Alice Dunbar-Nelson

Alice Dunbar-Nelson (b. 1875–d. 1935) was born in New Orleans and raised there by her mother, Patricia Moore, a freedwoman of African American and Native American descent. She attended Southern University in Baton Rouge, earned a teaching degree at Straight (now Dillard) University, and taught in New Orleans’s black schools from 1892 to 1896. During those same years Dunbar-Nelson (then Alice Ruth Moore) became active in the black women’s club movement, both locally and nationally, and began publishing in black periodicals. At twenty she published her first book, Violets and Other Tales (1895), a collection of stories, sketches, poems, and essays that brought her local celebrity. Leaving the city in 1896, Dunbar-Nelson continued to dedicate herself to teaching, activism, and writing—three areas of passionate commitment that shaped the rest of her life. She taught in Boston, then in Brooklyn where she also helped the writer and reformer Victoria Earle Matthews found the White Rose Mission, a settlement house for black women, while finishing her short story collection The Goodness of St. Rocque (1899). In 1898 she married the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, then at the height of his success. Their union advanced Alice’s literary career: she published Goodness with his press, Dodd, Mead and Company, and enjoyed positive reviews. But his fame also overshadowed her accomplishments; after her death she was remembered primarily as his wife until scholars R. Ora Williams and Akasha Hull recovered her from obscurity. Paul and Alice separated in 1902, partly because of his abuse. Nevertheless, she kept his name and, following his 1906 death, promoted his legacy with projects like her anthology, The Dunbar Speaker and Entertainer (1920). For the next thirty years Dunbar-Nelson lived in Wilmington, Delaware, teaching for eighteen of them at Howard High School. During this period she was briefly married to another teacher, Arthur Callis, and romantically involved with Edwina Kruse, an educator about whom she wrote an unpublished novel titled The Lofty Oak. She worked as a paid and unpaid organizer, writer, and speaker for myriad causes, including suffrage, the war effort, the peace movement, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), anti-lynching legislation, education reform, and electoral politics. Although she never published another book of her own work, Dunbar-Nelson was a recognized Harlem Renaissance writer whose poems, stories, plays, essays, and reviews appeared in Crisis, Opportunity, The Messenger, and The Book of American Negro Poetry, and she wrote nationally syndicated newspaper columns. In 1932 Dunbar-Nelson moved with third husband Robert Nelson to Philadelphia, where she died of heart disease in 1935.

Naomi B. Sokoloff and Nancy E. Berg (eds.), What We Talk About When We Talk about Hebrew (And What It Means to Americans). Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018. x + 238 pp.

This chapter discusses What We Talk About When We Talk about Hebrew (And What It Means to Americans) (2018). The essays in this collection address the diminishing role of Hebrew in American Jewish communal identity and practice. On the one hand, each writer demonstrates passionate commitment to the Hebrew-language, in many cases offering moving testimony of Hebrew's role in their personal and communal lives. Consequently, they propose diverse strategies for boosting the presence of Hebrew among Jewish Americans. On the other hand, they all resist romantic concepts of Hebrew drawn from Johann Gottfried Herder's conflation of language, nation, and folk, which inevitably leads to a valorization of authenticity. To put it another way, modern Israeli Hebrew poses particular challenges to Hebraists elsewhere, despite the longstanding role of Hebrew in Jewish civilization. The great strength of this volume lies in its successful severing of devotion to Hebrew (whether intellectual, emotional, or cultural) from allegiance to “authenticity” in its diverse meanings.

Shore, Barbara K.

Barbara K. Shore (1920–2013) was a Distinguished Service Professor at the Pittsburgh University School of Social Work. A warm and generous person, she was dedicated to issues of inclusion and faculty rights and held a passionate commitment to community and professional service.

How formal is the ethics of responsibility?

Max Weber’s last in his life publications give grounds to correct the traditional notions of the ethics of responsibility as purely calculative and one that subordinates the ethical goal to the right means of achieving it and the strictness of its observance. For Weber devotion to certain values is ultimately the basis of any possible ethics: in the ethics of conviction, this devotion is contrasted with taking into account all the results of the ethical act, and in the ethics of responsibility these results seek to take into account what should make certain values more reliable. Passionate commitment to political goals that express the interests of the community, rather than the selfish and vain intentions of the politician is a solid basis for the responsibility of the politician. The passionate pursuit of truth directs the scientist’s well-thought-out research pro- gram. In economics, the pursuit of personal gain, which is inherent for the “economic man”, requires consideration of the common economic good both for those with whom the man makes his business and for the community, which is his lifeworld and creates the necessary conditions for any possible economic activity. In any social sphere, each social system has its own logic of calculating success, but each time this calculation involves respecting and protecting the basic values for this system. In everyday life we observe numerous deviations from this clear and transparent logic of the ethics of responsibility, which create the illusion of its dysfunction. Similarly, insincere and inconsistent adherence to declared beliefs can give the wrong impression of the whole ethics of conviction. It is these deviations from the intrinsic integrity of the ethics of responsibility and the ethics of persuasion that create the false impression of them as mutu- ally exclusive behavioral strategies. In their conscientious pursuit, the ethics of conviction and the ethics of responsibility complement each other. The formalism of the ethics of responsibility makes sense only for a stricter and more impartial protection of the values that are important to the adherents of this ethic. This formalism is a denial only of all other, irrelevant values, and not a designation of responsibility for a particular ethical commitment as a value-empty, indifferent form. Weber points to the prospect of recognition as a path to a collective ethic of responsibility in its positive sense — as a conscious commitment by a community of like-minded people to commit to values that are significant to them.

