions from January 2020 to Election Day while the nation faced COVID-19. Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration’s Response to the Pandemic That Changed History (Harper, 2021) is based on extensive reporting and interviews with some 180 people, including White House senior staff members and government health leaders. Paletta and Abutaleb reveal the numerous times officials tried to dissuade Trump from following his worst impulses as he defied recommendations from the experts and even members of his own administration. And they show how the petty backstabbing and rivalries among cabinet members, staff, and aides created a toxic environment of blame, sycophancy, and political pressure. Even after an outbreak that swept through the White House and infected Trump himself, he remained defiant in his approach to the virus, say the authors. Paletta is the economics editor at the Washington Post and previously covered the White House for the Post and the Wall Street Journal. An excerpt from the book was published in the Washington Post. The authors discussed their book on Washington Post Live | Transcript.
Chaos in the face of COVID
Alliance politics
Accommodative wedge strategy, a form of divisive statecraft and diplomacy designed to isolate adversaries from allies and potential supporters through inducements, is a powerful tool in the international politics arsenal. In his new book, The Power to Divide: Wedge Strategies in Great Power Competition (Cornell University Press, 2021), Boston College Associate Professor of Political Science Timothy Crawford looks at eight cases of alliance diplomacy from 1915 to 1941 and assesses the record of countries that tried an accommodative wedge strategy, and why ultimately, they succeeded or failed. Crawford argues that a deeper historical and theoretical grasp of the role of these wedge strategies in alliance politics and grand strategy is important for consideration of contemporary U.S. relations with China and Russia. Crawford concludes his book with a survey of China’s potential to use such strategies to divide India from the U.S. and the United States’ potential to use them to forestall a China-Russia alliance. Crawford wrote about the wedge strategy logic of U.S.-Russian dialogue ahead of last month’s summit between Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin. For more from Crawford about his book, read this Q&A from Cornell University Press.
Faculty authors honored
Faculty in the Philosophy and Theology departments have been honored for their work by organizations recognizing outstanding Catholic books, magazines, newspapers, and other communications vehicles. The Catholic Media Association (formerly Catholic Press Association) awarded Kraft Family Professor Emeritus James Bernauer, S.J., a second place CMA Book Award for his publication, Jesuit Kaddish: Jesuits, Jews, and Holocaust Remembrance (Notre Dame Press). The book was recognized in the category of ecumenism or interfaith relations. The CMA also awarded the Theology Department’s Michael P. Walsh Professor of Bioethics Andrea Vicini, S.J., an honorable mention for Best Writing – Analysis (magazine category) for his article “Reflecting on CRISPR Gene Editing.” The article appeared in Health Progress, the journal of the Catholic Health Association of the United States. The Association of Catholic Publishers awarded Professor of Philosophy Marina Berzins McCoy a first place prize in the category of general interest books for her publication The Ignatian Guide to Forgiveness (Loyola Press). Read more from BC News.
Posted in Awards/Honors, Boston College Authors
Tagged Catholic, Philosophy Department, Theology Department
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Handing on the Fire
The Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies at Boston College is hosting a live webinar book launch on July 1 at 12 noon (ET) for one of its newest titles, Handing on the Fire: Making Spiritual Direction Ignatian. The book event will feature Handing on the Fire’s author, Joseph Tetlow, S.J., an internationally renowned spiritual director who served in Rome as Secretary for Ignatian Spirituality on the Jesuit Superior General’s staff, overseeing 250 Jesuit retreat houses throughout the world. In Handing on the Fire, Fr. Tetlow lays out the theology in action that must inform Ignatian spiritual direction: the principles, norms, and practices that characterize the robust experience of Ignatian spirituality in everyday life. The book contributes to this deepening spiritual formation—both for those who are already offering Ignatian spiritual direction, and for those aspiring to give it. To learn more about the book or register for the free book launch, visit the IAJS website.
Love and baseball on the Cape
A new novel written by 1986 Boston College alumna Kristin Moyer Waring combines family, autism, baseball, and love. On the Mound tells the story of the daughter of a New York baseball tycoon who travels to witness a 19-year-old pitching phenom in hopes of telling his story to the world. The young man’s career ends that night, but the pitcher’s father takes hold of her heart. A Massachusetts native, Waring set her novel on Cape Cod, where she spent many summers. Waring also is the parent of a rising BC senior and 2020 BC graduate. A portion of the proceeds from the sales of On The Mound are being donated to the Doug Flutie, Jr. Foundation for Autism, which helps people and families affected by autism live life to the fullest.
