Lexington Books – serie

Rooted in a rigorous social-scientific reading of the New Testament, S.H. Mathews illuminates how fasting functioned within the honor-shame, kinship-bound, and collectivist world of the first-century Mediterranean. Drawing on anthropology, sociology, and historical criticism, the volume re-situates fasting not as a universal spiritual discipline but as a culturally coded practice signalling mourning, repentance, solidarity, and communal identity. By positioning early Christian fasting within broader Jewish, Greek, Roman and Near Eastern contexts, Mathews demonstrates how abstention shaped boundary-making, social meaning, and the maintenance of group identity.The analysis engages closely with key biblical episodes, Moses’ and Elijah’s forty-day fasts, Esther’s intercessory fast, Ezra’s and Nehemiah’s communal fasts, the critique of exploitative fasting in Isaiah 58, and the ritual fasts in Zechariah 7–8, before turning to the New Testament’s reframing of fasting. Mathews offers detailed readings of Jesus’ forty-day wilderness fast (Matthew 4), the controversies surrounding Pharisaic fasting, Anna’s temple devotion in Luke 2, and the communal discernment fasts in Acts 13–14. Throughout, the study shows how concepts such as honor, limited good, the evil eye, dyadic identity, and Mediterranean social structures shape the rhetorical force and theological function of fasting across the canon.Bringing this framework into dialogue with contemporary evangelical interpretations, Mathews challenges modern assumptions that cast fasting primarily as a private or devotional practice. Instead, the book presents a compelling and nuanced account of fasting as a socially embedded act—one that both reflected and reshaped early Christian piety, communal life, and interpretive traditions. A valuable resource for scholars, teachers, and advanced students, the volume offers a rich interdisciplinary lens for understanding one of the most overlooked phenomena in biblical interpretation.

Promotion of the low risk “ABC” behaviors—Abstinence, Being faithful, and Condom use—has had only limited success in Africa. This book draws on a large qualitative study affiliated with an adolescent intervention trial to examine how ABC promotion can be improved. It evaluates the MEMA kwa Vijana sexual health program, which was implemented in 62 primary schools and 18 health facilities in rural Tanzania, scrutinizing its teacher-led curriculum, peer education, youth-friendly health services, youth condom distribution, and community mobilization components. The book examines how implementing such a low-cost, large-scale program involved many compromises, including those between national policies and international “best practice” recommendations, between the most desirable intervention design and one that was affordable and sustainable at a large scale, between optimal teaching methods and real-world teaching capacity, between ideal curriculum content and what was acceptable to the local community, and between adults’ values and youths’ realities. The program’s impact is evaluated by triangulating findings from three person-years of participant observation, in-depth interviews, survey interviews, and biomedical tests.The book also provides in-depth case studies to examine the motivations and strategies of extraordinary young people who practiced ABC behaviors. It outlines broad principles for ABC promotion, including: acknowledging existing youth sexual relationships; promoting each low risk behavior in complexity and depth; working with preexisting, culturally compelling motivations; and intervening at individual, interpersonal, community, and structural levels. Many recommendations for the promotion of specific ABC behaviors are discussed, such as reducing pressures and incentives for girls to have sex; targeting male risk-perception and self-preservation; promoting alternative forms of masculinity than sexual conquest; strengthening premarital and marital relationships; tailoring fidelity programs for hidden couples, couples planning to marry, and monogamous and polygynous married partners; and addressing pleasure, trust, pregnancy prevention, and fertility protection in condom promotion. The book concludes with additional recommendations specific to school programs, and a review of promising complementary interventions for out-of-school youth, women, men, couples, and parents.

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Italy's War of Liberation takes issue with the apparently prevalent attitude among Allied commanders during World War II that the Italian military was ineffective. O'Reilly recounts the little-known story of the significant contribution made by the Italian military during the Italian Campaign, including the contribution of relatively unacknowledged Italian Partisan formations that fought in Italy, France, Yugoslavia, and Greece. Despite the fact that Italians fought on the front lines with the British and American soldiers, and despite the service of the Italian Navy and Air Force, the Allies refused repeated Italian pleas for more involvement in combat. This book not only attempts to correct the record of military history by illustrating the ways in which the Italians were underutilized by the Allies, but it also serves to paint a fair portrait of the Italian military's substantial efforts to defeat Hitler and eradicate Fascism.

