Holy Cross Professors Author Books in Wide Array of Fields

WORCESTER, Mass. – From the history of Charleston to the philosophy of viewing art to the practice of Catholicism, faculty members at the College of the Holy Cross have authored numerous books in a range of subjects recently. Many of the books have received praise from experts in their respective fields.

Among them:

Avery-Peck, Alan J. (ed.). The Review of Rabbinic Judaism: Ancient, Medieval, Modern, Vol. 9. Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2006.

This journal presents research on fundamental problems in the study of the authoritative texts, beliefs and practices, events and ideas, of the Judaic religious world from the Hellenistic period to the present. Pseudepigrapha, the editing of the Babylonian Talmud, life in Late Roman Palestine, Pharisaic law, vegetarian ideology in Judaism, and the Church Fathers’ use of Rabbinic Midrashic techniques. Avery-Peck is professor and chair of the religious studies department.

Avery-Peck, Alan J. & Jacob Neusner (eds.). The Mishnah in Contemporary Perspective. Part Two. Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2006.

This second of a two-part project on the Mishnah in contemporary study, displays a broad selection of approaches to the study of the Mishnah in the contemporary academy. Topics in this volume include the problem of Mishnaic historiography, the construction of households in the Mishnah, archaeology and the Mishnah’s legal tradition, and the Poetics of the Mishnaic literature. Avery-Peck is professor and chair of the religious studies department.

Avery-Peck, Alan J., Jacob Neusner and William Green (eds.). The Encyclopaedia of Judaism Second Edition, enlarged and expanded. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2005.

In four volumes and 2948 pages, this encyclopedia covers the religion of Judaism beginning in ancient Israelite times and extending to our own day. Containing 150 major articles written by scholars in North America, Europe, and Israel, it treats Jewish religion, history, literature, beliefs, observances, practices, and the place of Jews and Judaism in diverse societies and cultures. This second edition doubles the size of the original publication, so as to cover all aspects of Jewish history and practice as well as to provide accounts of the character of contemporary Jewish communities around the world. Avery-Peck is professor and chair of the religious studies department.

Bizzell, Patricia L. (ed.). Rhetorical Agendas: Political, Ethical, Spiritual. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers Inc., 2006.

Rhetorical Agendas comprises the proceedings of the 2004 biennial international conference of the Rhetoric Society of America. In addition to keynote addresses by Lester Faigley, Gerard Hauser, Peter Mack, and Jacqueline Jones Royster, 36 additional papers from the conference are grouped under these headings: History, Theory, Pedagogy, Publics, and Gender. Bizzell is a professor in the English department.

Cass, Loren R. The Failures of American and European Climate Policy: International Norms, Domestic Politics, and Unachievable Commitments. State University of New York Press, 2006.

Cass, associate professor of political science, argues that international norms and normative debates provide the key to understanding the evolution of both domestic and international responses to the threat of global climate change. The focus of analysis is German, British, European Union, and American climate policy between 1985 and 2005. He examines why some nations, but not others, have made climate commitments and succeeded or failed to meet these commitments.

Clark, S.J., William A. A Voice of Their Own: The Authority of the Local Parish. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2005.

In light of three parish studies, Fr. Clark, assistant professor of religious studies, examines community, intimacy, and authority, and claims that a fundamental aspect of ecclesial authority resides in the local community.

Clooney, S.J., Francis (ed.). Jesuit Postmodern: Scholarship, Vocation, and Identity in the 21st Century. Lexington Books, 2006.

Nine American Jesuit scholars teaching at colleges and universities — including Holy Cross alumnus Fr. Bruce T. Morrill, S.J., ’81 and professor Rev. William E. Stempsey, S.J., M.D., professor and chair of the College’s philosophy department — reflect on their academic work, explaining why they engage in this endeavor and how it coheres with their self-understanding as Jesuits. In accounts that weave together scholarly lives and personal stories, the contributors explore the irreducible diversity of their experiences and criticize the dominant modern synthesis that shaped Jesuit institutions of higher education from the 1960s to the 1990s. Through unconventional ways of discussing Jesuits, scholarship and religious intellectual inquiry, this book challenges scholars to speak more critically and imaginatively on these subjects.

Cording, Robert K. Common Life. Cavankerry Press, 2006.

