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Go Down to Silence: A Novel
Gregory Kenneth Belliveau
Jacob Horowitz, a worn and bitter business tycoon, has never spoken to anyone about his experience of Nazi persecution during World War II -- not even his recently deceased wife, Liza. Suddenly stricken with terminal cancer, the aging Jew receives an invitation from his old friend Pierre, a Gentile Christian and former Belgian underground operative, to pay him one last visit in Belgium. Jacob accepts, and determines to take along his estranged son Isaac. In this fast-paced, vivid historical account set alternately in war-torn Europe and today's United States, the consequences of war become clear. Momentous events push the hardened Horowitz toward reconciliation with his youngest son, with his past, with God, and with himself.
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Say to This Mountain: The Life of James T. Jeremiah
Gregory Kenneth Belliveau
Biography of James T. Jeremiah.
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Exploring U2: Is this Rock 'N' Roll?: Essays on the Music, Work, and Influence of U2
Scott D. Calhoun
Exploring U2: Is This Rock 'n' Roll? features new writing in the growing field of U2 studies. Edited by Scott Calhoun, with a foreword by Anthony DeCurtis, Exploring U2 contains selections from the 2009 inaugural gathering of "The Hype and The Feedback: A Conference Exploring The Music, Work and Influence of U2." In keeping with U2's own efforts to remove barriers that have long prevented dialogue for understanding and improving the human experience, this collection of essays examines U2 from perspectives ranging from the personal to the academic and is accessible to curious music fans, students, teachers, and scholars alike.
Four sections organize 16 essays from leading academics, music critics, clergy, and fans. From the academic disciplines of literature, music, philosophy, and theology, essays study U2's evolving use of source material in live performances, the layering of vocal effects in signature songs, the crafting of a spiritual community at live concerts, U2's success as a business brand, Bono's rhetorical presentation of Africa to the Western consumer, and readings of U2's work for irony, personhood, hope, conservatism, and cosmic-time. Official band biographer Neil McCormick considers U2 as a Dublin-shaped band, and Danielle Rhéaume tells how discovering and returning Bono's lost briefcase of lyrics for the album October propelled her along her own artistic journey.
This thoughtful and timely collection recognizes U2's music both as art and commentary on personal journeys and cultural dialogues about contemporary issues. It offers insights and critical assessments that will appeal not only to scholars and students of popular music and culture studies but to those in the fields of theology, philosophy, the performing arts, literature, and all intellectually curious fans of U2.
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U2 Above, Across, and Beyond: Interdisciplinary Assessments
Scott D. Calhoun
U2’s success and significance are due, in large part, to finding inventive, creative solutions for overcoming obstacles and moving past conventional boundaries. As it has embraced change and transformation over and over again, its fans and critics have come to value and expect this element of U2. These new essays from the disciplines of organizational communication, music theory, literary studies, religion, and cultural studies offer perspectives on several ways U2’s dynamic of change has been a constant theme throughout its career. The eight essays here come from the U2 Conference 2013, which explores the music, work, and influence of U2, furthering the scholarship on U2.
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Bruce Springsteen: American Poet and Prophet
Donald L. Deardorff II
Like other major musical artists, Bruce Springsteen’s work has reflected, revealed, and reacted to modern American realities over the course of his forty-year career.
Since releasing his first record in 1973, Springsteen has sold more than a hundred million albums worldwide, played thousands of concerts, and won Grammy, Golden Globe, Emmy, and Academy awards. More importantly, however, he is one of the few twentieth-century singer-songwriters to serve as the voice of his generation, a defining artist whose works reflect the values, dreams, and concerns of many Americans. In Bruce Springsteen: American Poet and Prophet, Donald L. Deardorff II explores the works of “The Boss,” defining the exact nature of Springsteen’s cultural influence.
With the release of seventeen studio albums, Springsteen’s influence and popularity spans multiple generations. Deardorff classifies and explains Springsteen’s remarkable reception as it evolved from small beginnings in the Jersey shore bars of the 1970s to worldwide fame today. This book thoughtfully considers the trenchant commentary Springsteen’s albums make on the mythology of the American Dream, working-class concerns, the changing character of American masculinity, the relationship between Americans and their government, the importance of social justice, and the evocation of an American spirit.
Bruce Springsteen: American Poet and Prophet will appeal to more than just Springsteen fans. It describes Springsteen as an apt critic of his own culture, whose music paints literary portraits that uncover the realities of an American society constantly evolving, while striving toward its own betterment.