This is the story of an amazing manifestation of a modern blood libel against the Jews and Israel, involving not only Arabs and Muslims, but also the European media and world organizations. Based on rich documentation from all angles: Israeli, Palestinian, Arab, European, American, and International, Raphael Israeli aims to draw our attention toward another piece in the multi-faceted puzzle of the Arab-Israeli dispute, and of international antisemitism. By bringing this Middle Eastern version of the perennial theme of blood libel before their readers, the author hopes to instruct people of good will of the dangers inherent in protracted conflicts, such as the one opposing Israelis and Arabs, which can provoke war, misery, destruction, and violence, but also recriminations born out of hallucinations and ill-will. This is a multi-disciplinary book which should interest not only students of antisemitism, Judaism, and Israel, but also psychologists, journalists, political scientists, and scholars of communications, the Middle East, international relations, and the Israeli-Arab dispute.

This is the story of an amazing manifestation of a modern blood libel against the Jews and Israel, involving not only Arabs and Muslims, but also the European media and world organizations. Based on rich documentation from all angles: Israeli, Palestinian, Arab, European, American, and International, Raphael Israeli aims to draw our attention toward another piece in the multi-faceted puzzle of the Arab-Israeli dispute, and of international antisemitism. By bringing this Middle Eastern version of the perennial theme of blood libel before their readers, the author hopes to instruct people of good will of the dangers inherent in protracted conflicts, such as the one opposing Israelis and Arabs, which can provoke war, misery, destruction, and violence, but also recriminations born out of hallucinations and ill-will. This is a multi-disciplinary book which should interest not only students of antisemitism, Judaism, and Israel, but also psychologists, journalists, political scientists, and scholars of communications, the Middle East, international relations, and the Israeli-Arab dispute.

In its comparison of anarchist and poststructuralist thought, From Bakunin to Lacan contends that the most pressing political problem we face today is the proliferation and intensification of power. Saul Newman targets the tendency of radical political theories and movements to reaffirm power and authority, in different guises, in their very attempt to overcome it. In his examination of thinkers such as Bakunin, Lacan, Stirner, and Foucault Newman explores important epistemological, ontological, and political questions: Is the essential human subject the point of departure from which power and authority can be opposed? Or, is the humanist subject itself a site of domination that must be unmasked? As it deftly charts this debate's paths of emergence in political thought, the book illustrates how the question of essential identities defines and re-defines the limits and possibilities of radical politics today.

Harold I. Saperstein served as rabbi of Temple Emanu-El of Lynbrook, N.Y., from 1933 until his retirement in 1980. The specific contours of his career reflect a sustained effort to use the pulpit of this suburban temple to communicate a Jewish perspective based on personal encounters with great issues of the day-including the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust, the civil rights era, the McCarthy era, and other turning points in American history. The fifty-two sermons in this book have been selected, introduced, and annotated by Marc Saperstein, whose award-winning books on the history of Jewish preaching have established him as a leading expert on this subject. No other book illustrates as effectively the value of the sermon as a resource for understanding the challenges faced by American Jews at some of the most dramatic moments in the turbulent history of this century.

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Forgetting Futures reignites the debate about the crisis of memory and the search to understand the relationship between past and present, remembering and forgetting. In the book Petar Ramadanovic presents an elegant critique of the most significant concepts of memory, from Plato to Nietzsche, as he challenges the prevalent, Aristotelain understanding of memory as mere repeated presentation of the past in the present.Ramadanovic skillfully examines the power of traumatic memory in history. Through an analysis of Cathy Caruth and a ground breaking revisionist interpretation of Toni Morrison's Beloved he shows how the memory of the Holocaust and slavery has shaped American identity. This unique study of memory places trauma, identity, and race under the intellectual microscope resulting in a book of great use for literary and cultural studies scholars, and educated readers seeking to learn more about the relationship between history and memory.

Postmodernism has become the orthodoxy in educational theory. It heralds the end of grand theories like Marxism and liberalism, scorning any notion of a united feminist challenge to patriachy, of united anti-racist struggle, and of united working-class movements against capitalist exploitation and oppression. For postmodernists, the world is fragmented, history is ended, and all struggles are local and particularistic. Written by internationally renowned British and American educational theorists Marxism Against Postmodernism in Educational Theory—a substantially revised edition of the original 1999 work Postmodernism in Educational Theory—critically examines the infusion of postmodernism and theories of postmodernity into educational theory, policy, and research. The writers argue that postmodernism provides neither a viable educational politics, nor the foundation for effective radical educational practice and offer an alternative 'politics of human resistance' which puts the challenge to capitalism firmly on the agenda of educational theory, politics, and practice.

