LATEST NEWS & EVENTS

“All I can say is that I saw it, and that it is the truth.” A Mission that Informed the World of One of its Greatest Atrocities

>> March 12, 2013 - 5:35pm

“Within Jan Karski’s stirring account of selfless heroism to expose the Holocaust, lie two compelling messages: It is possible for one man to bring to the word’s attention unimaginable political evil. The harder and still relevant question raised by Karski’s story is: How does one get the civilized world to respond?”—Daniel Henninger, Wall Street Journal

Jan Karski’s Story of a Secret State stands as one of the most poignant and inspiring memoirs of World War II, the Holocaust, and the Polish Underground. With elements of a spy thriller, documenting his experiences in anti-Nazi espionage, and as one of the first accounts of the systematic slaughter of the Jews, this volume is a remarkable testimony of one man’s courage and a nation’s struggle for resistance against overwhelming oppression. President Bill Clinton praises Karski’s “lessons of heroism, resilience, and uncompromising leadership,” adding that “all freedom-seeking people around the world should know Karski’s story.”

Karski’s memoir begins with his life as a brilliant young diplomat when war broke out in 1939 with Hitler’s invasion of Poland. Taken prisoner by the Soviet Red Army, which had simultaneously invaded from the East, Karski narrowly escaped the subsequent Katyn Forest Massacre. The story advances with Karski becoming a member of the Polish Underground, the most significant resistance movement in occupied Europe, acting as a liaison and courier between the Underground and the Polish government-in-exile. In his work, he was twice smuggled into the Warsaw Ghetto, at one point tortured by the SS, and eventually entered the Nazi’s Izbica transit camp disguised as a guard, witnessing first-hand the horrors of the Holocaust.

Rahm Emanuel, Mayor of the city of Chicago, praises Story of a Secret State, saying, “Jan Karski’s brave account of the Nazi’s horrific crimes and one man’s heroic resistance strikes our collective conscience as strongly today as when he first published it over six decades ago. Today, millions around the world continue to thank and honor him for exposing the evil that was perpetuated throughout concentration camps. When President Barack Obama posthumously awarded Jan Karski the Medal of Freedom he recognized that Karski’s story is one of courage as much as compassion. This book is a stirring reminder that our world depends on both.”

Karski’s courage and testimony, conveyed in a breathtaking manner in Story of a Secret State, offer the narrative of one of the world’s greatest eyewitnesses and an inspiration for all of humanity, emboldening each of us to rise to the challenge of standing up against evil and for human rights. This definitive edition—which includes a foreword by Madeleine Albright, a biographical essay by Yale historian Timothy Snyder, an afterword by Zbigniew Brzezinski, previously unpublished photos, notes, further reading, and a glossary—is an apt legacy for this hero of conscience during the most fraught and fragile moment in modern history.

The Future of the Book in the Digital Age

>> August 9, 2012 - 12:27pm

Our business manager, Ioan Suciu, published “The Future of the Book in the Digital Age,” an excellent article about ebooks in the Spring issue of the National Association of College Auxiliary Services (NACAS) magazine, College Services. The article offers a wide-ranging look at issues confronting university libraries, departments, and students as they adopt ebooks, and is available online through the NACAS site. Here are a few highlights:

“The biggest current issue is that there is a lack of publishing infrastructure to take an e-textbook and deliver it against all available platforms and operating systems. Therefore, the question about switching from print to digital in the classroom is: Could providing access to e-textbooks be enhanced by libraries facilitating use of iPads, smartphones, and ebook readers via standardized platforms?”

“Some U.S.-based institutions have started handing out tablets to students pre-loaded with content: others have started renting out e-readers. Sem Sutter, the head of collection development at Georgetown University said the university offers Amazon e-book readers for check out to students, faculty, and staff.”

Library director Sarah Houghton offers another librarian’s perspective, humorously presented on her Librarian in Black blog: “eBooks is to libraries what that awful boyfriend (or girlfriend) was to you. Think about it. And when I say “eBooks” I mean the whole messed up situation–the copyright nightmares, the publishers, the fragmented formats, the ridiculous terms of service, the device incompatibility, the third-party aggregation companies libraries do business with–all of it. eBooks is the guy who takes advantage of your good nature and generosity only to exploit every last weakness you have for his own personal gain.”

