Jesus is Lord over everything. So his lordship should shape every aspect of life. But what impact does faith really have on our day-today existence? And how should we, as Christians, interact with the culture? In Every Square Inch, Bruce Ashford skillfully navigates such questions. Drawing on sources like Abraham Kuyper, C.S. Lewis, and Francis Schaeffer, he shows how our faith is relevant to all dimensions of culture. The gospel informs everything we do. We cannot maintain the artificial distinction between "sacred" and "secular." We must proclaim Jesus with our lips and promote him with our lives, no matter what cultural contexts we may find ourselves in.

"A sprawling, comprehensive account of the neighborhood's history from 1797 to the present day... It is a treasure trove for both the historian and the lover of the Village." -- New York Sun

A profoundly original philosophical detective story tracing the surprising history of an anecdote ranging across centuries of traditions, disciplines, and ideas Red Sea-Red Square-Red Thread is a work of passages taken, written, painted, and sung. It offers a genealogy of liberty through a micrology of wit. It follows the long history of a short anecdote. Commissioned to depict the biblical passage through the Red Sea, a painter covered over a surface with red paint, explaining thereafter that the Israelites had already crossed over and that the Egyptians were drowned. Clearly, not all you see is all you get. Who was the painter and who the first teller of the tale? Designed as a philosophical detective story, Red Sea-Red Square-Red Thread follows the extraordinary number of thinkers and artists who have used the Red Sea anecdote to make so much more than a merely anecdotal point. Leading the large cast are the philosophers, Arthur Danto and Søren Kierkegaard, the poet and playwright, Henri Murger, the opera composer, Giacomo Puccini, and the painter and print-maker, William Hogarth. Strange companions perhaps, until their use of the anecdote is shown as working its extraordinary passage through so many cosmopolitan cities of art and capital. What about the anecdote brings Danto's philosophy of art into conversation with Kierkegaard's stages on life's way, with Murger and Puccini's la vie de bohème, and with Hogarth's modern moral pictures? Lydia Goehr explores these narratives of emancipation in philosophy, theology, politics, and the arts. What has the passage of the Israelites to do with the Egyptians who, by many gypsy names, came to be branded as bohemians when arriving in France from the German lands of Bohemia? What have Moses and monotheism to do with the history of monism and the monochrome? And what sort of thread connects a sea to a square when each is so purposefully named red?

This Festschrift brings together a range of scholars who congratulate Reinhard Schulze on the occasion of his 65th birthday, by shedding light and reflecting on the relation between Islam and modernity. Scholars from the fields of Islamic studies, religious studies, sociology and Arabic literature connect in various ways to Reinhard Schulze’s work to constructively criticize a Eurocentric understanding of modernity. The more specific aspects dealt with under the overarching topic of Islam and modernity make for the four thematic sections of this volume: the study of religion, Islam, and Islamic studies; Islamic knowledge cultures and normativity; language and literature as media of modernity; Islam and Islamic studies in the public sphere. Die Beitragenden zu dieser Festschrift gratulieren Reinhard Schulze zu seinem 65. Geburtstag, indem sie mit der Beziehung zwischen Islam und Moderne ein Lebensthema des Jubilars beleuchten. Vertretende der Islamwissenschaft, Religionswissenschaft, Soziologie und der arabischen Literaturwissenschaft beziehen sich in verschiedener Hinsicht auf Reinhard Schulzes Werk, um ein eurozentrisches Verständnis von Moderne konstruktiv zu kritisieren. Die unter dem Oberthema Islam und Moderne näher behandelten Aspekte sind aus den vier thematischen Sektionen des Bandes ersichtlich: Islam(wissenschaft), Religion und der Eigensinn der Moderne; islamische Wissenskulturen und Normativität; Sprache und Literatur als Medien der Moderne; Islam(wissenschaft) in der Öffentlichkeit. Contributors are: Mona Abaza, Hüseyin Ağuiçenoğlu, Aziz al-Azmeh, Katajun Amirpur, Monica Corrado, Ahmad Dallal, Peter Dové, Susanne Enderwitz, Anne Grüne, Stephan Guth, Kai Hafez, Albrecht Hofheinz, Michael Kemper, Hans G. Kippenberg, Karénina Kollmar-Paulenz, Felix Konrad, Gudrun Krämer, Volkhard Krech, Anke von Kügelgen, Jamal Malik, Jürgen Paul, Frank Peter, Stefan Reichmuth, Armando Salvatore, Johannes Stephan, Anna Trechsel, Yves Wegelin, Florian Zemmin.

