Bøger udgivet af Mercer University Press

Xenophon (430-354 BCE) was a man of many modes: follower of Socrates, Athenian General, friend to Sparta, philosopher, political theorist, military historian, and writer. This collection of essays explores his writings across three genres, all of which he blends into one another: philosophical dialogue, political theory, and history. In whatever form he chose, Xenophon seems to have several foundational questions always in mind: What makes a human life good? How best should human beings be governed? What aspects of character and accidents of history contribute to good and bad rule and to good and bad lives? Like his teacher Socrates, there seem to be no questions off limits to Xenophon, who defied convention in his writing and in his life. Xenophon was once considered among the most important figures in Classical Literature. Contributors include Peter Ahrensdorf, Wayne Ambler, Thomas Martin, Gregory McBrayer, Carol McNamara, Paul A. Rahe, Richard Ruderman, and Charlotte C. S. Thomas.

If festschrifts celebrate a person for their life's work, few are more worthy of the honor than Bill J. Leonard. He is equal parts teacher, minister, and administrator, all with a style that is "uniquely Leonard." The eleven essays in this volume are a testimony to Leonard's call for integrity of thought and deed and explore topics ranging from race and spirituality to Appalachian religion, and religious freedom. If one detects a familiar ring, it is because those are broad themes that reflect Bill Leonard's career. So, why should anyone study Baptists? The reasons vary from person to person, but one thing is certain: Bill Leonard has set a high standard. They are also a testimony to the effect one person can have on how you see the world around you. Contributors include Randall Balmer, Linda McKinnish Bridges, Edward R. Crowther, Pamela R. Durso, Keith Harper, Andrew Manis, Molly T. Marshall, Robert N. Nash Jr., Meredith Stone, Corey D.B. Walker, and C. Douglas Weaver.

All manner of ghosts haunt the poems in Jack Bedell's new collection, GHOST FOREST. From memories of lost loved ones, to the ghosts of heroes, to the remnants of an eroding coastline, these spectres fill Bedell's lines with beauty and wisdom to help us all move into the future. Sometimes through memory, sometimes through visitation, sometimes through pure fantasy, Bedell's poems invoke spirits to help us see the world as it needs to be seen, or put back whole our broken pasts to make moving forward possible. No matter if it's Sonny Liston in need of a moment's peace, a ghost forest glowing as harbinger of what's headed our way, or old habits left to us by family we've lost come back around on the breeze to make their souls present in this world, GHOST FOREST takes time, page by page, to pay its due respects.

Volume II documents nineteenth-century literary celebrity Elizabeth Oakes Smith's decision to commit herself to the cause of woman's rights. Volume II traces the sharp turn in her career at mid-century: a multidimensional effort involving newspaper editorial, a lecture career extending as far as Louisville and Chicago, and throughout these efforts, an attempt to garner the support to inaugurate the first journal owned and edited by women dedicated to the cause of woman's empowerment. Featured are fully annotated editions of two of Oakes Smith's treatises published in the early 1850s (Woman and Her Needs and Hints on Dress and Beauty), along with her most popular lecture, "The Dignity of Labor." Correspondence between Oakes Smith and Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison, Lucretia Mott, Horace Greeley, and other reform leaders of the period regarding her projected journal, the The Egeria, reveal the economic challenges faced by radical leaders in the Antebellum period.

Vincent Van Gogh, even with his mental illness, poverty, isolation, and persistent failure, reflected compassion remarkable for his own life of rejection. He loved God. He loved beauty. He acknowledged his own shortcomings and was never as good as he wanted to be. He might be an unlikely role model for some, since he was neither saintly nor successful; but his serious attention to human suffering, as well as to beauty in the world around him, gave this author a different vision. Cox writes about her own experiences: weeks spent living in a homeless shelter in New York City, a trip to the Mid-East where she visited Yasser Arafat in his compound, an unexpectedly impacting Alaskan adventure, working with abused/neglected children, and the explorations of the mind through reading. READING VAN GOGH plunges into the ideas of psychologists, artists, poets, physicists, and fiction writers who combine reason, imagination, and experience in a way that might enlarge the definitions we live by.

"There is much about her hometown that Carrie Buck loves: Venable Elementary where she first learned to read; Starr Hill because that's where Miss Mora lives; Chancellor's Drugstore where she sometimes gets a free cola; and Anderson's Bookstore where a girl can look through all the books she likes. While 1920s Charlottesville, Virginia, is a charming place to grow up, there's one thing Carrie doesn't like about her hometown--her home. Abandoned by her father and taken from her mother, Carrie is put up for fostering as a toddler. A silent child, her foster parents regard her as slow. She feels no obligation to correct them. At age ten, Carrie is forced to leave school to work as a domestic. Carrie's lone ally, Miss Mora, a Scottish immigrant, is hindered by racial barriers from being the helper Carrie so desperately needs. But when Carrie turns up pregnant at seventeen, it is Miss Mora, Charlottesville's most competent midwife, who she turns to. Fearing their nephew's assault of Carrie will be discovered, Carrie's foster parents fraudulently commit her to the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded. They claim custody of her infant daughter. Dr. Priddy, the colony's superintendent, deceptively labels Carrie an imbecile, unfit to bear children. In pursuit of a legal argument granting states the right to forcibly sterilize individuals, he exploits her. No Perfect Mothers explores characters, historical and imagined, who over the late 1800s to the 1920s were parties to the infamous Buck v. Bell U.S. Supreme Court case of 1927. Here, Carrie is given back what was denied her by the Court and by society some 100 years ago--her own voice and personhood." --