The November Charleston conference is always a great place to soak up the perspective of librarians across the spectrum, and many of our friends are presenting this year, including Mark Coker, Peter Brantley, Mike Shatzkin, Doug Armato, and Georgetown University’s former provost James O’Donnell.

-John Warren

2012 APSA Herbert Simon Book Award to Moynihan’s The Dynamics of Performance Management

>> August 8, 2012 - 10:53am

The Public Administration Section of the American Political Science Association has awarded their 2012 Herbert Simon Book Award to Donald P. Moynihan’s The Dynamics of Performance Management: Constructing Information and Reform. Drawing on research from state and federal levels, The Dynamics of Performance Management illustrates how governments have emphasized some aspects of performance management—such as building measurement systems to acquire more performance data—but have neglected wider organizational change that would facilitate the use of such information.

In Moynihan’s analysis of why and how governments in the United States have made the move to performance systems, he identifies agency leadership, culture, and resources as keys to better implementation, goal-based learning, and improved outcomes.

How do governments use the performance information generated under performance systems? Moynihan develops a model of interactive dialogue to highlight how performance data, which promised to optimize decision making and policy change for the public’s benefit, has often been used selectively to serve the interests of particular agencies and individuals, undermining attempts at interagency problem solving and reform.

A valuable resource for public administration scholars and administrators, The Dynamics of Performance Management offers fresh insight into how government organizations can better achieve their public service goals.

Chellaney’s Water Named as Finalist for the Bernard Schwartz Book Award

>> August 7, 2012 - 1:39pm

The Asia Society has selected Brahma Chellaney’s book Water: Asia’s New Battleground as a finalist for their 2012 Bernard Schwartz Book Award. Suzanne DiMaggio, Vice President of Asia Society’s Global Policy Programs, commented on the announcement of the finalists, saying, “The five finalists for the 2012 Bernard Schwartz Book Award each, in different ways, shed light on important trends, challenges, and opportunities taking place in Asia. They are required reading for all who want to better understand this dynamic region.”

We are proud that one of the finalists is a Georgetown University Press book. Water: Asia’s New Battleground is a pioneering study of Asia’s murky water politics and the relationships between freshwater, peace, and security. In this unique and highly readable book, Brahma Chellaney expertly paints a larger picture of water across Asia, highlights the security implications of resource-linked territorial disputes, and proposes real strategies to avoid conflict and more equitably share Asia’s water resources.

The Bernard Schwartz Book Award distinguishes books of nonfiction that focus on contemporary Asia or U.S.-Asia relations and promote a meaningful dialogue of the changes in Asia and their implications for the world at large. The other books that have been recognized are: Cambodia’s Curse by Joel Brinkley (PublicAffairs), China in Ten Words by Yu Hua (Pantheon Books), Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China by Ezra Vogel (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), and Where China Meets India by Thant Myint-U (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

2012 Best Book from the Academy of Management, Public and Nonprofit Division: How Information Matters

>> August 6, 2012 - 12:45pm

Kathleen Hale’s How Information Matters: Networks and Public Policy Information has won the Academy of Management’s Public and Nonprofit Division’s 2012 Best Book Award. This award-winning book examines the ways a network of state and local governments and nonprofit organizations can enhance the capacity for successful policy change by public administrators. Hale examines drug courts, programs that typify the highly networked, collaborative environment of public administrators today. These “special dockets” implement justice but also drug treatment, case management, drug testing, and incentive programs for non-violent offenders in lieu of jail time. In a study that spans more than two decades, Hale shows ways organizations within the network act to champion, challenge, and support policy innovations over time. Her description of interactions between courts, administrative agencies, and national organizations highlight the evolution of collaborative governance in the state and local arena, with vignettes that share specific experiences across six states (Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Missouri, and Tennessee) and ways that they acquired knowledge from the network to make decisions.

Congratulations to Dr. Hale!

Proposing a Renewed Catholic Understanding of the Sexual Person, pt 2

>> August 3, 2012 - 1:08pm

By Todd A. Salzman and Michael G. Lawler, authors of Sexual Ethics

Part Two of a Two-Part Series

Sister Farrell’s comment and questions cited in Part One of this series highlight the need for a renewed definition of the sexual person that adequately considers the sexual person in light of “the signs of the times.” Drawing insights from scripture, tradition, the sciences, and experience, Catholic theologians are proposing a renewed understanding of the sexual person that challenges the historical suspicion surrounding human sexuality in the Catholic Church. This renewed understanding builds on many of the Catholic Church’s positive messages about human sexuality, especially about the unitive end of marriage or meaning of the sexual act, and can provide sound principles to educate the faithful about the God-given gift of sexuality.