Cording, professor of English, looks at the various meanings of common, especially its senses of familiar and widely known; belong or relating to the community at large; and its twinned notions of simple and rudimentary and vulgar and profane. The book’s perspective is religious, and is grounded in the epigraph from the Psalms: “Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him.” The “waiting” that is required has to do with three things: first, our desire, as Charles Wright puts it, “to believe in belief” rather than believe; secondly, the need for a setting aside of the self, an abandonment of “every attempt to make something of oneself, even ... a righteous person” in the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer; and thirdly, the “waiting” must be as Eliot wrote in the Four Quartets a waiting “without hope for hope would be hope of the wrong thing.” If we learn to wait in these ways, the final section of the book suggests that we have the chance of opening ourselves to all that is graceful within life’s common bounds.

Dustin, Christopher A., and Joanna E. Ziegler. Practicing Mortality: Art Philosophy, and Contemplative Seeing. Palgrave/Macmillan, 2005.

Dustin, associate professor and chair of the philosophy department, and Ziegler, professor of visual arts, are authors of Practicing Mortality, a collaborative endeavor to deepen readers’ understanding of “contemplative seeing” through the works of Plato, Thoreau, Heidegger and more. The authors explore what it means to “see” reality and contemplate how viewing reality philosophically and artfully is a form of spirituality. In this way, the authors propose a way of seeing that unites both critical scrutiny and spiritual involvement, as opposed to simple passive reception.

Kom, Ambroise. Jalons pour un dictionnaire des oeuvres littéraires de langue française des pays du Maghreb. L’Harmattan, 2006.

Last volume of a trilogy that includes the Dictionnaire des oeuvres litteraires de langue francaise en Afrique au Sud du Sahara, Volume 1 (1983) and Volume 2 (1996). The goal of this project is to develop a useful instrument to appreciate francophone literary production of the African continent as a whole. Kom is a professor in the modern languages and literatures department.

Kom, Ambroise. Mongo Beti Parle. Homispheres, 2006. (Originally published in 2002, this is an enlarged edition.) Mongo Beti (1932-2001) is one of the most original francophone African writers. Novelist, essayist, human rights and political activist, he spent more than 40 years of his life in exile. Mongo Beti parle is his last words, the result of interviews recorded two years before his death. Kom is a professor in the modern languages and literatures department. Kom is a professor in the modern languages and literatures department.

Lapomarda, S.J., Vincent A. The Jesuits and the Third Reich. Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2005. In The Jesuits and the Third Reich, Second Edition, Fr. Lapomarda, associate professor in the history department, describes Nazi persecutions of the Jesuit order during the Third Reich and the fates of many Jesuits in Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, the Baltic States, Russia, Rumania, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Italy, the Low Countries and France. He also focuses on Jesuit efforts in defense of human rights — particularly those of Jews — and provides a corrective to such views of the Roman Catholic Church of the Nazi period as that popularized by Rolf Hochhuth in The Deputy. According to America magazine, “Readers of Father Lapomarda’s excellent book, rich in notes and bibliography, can understand better the dimensions of a drama that struck one small, if representative, group of servants of the church before and during World War II.”

Luria, Sarah. Capital Speculations: Writing and Building Washington, D.C. Lebanon, N.H.: University of New England Press, 2006.

Luria, associate professor of English, pursues the vital political connection between architecture and literature in the formation in 1791 of America’s grand new capital city. City planners believed that designing Washington, D.C. as a physical model of the Constitution and its balance of powers would help citizens bond with the newly created nation. Once established, Luria argues, the capital became a stage for the visions of subsequent reformers. Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, and Henry Adams, all lived in the capital, and, as Luria shows, shaped its space in significant ways in an attempt to realize their written visions of how the nation should change. Clarifying the dynamic relations among discourse, economics, politics, and the built environment, Luria demonstrates how keenly architectural history is interwoven into American literary and political life.

Morrill, S.J., Bruce T., Susan Rodgers, and Joanna E. Ziegler (eds.). Practicing Catholic: Ritual, Body, and Contestation in Catholic Faith. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

This collected papers volume, based on a 2002 national conference held at Holy Cross’ Center for Religion, Ethics, and Culture, interprets world Catholicism as a deeply embodied and performed faith. Chapters range in subject from medieval rituals to contemporary faith practices in Massachusetts; scholars include art historians, liturgical theologians, performance artists, historians, and anthropologists. Rodgers is professor of anthropology, and Ziegler, an art historian and medievalist, is professor of visual arts.

Murphy, Frederick J. An Introduction to Jesus and the Gospels. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2006.

Murphy, professor of religious studies, introduces readers to the four Gospels by discussing the variety of ways in which the Gospels are studied, describing their historical, cultural, and literary contexts, and analyzing each biblical gospel in depth. In addition, the book goes beyond biblical sources by surveying gospels outside the Bible. All gospels were written a generation or more after the death of Jesus, so this book also explains how historians attempt to study the historical Jesus. Finally, there is a chapter on why Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were chosen for inclusion in the Bible, to the exclusion of others.