Listen to an interview of Dr. Deardorff on the New Books Network.
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Hero and Anti-hero in the American Football Novel: Changing Conceptions of Masculinity from the 19th Century to the 21st Century
Donald L. Deardorff
This book examines the rise and evolution of the football narrative, from 1870 to the present, in order to analyze and define the process by which American men have sought to fashion masculine identity over the last century. The author uses the athletic hero as a representative of a larger number of templates or centers (the religious man, the business tycoon, the family man, the rebel, etc.), many of which have been used by various men to make meaning of their lives.
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Sports: A Reference Guide and Critical Commentary, 1980-1999
Donald L. Deardorff
This guide to the available literature on sports in American culture during the last two decades of the 20th century is a companion to Jack Higg's Sports: A Reference Guide (Greenwood, 1982). The types of individual or team sports included in this volume include those that are viewed as physical contests engaged in for physical, emotional, spiritual, or psychological fulfillment. With a focus on books alone, chapters review the available literature regarding sports and each concludes with a bibliography. Academic journals likely to contain articles on the topics discussed are listed at the end of each chapter. Twelve chapters discuss sports and American history, business and law, education, ethnicity and race, gender, literature, philosophy and religion, popular culture, psychology, science and technology, sociology and world history.
This reference and guide to further research will appeal to scholars of popular culture and sports. An index and two appendixes are included, one listing important dates in American sports from 1980 through 2000 and one listing sports halls of fame, museums, periodicals, and websites.
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The Image of God in the Human Body: Essays on Christianity and Sports
Donald L. Deardorff II and John White
This work uses sports as a metaphor for humanity itself. Using a biblical structure: creation, fall, and redemption, the editors show how God may have intended us to enjoy sport, how we have corrupted sports, and how we might reattach ourselves to God's original purposes through sport.
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Cedarville University: Defining Legacies
Barbara L. Loach
Cedarville University’s 125th anniversary in 2012 provided an appropriate moment to look back and remember how God has led so many wonderful people to this place and how His hand has guided and kept us over all these years. As the university continues to grow and change, many individuals new to the campus—students, administrators, faculty and staff members alike—may not be aware of all the contributions of those who preceded them. In order to capture those lives before they are lost to history, Dr. Loach set out to record the stories behind some of the faces and names long associated with the university. In addition, she highlights how some of the university's more than 30,000 alumni have served the Lord through various fields of endeavor around the world.
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Particular Scandals: A Book of Poems
Julie L. Moore
Broad in scope--theological, ecological, and personal--and acutely particular in details--witnessed and lived--the affecting poems in Particular Scandals explore how one endures suffering, avoiding the clichés of both bitterness and transcendence. Thus, while Moore's poetry depicts the debilitating ruin illness wreaks, it also embraces the beauty and mystery in creation, in faith, even in tribulation itself. At the book's core is pure paradox and insightful integration, wedding Christmas--Christ's incarnation and eventual, willing sacrifice--to pain and grief. Thus, on the heels of Moore's multiple surgeries and amid her husband's serious heart problem--both while in their forties--come "flashes of hallelujah" and songs knit with Amens "un- / broken, like a world without end." Empathetic and observant, Moore's evocative poems also turn their attention to friends' and other family members' appalling losses: a stillborn infant, suicidal adolescents, molested, and trafficked children. All in all, the book portrays how Moore survives like the Sycamore tree in one of her poems, "scabbed and scarred from moments like this," offering her "empty self / like a cup to the Lord of the storm."
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...And Ladies of the Club
Helen Santmyer
"...And Ladies of the Club" centers on the members of a book club and their struggles to understand themselves, each other, and the tumultuous world they live in. A true classic, it is sure to enchant, enthrall, and intrigue readers for years to come.
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Farewell, Summer
Helen Santmyer
It's a long, languorous, country summer in a small Ohio town. After many years spent away as a scholar and writer, Elizabeth Lane has returned to the setting of her most poignant childhood memories, a town steeped in her family's long history. She comes to Sunbury to work on a book but finds she is haunted by one memory in particular. It was 1905, she was eleven and in love with her cousin, Steve, painfully watching his ill-fated romance with the beautiful Damaris. Looking back, Elizabeth discovers a world of feelings that she knows belong more to adulthood than childhood, and as she sees the tragic, doomed love of Steve and Damaris, she wishes she could be a child forever.
