Louis A. Ruprecht Jr. – författare

Father Matthew Kelty was an especially beloved monk at the historic Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky. Perhaps best known as Thomas Merton's colleague and confessor in the year prior to Merton's death, Father Matthew was also an enormously gifted spiritual writer in his own right, one whose homilies at Gethsemani attracted a wide following. This is the first book-length study of Matthew Kelty's life in relation to his spiritual writings and his profound reflections on the virtues of the monastic life in the modern age.

The manner in which Kathryn Johnston died so tragically at the hands of Atlanta narcotics police on the evening of November 21, 2006, anticipates and informs a number of very contemporary--and extremely volatile--issues that have become closely associated with the name of Ferguson, Missouri. As the "Black Lives Matter" movement makes clear, the issues center primarily around the relationship between racial identity and lethal police violence in the United States today. In this Second Edition of Policing the State, Louis A. Ruprecht Jr. attempts to situate both "Ferguson" and "Black Lives Matter" within a relatively narrow historical frame of the two years since Policing the State was first published, as well as a longer history of the emergence of a more violent policing regime and an ever-more intensely carceral society that came on the scene quite suddenly in the United States in the mid-to-late 1980s.

Working within two popular genres, gardening books and biblical meditations, God Gardened East offers a meditation on the first twenty-five chapters of Genesis, emphasizing the tropes of cultivation, wandering, and the east. Reconceived in a post-9/11 environment, Ruprecht wrestles with difficult questions about the violent legacy of monotheism and traces some of this violence back to the foundational story of Abraham and his dislocation from his homeland.

Anne Carson (b. June 21, 1950, in Toronto, Canada) is one of the most versatile of contemporary classicists, poets, and translators in the English language. In Reach without Grasping, Louis A. Ruprecht Jr. explores the role played by generic transgressions on the one hand, and by embodied spirituality on the other, throughout Carson’s ambitious literary career. Where others see classical dichotomies (soul versus body, classical versus Christian), Carson sees connection. Like Nietzsche before her, Carson decries the images of the Classics as merely bookish and of classicists as disembodied intellects. She has brought religious, bodily erotics back into the heart of the classical tradition.

Anne Carson (b. June 21, 1950, in Toronto, Canada) is one of the most versatile of contemporary classicists, poets, and translators in the English language. In Reach without Grasping, Louis A. Ruprecht Jr. explores the role played by generic transgressions on the one hand, and by embodied spirituality on the other, throughout Carson’s ambitious literary career. Where others see classical dichotomies (soul versus body, classical versus Christian), Carson sees connection. Like Nietzsche before her, Carson decries the images of the Classics as merely bookish and of classicists as disembodied intellects. She has brought religious, bodily erotics back into the heart of the classical tradition.

Reading both philosophical and theological texts, this book presents an argument against nostalgia: against the myth of a Golden Age, against the posture that sees "modernity" as a problem to be solved.This book about nostalgia raises the question of why it has become such a dominant and influential posture in contemporary philosophical and theological writing. The author notes the presence of the word "after" in a great many contemporary academic titles, and notes a spiritual sort of alienation that many feel in the "modern age." Out of this scholarly discontent emerges one of two related attempts: the attempt to return to a pre-modern manner of thinking and being (nostalgia); and the playful flight into some vaguely defined "postmodernity" (utopia). In either case, the common perception is that modernity is a problem, a problem to be avoided or escaped.Bringing philosophical and theological texts into conversation with one another, the book discovers a startling similarity in the accounts of modernness offered in these disparate idioms. Both are telling a story-a story which, the author argues, is as seductive as it is misguided.