"Volk's impressive study rethinks the East-West binary often reiterated in discussions of Japanese modernism by reinserting local aspects into the universalizing tendencies of modernism itself. The book makes an important contribution to the growing literature on modern Japanese art history by providing an alternative comparative framework for understanding the global development of modernism that decenters Euro-America. Rigorously historical in her critique, Volk destabilizes our understanding of the Japanese experience of modernity through the prism of Yorozu's singular vision of the self, leaving us questioning conventional wisdom and contented to wobble."--Gennifer Weisenfeld, Duke University "In Volk's affectingly stunning and deeply reflective study of the Japanese artist Yorozu Tetsugorō's work between 1910-1930, we have a profoundly historical reminder of how modernism everywhere struggled to meet the demands of the new with the readymades of received artistic practices. In this study of Yorozu's utopian universalist project, Volk has imaginatively broadened our understanding of the modernist moment and perceptively captured its global program to unify art and life, contemporary culture and history."--Harry Harootunian, author of Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture and Community in Interwar Japan

In this volume Ann Lee Bressler offers the first cultural history of American Universalism and its central teaching -- the idea that an all-good and all-powerful God saves all souls. Although Universalists have commonly been lumped together with Unitarians as "liberal religionists," in its origins their movement was, in fact, quite different from that of the better-known religious liberals. Unlike Unitarians such as the renowned William Ellery Channing, who stressed the obligation of the individual under divine moral sanctions, most early American Universalists looked to the omnipotent will of God to redeem all of creation. While Channing was socially and intellectually descended from the opponents of Jonathan Edwards, Hosea Ballou, the foremost theologian of the Universalist movement, appropriated Edwards's legacy by emphasizing the power of God's love in the face of human sinfulness and apparent intransigence. Espousing what they saw as a fervent but reasonable piety, many early Universalists saw their movement as a form of improved Calvinism. The story of Universalism from the mid-nineteenth century on, however, was largely one of unsuccessful efforts to maintain this early synthesis of Calvinist and Enlightenment ideals. Eventually, Bressler argues, Universalists were swept up in the tide of American religious individualism and moralism; in the late nineteenth century they increasingly extolled moral responsibility and the cultivation of the self. By the time of the first Universalist centennial celebration in 1870, the ideals of the early movement were all but moribund. Bressler's study illuminates such issues as the relationship between faith and reason in a young, fast-growing, and deeply uncertain country, and the fate of the Calvinist heritage in American religious history.

If we want to decolonize the history of art, argues Kristopher Kersey, we must rethink our approach to the historical record. This means dispensing with Eurocentric binaries—divisions between Western and non-Western, modern and premodern—and making a commitment to artworks that challenge the perspectives we build upon them. In Facing Images, the question takes elegant and intriguing form: If the aesthetic hallmarks of “modernity” can be found in twelfth-century art, what does it really mean to be “modern”? Kersey’s answer to this question models a new historiography. Facing Images begins by tracing the turbulent discourse surrounding the emergence of Japanese art history as a modern field. In lieu of examining canonical works from the twelfth century, Kersey foregrounds the elusive and the enigmatic in artworks little known and understudied outside Japan; the manuscripts he selects defy traditional art-historical narratives by exhibiting decidedly modern techniques, including montage, self-reference, reuse, noise, dissonance, and chronological disarray. Kersey weaves these medieval case studies together with insights from a wide range of interdisciplinary scholarship, using a methodology that will prove important for historians: Facing Images produces a history of non-Western art in which diverse and anachronic works are brought responsibly and equitably into dialogue with the present, without being subsumed under Eurocentric formalisms or false universals. A timely intervention in the history of medieval Japanese art, art historiography, and the history of global modernism, Facing Images redefines the relationship of the “premodern” non-West to “modern” art. It will be of particular interest to scholars of medieval Japanese art and of modernism.

This contextualised study illuminates the oft-misunderstood aspects of Richard Baxter's ecclesiology: purity, unity, and liberty. In doing so, it sheds further light on the nature of seventeenth-century English Puritanism, and the quest for the true church and the corresponding conflicts between the Laudians and Puritans.

“This is a loving, sophisticated, illuminating, outstanding depiction of a brilliant intellectual/spiritual/moral leader who deserves just such a treatment. This book will serve as testimony and inspiration for the new generation... a tour de force articulation of a truly great life.” – Rabbi Irving (Yitz) Greenberg A comprehensive biography about the life and work of Rabbi Harold Shulweis who was essential in the renewal of Jewish life in post-war America. Harold Schulweis was a dominant figure in the renewal of Jewish life in the post-war generation of American Jewry. Widely regarded as the most successful and influential pulpit rabbi of his generation, he shaped an extraordinary career as pulpit rabbi, theologian, public intellectual, and communal leader. His innovations in synagogue practice reshaped congregations across the continent introducing synagogue-based havurot, “para-rabbinics” and para-professional counseling programs, outreach to alienated Jews and “unchurched” Christians, opening the traditional synagogue to gay and lesbian Jews and their families, and welcoming families of children with special needs. With Leonard Fein, Schulweis founded Mazon, the Jewish communal response to hunger. He launched The Foundation for the Righteous – recognizing Christians who rescued Jews during the Holocaust – an effort chronicled on the CBS news program “60 Minutes.” In the closing years of his career, he initiated the Jewish World Watch – a communal response to the incidence of genocide worldwide.

Feminist Theory in Pursuit of the Public argues that feminism needs to develop a theory of the public. It responds to a moment when feminism's impetus to reconstitute the private sphere left a huge gap in its political thinking on the public. This inattention to the public is particularly worrisome now when the nation-state and its publics seem to have diminishing power and compromised democratic agency. The waning of power in the public sphere diminishes the influence that citizens can have in deciding on the conditions of life, and therefore minimizes the changes that feminists can envision or enact in the social field to work towards equality, access, deliberation, participation, just distribution, rights, and authority for women.