Literacy in the Mountains

Literacy in the Mountains examines five Appalachian newspapers published between 1885 and 1920 for evidence of literacy practices in mountain communities. The newspapers illustrate that there existed a vibrant community of readers and writers in an area often imagined as illiterate and textless. Documenting a variety of literacy exchanges and a passionate commitment to local education institutions, the newspapers serve as a historical archive to recover otherwise invisible practices from the turn of the century. These findings demonstrate that the “idea of Appalachia” as a poor and illiterate region at the turn of the century is inaccurate, thus belying current narratives that the region is doomed to repeat cycles of poverty that reach into the distant past. Instead, Appalachia has a rich history of literacy and civic participation on which to draw.

Fotballidenskap som «religiøs» fortolkningsramme i oppveksten – en analyse av Hornbys Tribunefeber

The article discusses whether football culture functions as a religious ritual and identity marker by highlighting key passages from Nick Hornby’s classic autobiography Fever Pitch (1992) (in Norwegian, Tribunefeber (1997)). Here, Hornby portrays his obsession with the English top club, Arsenal, a passionate commitment that began when he was a child and continued into adulthood. The article points to functional religious definitions and liminality theory. It explains characteristics of functional religious understandings and liminality theory as applied to football culture. Secondly, the article emphasizes key aspects of Hornby’s passionate football engagement, focusing on his total devotion to football culture.

Body Breakdowns as Politics: Identity regulation in a high-commitment activist organization

Recent studies on identity regulation emphasize the significance of the body in mediating individuals’ responses to cultural control within organizations. However, little is known about how such responses are concretely enacted by individuals through their bodies. Based on an ethnography of an activist organization, this study discusses the culture of self-sacrifice through which activists’ identity is regulated. It reveals the everyday tensions between passionate commitment and vulnerable bodies, exploring how body breakdowns lead activists to separate their passion for a cause from the organizational culture and ultimately make their exit. We thus aim to contribute to research on identity regulation by highlighting the precariousness of this process and demonstrating the political potential of bodies to resist controlling regimes. We interpret breakdowns as political events emerging at the interface between the docile enactment of a bodily norm and its concrete physical violence.

Bothering to Believe: Acts of Faith in J. M. Coetzee's Late Novels

J. M. Coetzee's late fictions display a recurrent fascination with attitudes of faith and belief. This preoccupation has been read sometimes as an effort to reinvigorate the novel's engagement with materiality and embodied life, other times as an elegy to the waning power of belief in fiction. But belief is not a monolithic term in Coetzee's late work, nor does his disposition toward it remain static. This article examines two texts that display a related yet evolving concern with faith and belief—Elizabeth Costello (2003) and The Childhood of Jesus (2013). These works not only share a thematic interest in various forms of belief; they are also linked by the scene of a petitioner “at the gate.” In the final lesson of the earlier novel, aging novelist Elizabeth Costello finds herself in a purgatorial border town, where she must produce a statement of belief in order to pass on. In the opening paragraphs of Childhood, the characters arrive on the other side of a similar portal, entering a world whose institutions reject belief as a form of unreasoned, passionate commitment. Where Costello refuses the institutional demand for belief, insisting that belief in fiction is incompatible with the stronger form of commitment in excess of reason, Childhood's characters attempt a reconciliation between reading and believing. Read together, these texts present an apocalyptic vision of the novel after the end of formal realism, when readerly belief requires more than a weak trust in fiction's mimetic capacities.

Becoming Bishop Simpson

This chapter summarizes the early life and ministry of Matthew Simpson. The chapter discusses Simpson’s rise from obscurity to being elected a bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church. The chapter focuses on Simpson’s account of his own spiritual life, particularly noting his struggle to receive the witness of the Spirit and assurance, which were key Methodist doctrines and experiences. The chapter also discusses Simpson’s time as a professor, college president, and editor of an influential Methodist periodical before being elected to the episcopacy. The chapter also highlights the importance of Simpson’s uncle in his life and the disagreement that they had over slavery, due to his uncle’s passionate commitment to abolition. The chapter places Simpson in his ecclesial context and shows his commitment to growing the Methodist Episcopal Church by appealing to as broad a group of people as possible in order to get more people and build nicer buildings (churches, parsonages, colleges, and seminaries).

Hunters-Turned-Conservationists

The final chapter locates the careers of two prominent hunters-turned-conservationists—Jim Corbett and Richard Burton—within the essential paradox of hunting and conservation in colonial India. In the case of both, as this chapter demonstrates, any simple binary of the colonizer–colonized model is inadequate to explain their prolific hunting in the first half of their lives as well as their passionate commitment to the cause of conservation in the second half. The chapter examines how, in their dual roles as hunter and conservationist, killer and protector, ruler and saviour, both men encompassed the quintessential split image of the British Raj. Particularly in their role as slayers of man-eating predators, Corbett and Burton offer an extremely nuanced and complex image that revises any straightforward impression of colonial hunters in India dominating their natural environment in imitation of the imperial domination of India’s politics. Despite such caveats, this chapter argues that Corbett and Burton remained staunch loyalists to the British Raj, and cautions that the wider history of conservation thinking should pay due attention to the critical and historical analysis of individuals like Corbett and Burton, whose individual approaches to conservation issues were drawn from lived experience, just as much as from broader colonial attitudes.