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This book is a Festschrift in honour of David Thomas (Professor of Christianity and Islam, and Nadir Dinshaw Professor of Inter Religious Relations, at the University of Birmingham, UK). The Editors have put together a collection of over 30 contributions from colleagues of Professor Thomas that commences with a biographical sketch and representative tribute provided by a former doctoral student, and comprises a series of wide-ranging academic papers arranged to broadly reflect three dimensions of David Thomas's academic and professional work - studies in and of Islam; Christian-Muslim relations; the Church and interreligious engagement. These are set in the context of a focused theme - the character of Christian-Muslim encounters - and cast within a broad chronological framework.

The first major claim of this dissertation is that love of home is the preeminent environmental virtue. For the most part, environmental virtue ethicists have not talked much about love. In the first chapter, this oversight is addressed by way of an argument that love of home can be understood, at least from within the Aristotelian philosophical tradition, as the environmental virtue par excellence. The second main contention of the dissertation is that there is an internal connection between the virtue of love and a particular sort of knowledge of the object of that love. For that reason, when it comes to homes, those people who make their dwelling in such places are best situated to take responsibility for them. The third and final major thesis of the dissertation is that political authority over any home—understood as a place of a certain kind—should be vested in the sustainably-settled inhabitants of that place. Support for this claim derives from a discussion of Aristotle’s Politics that takes into account Aristotle’s discussions of the self-sufficiency of the polity and of the vice of acquisitiveness. The conclusion of the dissertation gestures toward a political form of localism grounded in the activity of sustainably-settled inhabitants of locales.

This dissertation rejects postsecularism as a methodology for American literary studies. Instead, I turn to Stathis Gourgouris's work on secular criticism to ask how we might reject postsecularism in the American literary context. I am thinking with three American authors dealing with the issue of faith in a secular age: Marilynne Robinson, Flannery O'Connor, and J.D. Salinger. As a literary critic trained in the discipline of Comparative Literature, my intervention lies in my attempt to bring in an interdisciplinary perspective to American literary debates, specifically in the discourse of secularism and postsecularism studies. In cultural studies, the idea of secular criticism comes from Edward Said; recently, this idea is re-conceptualized in Stathis Gourgouris’s work in Lessons in Secular Criticism. What I have found in Stathis Gourgouris’s work on secular criticism is a succinct rejection of postsecularism as a scholarly discourse. Instead, Gourgouris argues for a performative atheism as a point of departure in order to do the work of “secular criticism”. Secular criticism here is a practice that detranscendentalizes both the secular and the Christian metaphysics. I have tried to put my efforts in understanding how this idea of secular criticism helps me intervene into the context of American literary studies as a discipline. My work should be contrasted from recent literary criticisms that uses the postsecular and post-metaphysical argument. John McClure’s Partial Faiths and Amy Hungerford’s Postmodern Belief in Meaninglessness are two important examples of the postsecular discourse of literary studies that emphasize the subjective experiences of a spiritual crisis to create collections of fictions that buttress postsecular literary studies. Instead of taking the path of the postsecular, I ask: how might I reject the politics of postsecularism in literary criticism? What happens when we do not read literature with the desire to “save” literature from its waning status?

References to the economy are ubiquitous in modern life, and virtually every facet of human activity has capitulated to market mechanisms. In the early modern period, however, there was no common perception of the economy, and discourses on money, trade, and commerce treated economic phenomena as properties of physical nature. Only in the early nineteenth century did economists begin to posit and identify the economy as a distinct object, divorcing it from natural processes and attaching it exclusively to human laws and agency. In The Natural Origins of Economics, Margaret Schabas traces the emergence and transformation of economics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from a natural to a social science. Focusing on the works of several prominent economists—David Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill—Schabas examines their conceptual debt to natural science and thus locates the evolution of economic ideas within the history of science. An ambitious study, The Natural Origins of Economics will be of interest to economists, historians, and philosophers alike.