Raguin, Virginia C. (ed.). Catholic Collecting, Catholic Reflection 1538-1850. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2006.

In 224 profusely illustrated pages this book reflects an exhibition in Holy Cross’ Cantor Art Gallery of religious art borrowed from Jesuit institutions in England and the United States. These objects include chalices, vestments, sculpture, manuscripts, and stained glass preserved by Catholics after England became Protestant. Raguin, professor of visual arts, and seven other scholars profile aspects of piety, politics, and art, including the early missionary work of the Society of Jesus in England and the Maryland Colony. The collected essays also treat the 19th-century rehabilitation of the art of the Middle Ages and the restoration of legal rights for Catholics who were pioneers in the collecting of medieval art and early patrons of the Gothic Revival.

Raguin, Virginia C., and Sarah Stanbury (eds.). Women’s’ Space: Patronage, Place, and Gender in the Medieval Church. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005.

Raguin, professor of visual arts, and Stanbury, associate professor of English, have collaborated with six other scholars to produce a cross-disciplinary study of gendered spaces in the Middle Ages. Raguin and Stanbury both give different perceptions on architectural space and donor representations for the widely-read text The Book of Margery Kempe. Other essays explore theater, burial customs, the power of donations, clerical exclusion of women from sacred spaces and women’s strategies for inclusion, and gendered representation in binary coding of right for male and left for female.

Reynolds, Paige. Pearson Introduction to Literature. Boston: Pearson Editorial Board, 2005.

Reynolds, associate professor of English, is a member of the editorial board for The Pearson Custom Library: Introduction to Literature. The Custom Library combines the flexibility of a customizable database anthology with the breadth of an Introduction to Literature anthology. It offers more than 700 literature selections by more than 375 authors, with a wide range of supporting apparatus, such as glossaries, MLA guidelines, and introductions to literary genres and theory. Instructors simply select the materials they want for their own literary anthology, and obtain for their classes a hardcopy anthology of their own design. Other members of the editorial board include: Kathleen Shine Cain, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Janice Neuleib Stanley Orr, and Stephen Ruffuss.

Rodgers, Susan. Print, Poetics and Politics: A Sumatran Epic in Colonial Indies and New Order Indonesia. Leinden the Netherlands: KITLV Press, 2005. Rodgers, professor of anthropology, offers the first English translation of a major Sumatran chanted epic, the story of Datuk Tuongku Aji Malim Leman. The epic was written down by a politically savvy newspaper freelancer from the Angkola Batak society, a mostly Muslim group. He published his folkloric epic in 1941, on the eve of the Japanese occupation of the Dutch East Indies. Rodgers’ book, based on research supported by a 2000-2001 National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, presents a political anthropology reading of this remarkable printed epic.

Roorbach, Bill. Temple Stream: A Rural Odyssey. The Dial Press, 2006. Roorbach, Jenks Chair in Contemporary American Letters in the English department, chronicles his determination to follow a stream that runs by his home in Maine to its elusive source. While on his many walks, Roorbach discovers a world of nature along the stream, and he records the incidents, thoughts and memories that he encounters there in this collection of essays. At times, his wife or their newborn baby accompanies him on these humorous and poignant outings, but more often just his two dogs are at his side as he experiences the flowers, trees, wildlife — and even the garbage — along Temple Stream. The Hartford Courant raves: “ Roorbach is a brilliant guide to the natural world.”

Ross, Claudia N., and Jing-heng Sheng Ma. Modern Mandarin Chinese Grammar. Routledge Press, 2006.

Modern Mandarin Chinese Grammar is an innovative reference guide to Mandarin Chinese, combining traditional and function-based grammar in a single volume. The Grammar is divided into two parts. Part A covers traditional grammatical categories such as phrase order, nouns, verbs and specifiers. Part B is organized around language functions and situations. The two parts of the Grammar are closely linked by extensive cross-references, providing a grammatical and functional perspective on many patterns. Ross is a professor in the modern languages and literatures department.

Ross, Claudia N., Baozhang He & Jing-heng Sheng Ma, Workbook for Modern Mandarin Chinese Grammar. Routledge Press, 2006. The Modern Mandarin Chinese Grammar Workbook is an innovative book of exercises and language tasks for all learners of Mandarin Chinese. Divided into two sections, the workbook initially provides exercises based on essential grammatical structures, and moves on to practice everyday functions such as making introductions, apologizing and expressing needs. Ross is a professor in the modern languages and literatures department. He is visiting assistant professor in the modern languages and literatures department.

