Basing her discussion on the Bible and today's situation in society and theology, Letty Russell explores what it means to be human. She focuses particular attention on who we are in light of Jesus' own humanity, relationships between men and women, those who are treated as less than human, and how human liberation may be achieved.

Becoming Human argues that human identity was articulated and extended across a wide range of textual, visual, and artifactual assemblages from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. J. Allan Mitchell shows how the formation of the child expresses a manifold and mutable style of being. To be human is to learn to dwell among a welter of things. A searching and provocative historical inquiry into human becoming, the book presents a set of idiosyncratic essays on embryology and infancy, play and games, and manners, meals, and other messes. While it makes significant contributions to medieval scholarship on the body, family, and material culture, Becoming Human theorizes anew what might be called a medieval ecological imaginary. Mitchell examines a broad array of phenomenal objects—including medical diagrams, toy knights, tableware, conduct texts, dream visions, and scientific instruments—and in the process reanimates distinctly medieval ontologies. In addressing the emergence of the human in the later Middle Ages, Mitchell identifies areas where humanity remains at risk. In illuminating the past, he shines fresh light on our present.

The book Becoming Human: Li Zehou’s Ethics offers a critical introduction and in-depth analysis of Li Zehou’s moral philosophy and ethics. Li Zehou, who is one of the most influential contemporary Chinese philosophers, believes that ethics is the most important philosophical discipline. He aims to revive, modernize, develop, and complement Chinese traditional ethics through what he calls “transformative creation” (轉化性的創造). He takes Chinese ethics, which represents the main pillar of Chinese philosophy, as a vital basis for his elaborations on certain aspects of Kant’s, Marx’s and other Western theoreticians’ thoughts on ethics, and hopes to contribute in this way to the development of a new global ethics for all of humankind.

Winner, 2021 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize, given by the National Women's Studies Association Winner, 2021 Harry Levin Prize, given by the American Comparative Literature Association Winner, 2021 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Studies Argues that Blackness disrupts our essential ideas of race, gender, and, ultimately, the human Rewriting the pernicious, enduring relationship between Blackness and animality in the history of Western science and philosophy, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World breaks open the rancorous debate between Black critical theory and posthumanism. Through the cultural terrain of literature by Toni Morrison, Nalo Hopkinson, Audre Lorde, and Octavia Butler, the art of Wangechi Mutu and Ezrom Legae, and the oratory of Frederick Douglass, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson both critiques and displaces the racial logic that has dominated scientific thought since the Enlightenment. In so doing, Becoming Human demonstrates that the history of racialized gender and maternity, specifically anti-Blackness, is indispensable to future thought on matter, materiality, animality, and posthumanism. Jackson argues that African diasporic cultural production alters the meaning of being human and engages in imaginative practices of world-building against a history of the bestialization and thingification of Blackness—the process of imagining the Black person as an empty vessel, a non-being, an ontological zero—and the violent imposition of colonial myths of racial hierarchy. She creatively responds to the animalization of Blackness by generating alternative frameworks of thought and relationality that not only disrupt the racialization of the human/animal distinction found in Western science and philosophy but also challenge the epistemic and material terms under which the specter of animal life acquires its authority. What emerges is a radically unruly sense of a being, knowing, feeling existence: one that necessarily ruptures the foundations of "the human."

"This brilliant and judicious book is a hermeneutically based analysis of the very significant theology of Gustaf Wingren. Uggla makes Wingren's theology--in all its conflictual glory--come alive again through both an analysis of Wingren's major works and a moving narrative of his singular eventful life: a major work on a major theologian." --David W. Tracy, University of Chicago "Uggla takes the genre of intellectual biography to new heights. 'What Theology Is and What It Ought to Be' is the subtitle of Gustaf Wingren's debate book The Silent Interpreter; it also works as a subtitle for what this eloquent interpreter, Bengt Kristensson Uggla, achieves as he navigates the seas of academic and public theology with scholarly rigor and hermeneutical elegance. We are given a powerful testimony of why and how the church needs theology." --Antje Jackelen, Archbishop of Uppsala "This is probably the definitive biography of the great Swedish theologian Gustaf Wingren. Uggla writes with scope and theological nerve, and with a sense of wit and detail." --Niels Henrik Gregersen, University of Copenhagen REVIEWS OF THE SWEDISH EDITION OF THE BOOK (FOR FRONT MATTER) "It is a rich, stylistically brilliant and exciting work [...] Bengt Kristensson Uggla has created an intellectual masterpiece about a complex theological personality. When reading the book, it becomes clear how much we risk losing if we let Gustaf Wingren remain in oblivion. A reading experience of large dimensions." --KG Hammar, former Archbishop of Uppsala, Sydsvenska Dagbladet "This is a large and impressive work. Bengt Kristensson Uggla has the advantage that he writes extremely well / ... / The book is a shocking and highly interesting reading about a constantly struggling person." --Mary Schottenius, cultural journalist, Dagens Nyheter "An extremely readable book, initiated, well-informed and committed." --Svante Nordin, Professor of History of Ideas at Lund University, Svenska Dagbladet "An important book on an important theologian / ... / also if you belong to Wingren's critics, as I do, Kristensson Uggla's book is rewarding and thought provoking. For me, it meant that I had to re-examine some of my criticism. / ... / Gustaf Wingren continues to amaze even after his hundredth birthday." --Anders Jeffner, Professor of Theology at Uppsala University, Kyrkans Tidning "A magnificent and fascinating biography" --Dr. and Reverend Arne Fritzon, Sandaren "When Bengt Kristensson Uggla takes on the task of writing about Gustaf Wingren, it immediately becomes exciting / ... / it deserves its place among standard works of our business and for future Swedish theologians." --Dr. and Reverend Hans Andreasson, Tro & Liv