In The Sexual Person (2008) and Sexual Ethics (2012) we propose six fundamental dimensions of a renewed understanding of the sexual person. These include:

Move from the sexual person considered as a procreative person to the sexual person considered as a relational person, one who focuses, not simply on sexual acts, but on the interpersonal meaning of sexual acts for interpersonal relationships and asks whether or not these sexual acts facilitate growth in just and loving relationship with one’s intimate partner, oneself, and one’s God.
Move from viewing heterosexual orientation as normative and homosexual and bisexual orientation as “objectively disordered” to viewing sexual orientation, heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual, as an intrinsic dimension of the sexual person and, therefore, “objectively ordered” for persons with such orientations.
Move to a more holistic and integrated understanding of the sexual person, physiologically, emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually considered.
Acknowledge the fundamental desire in persons to be in relationship, including sexual relationship, with another person. This desire is realized in a complex of relationships that the magisterium refers to as complementarity, which intends that certain realities belong together and produce a whole that neither produces alone. The magisterium prioritizes physical complementarity and argues that it demands heterosexual marriage as the exclusive stable sexual relationship between a man and a woman.
Move from the magisterium’s description of sexual complementarity, limited to physical complementarity and heterosexual marriage, to a holistic complementarity which integrates sexual orientation as an intrinsic dimension of the sexual person.
Move from an understanding of “truly human sexual acts” (Gaudium et spes, n. 49) limited to reproductive-type sexual acts within a heterosexual marital relationship as fulfilling of sexual persons to an understanding of “truly human sexual acts” as either reproductive-type or non-reproductive-type sexual acts in accord with a person’s sexual orientation that facilitate the sharing of a person’s embodied self with another embodied self in just love that fulfill sexual persons.

This renewed understanding focuses on persons rather than their acts, interpersonal relationships rather than biology, real and experienced rather than abstract and ideal sexuality, principles and virtues (such as justice and love) rather than absolute norms. The normative conclusion that follows from these six renewed dimensions of the sexual person changes the approach to sexual morality: some heterosexual and some homosexual acts, those that meet the requirements for holistic complementarity and just love, are truly human and therefore moral; some heterosexual and some homosexual acts, those that do not meet the requirements for holistic complementarity and just love, are not truly human and therefore immoral.

Proposing a Renewed Catholic Understanding of the Sexual Person

>> August 2, 2012 - 4:03pm

By Todd A. Salzman and Michael G. Lawler, authors of Sexual Ethics

Part One of a Two-Part Series

In a recent interview with NPR’s Fresh Air, Sister Pat Farrell, President of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), commented on one aspect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s “doctrinal assessment” of the group: “We have been, in good faith, raising concerns about some of the Church’s teaching on sexuality…the problem being that the teaching and interpretation of the faith can’t remain static and really needs to be reformulated, rethought in light of the world we live in….” Regarding whether or not these concerns are open for discussion in the Church, Farrell asks: “Can you be Catholic and have a questioning mind?…Is freedom of conscience within the church genuinely honored?” Her comment and questions invite reflection on a historical reason for concerns about some Catholic sexual teachings, the need for Church teaching that respects the consciences of the faithful, and the need for a renewed definition of the sexual person that adequately considers the sexual person in light of “the signs of the times.”

Suspicion of human sexuality and the pleasure associated with its use has a long history in the Catholic tradition. Stoic suspicions of sexual pleasure and its emphasis that all moral sexual acts must be acts open to procreation within marriage were incorporated into Christian views on human sexuality and both “conjugalized” and “procreationalized” the approach to sexual activity. Augustine affirmed that sexuality and sexual activity in marriage are good because they were created good by the good God, but he also affirmed that their goodness is threatened by the powerful pleasure associated with sexual intercourse. Pope Gregory the Great even banned from access to the church anyone who had just had pleasurable intercourse. Despite some developments in Catholic sexual teaching, this suspicion of sex has for centuries placed enormous strain on Catholic consciences and self-esteem. This strain continues in the present and is highlighted by different perceptions of the role and function of conscience in relation to Catholic sexual ethics and Catholic social ethics.

