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Fear and Trembling continues to fascinate and frustrate all who find, for many reasons, that they must struggle with it. Not only 'professional intellectuals,' but students and other seekers perennially wrestle with it, working their way through its difficult dialectic. Both philosophers and theologians are provoked by the prominence of typically Kierkegaardian terms, categories, and arguments—paradox, resignation, faith, the absurd, the individual, the poet, immediacy, the ethical, leap, offence, silence, and others. In Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard challenges many of our modern assumptions, and he will continue to frustrate and fascinate us for so long as we attempt to sort out ourselves and our times. IKC 6 includes the first collection of essays to concentrate the talents of a number of scholars on Kierkegaard's obscure little book Repetition which is, in a word, about hope. Kierkegaard suggests that in the midst of our epistemological errors, the weakness and/or arrogance of our wills, and in making fools of ourselves, or being made fools of, there is everlasting hope for us. Repetition indeed goes to the heart of the matter, to the core of human existence.

In the fifty years since her death, Flannery O’Connor studies have been conventionally delimited to two critical parameters: the South and the Church of Rome. This work challenges the conception of O’Connor as inherent to a monolithic South and to orthodox Roman Catholicism by problematizing the “Southern Gothic” trope, positing a non-canonical Southern realism, and repositioning O’Connor as essentially ecumenical in her private theology. The study contextualizes O’Connor’s work within the American scene by detailing the varied political and literary histories of the “North” and “South” as well as opposing the notion of region-specific aesthetics and a native anti-realist mode in the South.

Adam Smith is best known for his magisterial Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, but his other great work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, is as deserving of serious study. In this volume, scholars in economics, philosophy, and political science take up questions that range throughout Smith’s work, seeking to find connections between his moral theory and political economy. 

This volume, based on the 2013 A. V. Elliot Conference on Great Books and Ideas at Mercer University, represents a great diversity of disciplinary perspectives. Its authors take up a wide range of concerns that exist in the intersection of Smith’s political and moral theory. It also includes several articles that attempt to compare his work to thinkers that preceded and followed him, coming from as far back in the tradition as the Italian Renaissance, and moving forward in history to claim Smith’s relevance for contemporary research in experimental economics.

This narrative provides a comprehensive history of America’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). The book concludes that race, the Civil Rights movements, and black and white philanthropy had much affect on the development of these minority institutions. Northern white philanthropy had much to do with the start and maintenance of the nation’s HBCUs from 1837 into the 1940s. Even from 1950 to 1970, HBCUs depended upon financial support of philanthropic groups, benevolent societies, and federal and state government agencies, but the survival of HBCUs became dependent mostly on their own creative responses to the changing environment of higher education and have helped to shape our culture and society.

 

The essays in BETWEEN FETTERS AND FREEDOM explore a number of issues bearing on post-Civil War African American Baptists. With limited resources at their disposal, precisely what did freedom mean? Would African American Baptist organizations be recognized as legitimate by white peer organizations? What sort of internal stress would African American organizations face as they gained traction in the black community, and what sort of stress would a rapidly changing culture place on those organizations and the people who made them what they were? Through it all, preachers and lay people alike wondered how their voices would be heard above the din.

What does it mean to become a human being? This question was persistently repeated by Kierkegaard scholar Howard V. Hong (1912–2010) to students during his forty-year tenure at St. Olaf College. As one of Dr. Hong’s students, Jamie Lorentzen never forgot the question—one that always pointed to the ethical upbuilding of individuals. Lorentzen’s Kierkegaard studies inform commentary on how central characters in four works of literature help readers answer Howard Hong’s question. Twain’s Huck Finn becomes human by being an unwitting ethicist despite himself and the pro-slavery culture in which he was reared. Ishmael and Queequeg’s embrace of the neighbor and outcast in Melville’s Moby-Dick is an ethical counterpoint to Ahab’s terrifying narcissism. Meanwhile, Ibsen’s famous narcissist, Peer Gynt, offers an archetypal negative ethical model for becoming human. Finally, Dostoevsky’s Father Zosima and Ivan and Alyosha Karamazov show how ethics informs human development in both secular and religious cultures.

