Dialoguing with Critical Race Theory: Constitutional and Christian Links

Mark Ellingsen, Interdenominational Theological Center

May 2024 / ISBN: 978-1-64889-896-9
Availability: In stock
112pp. ¦ $54 £43 €50

Critical Race Theory (CRT) is certainly a hot topic. No longer just the legal theory it was originally designed to be, it has become an icon for determining which side you are on concerning racism. Most of the loudest voices, especially in the debate about CRT in our schools, seem not to have actually studied the theory. This is a book to get you into the heart of CRT’s actual analysis and prescriptions. It’s a book to get Americans to stop all the shouting and really find out what CRT teaches. It might also contribute to getting more civility into our public discourse. Ellingsen demonstrates how in fact what Critical Race Theory teaches is in line with our Constitutional system’s realism about political solutions, suspicions of our selfishness, and the majority’s tendency to run roughshod over minorities. He also demonstrates that these commitments are consistent with Christianity’s understanding of original sin and the quest for social justice. Consequently, if critics do not want CRT taught in our schools or to be part of our public discourse, we had better stop teaching the Constitution and Christian values in our schools, to rule these commitments as out of order in our search for common values! Get ready for a stimulating, controversial, well-documented read.

Poetic Inquiry Atlas Vol. 1: A Survey of Rigorous Poetics

Edited by Adam Vincent, Capilano University; The University of British Columbia, Canada

July 2024 / ISBN: 979-8-8819-0005-2
Availability: In stock
324pp. ¦ $108 £86 €101

This edited volume illustrates various definitions and uses of poetry in research and scholarship, both across disciplines and across the world. The collection offers a worldview of the capacity of poetic inquiry to enhance research and scholarship by showcasing rigorous poetics (which [re]present epistemology and aesthetics as synergistic) in action. Each chapter is intended to highlight diverse perspectives and uses of poetic inquiry, thereby highlighting commonalities and differences in praxis, that include: - Critical discussion around poetry and its uses in each poet-scholar’s diverse practices (e.g., research, writing, personal development, healthcare, mental health, ecology and/or scholarship). - An example of poetry that showcases their approach(es) in action. - Insights into the crafting of their poetry (i.e., what choices were made? why were specific choices made?) - An exploration of how their poetic work links to the vast rhizomatic array of poetic inquiry. This volume is well-suited for new scholars, looking for ways to integrate poetry into their praxis, and experienced scholars who wish to further their understanding of the capaciousness of poetic inquiry as a valuable method, methodology, tool and/or approach. It also holds insights for those interested in the power of poetry as it relates to mental health, health care, ecology, teaching, qualitative research and identity work.

Silver Age and After: Repressed Russian Poets, Artists and Philosophers during the Soviet Period

Roberto Echavarren

July 2024 / ISBN: 978-1-64889-020-8
Availability: In stock
270pp. ¦ $79 £63 €74

The details of the Jewish Holocaust have become part of our history through the testimony of those who survived the death camps. The details of Lenin’s and Stalin’s reign of terror are far less known because they took place behind a wall of secrecy, and because survivors have been loath to speak about them for fear of retribution. This is an encompassing volume presenting an intense display, as complete as can be, of poets, artists, musicians, and philosophers and intellectual actors implicated in different aspects of Russian life roughly through the period 1900-1960. They were people who had lived under the Soviet regime in times of peace and in times of war, from the Red Terror through the Great Terror. One must bear in mind the political and economic conditions in which those lives developed: the one-party rule placed above both the government and the citizens, the abashment of the division of powers, the suppression of private property and private economic initiative, the political police, and the GULAG. I deal with the poets in several chapters, then theater directors, then composers, then philosophers (these both in the introduction and in the play at the end of the book). Besides the Prologue and Introduction, the reader will find an Index of historical names, plus an extensive Bibliography. The work can be used for reference, for classroom adoption, for researchers/practitioners of Russian Literature, Political Studies, Slavic Studies, and Russian History.

Thomas Jefferson on American Indians

M. Andrew Holowchak

May 2024 / ISBN: 978-1-64889-105-2
Availability: In stock
236pp. ¦ $77 £62 €72

Jefferson’s views on Indians were characterized by ambivalence. Jefferson both loved and hated Native Americans, because he loved Native Americans. Jefferson was, through his father Peter, exposed early on and directly, though likely infrequently, to mysterious but congenial Indigenes, and he came to respect profoundly their courage, physical endurance, artistry, integrity, and most importantly, their large love of liberty, even if they were “uncivilized.” So impressed by Indians culture was Jefferson that he made their nature and culture objects of study in his ‘Notes on Virginia.’ Though uncivilized, Indians showed marked signs of being readily civilizable. Thus, Jefferson, qua politician and philosopher, hoped that they would mix their blood with Whites and become part of what he saw as a great American “empire for liberty.” Miscegenation meant integration, willful or by force, into American culture and abandonment of Aboriginal ways and their radically different way of seeing the land upon which they lived, which Natives could only grudgingly accept. Was Jefferson’s Indian policy, though guided by true concern for their wellbeing, genocidal? This book ultimately aims to answer that question.

The Red Warrior: U.S. Perceptions of Stalin’s Strategic Role in the Allied Journey to Victory in The Second World War

Reagan Fancher, Texas Woman’s University

June 2024 / ISBN: 979-8-8819-0007-6
Availability: In stock
274pp. ¦ $81 £65 €76

Through U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease program, American leaders sought to keep Joseph Stalin’s Red Army in the field and fighting Adolf Hitler’s forces in the Second World War from 1941 forward. Delivered by the Anglo-American Arctic naval convoys, overland through the Iranian deserts and mountains, and through the skies from Alaska to Siberia, this much-needed material aid helped Stalin’s Red Army to continue fighting and thereby prevented a separate peace with Hitler’s Germany and a mechanized repeat of the First World War’s Brest-Litovsk fiasco. Yet Roosevelt and other U.S. officials, due to their severe underestimation of Stalin’s character and his rigid and fanatical devotion to exporting Communism at gunpoint, gambled incorrectly that they could win the Soviet premier’s heart and mind through several excessive wartime aid gestures, including the furnishing of atomic bomb materials to the Soviet regime. By 1945, American leaders had succeeded in their strategic goal of keeping Stalin and his Red Army in the war and hastening victory but failed in their efforts to purchase the Soviet premier’s goodwill and commitment to postwar peace, heralding the global Cold War, and setting the stage for later U.S. martial aid programs to those resisting aggression abroad. In addition to its primary focus on the American leadership’s perceptions of Stalin’s strategic importance to the Allied war effort in the Second World War, this work also includes a detailed assessment of Roosevelt’s Soviet Lend-Lease program alongside U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s later support for the Afghan Islamic guerrillas resisting Soviet occupation during the Soviet-Afghan War of the 1980s and a comparison of both martial aid programs with Washington’s recent revival of Lend-Lease aid for the Ukrainian war effort. It offers today’s American leaders and policymakers a chance to consult the lessons of history and apply them in the present.