Gillian Alban meticulously pursues the Fairy Melusine snake-woman image through the plot and the poetry of A. S. Byatt's novel Possession, into medieval legend, and beyond into her antecedents in ancient myth. The book describes the erotically inspiring force of Melusine's love story and draws parallels with goddesses such as Lamia, Ishtar or Inanna, Isis, and Asherah. Mother, creator, and leader, the figure of Melusine was ultimately vilified and tellingly converted into the demon of patriarchal accounts, as seen in the examples of Lilith, Medusa, Scylla, and the serpent in the Garden. Alban deconstructs part of Genesis, including the roles of Adam and Eve and Cain's crime, and illuminates the Old Testament worship of the goddess Asherah alongside the male Yahweh. A forceful exploration of literature, history, and myth, this study sweeps away limiting assumptions about the female sex. Melusine the Serpent Goddess restores the dignity acknowledged to women of old, making a forceful statement about the power and creativity of women.

In her pioneering work, The Debates of Liberty, Wendy McElroy provides a comprehensive examination of one of the most remarkable and influential political phenomena in America: the anarchist periodical Liberty and the circle of radicals who surrounded it. Liberty, which is widely considered to be the premier individualist-anarchist periodical ever issued in the English language, published such items as George Bernard Shaw's first original article to appear in the United States and the first American translated excerpts of Friedrich Nietzsche. Arguably the world's foremost expert on Liberty, Dr. McElroy exposes the reader to the controversy etched in each debate, ranging from radical civil liberties to economic theory, and from children's rights to the basis of rent and interest. While addressing the facts, Dr. McElroy also conveys and captures the individualistic personalities that emerged: Lysander Spooner, Auberon Herbert, Joshua K. Ingalls, John Henry Mackay, Victor Yarros, and Wordsworth Donisthorpe are only a partial listing.

Does public opinion matter in international conflict resolution? Does national foreign policy remain independent of public opinion and the media? International Public Opinion and the Bosnia Crisis examines, through U.S., Canadian, and European case studies, how public reaction impacted democratic governments' response to the ethnic and religious conflict in Bosnia during the period from 1991-1997. Each case study offers an overview of the national media coverage and public reaction to the war in the former Yugoslavia and examines the links between public opinion and political and military intervention in Bosnia. The result is a comprehensive evaluation of the complex relationship between public opinion, media coverage, and foreign policy decision-making.

Between 1939 and 1947 the county of Janów Lubelski, an agricultural area in central Poland, experienced successive occupations by Nazi Germany (1939-1944) and the Soviet Union (1944-1947). During each period the population, including the Polish majority and the Jewish, Ukrainian, and German minorities, reacted with a combination of accommodation, collaboration, and resistance. In this remarkably detailed and revealing study, Marek Jan Chodakiewicz analyzes and describes the responses of the inhabitants of occupied Janów to the policies of the ruling powers. He provides a highly useful typology of response to occupation, defining collaboration as an active relationship with the occupiers for reasons of self-interest and to the detriment of one's neighbors; resistance as passive and active opposition; and accommodation as compliance falling between the two extremes. He focuses on the ways in which these reactions influenced relations between individuals, between social classes, and between ethnic groups. Casting new light on social dynamics within occupied Poland during and after World War II, Between Nazis and Soviets yields valuable insight for scholars of conflict studies.

Delving into the anarchist writings of Nietzsche, Foucault, and Baudrillard, and exploring the cyberpunk fiction of William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, theorist Lewis Call examines the new philosophical current where anarchism meets postmodernism. This theoretical stream moves beyond anarchism's conventional attacks on capital and the state to criticize those forms of rationality, consciousness, and language that implicitly underwrite all economic and political power. Call argues that postmodernism's timely influence updates anarchism, making it relevant to the political culture of the new millennium.

The Asian American activist and political communities viewed 1996 as a watershed year, in which the Democratic Party took seriously its Asian American constituency—until the "Asian Donorgate" campaign finance controversy complicated that representation. In the ensuing public discourse Chinese Americans, and by proxy all Asian Americans, were depicted as foreigners subversively attempting to buy influence with U.S. politicians. While neither disputing nor confirming the guilt of the individuals charged in this episode with raising illegal foreign campaign money, Racial Politics in an Era of Transnational Citizenship highlights the conflation of Asian transnational capital and government interests with Asian Americans and the resulting racialization, foreignization, and even criminalization of this large community. Scholar Michael Chang asks, Will the perception of the Asian American as the "perpetual foreigner" continue to reproduce itself uncritically, heightening during times of media-supported nationalism? This incisive work contributes greatly to current debates on civil rights and on the meaning of "citizenship" and "belonging" among a transnational community and in a globalized world.