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Herbs and Apples
Helen Santmyer
Herbs and Apples, the novel Helen Hooven Santmyer wrote at the height of her youthful creative powers, is the work that many critics have loved even more than . . . And Ladies of the Club. Laced with nostalgia as well as timeless insight into human character, Santmyer's enchanting novel is as contemporary today as the day it was written.
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Ohio Town
Helen Santmyer
Ohio Town is Santmyer's only published work of nonfiction, chronicling her own reminiscences of the town she lived in all her life -- Xenia, Ohio.
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The Fierce Dispute
Helen Santmyer
Small-town America, ghosts, domesticity, and New World-Old World tensions - these combine in Helen Hooven Santmyer's second novel, The Fierce Dispute (1929), which feature a fiercely disputatious southern Ohio matriarch and her adult daughter locked in battle for the very soul of a child, Lucy Anne, from whose viewpoint much of the narrative unfolds.. "The Fierce Dispute pits Margaret Baird, the proud bearer of the Linley-Hewitt-Baird family history, against Margaret's cosmopolitan and romantic daughter, Hilary. Set in the Xenia, Ohio, family home, the novel's real battleground is Lucy Anne herself, the child mired in conflict because she loves both her mother Hilary and grandmother Margaret.
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The Augustinian Theology of W.H. Auden
Stephen J. Schuler
When W.H. Auden returned to Christianity in the early 1940s, he identified himself with what he called an 'existential' method of spiritual and literary inquiry, which the writings of St. Augustine helped him define as a mode of thinking that not only allows for human subjectivity, but emphasizes the hopes, fears, needs, desires, and anxieties of the individual. Augustine thus became for Auden a model of a thinker who seamlessly merged psychological reflection with philosophical speculation and theological insight, and it is this combination of introspection and theoretical investigation that shapes much of Auden's later poetry. The Augustinian Theology of W.H. Auden illustrates that Augustine's thought is a major influence on Auden's postconversion poetry and prose. Auden encountered Augustine both directly, through his reading of the Confessions, and indirectly, through several of Auden's contemporaries, such as Reinhold Niebuhr, Charles Norris Cochrane, and Charles Williams. Stephen J. Schuler argues that Augustine provided Auden with the language of privation to describe the nature of moral and social evil, enabling him to make sense of the pervasive anxieties produced by World War II. Augustine's works also offered Auden a rationale for his intuition that the physical world, and especially the human body, is intrinsically good. Auden's struggle to reconcile the implications of his Augustinian theology with his attitudes toward romantic love and sexuality are explained by Schuler, who demonstrates how the Augustinian theology of Reinhold Niebuhr helped shape Auden's ideas about human identity and community, which is defined and maintained by love in all its various forms. Finally, Schuler analyzes Auden's Augustinian view of the ethics of poetry. By examining the presence of Augustinian ideas in Auden's poetry and prose, Schuler establishes the Augustinian origins of several crucial but often misunderstood features of Auden's work as well as the importance of Augustine in shaping and articulating the concerns of Auden's later poetry.
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Staging Luther: Four Plays by Hans Sachs
Annis N. Shaver
The book contains four plays written by Hans Sachs, a troubadour, playwright, shoemaker, and important compatriot and supporter of Martin Luther.
Unlike Sachs' well-known poem "The Wittenberg Nightingale" (also included here in a new translation), the plays have not been translated into English until now and will be a boon for researchers and students who can now read them for the first time.
The plays are full of scriptural references and are generally written as dialogs between a Luther supporter and a Catholic cleric. Inevitably the Luther supporter wins the argument, but not without some name-calling and strong derision towards the Papist discussant!
In addition to the plays, the book provides historical commentary on the importance of Sachs' support of Luther, as well as annotations related to the translation and word choices along with cultural information to support the translations.
It is an important scholarly contribution to the ongoing work of reformation scholarship in the English language.
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The Textbook as Discourse: Sociocultural Dimensions of American Schoolbooks
Annis N. Shaver
The central assumption of The Textbook as Discourse is this: interpreted in the flow of history, textbooks can provide important insights into the nature and meaning of a culture and the social and political discourses in which it is engaged. This book is about the social, political and cultural content of elementary and secondary textbooks in American education. It focuses on the nature of the discourses—the content and context—that represent what is included in textbooks. The term "discourse" provides the conceptual framework for the book, drawing on the work of the French social theorist Michel Foucault. The volume includes classic articles and book chapters as well as three original chapters written by the editors. To enhance its usefulness as a course text, each chapter includes an Overview, Key Concepts, and Questions for Reflection.
