scholarly journals Review essay: When the dancing turned to mourning: Theological responses to the pandemic

2021 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-80
Author(s):  
Jonathan C. P. Birch
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Review Essay ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Apparent Absence ◽  
Good Book ◽  
Four Books ◽  
Walter Brueggemann ◽  
Milton Keynes

This review essay considers four books published within the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic. It guides us through how each of these texts offers a timely Christian response to, and not explanation for, the challenges that we face: innumerable deaths, the inability to worship together, deserted streets and shut-up businesses, the place of viruses in the Earth’s ecology, and the apparent absence of God as the innovations of modern science seem to be our only salvation. Reviewed works:John C. Lennox, Where is God in a Coronavirus World? (Epsom, Surrey: The Good Book Company, 2020)Tom Wright, God and the Pandemic: A Christian Reflection on the Coronavirus and its Aftermath (London: SPCK: 2020)Walter Brueggemann, Virus as a Summons to Faith: Biblical Reflections in a Time of Loss, Grief, and Uncertainty (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2020)Robert Keay, Reframing Pandemic (The Window of Christianity series; New York: Basiliad Publishing, 2020)

scholarly journals Why the lie: probing the explanation for journalistic cheating

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivor Shapiro
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Affirmative Action ◽  
Review Essay ◽  
New York Times ◽  
Star System ◽  
The New York Times ◽  
News Organizations ◽  
Four Books

This Review Essay examines four books that offer a variety of explanations fabrication and plagiarism within journalism. They include explanations offered by the two most famous recent perpetrators of fabrication (Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass), as well as an analysis of the recent scandals at the New York Times and of cheating in the wider society. Among the explanations probed are workplace pressure, the "star" system in journalism, and the culture of trust and lack of policing within news organizations. Simpler explanations are rejected, including pure ambition, lack of ability, dysfunctional management, and affirmative action.

scholarly journals Review Essay: Steps to a Material Ecocriticism. The Recent Literature about the “New Materialisms” and its Impact on Ecocritical Theory

2012 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Serenella Iovino
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Political Ecology ◽  
Review Essay ◽  
Recent Literature ◽  
Material Ecocriticism ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
Four Books

This bibliographic essay illustrates the proliferation of studies about the "new materialisms" and examines the potential influx of this conceptual trend on ecocriticism. In the discussion, in particular, I provide a comparative analysis of four books: Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, Eds. Material Feminisms (Bloomington: Indiana U P, 2008), Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Bloomington: Indiana U P, 2010), Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham and London: Duke U P, 2010), David Abram, Becoming Animal (New York: Vintage Books, 2010).

scholarly journals Why the lie: probing the explanation for journalistic cheating

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivor Shapiro
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Affirmative Action ◽  
Review Essay ◽  
New York Times ◽  
Star System ◽  
The New York Times ◽  
News Organizations ◽  
Four Books

This Review Essay examines four books that offer a variety of explanations fabrication and plagiarism within journalism. They include explanations offered by the two most famous recent perpetrators of fabrication (Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass), as well as an analysis of the recent scandals at the New York Times and of cheating in the wider society. Among the explanations probed are workplace pressure, the "star" system in journalism, and the culture of trust and lack of policing within news organizations. Simpler explanations are rejected, including pure ambition, lack of ability, dysfunctional management, and affirmative action.

Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe. Edited by Pamela Smith and Paula Findlen. New York: Routledge, 2002. Pp. ix, 437. $27.95.

2003 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 250-251
Author(s):  
Margaret C. Jacob
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Arts And Sciences ◽  
Science And Art ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Modern Capitalism ◽  
Natural Philosophers

The Marxists had it right all along, they just got tripped up by their materialism. Early modern capitalism opened vast new worlds, particularly in the arts and sciences, only the traffic went both ways. Creative agents invented new markets and pushed commerce in directions that favored enterprises immensely cosmopolitan and innovative, often solely for the sake of beauty and display. Commerce offered a context but the nobility, and not an imagined bourgeoisie, had the edge when it came to exploiting the market for objets. Paintings could be traded for property, land, and houses. Princes could sponsor natural philosophers, and the fluidity in values meant that good investors, like good practitioners of the arts and sciences, took an interest in all aspects of learning. The interrelatedness of the representational arts and natural philosophy stands as one of the central themes in this tightly integrated collection of essays. We now have a vast historiography telling us that we should no longer teach early modern science without reference to the art of the time, and vice-versa. The point is beautifully illustrated by an exhibition recently held at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles (spring 2002) on the art of Pieter Saenredam. Working in Utrecht in the 1630s, he used geometry to regularize and make precise the angles and corners found in the exquisite paintings he made of the city's churches. He knew as much about geometry as he did about chiaroscuro. At precisely the same moment, an hour or two away by barge, Descartes in Leiden put the final touches on his Discourse on Method (1637). In effect he explained to the world why precision and clarity of thought made possible the kind of beauty that Saenredam's paintings would come to embody.

scholarly journals On international migration: A review essay

2017 ◽  
Vol 44 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 200
Author(s):  
Anthony C. Masi
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
International Migration ◽  
Review Essay ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Immigrant Integration ◽  
Empirical Information ◽  
New Information ◽  
Four Books ◽  
Unanticipated Consequences ◽  
Do So

International migration continues to reshape our world, sometimes in predictable ways, but often with unanticipated consequences. The four books reviewed here provide new information and important insights regarding migration and migrant adjustment. They do so either by dealing with the policy dimension of this vast topic (Freeman and Mirilovic; Phillimore) or by delving deeply into the issue of immigrant integration (Scholten et al.; Waters and Gerstein Pineau). These editors took four different approaches to their task: (1) a compilation of already published works on the topic (Phillimore); (2) original pieces on topics or countries but following a predetermined framework (Scholten, et al.); (3) chapters designed to test theories against available empirical information (Freeman and Mirilovic); and (4) a comprehensive group-written “state of the art” for a single country (Waters and Gerstein Pineau). Together, the books provide an impressive array of scholarship from a variety of disciplinary perspectives on the links between migration and social policy and on immigrant integration.

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