Kazimir Malevich’s painting Black Square is one of the twentieth century's emblematic paintings, the visual manifestation of a new period in world artistic culture at its inception. None of Malevich’s contemporary revolutionaries created a manifesto, an emblem, as capacious and in its own way unique as this work; it became both the quintessence of the Russian avant-gardist's own art—which he called Suprematism—and a milestone on the highway of world art. Writing about this single painting, Aleksandra Shatskikh sheds new light on Malevich, the Suprematist movement, and the Russian avant-garde. Malevich devoted his entire life to explicating Black Square's meanings. This process engendered a great legacy: the original abstract movement in painting and its theoretical grounding; philosophical treatises; architectural models; new art pedagogy; innovative approaches to theater, music, and poetry; and the creation of a new visual environment through the introduction of decorative applied designs. All of this together spoke to the tremendous potential for innovative shape and thought formation concentrated in Black Square. To this day, many circumstances and events of the origins of Suprematism have remained obscure and have sprouted arbitrary interpretations and fictions. Close study of archival materials and testimonies of contemporaries synchronous to the events described has allowed this author to establish the true genesis of Suprematism and its principal painting.

Great cities and neighborhoods rise and fall, yet Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia has seized the imagination and envy of social climbers, urban planners, and novelists alike for two centuries. In The Perfect Square, Nancy Heinzen—a resident of Rittenhouse Square for over 40 years and an activist committed to its preservation—provides the first full-length social history of this public urban space. One of the five squares William Penn established when he founded the city, the southwest-situated Rittenhouse Square has transformed from a marshy plot surrounded by brickyards and workers’ shanties into the epicenter of Philadelphia high society. A keystone of center city Philadelphia, it was once home to great dynasties, elegant mansions, and grand dames of the Victorian era. Today it is lined with million-dollar high-rise condominiums, where nouveau-riche entrepreneurs and descendants of ethnic immigrants live side-by-side. Heinzen lovingly chronicles this urban space’s development and growth, illustrating that not only is Rittenhouse Square unique, but so is the combination of human events and relationships that have created and sustained it. Painstakingly researched and generously illustrated with black-and-white photos from public archives, The Perfect Square will appeal to lay readers interested in history, to professional historians and urban planners, and to the thousands of new residents who have settled on or near Rittenhouse Square since the dawn of the 21st century.

In The Icon and the Square, Maria Taroutina examines how the traditional interests of institutions such as the crown, the church, and the Imperial Academy of Arts temporarily aligned with the radical, leftist, and revolutionary avant-garde at the turn of the twentieth century through a shared interest in the Byzantine past, offering a counternarrative to prevailing notions of Russian modernism. Focusing on the works of four different artists—Mikhail Vrubel, Vasily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, and Vladimir Tatlin—Taroutina shows how engagement with medieval pictorial traditions drove each artist to transform his own practice, pushing beyond the established boundaries of his respective artistic and intellectual milieu. She also contextualizes and complements her study of the work of these artists with an examination of the activities of a number of important cultural associations and institutions over the course of several decades. As a result, The Icon and the Square gives a more complete picture of Russian modernism: one that attends to the dialogue between generations of artists, curators, collectors, critics, and theorists. The Icon and the Square retrieves a neglected but vital history that was deliberately suppressed by the atheist Soviet regime and subsequently ignored in favor of the secular formalism of mainstream modernist criticism. Taroutina’s timely study, which coincides with the centennial reassessments of Russian and Soviet modernism, is sure to invigorate conversation among scholars of art history, modernism, and Russian culture.