There is a paradoxical difference in method between Catholic social and sexual ethics that has implications for exercising one’s conscience on these issues. In Sollicitudo rei socialis, Blessed John Paul II articulates the Catholic Church’s approach to social ethics. The Church seeks “to guide people to respond, with the support of rational reflection and of the human sciences, to their vocation as responsible builders of earthly society” (Sollicitudo rei socialis, paragraph n. 1). In social ethics, the Church guides, and believers, drawing on that guidance, their own experience, the findings of the sciences, and their informed consciences, responsibly respond. If the Church’s way in social ethics is the way of principles that enable believers to responsibly respond, not the way of absolute norms to be unquestioningly obeyed, then surely it can be the way also in sexual ethics. That opens the way to the long-standing Catholic teaching on the moral ultimacy of conscience articulated, for instance, by the young Joseph Ratzinger in his commentary on Gaudium et spes’ teaching on conscience. “Over the Pope as the expression of the binding claim of ecclesiastical authority there still stands one’s own conscience, which must be obeyed before all else, if necessary even against the requirement of ecclesiastical authority.” Catholics rightly accord theological respect to the conscience of the magisterium when it teaches on sexual issues. Today they ask only that the magisterium reciprocate respect for their consciences.

[Part two will be posted tomorrow. It will discuss what a renewed understanding of sexual ethics might look like.]

St. Ignatius of Loyola

>> July 31, 2012 - 2:38pm

Today is the feast day of St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus. In celebration of this special feast day (Georgetown University is a Jesuit institution), we wanted to share this selection from Saints and Feasts of the Liturgical Year that highlights St. Ignatius.

St. Ignatius of Loyola was born in his family’s castle, near Azpeitia, in Spain’s Basque country, sometime before October 23, 1491. As a youth, he served (1506?-17) as a page to Juan Velazquez de Cuellar, King Ferdinand V’s chief treasurer, and there he learned his courtly manners. In 1517, he entered the service of the Duke of Najera, Viceroy of Navarre, and while defending the fortress at Pamplona was wounded (May 20, 1521) by a cannon shot. He convalesced at Loyola Castle, and by reading a life of Christ as well as those of the saints, he experienced a conversion and resolved to visit the Holy Land and serve the Lord.

On his way to the Holy Land, he stopped at the Benedictine monastery at Montserrat, and there he made a night’s vigil (March 24-25, 1522) before the Black Madonna. He then went on to nearby Manresa and spent about eleven months in prayer and penance. After a brief visit to Rome to request papal approval for his pilgrimage, he left Venice and arrived in Jerusalem on September 4, 1523. Less than a month later, he left to return to Venice. He then made his way to Barcelona to begin his studies “in order to help souls.” After studies in Barcelona (1524-26), Alcala (1526-27), and Salamanca (1527), Ignatius went to the University of Paris (1528-35), and there he gathered a group of six like-minded men. On August 15, 1534, in a Montmartre chapel, the small band of seven took a vow to go to Jerusalem within a year after their studies, if this were possible, and work for the conversion of the Turks. After their arrival in Venice (1537), they learned that they could not sail for the Holy Land because of imminent war; hence, they went (November 1567) to Rome and offered (November 18-23, 1538) their services to Pope Paul III.

After Ignatius and his first companions decided to form a new religious congregation, their plans received Paul III’s approval (September 27, 1540), and thus the Society of Jesus was born. Ignatius was then elected general and accepted the office on April 19, 1541; on April 22, in a ceremony at St. Paul Outside-the-Walls, the six pronounced their vows as Jesuits. As a general of the new order, Ignatius remained in Rome, wrote its Constitutions, and supervised the Society’s growth, not only in Italy, but in the other countries of Europe as well. He likewise sent missionaries to India. Because of the excessive acts of penance he had practiced while at Manresa, his health had been severely impaired. St. Ignatius died in Rome on July 31, 1556, and was canonized by Pope Gregory XV on March 12, 1622. His Spiritual Exercises had been first approved by Pope Paul III on July 31, 1548, and on July 25, 1922, Pope Pius XI named him heavenly patron of all Spiritual Exercises.

Interested in learning more? As Georgetown University is a Jesuit institution, St. Ignatius of Loyola’s order features importantly in the three-volume A History of Georgetown University. Another book by Georgetown University Press that reflects on the Society of Jesus is Reverse Mission, a work that looks at religious orders’ influence on US foreign policy.