In A Centaur in Auschwitz, Massimo Giuliani sheds new light on Primo Levi's rational, demythologizing approach to suffering and survival. Whether working in narrative or poetic form, Levi grappled with the ambiguities and complexities of innocence and guilt, triumph and loss. Giuliani presents a powerful new means to understand Levi's thought: employing the neologism of salvaction (conveying "salvation" through one's own "action"), Giuliani has developed a "star of salvaction"—a diagram in the shape of a star of David, in which each of the six points leads to a strategy Levi learned for seeking meaning, and thereby salvation, in the misery of Auschwitz. This unique book, with its concise overview of Levi's expression and development as a writer, reveals Primo Levi for what he was: scientist, intellectual, Jew, and dedicated seeker of the roots of human dignity.

While Alexis de Tocqueville described America as the 'absolute democracy,' Karl Marx saw the nation as a 'defiled republic' so long as it permitted the enslavement of blacks. In this insightful political history, Nimtz argues that Marx and his partner, Frederick Engels, had a far more acute and insightful reading of American democracy than Tocqueville because they recognized that the overthrow of slavery and the cessation of racial oppression were central to its realization. Nimtz's account contrasts both the writings and the civil action of Tocqueville, Marx and Engels, noting that Marx and Engels actively mobilized the German-American community in opposition to the slavocracy prior to the Civil War, and that Marx heavily supported the Union cause. This potent and insightful investigation into the approaches of two major thinkers provides fresh insight into past and present debates about race and democracy in America.

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the once numerous pronouncements of a coming conflict with China have been muted as both countries face new challenges. The contributors to this insightful volume discuss some of the most critical issues in contemporary U.S.-China relations and provide historical and cultural perspectives on these issues. The importance of every major development in U.S.-China relations is discussed, from the success of Chinese economic reform and the rise of civil society to the EP-3 collision and the Taiwan Strait issue. While not all contributors have the same interpretation of events or conception of their implications, this volume provides a balanced, non-partisan account that presents readers with a brief and comprehensive summary of the issues at the forefront of the debate over the future of U.S.-China relations.

Ayn Rand remains a truly significant figure of modern philosophy. Her unique vision of a world in which man, relying on reason, acts wholly for his own good is skillfully developed and illustrated in her most famous novels, Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. But Rand's first novel, We the Living, a lesser-known but no less important book, offers an early form of the author's nascent philosophy—the philosophy Rand later called Objectivism.Robert Mayhew's collection of entirely new essays brings together pre-eminent scholars of Rand's writing. In part a history of We the Living, from its earliest drafts to the Italian film later based upon it, Mayhew's collection goes on to explore the enduring significance of Rand's first novel as a work both of philosophy and of literature. For Ayn Rand scholars and fans alike, this collection is a compelling examination of a novel that set the tone for some of the most influential philosophical literature to follow.

Under Siege is one of the first books of its kind. It vividly describes the devastating consequences of living in a public housing community damaged by the disappearance of manufacturing jobs, government cutbacks, and other alarming structural transformations that currently plague the United States and Canada. Walter DeKeseredy and his colleagues build on the rich theoretical perspectives developed by feminist scholars—as well as those constructed by Jock Young, Robert Sampson, and William Julius Wilson—as they present both the qualitative and quantitative results of a case study of six public housing estates located in an impoverished urban area. This groundbreaking book provides an in-depth analysis of predatory crime victimization, intimate partner victimization, public racial and sexual harassment, and the relationship of all these harms to the residents' perceptions of their neighborhood social disorganization/collective efficacy. Under Siege is uniquely valuable both for its rich theoretical basis and for its transparent presentation of the authors' research methodology. It is a thought-provoking sociological contribution that offers progressive strategies for ameliorating both poverty and crime in North American public housing complexes.

Politics, and the redistricting process through which it is carried out, has always been part of our history. In the last four decades, however, the frequency with which redistricting has taken place has grown dramatically. Through a series of theoretical, historical, and case study essays by leading scholars, Redistricting in the New Millennium addresses the complications of redistricting from before the 1812 plan setting gerrymandering to the latest Congressional races. The essays take the reader through the complicated issues of redistricting, addressing partisan, incumbent, racial, and judicial concerns. The book is essential for students of politics as well as anyone interested in the political process.

