Ontologies of Violence

Ontologies of Violence
Author: Maxwell Kennel
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2023-07-24
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9004546448

Ontologies of Violence provides a new paradigm for understanding the concept of violence through comparative interpretations of French philosopher Jacques Derrida, philosophical theologians in the Mennonite pacifist tradition, and Grace M. Jantzen’s feminist philosophy of religion. By drawing out and challenging the remarkably similar priorities shared by its three sources, and by challenging the assumption that differences necessarily lead to displacement, Ontologies of Violence provides a critical theory of violence by treating it as a diagnostic concept that implies the violation of value-laden boundaries.

Ontological Terror

Ontological Terror
Author: Calvin L. Warren
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 185
Release: 2018-05-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0822371847

In Ontological Terror Calvin L. Warren intervenes in Afro-pessimism, Heideggerian metaphysics, and black humanist philosophy by positing that the "Negro question" is intimately imbricated with questions of Being. Warren uses the figure of the antebellum free black as a philosophical paradigm for thinking through the tensions between blackness and Being. He illustrates how blacks embody a metaphysical nothing. This nothingness serves as a destabilizing presence and force as well as that which whiteness defines itself against. Thus, the function of blackness as giving form to nothing presents a terrifying problem for whites: they need blacks to affirm their existence, even as they despise the nothingness they represent. By pointing out how all humanism is based on investing blackness with nonbeing—a logic which reproduces antiblack violence and precludes any realization of equality, justice, and recognition for blacks—Warren urges the removal of the human from its metaphysical pedestal and the exploration of ways of existing that are not predicated on a grounding in being.

Routledge Handbook of the Future of Warfare

Routledge Handbook of the Future of Warfare
Author: Artur Gruszczak
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 617
Release: 2023-09-19
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1000930947

This handbook provides a comprehensive, problem-driven and dynamic overview of the future of warfare. The volatilities and uncertainties of the global security environment raise timely and important questions about the future of humanity’s oldest occupation: war. This volume addresses these questions through a collection of cutting-edge contributions by leading scholars in the field. Its overall focus is prognostic rather than futuristic, highlighting discernible trends, key developments and themes without downplaying the lessons from the past. By making the past meet the present in order to envision the future, the handbook offers a diversified outlook on the future of warfare, which will be indispensable for researchers, students and military practitioners alike. The volume is divided into six thematic sections. Section I draws out general trends in the phenomenon of war and sketches the most significant developments, from the past to the present and into the future. Section II looks at the areas and domains which actively shape the future of warfare. Section III engages with the main theories and conceptions of warfare, capturing those attributes of contemporary conflicts which will most likely persist and determine the dynamics and directions of their transformations. The fourth section addresses differentiation and complexity in the domain of warfare, pointing to those factors which will exert a strong impact on the structure and properties of that domain. Section V focuses on technology as the principal trigger of changes and alterations in the essence of warfare. The final section draws on the general trends identified in Section I and sheds light on how those trends have manifested in specific local contexts. This section zooms in on particular geographies which are seen and anticipated as hotbeds where future warfare will most likely assume its shape and reveal its true colours. This book will be of great interest to students of strategic studies, defence studies, war and technology, and International Relations.

More Than Communion

More Than Communion
Author: Scott MacDougall
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2015-05-21
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0567659895

The dominant contemporary model for ecclesiology (theological views of the church itself) is the ecclesiology of communion. MacDougall argues that communion ecclesiologies are often marked by a problematic theological imagination of the future (eschatology). He argues further that, as a result, our ways of practising and being the church are not as robust as they might otherwise be. Re-imagining the church in the light of God's promised future, then, becomes a critical conceptual and practical task. MacDougall presents a detailed exploration of what communion ecclesiologies are and some of the problems they raise. He offers two case studies of such theologies by examining how distinguished theologians John Zizioulas and John Milbank understand the church and the future, how these combine in their work, and the conceptual and practical implications of their perspectives. He then offers an alternative theological view and demonstrates the effects that such a shift would have. In doing so, MacDougall offers a proposal for recovering the 'more' to communion and to ecclesiology to help us imagine a church that is not beyond the world (as in Zizioulas) or over against the world (as in Milbank), but in and for the world in love and service. This concept is worked out in conversation with systematic theologians such as Jürgen Moltmann, Wolfhart Pannenberg, and Johannes Baptist Metz, and by engaging with a theology of Christian practices currently being developed by practical theologians such as Dorothy C. Bass, Craig Dykstra, and those associated with their ongoing project. The potential for the church to become an agent of discipleship, love, and service can best be realised when the church anticipates God's promised perfection in the full communion between God and humanity, among human beings, within human persons, and between humanity and the rest of creation.

