Books published by Fordham University Press

Drawing on Winnicott and Hannah Arendt, Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair develops a lexicon for a political theory of public things. Indigenous activism, racial inequality, and democratic citizenship; care, concern, hope, and play all figure in readings of contemporary events and literary, film, and political theory (Tocqueville, Melville, von Trier).

Cruising the Library examines the ways in which library classifications have organized sexuality and sexual perversion. The author studies the Library of Congress Subject Headings and Classification, as well as the Library of Congress's Delta Collection, a restricted collection of obscenity until 1964.

A phenomenological reflection on central aspects of Christian revelation: the practice of faith, the obligation and role of the baptized Christian, the gift of the sacraments, the future of Catholicism, the role of the Christian intellectual, examined always in light of their inherent rationality and relationship to philosophical reason.

"e;Warrior monks"e;-the misnomer for the Iberian military orders that emerged on the frontiers of Europe in the twelfth century-have long fascinated general readers and professional historians alike. Proposing "e;ecclesiastical knights"e; as a more accurate name and conceptual model-warriors animated by ideals and spiritual currents endorsed by the church hierarchy-author Sam Zeno Conedera presents a groundbreaking study of how these orders brought the seemingly incongruous combination of monastic devotion and the practice of warfare into a single way of life.Providing a detailed study of the military-religious vocation as it was lived out in the Orders of Santiago, Calatrava, and Alcantara in Leon-Castile during the first century, Ecclesiastical Knights provides a valuable window into medieval Iberia. Filling a gap in the historiography of the medieval military orders, Conedera defines, categorizes, and explains these orders, from their foundations until their spiritual decline in the early fourteenth century, arguing that that the best way to understand their spirituality is as a particular kind of consecrated knighthood.Because these Iberian military orders were belligerents in the Reconquest, Ecclesiastical Knights informs important discussions about the relations between Western Christianity and Islam in the Middle Ages. Conedera examines how the military orders fit into the religious landscape of medieval Europe through the prism of knighthood, and how their unique conceptual character informed the orders and spiritual self-perception.The religious observances of all three orders were remarkably alike, except that the Cistercian-affiliated orders were more demanding and their members could not marry. Santiago, Calatrava, and Alcantara shared the same essential mission and purpose: the defense and expansion of Christendom understood as an act of charity, expressed primarily through fighting and secondarily through the care of the sick and the ransoming of captives. Their prayers were simple and their penances were aimed at knightly vices and the preservation of military discipline. Above all, the orders valued obedience. They never drank from the deep wellsprings of monasticism, nor were they ever meant to.Offering an entirely fresh perspective on two difficult and closely related problems concerning the military orders-namely, definition and spirituality-author Sam Zeno Conedera illuminates the religious life of the orders, previously eclipsed by their military activities.

Carnal hermeneutics offers a philosophical approach to the body as interpretation. It engages our finite, spatio-temporal being-in-the-world through an account of meanings involving corporeal sensation, orientation, and linguistic articulation, and transcends the traditional dualism of rational understanding and embodied sensibility, arguing that our most carnal sensations are already interpretations.

What happens to poetic beauty when history turns the poet from one who contemplates natural beauty and the sublime to one who attempts to reconcile the practice of art with the hustle and noise of the city?An Atmospherics of the City traces Charles Baudelaire¿s evolution from a writer who practices a form of fetishizing aesthetics in which poetry works to beautify the ordinary to one who perceives background noise and disorder¿the city¿s version of a transcendent atmosphere¿as evidence of the malign work of a transcendent god of time, history, and ultimate destruction.Analyzing this shift, particularly as evidenced in Tableaux parisiens and Le Spleen de Paris, Ross Chambers shows how Baudelaire¿s disenchantment with the politics of his day and the coincident rise of overpopulation, poverty, and Haussmann¿s modernization of Paris influenced the poet¿s work to conceive a poetry of allegory, one with the power to alert and disalienate its otherwise inattentive reader whose senses have long been dulled by the din of his environment.Providing a completely new and original understanding of both Baudelaire¿s ethics and his aesthetics, Chambers reveals how the shift from themes of the supernatural in Baudelaire to ones of alienation allowed a new way for him to articulate and for his fellow Parisians to comprehend the rapidly changing conditions of the city and, in the process, to invent a ¿modern beauty¿ from the realm of suffering and the abject as they embodied forms of urban experience.