The major presentations of the 2018 Unitarian Universalist Association General Assembly (GA) in Kansas City, Missouri. Addressing the theme “All Are Called” at this General Assembly, Unitarian Universalists dove deeply into questions of mission, discussing how Unitarian Universalists can faithfully meet the demands of our time. In her foreword, Rev. Susan Frederick-Gray, president of the Unitarian Universalist Association, writes, “I commend to you this collection. Each of the speakers issues a challenge to take the call of our faith seriously and reassures us that, in community, we have all we need to do so. As I said in my sermon on our last day together that week, this is no time for a casual faith and no time to go it alone.” The collection includes the Berry Street Essay by Rev. Meg Riley, with responses by Rev. Rosemary Bray McNatt and Rev. Elizabeth Nguyen; the Sophia Lyon Fahs Lecture by Juana Bordas; the Ware Lecture by Brittany Packnett; the Sermon for the Service of the Living Tradition by Rev. Sofia Betancourt, and the Sermon for Sunday Morning Worship by Rev. Susan Frederick-Gray.

An intelligent, engaging, and in-depth reading of the nature of the state and the establishment of the modern political order in the mid-nineteenth century. Previous studies have covered in great detail how the modern state slowly emerged from the early Renaissance through the seventeenth century, but we know relatively little about the next great act: the birth and transformation of the modern democratic state. And in an era where our democratic institutions are rife with conflict, it’s more important now than ever to understand how our institutions came into being. Stephen W. Sawyer’s Demos Assembled provides us with a fresh, transatlantic understanding of that political order’s genesis. While the French influence on American political development is well understood, Sawyer sheds new light on the subsequent reciprocal influence that American thinkers and politicians had on the establishment of post-revolutionary regimes in France. He argues that the emergence of the stable Third Republic (1870–1940), which is typically said to have been driven by idiosyncratic internal factors, was in fact a deeply transnational, dynamic phenomenon. Sawyer’s findings reach beyond their historical moment, speaking broadly to conceptions of state formation: how contingent claims to authority, whether grounded in violence or appeals to reason and common cause, take form as stateness.

Archive, Matrix, Assembly: The Photographs of Thomas Struth 1978-2018' presents the first comprehensive, systematic theory of contemporary German artist Thomas Struth's main body of photographic work from its beginnings in the late 1970s until his most recent work in 2018.0The book presents a unique, evolutionary understanding of the work, proposing that it has established three stages of production: archive, matrix, and assembly. Together the three stages form a developmental system that characterises the individual photographs, their relation to their subject matter, and how they form larger, significant collections of images. In covering all phases of the artist's work, it also develops a comprehensive critical reading of the work, serves as a monograph of the artist, and provides an extensive analysis of the photographs at all stages, including the less discussed, more recent photography, which is placed on par with his earlier work for which Struth first became internationally renowned.