Artificial Intelligence and Innovations 2007: From Theory to Applications

Artificial Intelligence and Innovations 2007: From Theory to Applications
Author: Christos Boukis
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 402
Release: 2007-11-10
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 0387741615

This book brings together leading research from engineers and practitioners interested in the technical advances, business and industrial applications of intelligent systems. AIAI 2007 is focused on providing insights on how AI can be implemented in real world applications. Topics covered in this volume include: Theoretical Advances in AI; Intelligent Internet Systems: Emerging Technologies and Applications; Intelligent Systems in Electronic Healthcare; AI in Business and Finance.

The Gender Conversation

The Gender Conversation
Author: Edwina Murphy
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 439
Release: 2016-05-13
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1498298958

Conversations about gender, both inside and outside the church, can frequently degenerate into stale and rancorous disputes in which predictable arguments are traded back and forth, or fade awkwardly away into the tense silences of mutual misunderstanding. But the issue is an important one, and calls for a better conversation than either of those alternatives. In September 2015, Morling College hosted a one-day symposium entitled The Gender Conversation. A rich and diverse mix of contributors met to discuss issues of gender, theology, and Christian living, within a shared framework of evangelical conviction. Our aim in hosting the symposium was to deepen mutual understanding and respect, highlight common ground, clarify points of difference, and unite us all in a quest to learn from the Scriptures and live in the light of the gospel. This book brings together the papers presented at the symposium and the contributors' responses to one another, as a resource for further reflection and discussion.

Postsecular History

Postsecular History
Author: Maxwell Kennel
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2021-11-13
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 3030857581

This book explores how contemporary approaches to the meaning of time and history follow patterns that are simultaneously political and theological. Even after postsecular critiques of Christianity, religion, and secularity, many influential ways of dividing time and history continue to be formed by providential narratives that mediate between experience and expectation in movements from promise to fulfilment. In response to persistent theological influences within ostensibly secular ways of understanding time and history, Postsecular History revisits and revises the concept of periodization by tracing powerful efforts to divide time into past, present, and future, and by critiquing historical partitions between the Reformation and Enlightenment. Developing a postsecular critique of theopolitical periodization in six chapters, Postsecular History questions how relations of possession, novelty, freedom, and instrumentality implied in the prefix ‘post’ are reproduced in postsecular discourses and the field of political theology.

Violentologies

Violentologies
Author: B. V. Olguín
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 407
Release: 2021-01-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0198863098

Violentologies explores how different forms of violence shape identity and political vision in both familiar and unexpected ways using Latina/o writers and performers as case-studies.

The Violence of Law

The Violence of Law
Author: Jens Meierhenrich
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 769
Release: 2024-04-30
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1108675573

'Lawfare' describes the systematic use and abuse of legal procedure for political ends. This provocative book examines this insufficiently understood form of warfare in post-genocide Rwanda, where it contributed to the making of dictatorship. Jens Meierhenrich provides a redescription of Rwanda's daring experiment in transitional justice known as inkiko gacaca. By dissecting the temporally and structurally embedded mechanisms and processes by which change agents in post-genocide Rwanda manoeuvred to create modified legal arrangements of things past, Meierhenrich reveals an unexpected jurisprudence of violence. Combining nomothetic and ideographic reasoning, he shows that the deformation of the gacaca courts – and thus the rise of lawfare in post-genocide Rwanda – was not preordained but the outcome of a violently structured contingency. The Violence of Law tells a disturbing tale and will appeal to scholars, advanced students, and practitioners of international and comparative law, African studies and human rights.

An Ocean Vast of Blessing

An Ocean Vast of Blessing
Author: Steven D. Cone
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2014-07-09
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1630872423

Humans are made in the image of God, and authentically coming to be human means to become like him. This work pursues a robust and renewed theology of grace in conversation with the patristic traditions of Irenaeus, the Cappadocian Fathers, and Augustine, the medieval theology of Maximus and Aquinas, and such modern interlocutors as Soren Kierkegaard, Bernard Lonergan, John Milbank, and John Behr. It thereby regrounds our interpretation of Scripture in the wide tradition of the church. By doing so, it argues that Christ's incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection form the only possible point of reference by which we can understand the universe, as God creates it and works in it to bring us into union with himself.