SOUL AND LIFE brings together essays on Greek ontology, psychology, politics, and theories of soul in Socratic thought, Plato, Aristotle, and Herodotus. Among the included perspectives, there is the recognition in common that the soul (psyche) is not a mere hypostatization or reification of the object of cognitive studies. Instead, these essays attempt to understand the soul as distinguished by life itself and as setting out ways of being in the world. Essays focus on political psychology, pursue feminist themes, and engage with issues in ethics and education. Others argue that the soul situates the fundamental structures in ontology and the study of Being as such. Contributors include Deborah Achtenberg, Cinzia Arruzza, Ronna Burger, Shane Montgomery Ewegen, I-Kai Jeng, Daniel P. Maher, Kevin Marren, Michael M. Shaw, Charlotte C.S. Thomas, and Stuart D. Warner.

Civil War historians have remained baffled over the Cassville controversies for the past 150 plus years. There are two versions of events: Confederate commanding General Joseph E. Johnston's story, and Lieutenant General John Bell Hood's story. But Federal General William T. Sherman had other plans, and it was Confederates who would be "surprised" instead. THE CASSVILLE AFFAIRS looks at two critical decisions the Confederate leadership faced: first, whether to attack a portion of the Federal army in the morning; and second, once the morning attack was no longer feasible, whether to stay and fight the next day. Both decisions were the responsibility of Johnston, and both decisions involved the advice and assistance by Hood. Before the war even concluded, Johnston and Hood began finger-pointing as they wrote their own versions of what happened. This book promises to change our understanding of the events surrounding the Cassville controversies and close the gap in its history.

"Timothy H. Scherman re-introduces modern readers to a nineteenth-century woman writer and political activist whose disappearance from literary history would seem impossible in light of the volume of her published writing and the visceral responses she elicited from readers in her own day. Collecting samples of her work in every genre--personal letters, short fiction, essays, lectures, editorial, memoir, excerpts from several novels and one of her plays--Scherman captures the full creative range of one of the earliest woman professionals in the literary field in three conveniently arranged volumes. Scherman's most intriguing admission in his editor's introduction constitutes the difference between this series and others like it in the recent recovery of women writers of Oakes Smith's era. While grounding the writer's life and work in the broad contours of U.S. and trans-Atlantic literary culture and suggesting thematic and political relations among Oakes Smith's variety of writings, these volumes advertise a still broadly open field of investigation, where even basic information that might lead to clearer understanding of Oakes Smith's success and latter-day disappearance await the scholar, the graduate student, or the amateur historian with access to a growing array of electronic archives at their fingertips, now including an expanded Oakes Smith website and EOS Log."--

"John Lane continues his exploration of the intersection of the human imagination with the world of other animals in a companion volume to COYOTE SETTLES THE SOUTH (2016) and NEIGHBORHOOD HAWKS (2019). Each of these fifteen pieces--some more formal essays, some journalism, and some stories of Lane's encounters with wild animals in wild places--explores the diversity and the mystery of what's often been called "the more than human world." In each piece there is always animal presence, sometimes central and sometimes peripheral. In one piece the Columbian mammoth comes back to trouble the contemporary political landscape of South Carolina. In another, he ponders the fate of a wing-shot goose finding a last refuge in the Lane family's tiny frog pond. In another, Lane ventures into an abandoned Zimbabwean gold mine alone to check on the status of a common genet, a shy carnivore"--

The new edition of Scandalous Providence: The Jesus Story of the Compassion of God constructs a postmodern interpretation of the providence of God through a narrative rendering of providence on the basis of the epochal moments in the story of Jesus, a distinctive modern reconstruction of the theology of providence through a critical, non-reductionist interpretation of the Gospel traditions on the one side, and contemporary narratives of lived experience within the scientific understanding of the world on the other. Significant theological problems have rendered the reformulation of the doctrine of providence elusive and unachievable for more than half a century. Beyond Karl Barths neo-orthodox interpretation of providence within the Reformed tradition in 1947 (Church Dogmatics: The Doctrine of Creation, Volume III, Part 3), A Scandalous Providence is the first holistic reconstruction of the doctrine of providence in modern, now postmodern theology.

The International Kierkegaard Commentary-For the first time in English the world community of scholars systematically assembled and presented the results of recent research in the vast literature of Søren Kierkegaard. Based on the definitive English edition of Kierkegaard's works by Princeton University Press, this series of commentaries addresses all the published texts of the influential Danish philosopher and theologian. This is volume 8 in a series of commentaries based upon the definitive translations of Kierkegaard's writings published by Princeton University Press, 1980ff.

The International Kierkegaard Commentary-For the first time in English the world community of scholars systematically assembled and presented the results of recent research in the vast literature of Søren Kierkegaard. Based on the definitive English edition of Kierkegaard's works by Princeton University Press, this series of commentaries addresses all the published texts of the influential Danish philosopher and theologian. This is volume 4 in a series of commentaries based upon the definitive translations of Kierkegaard's writings published by Princeton University Press, 1980ff.