Taking its bearing from the mission statement in prophet Jeremiah’s vocation narrative (Jer 1:10), the book examines YHWH’s events of deconstruction and reconstruction in Israel of the Old Testament. Through the analysis of the six verbs—namely, “pluck up,” “pull down,” “demolish,” “destroy,” “build,” and “plant,” the book gives a different dimension to the common impression that Jeremiah is a prophet of woes and laments; thereby limiting his prophecies to only oracles of destruction, hence total annihilation. Rather, it investigates Jeremiah’s prophecies as flying with two wings: oracles of judgement and oracles of salvation. In other words, the oracles are not only against the nations but also for the nations. With the exile of the Israelites and their restoration to the land in view, according to the book of Jeremiah, YHWH continues His creative and restorative acts and depicts the divine full involvement and control of Israel’s history. In like manner, the book portrays the abiding divine presence in the history of humankind in general. Therefore, Israel is only used to form a bridge of YHWH’s concern for the nations; hence the entire humanity. As YHWH sets the history of Israel in motion, so He performs for the rest of humanity. The goal of which has always been for the good and salvation of humankind of which the culmination is in the person and advent of Jesus Christ.

Bringing together a range of contributors from multiple countries, this interdisciplinary volume offers a unique field view of the rule of law and human rights reform in the reconciliation and reconstruction process. The contributors all worked in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the ten years after the Dayton Peace Accords were signed; here they pause to analyze and critique the work they did.

These lucid and closely reasoned studies of the thought of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, J�rgen Habermas, and Richard Rorty provide a coherent analysis of major pathways in recent critical theory. They defend a position analogous to Kant's - that ideas of reason are both unavoidable presuppositions of thought that have to be carefully reconstructed and persistent sources of illusions that have to be repeatedly deconstructed.McCarthy examines the critique of impure reason from the complementary viewpoints of the attackers and defenders of Enlightenment rationality. He first analyzes the work of Rorty, Foucault, and Derrida to determine what these radical critics have contributed to our understanding of reason and where they have gone wrong. He explores Habermas's theory of communicative rationality, focusing on the attempt to go beyond hermeneutics, the incorporation of systems theory, the implications of discourse ethics for our understanding of political debate and collective decision making, and the relation of political theology to critical social theory.Thomas McCarthy is Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University and the editor of The MIT Press series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought. The analysis and assessment of Habermas's recent work in Ideals and Illusions serves as a sequel to his earlier study The Critical Theory of J�rgen Habermas.

The controversy over Jacques Derrida's legacy is one of the most effective engines driving the contemporary debate, far beyond the bounds of philosophy. By now, the variety of contesting positions is so wide that it calls for a critical assessment to achieve a unified theoretical scheme. The dyad of deconstruction and reconstruction, to which the title of the volume refers, aims at composing a kind of map of this debate. The three sections of the book include essays that investigate specific aspects of Derrida's reception, from the view of 1. philosophy, 2. literary studies and 3. politics and law. These contributions study the implications of deconstruction beyond its original scope and intervene by taking stock of its most relevant aporias.