Genocide involves significant death and trauma. Yet the enormous scope of genocide comes into view when one looks at the factors that lead to mass killing, the struggle for survival during genocide, and the ways survivors reconstruct their lives after the violence ends. Over a one hundred day period in 1994, the country of Rwanda saw the genocidal slaughter of at least 800,000 Tutsi at the hands of members of the Hutu majority government. This book is a powerful oral history of the tragedy and its aftermath from the perspective of its survivors. Based on in-depth interviews conducted over the course of fifteen years, the authors take a holistic approach by tracing how victims experienced the horrific events, as well as how they have coped with the aftermath as they struggled to resume their lives. The Rwanda genocide deserves study and documentation not only because of the failure of the Western world to intervene, but also because it raises profound questions about the ways survivors create a new life out of the ashes of all that was destroyed. How do they deal with the all-encompassing traumas of genocide? Is forgiveness possible? And what does the process of rebuilding teach us about genocide, trauma, and human life?

Conversations is an important collection of interviews in which Luce Irigaray discusses the full range of her work and ideas with leading academics in the fields of Continental Philosophy, Feminist Theory and Critical Theory. Covering all the key topics that have been central to her work in the last thirty years, such as feminism, spirituality, difference, politics, education, and 'being two', this book offers essential insights into Irigaray's career as one of the world's most important contemporary thinkers. Topics and theorists approached include: philosophy, universality and difference, motherhood and gendered subjectivities, cultivation of desire and love, the other and others, globalization and ethics, politics and human rights, spirituality and religion, and, of course, being and becoming woman.

In 2001, Vanity Fair declared that the Age of Irony was over. Joan Didion has lamented that the United States in the era of Barack Obama has become an "irony-free zone." Jonathan Lear in his 2006 book Radical Hope looked into America’s heart to ask how might we dispose ourselves if we came to feel our way of life was coming to an end. Here, he mobilizes a squad of philosophers and a psychoanalyst to once again forge a radical way forward, by arguing that no genuinely human life is possible without irony. Becoming human should not be taken for granted, Lear writes. It is something we accomplish, something we get the hang of, and like Kierkegaard and Plato, Lear claims that irony is one of the essential tools we use to do this. For Lear and the participants in his Socratic dialogue, irony is not about being cool and detached like a player in a Woody Allen film. That, as Johannes Climacus, one of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous authors, puts it, “is something only assistant professors assume.” Instead, it is a renewed commitment to living seriously, to experiencing every disruption that shakes us out of our habitual ways of tuning out of life, with all its vicissitudes. While many over the centuries have argued differently, Lear claims that our feelings and desires tend toward order, a structure that irony shakes us into seeing. Lear’s exchanges with his interlocutors strengthen his claims, while his experiences as a practicing psychoanalyst bring an emotionally gripping dimension to what is at stake—the psychic costs and benefits of living with irony.

Ever since TIME magazine's 1983 'Man of the Year' was the PC, we have been led to believe that our domestic spaces have been colonized by digital technology. Too little attention has been paid to the domestic spaces and inhabitants impacted by this, and critical posthumanism has been captured by a picture of humanity overly indebted to digital technologies and their largely male progenitors. By applying feminist theory to posthumanism, this work recovers the plethora of sophisticated human-technology mediations associated with the home and practiced primarily by women, the elderly, infants, the disabled and across cultures globally, challenging dominant, contemporary visions of a future humanity. Authors Dennis M. Weiss and Colbey Emmerson Reid look at various iterations of the posthuman and assert the need for alternative, feminist readings that emphasize different standpoints from which to assess people, places, and products. Chapters address the impact of posthumanism on design theory and look at familiar domestic objects, with different attributes from those typically affiliated with technology and the future, such as clothing, textiles, ceramics, furniture and wallpaper. They reveal their unhomely, extra-human qualities and offer a much-needed perspective on domestic spaces and practices, revivifying the home as a site of species transformation and pushing beyond traditional understandings of person, mothering, families and care-giving to highlight a range of critically-overlooked mediated materialisms and embodiments affiliated with domestic space. By focusing on the neglected intersection of the posthuman with the home and exploring domestic posthuman design, Designing the Domestic Posthuman offers a vision of a future humanity that retains identity, integrity and considers our relationship to others, to the world and things in it. This book widens the lens of critical focus in posthumanism, feminist philosophy and design and presents an alternative, inclusive design framework for the future.