Finding your voice
Informed by her 40+ years of experience as an educator and guidance counselor, Boston College alumna Cynthia Daigle Xenakis has written a book that teaches kids ages 9-12 how to deal with bullying through self-confidence, empathy, and the power of a strong voice. Piccolo & the Big Ol’ Cat tells the story of fifth-grader Monique Abbott, who starts at a new school after her family moves to another town. Monique, who has a stutter, becomes the target of bullying. Inspired by her dog, Piccolo, and her aunt’s cat, Bertha, Monique develops a campaign that helps her and other students stand up to bullies. Xenakis has dedicated her career to helping students navigate relational aggression/bullying and hopes Monique’s story serves as inspiration to students who have experienced bullying. Xenakis earned a B.A. and a M.Ed. from the Lynch School of Education and Human Development.
Spotlight on overlooked books
Writers Elizabeth Graver and Carlo Rotella, both professors in the English Department, have contributed essays to the new book B-Side Books: Essays on Forgotten Favorites (Columbia University Press, 2021). Edited by John Plotz of Brandeis University, B-Side Books pays homage to underappreciated published works. The contributors—writers, scholars and critics—offer essays highlighting the virtues of a particular overlooked novel, poetry collection, or memoir that is a personal favorite of theirs. Graver’s essay is on Edward P. Jones’s short story collection, All Aunt Hagar’s Children. She “thinks it is the miniaturization of Edward Jones’s short stories that makes them sublime. She praises the way he carves out space and time for even the minorest of minor characters to have ‘a story; in one sentence, we glimpse its comedy, its force, its cosmic arc.'” Rotella’s essay is on Charles Portis’s novel Gringos. Rotella “worships the way [Portis’s] ‘prose can carry, with no apparent effort, such a charge of complex feeling—at once funny and sad, mock epic and genuinely stirring.'” Read reviews in the Washington Post and Arts Fuse.
The end of religious empires and the rise of the modern state
Coping with Defeat: Sunni Islam, Roman Catholicism, and the Modern State (Princeton University Press, 2021), a new book by Boston College Professor of Political Science Jonathan Laurence, explores the surprising similarities in the rise and fall of the Islamic and Catholic political-religious empires in the face of the modern state. Drawing on interviews, site visits, and archival research in Turkey, North Africa, and Western Europe, Laurence demonstrates how, over hundreds of years, both Sunni and Catholic authorities experienced three major upheavals and displacements―religious reformation, the rise of the nation-state, and mass migration. Catholic institutions eventually accepted the state’s political jurisdiction and embraced transnational spiritual leadership as their central mission. According to Laurence, an analogous process is unfolding across the Sunni Muslim world in the 21st century. Read more on BC News.
Posted in Boston College Authors
Tagged Islam, Political Science department, religion
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Freedom Freed by Hope
Hope. Is it only for moments of despair or can hope free imagination, enlarge desires, and rehabilitate a zest for life? Jesuit priest Alberto Munaiz, S.J., a graduate of the BC School of Theology and Ministry, looks at how hope contributes to forming a mentally healthy and mature identity in his new book, Freedom Freed by Hope: A Conversation with Johann B. Metz and William F. Lynch on the ‘Identity Crisis’ in the West (Peter Lang GmbH, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften, 2021). The book, an outgrowth of Fr. Munaiz’s STL thesis, applies an interdisciplinary perspective (psychology, sociology, neuroscience, philosophy, theology) to the topic. Pope Francis wrote the book’s preface. Fr. Munáiz holds a master’s degree in engineering from Vigo University (Spain), a master’s degree in pedagogy from the University of Salamanca, a bachelor’s degree in theology from the Pontifical University Comillas (Madrid), a diploma in pastoral psychology from UNINPSI (Psychosocial Intervention Unit, Madrid), and a diploma in practicum of spiritual direction (Berkeley, California),
Posted in Alumni Authors
Tagged Catholic Church, Jesuit author, School of Theology and Ministry
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Pandemic parenting
Education professors from across the country who have been parenting school-aged kids during COVID contributed first-person essays for a new book, co-edited by Lynch School of Education and Human Development Professor Rebecca Lowenhaupt and George Theoharis of Syracuse University. According to Lowenhaupt, the essays in Parenting in the Pandemic: The Collision of School, Work, and Life at Home (Information Age Publishing, 2021) provide powerful, painful, and joyous perspectives of education professors faced with the reality of schooling their own children in their homes during a global pandemic. The essays capture the upheaval as the professors confront practical (and impractical) aspects of long-held theories about what school could be, see up close the pedagogy their children endure online, and watch education policy go awry—all while trying to maintain their careers at the same time. The following Lynch School faculty contributed to the volume: Kristen Bottema-Beutel, Vincent Cho, Racquel Muñiz, Gabrielle Oliveira, Patrick Proctor, and Martin Scanlan. Lowenhaupt also contributed an essay, titled “A New Process of Living.”
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