Stempsey, S.J., William E. Elisha Bartlett’s Philosophy of Medicine. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer, 2005.

This volume by Fr. Stempsey, associate professor of philosophy, is the first systematic American work on the philosophy of medicine, An Essay on the Philosophy of Medical Science (Philadelphia, 1844), by Elisha Bartlett (1804-1855). The book is divided into two parts: Part I consists of a critical introduction that gives a biographical sketch of Elisha Bartlett and situates his empiricist philosophy of medicine within the philosophical debates of the various theoretical schools of medical practice of early 19th-century America. Short summaries of Bartlett’s other writings and important addresses are presented, and many of the reviews of Bartlett’s work that appeared in the medical journals of his time are discussed. Also, the influence of the Paris clinical school on Bartlett’s philosophy is shown. Part II contains the Essay, and includes a previously unpublished manuscript of Bartlett’s philosophy of therapeutics, which develops some of the ideas of the Essay and adds another facet to Bartlett’s philosophy of medicine. In conclusion, some critical notes on Bartlett’s works are incorporated. A bibliography includes Bartlett’s published work, published reviews of his work, unpublished manuscripts and correspondence, and secondary literature on Bartlett and the philosophy of 19th-century medicine, and the book’s index provides scholars access to the major ideas in Bartlett’s work.

Stueber, Karsten R. Rediscovering Empathy: Agency, Folk Psychology, and the Human Sciences. MIT Press, 2006.

In this timely and wide-ranging study, Stueber, associate professor of philosophy, argues that empathy is epistemically central for our folk psychological understanding of other agents — that it is something we cannot do without in order to gain understanding of other minds. Empathy, regarded at the beginning of the 20th century as the fundamental method of gaining knowledge of other minds, has suffered a century of philosophical neglect. Stueber addresses the "plausible" philosophical misgivings about empathy that have been responsible for its failure to gain widespread philosophical acceptance. Setting his argument in the context of contemporary philosophy of mind and the interdisciplinary debate about the nature of our everyday mindreading abilities, Stueber counters objections raised by some in the philosophy of social science and argues that it is time to rehabilitate the empathy thesis. He argues persuasively that empathy should be regarded as the central default mode for understanding other agents, even if empathy's scope is limited.

Waldoff, Jessica P. Recognition in Mozart’s Operas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Recognition in Mozart’s Operas, by Waldoff, associate professor and chair of the music department, is a thoughtful and insightful discourse that uses both literary and musicological methods to illuminate some of the composer’s best-loved operas. Through close readings of Mozart’s operas, including Don Giovanni and Cosi fan Tutte, Waldoff taps the unexplored themes of knowledge and discovery that figure prominently in many of these works. She argues that rather than offering the happy endings or tragic climaxes of traditional operas, many of Mozart’s works feature scenes of recognition — moments in which a protagonist has an important revelation that changes the course of the drama. Drawing on Aristotle’s Poetics, the works of contemporary critics such as Terence Cave, and her own reflections, the author provides a critical account of Mozart’s recognition scenes.

West, Michael R. The Education of Booker T. Washington: American Democracy and the Idea of Race Relations. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.

West, associate professor of history, offers a major reinterpretation of one of the most complex and controversial figures in American history. Lauded by some as a black George Washington, derided by others as a Benedict Arnold, Washington has long held an ambiguous position in the pantheon of black leadership. In this biography, West reveals the personal and political dimensions of his subject’s journey “up from slavery.” He explains why Washington’s ideas resonated so strongly in the post-Reconstruction era and considers their often negative influence in the continuing struggle for equality in the United States. His work also establishes a foundation for understanding the ideological origins of the civil rights movement.

Yuhl, Stephanie E. A Golden Haze of Memory: The Making of Historic Charleston. The University of North Carolina Press, 2005.

In A Golden Haze of Memory, Yuhl, associate professor of history, critically examines the city of Charleston, S.C., between 1920 and 1940. It was during this time that city leaders worked to promote Charleston’s cultural heritage and national value. Through a network of elite white artists, literary figures and cultural groups, the city marketed its architecture, art, literature and African American folk culture — and downplayed its Confederate associations. Yuhl believes that this “sanitized” version of southern history was a translation of the memories of privileged whites into a collective identity for the city that ultimately protected social hierarchies and preserved their power. Yuhl’s book has received two national awards this past year: the 2006 Historic Preservation Book Prize (sponsored by Mary Washington University) and the 2006 Willie Lee Rose Prize for best book in Southern history written by a woman from the Southern Association of Women’s Historians.