2008 Jesuit Book Award Winners
Results of the 2008 Competition
Alpha Sigma Nu, the honor society of Jesuit colleges and universities, announces the four winners of the 29th annual Jesuit Book Awards in the category of “The Humanities”
The awards are administered by the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities (AJCU).
In the Discipline of History:
Mobilizing the Masses: Gender, Ethnicity, and Class in the Nationalist Movement in Guinea, 1939-1958
By Elizabeth Schmidt
(Professor of History, Loyola College in Maryland)
In 1958, the Rassemblement Democratique Africain (RDA) led Guinea to independence in 1958. This historical landmark triggered a wave of decolonization that took Africa by storm. Schmidt examines the subject from a bottom-up perspective, straying from the traditional top-bottom approach. This different point of view gives the reader a very intimate look inside the revolution by using a variety of archival and oral sources. Rather than focusing on the few leaders of the nationalist movement in Guinea, the text shifts its focus on the mass of followers of the movement, the military veterans, trade unionists, peasants, and women.
In the Discipline of Literature/Fine Arts:
Serfdom, Society, and the Arts in Imperial Russia: The Pleasure and the Power
By Richard Stites
(Distinguished Professor of International Studies, School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University)
Stites explores the vast panorama of Russian cultural life before the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. We find in this book a vivid collage of the life of the arts and the artists of visual and performing arts in the last decades of serfdom. This fresh account of the middle of 19th century Russia will put readers in awe with its compelling narrative, wealth of information, and remarkable insight, and will quickly establish itself as the definitive study of pre-emancipation Russian culture. Stites passion is clearly seen within the pages of this historical text, and is a recommended read for all those interested in history and the cultural arts.
In the Discipline of Philosophy/Ethics:
Rethinking the Ontological Argument: A Neoclassical Theistic Response
(Cambridge University Press, 2006)
Daniel A. Dombrowski
(Professor of Philosophy, Seattle University)
In this volume, Daniel A. Dombrowski defends the ontological argument against its contemporary critics, but he does so by using a neoclassical or process concept of God, thereby strengthening the case for a contemporary theistic metaphysics. Rethinking the Ontological Argument brings together a host of objections and responses to the ontological argument from traditional disciplinary boundaries. It is a very engaging read that will have the reader thoroughly engaged throughout the book.
In the Discipline of Theology:
The Diet of John the Baptist
James A. Kelhoffer
(Assistant Professor of New Testament and Early Christian Literature, Saint Louis University)
Kelhoffer provides without a doubt the first thorough study of the diet of John the Baptist. His detailed study of John the Baptist’s diet of eating grasshoppers brings to light the historical perspective of biblical and Jewish traditions, and concludes that eating grasshoppers was no unusual in the classical and Hellinistic periods. The simple, yet unusual diet and asceticism of John the Baptist also provides an explanation and model of Christian simplicity which is explained by Kelhoffer.
