In Conversation: An OUP Podcast

Mark R. Stoll is associate professor of history and Director of Environmental Studies at Texas Tech University. His book Inherit the Holy Mountain: Religion and the Rise of American Environmentalism (Oxford University Press, 2015) offers a history of environmentalism emerging from a religious aesthetics and moral vision. Stoll argues that environmentalism began with Calvinists theological commitments regarding the divine relationship with nature and humanity. The Reformed branch of Christianity held that God spoke through scripture and “the book of nature.” Believers expressed this idea not only in literature but also through landscape paintings and a tradition of natural science and conservation. Preferring unpeopled landscapes, art was to capture both the truth of God’s creation and the sublime and the beautiful. Humanity had a moral responsibility to preserve the land for the common good and future generations. The book is filled with creative and colorful characters, well known and lesser known, whose commitment to preserving the earth was undergirded by religious ideals. The children of the Reformed tradition promoted biological holism, nature’s unity and diversity, and gave birth to ecology, conversation, and land improvement. National parks, American cities and their parks, and agriculture all bear their imprint. By 1870, the Reformed tradition faded and conservation and ecology were taken up by Transcendentalist, progressive Presbyterians, and denominations with an individualist ethic such as the Baptist to shape modern environmentalism. Stoll demonstrates how the children of these traditions challenge the often-assumed historical divide between religious ideas and environmentalism.

Published in October 2015, Caroline Shaw‘s timely new book, Britannia’s Embrace: Modern Humanitarianism and the Imperial Origins of Refugee Relief (Oxford University Press, 2015), traces the intertwined development of the category of refugee and of the moral commitment of Britons to providing refuge for persecuted foreigners. By confidently working across a range of methods and geopolitical contexts, Shaw shows how the refugee category became “potentially universal in scope,” thanks to the depth of this moral commitment. Yet the attendant challenges of providing relief and resettlement for a potentially endless stream of people fleeing slavery in the US and East Africa, political persecution in continental Europe, and Russian pogroms raised a number of questions, not least where these refugees would live and work. Here, the British Empire provided an important safety valve: resettling refugees abroad made the work of relief seem feasible, despite real problems on the ground. By the later nineteenth century, however, this moral commitment ran up against tightened resources and the increasingly violent radical politics of many who sought relief, leading both to the enshrinement of a “right to refuge” in law and the simultaneous narrowing of who exactly counted as a persecuted foreigner

We don’t commonly think of procreation as a moral issue. But why not? When you think about it, creating another person seems like a morally weighty thing to do. And we tend to think that procreation under certain conditions would be irresponsible, selfish, or reckless. Might there also be cases where procreation is morally impermissible? In The Risk of a Lifetime: How, When, and Why Procreation May be Permissible (Oxford University Press, 2016), Rivka Weinberg explores a broad range of questions concerning the morality of procreation. She argues that procreation is a form of risk imposition, and so is morally permissible only under certain circumstances. In taking this view, she places herself in opposition to two more popular stances, one holding that procreation is almost never impermissible, and the holding that procreation is never permissible. Employing a Rawlsian constructivist model, Weinberg proposes two principles that establish conditions for permissible procreation.

Adam Sheingate has written Building a Business of Politics: The Rise of Political Consulting and the Transformation of American Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2016). Sheingate is associate professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University. Who is spending all this money – multiple billions in 2016 – on politics? Consultants, of course, and they’ve been at it for decades. In Building a Business of Politics, Sheingate walks through a century of political history, explaining how the rise of polling and business marketing influenced the nature of campaigns and policy advocacy. The book’s central argument is about the way politics has been reshaped by business and how the business of politics has changed the way we think about policy.

In his new book Rigging The Game: How Inequality is Reproduced in Everyday Life (Oxford University Press, 2014), Michael Schwalbe identifies the roots of inequality in the appearance of economic surplus as human societies transitioned from communal hunting and gathering societies to forms of sedentary agricultural production that enabled a few to live off the surplus produced by the many. This immanently historical and human development of a class-stratified society was subsequently reified by the exploiting few, and made to appear to others as being the result of divine or natural forces that could not be altered. Schwalbe then reveals the present-day forms of reification used by the wealthy (the American 1%) to justify their privilege to keep poor and working class from imagining a better world and the way to reach it. The book is rich with pedagogical insight and suggestions for classroom use. In this interview Schwalbe responded to questions about his educational philosophy and views on the 2016 presidential campaign. Jerry Lembcke can be reached at jlembcke@holycross.edu and Ellis Jones at ejones@holycross.edu.