In A Centaur in Auschwitz, Massimo Giuliani sheds new light on Primo Levi's rational, demythologizing approach to suffering and survival. Whether working in narrative or poetic form, Levi grappled with the ambiguities and complexities of innocence and guilt, triumph and loss. Giuliani presents a powerful new means to understand Levi's thought: employing the neologism of salvaction (conveying "salvation" through one's own "action"), Giuliani has developed a "star of salvaction"—a diagram in the shape of a star of David, in which each of the six points leads to a strategy Levi learned for seeking meaning, and thereby salvation, in the misery of Auschwitz. This unique book, with its concise overview of Levi's expression and development as a writer, reveals Primo Levi for what he was: scientist, intellectual, Jew, and dedicated seeker of the roots of human dignity.

Religion and Global Culture draws together the work of a group of historians of religion who are concerned with situating the contemporary study of religion within the cultural complexity of the modern world. The writing of each of the volume's contributors relates to the work of leading historian of religion Charles H. Long, who has identified religious meanings in the contacts and exchanges of the colonial and postcolonial periods. Together with Long, these scholars explore religious practices in a variety of globalized contexts; chapters consider such varied subjects as the rituals of African immigrant communities in the United States, the making of Mohawk sweet grass and black ash baskets, the religious experience of prisoners in the Nazi holding camp of Westerbork, and the regional repercussions of contemporary multi-national business. By locating religion in the conflicted and cooperative relationships of the colonial and postcolonial periods, Religion and Global Culture calls on scholars of religion to reconfigure their interpretive stances from the perspective of the material structures of the modern, globalized world.

The Asian American activist and political communities viewed 1996 as a watershed year, in which the Democratic Party took seriously its Asian American constituency—until the "Asian Donorgate" campaign finance controversy complicated that representation. In the ensuing public discourse Chinese Americans, and by proxy all Asian Americans, were depicted as foreigners subversively attempting to buy influence with U.S. politicians. While neither disputing nor confirming the guilt of the individuals charged in this episode with raising illegal foreign campaign money, Racial Politics in an Era of Transnational Citizenship highlights the conflation of Asian transnational capital and government interests with Asian Americans and the resulting racialization, foreignization, and even criminalization of this large community. Scholar Michael Chang asks, Will the perception of the Asian American as the "perpetual foreigner" continue to reproduce itself uncritically, heightening during times of media-supported nationalism? This incisive work contributes greatly to current debates on civil rights and on the meaning of "citizenship" and "belonging" among a transnational community and in a globalized world.

At a time of intense urban civil unrest in the United States, this classic text by Milton Kotler was the first to forcefully demonstrate how governance on the neighborhood level could allow Americans to regain liberty and the right to govern their own lives. Kotler's original project showed how towns—once independent but then later annexed by adjacent cities—became exploited by centralized downtown power. As relevant today as it was when originally published in 1969, Neighborhood Government continues to speak to American cities whose faces have been radically changed by immigration, urban sprawl, and communities fractured by pervasive economic and racial inequality. With a new critical foreword by Terry L. Cooper that places the text within contemporary debates and a new foreword and afterword from the author, Neighborhood Government continues to be a vital work for anyone interested in the economic, social, and political health of American cities and the continuing struggle to increase community investment and control.

Why, in this supposedly rational, early twenty-first century, do large groups of people hate other groups of people and murder them wholesale? Pick up the paper any day of the week: Terrorists, torturers, mass murderers in and out of uniform, extremists of all nationalities, races, ethnic groups, and religions. How do such people justify their violence? What motivates them? What social conditions contribute to climates of hatred? How do those victimized by bigotry fight back? In The Hate Handbook: Oppressors, Victims and Fighters Martin Oppenheimer sets out to answer these questions in clear, conversational, and at times shockingly frank prose. Oppenheimer focuses on cases in recent history, from incidents of police brutality to Nazi executions, from wartime aerial bombing to suicide bombers, in order to shed sociological and psychological light on the behavior of both perpetrators and victims. Heralded by many as a terrific book for the layman and scholar alike, The Hate Handbook is an important core text for sociology, social psychology, history and political science courses, especially those focusing on minorities, conflict and social movements.

The Dispossessed has been described by political thinker Andre Gorz as 'The most striking description I know of the seductions—and snares—of self-managed communist or, in other words, anarchist society.' To date, however, the radical social, cultural, and political ramifications of Le Guin's multiple award-winning novel remain woefully under explored. Editors Laurence Davis and Peter Stillman right this state of affairs in the first ever collection of original essays devoted to Le Guin's novel. Among the topics covered in this wide-ranging, international and interdisciplinary collection are the anarchist, ecological, post-consumerist, temporal, revolutionary, and open-ended utopian politics of The Dispossessed. The book concludes with an essay by Le Guin written specially for this volume, in which she reassesses the novel in light of the development of her own thinking over the past 30 years.