The ethics debate about the use of enhancements in elite sport is becoming increasingly complex. Yet we are not asking what relevance sports’ religious dimension has to this debate.Through an examination of literature on the relationship between sport, religion and spirituality, hope emerges as a compelling feature of sport and a significant part of what makes sport meaningful. Trothen explores four main locations of hope in sport: winning, losing, and anticipation; star athletes; perfect moments; and relational embodiment, and examines how these locations intersect with the enhancement debate.

The Allman Brothers Band was formed in 1969 by Duane and Gregg Allman, along with Berry Oakley, Dickey Betts, Butch Trucks, and “Jaimoe.” Their musical combination of the elements of rock, blues, jazz, and country was hugely successful and continues to stand the test of time. Filled with more than two hundred captioned images, this new book chronicles Jack Weston’s collection and other items of The Allman Brothers Band memorabilia from 1969–1976. Weston and Perkins discuss in detail the various categories and aspects of band collectibles from that period. The book not only highlights individual collectibles, but also explains where to find them and how to preserve them. Included are band instruments and equipment, t-shirts, apparel and merchandise, autographs, bookkeeping documents, passes, posters, tickets, programs, promotional items, vintage photographs, and more. Galadrielle Allman, daughter of the late Duane Allman, offers an introduction that is both intimate and informative. Fans of classic rock music and The Allman Brothers Band alike will find this book irresistible and prepublication interest from fans has been phenomenal.

Baptists lack a single central figure in their origins that Lutherans, Reformed, Presbyterians, and Methodists have with Martin Luther, John Calvin, John Knox, and John Wesley. Additionally, Baptists focus so heavily on the Bible for authority and key beliefs or practices like religious liberty, social justice, missions, and preaching that sometimes Baptists and other Christians forget the significant role that people play in forging and promoting those ideas and practices. This book seeks to address this shortcoming by providing an introductory text of Baptist biographies.

With the title STAGES ON LIFE'S WAY, Kierkegaard gave a new phrase to many languages and offered through his delineation of aesthetic, ethical, and religious studies a tentative solution to a major conundrum of both modernist and postmodernist sensibility—the question of human identity. Though the title may suggest a Bildungsroman, the volume is more an arabesque, a collection of apparently separate works followed by a commentary and interpretation of the collection by the editor. The authors of this present collection of previously unpublished essays address, analyze, praise, criticize, and puzzle over the issues of STAGES ON LIFE'S WAY, its relation to the whole of Kierkegaard’s authorship, to Kierkegaard’s own life, and to the difficult task of making sense of our own selves in the various stages on life’s way.

THE MOST SACRED FREEDOM includes eight essays that were first presented at the 2014 A.V. Elliott Conference on Great Books and Ideas, the seventh annual conference sponsored by Mercer University’s Thomas C. and Ramona E. McDonald Center for America’s Founding Principles. Together, these essays explore the great principle of religious liberty by charting its development in the Western tradition and reconsidering its place at America’s founding. The major themes addressed include the theological and epistemological preconditions of religious liberty, the chief challenges to securing this liberty, the problematic but necessary role of religion in a free society, and the constitutional framework that has been handed down to us to help preserve this most sacred freedom. Contributors to the volume are Steven Grosby, Jeremiah H. Russell, Maura Jane Farrelly, Daniel Cullen, John Witte, Jr., Scott Yenor, David Ramsey, and Michael Novak.

CAPRICORN RISING: CONVERSATIONS IN SOUTHERN ROCK is a collection of interviews with many of the stars, producers, and associates of the 1970s Southern record label, Capricorn, which was founded in the heart of Macon, Georgia in 1969. Author Michael Buffalo Smith collects word for word, the complete interviews with Capricorn artists including Gregg Allman, Dickey Betts, George McCorkle, Bonnie Bramlett, Paul Hornsby, Johnny Sandlin, Chuck Leavell, and many others, providing a glimpse into the early 70s when Southern Rock was born in Macon.