Books

In Justice in Love, Nicholas Wolterstorff rejects egoism, eudaemonism and utilitarianism as inadequate ways to think about the practice of well-being.

Martha Nussbaum's perspective cuts to the heart of our tendency to exclude others when they fail to live up to expectations about how "good people" should be.

James Bailey has written a superb, creative and timely book whose primary audience should be the U.S. Congress. Unfortu­nately, the current members of Congress do not seem to possess the intellectual wattage necessary to profit from it.

At a book signing, Steve Earle was speaking when someone leaned on a light switch and the windowless room went dark. "Did I die?" Earle asked in a quiet voice.

After her bleak diagnosis, Julie Anderson Love learned that hope has nothing to do with passivity. She was, she writes, "the patient from hell."

Americans went into the Civil War believing that God was on their side, and they ended the war believing the same.

Reading is an act of "absorbed alertness," says Ursula Le Guin. Two reading memoirs record two distinct experiences of such absorption.

There is a good chance that you are a cyborg. A cyborg is a cybernated organism—which is anyone whose normal biological systems are en­hanced or extended by technological mechanisms, especially electronic and communication devices. The word "cybernetics" comes from the Greek word for "steersman" (kubernetes) and describes one who is in control, who is both flexible and agile in response to a given environment and who can tame it to certain ends. To the extent that we exercise such control through technological devices, our lives have become cybernated. If you have a hearing aid, a pacemaker or an artificial limb, if you use a computer or telephone or drive a car, you are a cyborg.

It takes a lifetime, as well as a remarkable life, to write a book like Eleonore Stump's Wandering in Darkness.

Our fall books issue's reviews include Walter Brueggemann on Peter Ochs, Robert Bellah on Parker Palmer, Shirley Showalter on Leymah Gbowee and others.