The Passion of the Indies

>> July 17, 2012 - 11:46am

By John Warren, Marketing & Sales Director, Georgetown University Press

Last week I had the pleasure of attending George Washington University’s 5^th Annual Conference on Ethics and Publishing, an event with the theme of “Preserving, Protecting and Enhancing the Publishing Ecosystem” and featuring some of the bright minds of academic and general publishing. My friend Mike Shatzkin of the Idea Logical Company, who writes the essential publishing blog The Shatzkin Files, had alerted me to the conference, but I was pleased to see some other familiar names and faces in the day’s line up.

Niko Pfund, President of Oxford University Press, offered a glimpse into Oxford’s strategy and some great case studies in e-book marketing. Shatzkin ran through a sobering summary of the Department of Justice’s case against the big six publishers and Apple, and discussed the possible unintended and negative consequences of the settlement for publishers, and by extension, for the diversity and health of publishing. (Shatzkin is quoted prominently in Ken Auletta’s recent New Yorker article about the case.) An in-depth look at higher education and K–12 publishing was provided by Al Greco, a professor of marketing at Fordham University. I had a hard time, however, discerning the connection to ethics through most of these presentations.

The highlights came from two speakers on the indie side of the equation: Lissa Muscatine, who passionately described her and husband Bradley Graham’s decision to purchase, just over a year ago, the iconic Washington, DC, bookstore Politics and Prose; and Dennis Loy Johnson, president of Melville House, who quite eloquently articulated the passion, potency, and peril of independent publishing in the Kindle age.

The day following the conference, I was able to spend some time with Dennis. We’d met ten years ago, when we had neighboring booth space at Book Expo America, the nation’s annual publishing confab. That was shortly after he and his wife, sculptor Valerie Merians, had become publishers, a decision that emerged from the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Then, I couldn’t help but admire his fervor, which the intervening decade has not dissipated. Among other things, he told me about the remarkable story of publishing Hans Fallada’s novel, Every Man Dies Alone. Dennis described how the novel, originally written shortly after World War II and overlooked for forty years hence, became a phenomenon largely due to the enthusiastic support of independent booksellers, stores such as Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh, NC.

The amazing backstory of Every Man Dies Alone, and how the book came to be published, reminded me of a nonfiction work which Georgetown University Press will be publishing in early 2013: Jan Karski’s Story of a Secret State. Melville House’s book is a novel, based on a true incident, while Georgetown’s is nonfiction, but both describe amazing acts of resistance, of passion and heroism in the face of Nazi oppression, and both are works being brought to new audiences in the digital age. Karski, a member of the Polish Underground, was one of the first people who tried to warn the West about the Holocaust. (Karski was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama, on May 29, 2012.) I just finished reading the manuscript, and look forward to helping to bring Karski’s story, relatively unknown in the United States, the attention it deserves.

Georgetown University Press to Publish the American Association of Teachers of Arabic’s Al-cArabiyya Journal

>> July 12, 2012 - 9:54am

Georgetown University Press is delighted to assume the publication of Al-^cArabiyya, the annual, peer-reviewed journal of the American Association of Teachers of Arabic (AATA). Volumes 44 and 45 (2011-2012), a joint issue edited by Dr. Reem Bassiouney of Georgetown University, will be the first issue, and it will be available in December 2012. Al-^cArabiyya is the only scholarly journal with a focus on Arabic language, linguistics, literature, and pedagogy.

“We are thrilled to work with the AATA to produce the leading journal for teaching Arabic language,” says Hope LeGro, Director of Georgetown Languages at GU Press. “GU Press is committed to serving the field of Arabic language learning, as we have been for nearly fifty years. This journal partnership is a natural evolution of our shared mission with AATA.” The press publishes the Al-Kitaab Arabic Language Program, as well as Arabic dictionaries and other Arabic textbooks.

This year, the AATA celebrates fifty years of serving the scholars of Arabic around the world. Dr. Elizabeth M. Bergman, Executive Director of AATA, praises the new relationship saying, “The AATA has demonstrated its commitment to scholarship on Arabic language, literature, and pedagogy through publication of Al-^cArabiyya and through other activities for nearly fifty years. Our partnership with Georgetown University Press is a fitting commemoration of these years of service. It is also a wonderful way to more forward, and serve the growing number of those who study and teach Arabic language and literature.”

LATEST NEWS & EVENTS

COMING SOON