Search Results

The moral and spiritual character of creation is developed through a reading of five different biblical motifs: (1) the Yahwist account of creation in Genesis, (2) the Sabbath code, (3) Job’s experience of suffering in a sublime universe, (4) new creation in Christ, and (5) the New Heaven and the New Earth in John’s Apocalypse. This chapter shows scripture to be of considerable ecological significance while not addressing specific contemporary environmental problems.

As creatures made in the “image of God,” we have a unique identity and vocation. After showing that the popular models of ourselves as stewards or citizens of creation is inadequate, a case is made for humans as the servants of creation. This account of servanthood is tied to ecological insight and developed in terms of the current design technique called biomimicry.

This essay argues that William Faulkner’s participation in the People-to-People program rendered his authorship through a middlebrow patriotism. Made up of 40-odd committees representing a diverse range of “fields of activity,” the program was distinctive for its less highbrow suggestion that “friendship between peoples” could serve national interests in a Cold War climate. Its rhetoric of “friendly” politics would, however, find in the Writers’ Committee both a compelling and troubling instrument. With Faulkner as its head, and other noted writers participating, the committee afforded the program the cachet attached to authorship. The People-to-People impulse toward contact, on the other hand, also rendered authorship through a sensibility that embraced identification for its political potential. For the writers of the committee, many of whom were skeptical of any state imperative, this emphasis prompted assertions that vocation, the work of literature and reading, would always supersede political deployment.

The conclusion briefly sums up the argument of the book: that Aristides’ Hieroi Logoi should be read in the context of his professional vocation, as a literary text in which he merges religion and rhetoric to make a claim for his status as a divinely inspired orator in terms that are concrete, embodied, and personal.

This concluding chapter conjoins, in one constellation, the three texts from which certain observations have been drawn, and ourselves as readers of texts, and thereby attempt to provide this story with meaning and purpose. The first text is The Confessions of Nat Turner. The second is Max Weber's famous lecture “Science as a Vocation,” delivered in 1917 in Munich, on the eve of the Russian revolution. The third is Walter Benjamin's abbreviated fragment “Capitalism as Religion,” written in 1921, unpublished in his lifetime. In this chapter the second and third texts become prisms from the future, as we are ourselves. They, and we, refract and enliven the first, and so reveal its image. They are as unlike each other as each is unlike The Confessions, except in one regard—the glance each casts at the demonic. Though brief, these glances are of significance if we are to assess the final meaning of the “full faith and credit” held due the decision of the Southampton County Court to convict Nat Turner of fomenting “insurrection,” and order that he hang.

The first chapter focuses on the works of four writers, Paule Constant, Pierre Michon, Claude Simon and Tierno Monénembo, whose scenes of departure (from the characters’ native village in the Creuse or Limousin or the cities of Lyon or Paris) and arrival (in Africa or the Americas) are saturated with tropes of yearning and despair that simultaneously conjure up exotic fantasies and deep-seated anxieties of displacement and alienation.

In the concluding volume of his Homo Sacer project, The Use of Bodies, Giorgio Agamben briefly turns to Marx to distinguish his own account of what he terms ‘inoperativity’ from a Marxist account of production. Accepting Marx’s account of the decisive relationship between production, social relationships and culture, he nonetheless suggests that Marx neglected the forms of inoperativity that exist within every mode of production, opening it to a new use. ‘One-sidedly focused on the analysis of forms of production, Marx neglected the analysis of the forms of inoperativity’, he writes, ‘and this lack is certainly at the bottom of some of the aporias of his thought, in particularly as concerns the definition of human activity in the classless society’ (UB 94). Agamben’s reference to Marx is typically brief and enigmatic, and he neither expands on the claim that Marx, the thinker of the classless society, neglected inoperativity, nor identifies the aporias to which he refers. Nonetheless, in these brief and enigmatic remarks we find the crystallisation of a position developed in works stretching back to Agamben’s first book, The Man Without Content. Marx remains a subterranean influence on Agamben’s thought, and the diverse accounts of his work throughout Agamben’s oeuvre oscillate between critiques of his supposed productivism and praise for his thematisation of a non-substantive, self-negating subject.1 It is in the course of this oscillation that Agamben has clarified his own accounts of both political subjectivity and inoperativity.

This introduction provides framing examples of American writers’ transatlantic vocational pursuits, including Whitman’s editorial attempt to introduce his poetry to foreign readers and Douglass’s recognition of the personal and journalistic potential of his liberating experience abroad. In a critical context that considers the evolution of transatlantic literary studies and explains the implications of such key terms in this book as ‘professionalism’ and ‘cosmopolitanism,’ the introduction develops an understanding of the professional commitments and political stances that led nineteenth-century writers to shape their careers in a transatlantic public sphere. The six authors featured in this book – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Margaret Fuller, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Grace Greenwood, and Walt Whitman – thought beyond the nation and acted outside of literature itself to play leading roles in making global culture. The introduction concludes with detailed summaries of subsequent chapters.

This chapter presents oral history interviews with five nuns who have chosen to live in the present: Sister Catherine Bertrand, executive director of the National Religious Vocation Conference; Sister Ancilla Maloney, a Sister Servant of the Immaculate Heart of Mary from Scranton, Pennsylvania who now lives in an intercommunity house in the Bronx with other women religious and teaches in an inner-city high school there; Mary Jo Leddy, a Canadian whose book, Reweaving Religious Life, has had a very strong influence on many American nuns and who now lives with a group of refugees and other volunteers at Romero House in Toronto; Sister Patricia Marks, a full-time director of religious education in a suburban New Jersey parish who also works as a marriage and family therapist as well as a certified divorce mediator; and Sister Virginia Johnson, who is affiliated with Visitation House, a large private home in New York City. The narratives capture the women's experiences over the past fifty years, beginning in the 1960s.

The conclusion sums up the argument of the book, explaining the interconnectedness of such key terms as vocation/calling, the name, and the promise and their essential coherence around the imperative of love. This prepares the transition to the third part of the philosophy of Christian life, A Metaphysics of Love.

This chapter focuses on Max Weber, who longed for a leading role in the public arena, even after his writings had made him a towering figure in social thought. In his 1918 lecture on “Science as a Vocation,” he emphasized that “the qualities that make a man an excellent scholar and academic teacher are not the qualities that make him a leader to give directions in practical life, or, more specifically, in politics.” Yet he could not recognize in himself what was obvious even to admirers like Karl Jaspers: that his self-critical faculties were so highly developed as to disable him from decisive action.