An authoritative collection of Australian Aboriginal writing over two centuries, across a wide range of fiction and non-fiction genres. Including some of the most distinctive writing produced in Australia, it offers rich insights into Aboriginal culture and experience.

The Subject of Belief Modernism, Religion, and Literature examines what has become a critical truism in twentieth-century studies: because modern and contemporary literature was written in the aftermath of the Nietzschean death of God, all serious writing in modernity has been presumed to be secular, reflecting the decline of religious belief in public and private. Yet, the persistence of religion in Western culture has produced in the last ten years a turn to post-skeptical or postsecular thinking, the interrogation of religion's continued meaning in the wake of Enlightenment critique. Drawing on the postsecular writings of such theorists as Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou, and Jacques Derrida, as well as the scholarship of Charles Taylor, Pericles Lewis, and Gauri Viswanathan, The Subject of Belief challenges this predominantly Nietzschean reading of twentieth-century literature to argue for modernism as the originating source of the postsecular. Both Žižek and Badiou have adapted theological concepts like conversion and epiphany for an ethically engaged politics, while Derrida has argued for an innovative ambiguity in the religious call of revelation. 1 demonstrate that these innovations were already present in James Joyce's concept of epiphany and T.S. Eliot's exploration of poetic subjectivity in religious conversion; these authors modified religious structures to preserve forms of transcendence that contemporary critics have critically forgotten or ignored. In so doing, modernist writers re-imagined both the self and its relation to society, constructing a \"subject of belief,\" or a believing subject, that questioned immanent and materialist notions of subjectivity. These modernist forms of transcendence reach forward in time and have shaped, often in unacknowledged ways, concepts of meaning and significance in the literature of a militantly anti-religious writer like Ian McEwan and of more ambiguously post-secular writers like J. M. Coetzee. By tracing the arc of transcendence through these four writers, The Subject of Belief argues not only that twentieth-century literature is far less secular than we have understood, but also that by encoding transcendent meaning into literary forms like epiphany and parataxis, modernist writers subtly inaugurated a formal tradition that has produced a religious resonance throughout contemporary literature.

Elegy (IFI and Light House [TBC] from 8th Aug), major adaptation of a Philip Roth novel starring Ben Kingsley and Penelope Cruz. Man on Wire (Light House from ist Aug, TBC), fascinating documentary 'reconstruction' of Phillippe Petits outrageous stunt in 1972 of illegally walking on a high wire between the twin towers of the World Trade Center. The Visitor (IFI, 4-17 July; Light House from 4th July; QFT, 1-7 Aug), impressive second film by Thomas McCarthy in which a grumpy out of town college professor finds a couple of illegal immigrants unexpectedly staying in his New York apartment.

Ican't say I dropped my \"Job Done\" commemorative Brexit mug in sheer molten astonishment when I read the results of the Freedom of Expression survey conducted by the publication ArtsProfessional of Brits toiling in the creative professions. Brexit Shorts: Dramas from a divided nation was an online co-production by The Guardian and the Headlong Theatre Company featuring predictable tripe from such professional bed-wetters as David Hare, who described the aftermath of the Brexit result as \"the most depressing time in my life.\" Elsewhere Carol Ann Duffy staged the perfunctory exercise in Remain doom-mongering My Country: A Work in Progress which the splendidly named Susannah Clapp of The Observer condemned as \"old hat… we are in a different, dark condition, the closest to civil war than any time in my life. [...]that was exactly the situation Jane Robins and I portrayed in our play, based on the time she was expelled from her North London book group for being a Brexiteer.

From grim warnings about climate change and rising pollution; startling studies about the impact of demographic trends; and — of course — Brexit and all its possible meanings and consequences, there is a lot to fret about when looking down the list of what awaits readers this year. September sees the publication of Atwood’s The Testaments, the sequel to her 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale, the chilling story of life in a totalitarian America where women are oppressed and violently abused that in the world of #MeToo has acquired renewed relevancy. Long-promised, often delayed, it is the former UK prime minister’s account of his time in office and how and why we got to Brexit.