This book opens to the reader the world of early medieval Armenia: its sacred landscapes, striking churches, and rich literary and religious traditions. Examination of three sculpted and inscribed monuments, produced during the global wars of the seventh century, demonstrates the close engagement of Armenia with Byzantine imperial interests and with contemporary events in the Holy Land. The dramatic context of the military frontier, and the apocalyptic expectations of its contemporaries, shaped a vibrant visual culture with ties to both the Byzantine and Sasanian worlds. The seventh-century monuments of Armenia are important not just as an extraordinary moment of local cultural production; they fill a crucial gap in our knowledge about the medieval traditions of the Christian East at a time from which little survives from Constantinople and the imperial heartland. East of Rome, North of Jerusalem is the first English-language book devoted to the subject.

Winner of the 2012 Melville J. Herskovits award (African Studies Association) Throughout southwestern Nigeria, Yoruba men and women create objects called aale to protect their properties�farms, gardens, market goods, firewood�from the ravages of thieves. Aale are objects of such unassuming appearance that a non-Yoruba viewer might not register their important presence in the Yoruba visual landscape: a dried seedpod tied with palm fronds to the trunk of a fruit tree, a burnt corncob suspended on a wire, an old shoe tied with a rag to a worn-out broom and broken comb, a ripe red pepper pierced with a single broom straw and set atop a pile of eggs. Consequently, aale have rarely been discussed in print, and then only as peripheral elements in studies devoted to other issues. Yet aale are in no way peripheral to Yoruba culture or aesthetics. In Vigilant Things, David T. Doris argues that aale are keys to understanding how images function in Yoruba social and cultural life. The humble, often degraded objects that comprise aale reveal as eloquently as any canonical artwork the channels of power that underlie the surfaces of the visible. Aale are warnings, intended to trigger the work of conscience. Aale objects symbolically threaten suffering as the consequence of transgression�the suffering of disease, loss, barrenness, paralysis, accident, madness, fruitless labor, or death�and as such are often the useless residues of things that were once positively valued: empty snail shells, shards of pottery, fragments of rusted iron, and the like. If these objects share �suffering� and �uselessness� as constitutive elements, it is because they already have been made to suffer and become useless. Aale offer would-be thieves an opportunity to recognize themselves in advance of their actions and to avoid the thievery that would make the "useless" people.

How the problematic behavior of private citizens—and not just the police force itself—contributes to the perpetuation of police brutality and institutional racism “Warning: Neighborhood Watch Program in Force. If I don’t call the police, my neighbor will!” Signs like this can be found affixed to telephone poles on streets throughout the US, warning trespassers that the community is an active participant in its own policing efforts. Thijs Jeursen calls this phenomenon, in which individuals take on the responsibility of defending themselves and share with the police the duty to mitigate everyday insecurity, “vigilant citizenship.” Drawing on eleven months of fieldwork in Miami and sharing the stories and experiences of police officers, private security guards, neighborhood watch groups, civil society organizations, and a broad range of residents and activists, Jeursen uses the lens of vigilant citizenship to extend the analysis of police brutality beyond police encounters, focusing on the often blurred boundaries between policing actors and policed citizens and highlighting the many ways in which policing produces and perpetuates inequality and injustice. As a central premise in everyday policing, vigilant citizenship frames racist and violent policing as matters of personal blame and individual guilt, ultimately downplaying the realities of how systemically race operates in policing and US society more broadly. The Vigilant Citizen illustrates how a focus on individualized responsibility for security exacerbates and legitimizes existing inequalities, a situation that must be addressed to end institutionalized racism in politics and the justice system.

Uncovers a fundamental change that took place in Western thinking, especially its departure from the Sephardic philosophy found in the Iberian Peninsula during the 13th century.

In Vigilant Faith: Passionate Agnosticism in a Secular World, Daniel Boscaljon takes up the contemporary challenges to faith by skepticism and secularism. He proposes a model of faith for believers and unbelievers alike—a passionate agnosticism—that is rooted in a skeptical consciousness. Skepticism and faith are structurally similar, he writes, in that they share an "unknowing" quality. The author argues that vigilance—the act of keeping watch, a spiritual practice in its own right—is as necessary a precondition for the structure of faith as it is for the structure of skepticism. A suspension in uncertainty and an openness to possibility require vigilance, he attests, if faith and skepticism are to avoid the often dogmatic tendencies of both theism and atheism to cling to their own brands of certainty and knowledge. Boscaljon has three aims: to expand the current, post-theistic definitions of God for greater relevance to human beings on an individual and existential level; to integrate skepticism into faith so that it will restore the importance of faith to current theology and recover it from anti-intellectual bias; and to conceptualize the vigilance of faith in such a way that can provide a vocabulary for distinguishing "good faith" from "bad faith." He offers a variety of cultural examples ranging from film to poetry to represent a life of faith and to show how its components come together in practice. As an alternative to the prevailing fundamentalisms in today's world, his book proposes a paradigmatic understanding of faith in which theism, atheism, and agnosticism refuse to differ.