What stories do we tell about finance? How does financial print culture shape our lives? Our guest today explores the narratives we have been told, and tell, about finance. A literary scholar, Leigh Claire La Berge writes about the representations of finance in years after 1979 and how many of the stories we tell about finance–that it is abstract and exceedingly complicated–took hold in this era. Leigh Claire La Berge is Assistant Professor of English in the Department of English at Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY. Her book, Scandals and Abstraction: Financial Fiction of the Long 1980s, was recently published by Oxford University Press.

George Cotkin is an emeritus professor of history at California Polytechnic State University. In his book Feast of Excess: A Cultural History of the New Sensibility (Oxford University Press, 2015) he has given us cultural criticism through a set of provocative portraits of creative Americans at mid-twentieth century who defied convention, pushed the boundaries of aesthetics and forged a new sensibility of personal liberation. From John Cage, who in 1952 explored the musical possibilities of silence in the composition 4′ 33″ to Chris Burden’s 1974 performance piece Trans-fixed nailing him to a Volkswagen; both challenged the standing categories of art and aesthetics. Two-dozen dramatic vignettes demonstrate the excess of violence, sex, and madness that blurred the boundaries between art, artist and audience. Creatives such as Marlon Brando, Lenny Bruce, Andy Warhol, and Anne Sexton populate his pages. The fascination with excess cut across diverse expressions taking art and audiences into uncharted territories of the imagination erasing the distinctions between high and low art. Cotkin argues that the advant-garde pushing the limits with a mania for the new and unfettered subjectivity constitutes American culture today. For all its transgressions the New Sensibility was politically impotent and its excess fed the explosive growth of capitalism, consumerism and the golden age of advertising. The New Sensibility became stale, expected, and commodified. With a weakened power to shock it has become our culture, our sensibility, yet still offering the possibility of something passionate and new on the boundary between liberation and limits.

How are we to think and live with climate change? In Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed – and What It Means for Our Future (Oxford University Press, 2014), Dale Jamieson (Environmental Studies and Philosophy, NYU) grapples with these questions. The book is a pragmatic philosophical exploration of climate change and the human response to it at the same time that it provides a clear scientific, conceptual, and economic history of the issues involved. Ultimately, the book asks how to “live in productive relationship with the dynamic systems that govern a changing planet” (180). Our conversation covers the obstacles to action on climate change, competing economic approaches to addressing climate change, the needed ethical and moral resources, a reflection on the 2015 Paris talks, and more.

Exorcisms and demons. In his new book American Possessions: Fighting Demons in the Contemporary United States (Oxford University Press, 2015), Sean McCloud argues that not only have such phenomena been on the rise in the last 30 or so years, they also reveal prominent tropes within the contemporary American religious landscape. More precisely, readers are introduced to the first in-depth study of demon fighting in the so-called “spiritual warfare” of Third Wave evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity, a movement that has global ramifications. McCloud examines Third Wave practices such deliverance rituals, spiritual housekeeping, and spiritual mapping. In short, demons are a central fact of life in the imagination of millions of Christians around the globe. Sean McCloud is Associate Professor of Religion at University of North Carolina, Charlotte.

It seems obvious that children need to be loved, that having a loving home and upbringing is essential to a child’s emotional and cognitive development. It is also obvious that, under typical circumstances at least, for every child there are adults who should love them. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that many national and international charters and declarations specifically ascribe to children a right to be loved. But the idea that children have a right to be loved seems philosophically suspicious. Questions arise almost instantly: Could there be right to be loved? Could children hold such a right? To whom does the correlate duty to love a child fall? What would such a duty require? One might also begin to wonder: What are the implications of such a right for family, parenting, child-rearing, and adoption? In The Right to be Loved (Oxford University Press, 2015), S. Matthew Liao works carefully and systematically through all of these questions in providing a compelling defense of the idea that children indeed have a right to be loved. This is a fascinating book with a bold thesis.