Böcker utgivna av Lexington Books

Driven by a detailed hermeneutical investigation of the Quranic story of creation, this book questions the hybrid Biblical/Quranic narrative that gradually erased the lines that define the authentic Quranic account. Abla Hasan argues that humanitys divine status is the bedrock from which to investigate the meaning of human religiosity and address the problem of pain and suffering. The detailed analysis in this book answers many linguistic and logical pending questions in the Quran and is a serious departure from popular Muslim narratives that seek to alleviate our pain and suffering.

Moral evaluations of actions are only appropriate for actions within the moral domain. Actions outside of the moral domain are amoral actions. In Why Suicide Is Amoral: A Philosophical Account, Robyn Gaier emphasizes the role of agency in determining whether an action is within the moral domain. If an agent lacks either deliberative agency or moral agency, then their action is amoral. An agent lacks deliberative agency if they cannot evaluate and act upon reasons, and moral agency if they cannot act upon moral reasons. Actions in which such agencies are compromised are also amoral actions. In treating actions of suicide, while granting their diversity, this book traces them to the loss or threat of loss of basic psychological needs. Gaier argues that when basic psychological needs are lost or under threat, an agent's deliberative agency, moral agency, or both are either lacking or compromised. Hence, actions of suicide are amoral, and it is a conceptual mistake to attempt the moral evaluation of actions of suicide. Furthermore, when we regard actions of suicide as within the moral domain, we perpetuate a social stigma against suicide.

Democratic Disunity: Rhetorical Tribalism in 2020 addresses that while attention has recently and rightly been paid to the tribal bifurcation of the GOP, the Democratic Party is similarly divided. Americans live in a democratic republic rather than a direct democracy and choices regarding governing concerns are configured through communicative action. These choices include those made between and within American political parties. Without rhetorical mediation and intervention, toxic partisan tribalism within the two major American political parties is likely to destabilize the nations' federalist system of government. Kelley argues that intraparty tribalism poisons public life and consumes public space within which electoral politics, including discussion, deliberation and compromise, should be thriving. Democratic Disunity considers intraparty tribalism as a rhetorical form, uniquely positioned within the twenty-first century. Details are provided regarding language-in-use strategies with which to anchor a rhetoric of governing through a mindful, deliberative dialogue which diminishes the effect of political partisanship, including its toxic variations both between and within American political parties. Scholars and students of rhetoric, political communication, and political science will find this book particularly interesting.

The authors argue that the potential threat of a resurgence of fascism has been consistently exaggerated from 1945 until present day; that the ongoing lack of conceptual and definitional clarity with respect to terms like fascism, the radical right, the alt right, white supremacism, populism, racism, etc., has enabled ill-informed or dishonest commentators to distort their meaning and abusively misapply those labels so as to delegitimize their political opponents; and that the political and economic elites in charge of contemporary Western societies are now deliberately exaggerating and exploiting the threat posed by the domestic radical right in order to facilitate vilifying, harassing, de-platforming, censoring, canceling, and repressing disgruntled citizens (no matter where they may lie along the political spectrum) who openly criticize and vigorously oppose their agendas. The authors also advocate the use of well-established scholarly methods for carrying out research on the right and provide precise definitions of various terms in order to facilitate the development of more accurate categorizations.

The films of Sofia Coppola have moved and entranced audiences with her minimalist style, moody soundscapes, and commitment to centering the lives and experiences of women and girls. A Critical Companion to Sofia Coppola explores the implications of her stories, images, and convictions in a comprehensive study of all eight of her major works. Drawing from a wide range of disciplines, each chapter offers a fresh, interdisciplinary reading of one of Coppola's films and her treatment of core themes like masculinity, sexual politics, bodies, and love. Rigorously researched and unique, the arguments presented within this volume shed new light on one of the most important women filmmakers in film history.

Movies and television series are excellent tools for teaching political science and international relations. Understanding how stories in various film and television genres illustrate political ideas can better assist students and fans understand and appreciate the political subtext of these media products. This book examines politics through five film genres and their variants. Gangster movies focus on American and other organized crime. They reached their zenith in the films of Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese. Political thrillers express paranoia about secrecy and political conspiracies, while action movies channel anger at foreign and domestic threats to order. Superhero films and TV present modern characters who seek to serve society as they face personal struggles about their individual identities. War movies promote positive images of wars when conflicts are perceived as successful, but often include antiwar messages when wars turn out badly. Western movies fell out of favor in the 1970s and 1980s but have undergone a renaissance since the 1990s. Westerns can be taken as either political parables, or as meditations on policing, anarchy, community organization. The author argues that while these genres all offer escape, they also offer important political lessons.

Drawing on insights from political science, criminology, and sociology, Torture: An Interdisciplinary Approach investigates the nature and evolution of torture. By surveying the use of torture across time and space, this book considers the development of an international human rights discourse challenging the legitimacy of torture as an instrument of interrogation. Kathleen Barrett, George Klay Kieh, Jr., Gavin M. Lee, and Neema Noori critically assess the effectiveness of legal regimes, both national and international, that arose as a result of this discourse and the emergent global movement to ban the use of torture. In addition to grappling with colonial legacies of torture and the particular ways that great powers, whether liberal or illiberal, deploy these coercive practices, this book argues that torture continues to serve as a repressive practice that mediates the relationship between the state and its citizens in many countries within the global south. The authors demonstrate that as governments move away from one set of perceived atrocities, they develop new methods of torture and establish novel strategies for justifying these coercive practices.

Third Parties, Outsiders, and Renegades analyzes 10 third-party, outsider, or renegade presidential candidates and explores each one's impact on the political process. The list of modern outsider candidates who have attracted the public's attention is fairly long, but most of the time the candidates never garner enough support to become elected or they self-destruct somewhere along the way. A few, however, have taken votes away from more mainstream candidates and changed the course of political parties or election outcomes. This book provides readers with an analysis of how their rhetoric, political tactics, and issues have challenged the political status quo and impacted later campaigns. The future viability of outsider candidates is discussed in light of current political polarization and the legacy of Donald J. Trump, the first elected outsider president, and considers how outsider candidates might be able to compete in upcoming elections given the current political divisions within the nation. Scholars and students of communication, political science, and rhetoric will find this book particularly interesting.

Exploring Religious Dimensions in A.I. and Humanity explores how the phenomenal advancements of artificial intelligence can reshape our spiritual journeys and influence established ethical frameworks. Very Reverend Dr. Aristarchos Gkrekas offers insights grounded in deep religious understanding. Nicholas Kokkinos provides insightful analyses of the ethical implications of emerging technologies and the potential for AI to serve as a dynamic repository of religious knowledge. Through years of collaboration, both authors sought a common approach to navigate the exponential growth of technology and its impact on humanity's enduring questions about consciousness, ethics, and spirituality. This book is an essential read for those intrigued by the evolving dialogue between technology and spirituality and is enriched by references to centuries-old texts. It promises to ignite curiosity and spark a deeper understanding of our digital age's spiritual dimensions and the ethical questions that arise from these phenomenal developments.

Despite the velocity and scale of the cumulative changes of immigrant integration and receptivity infrastructures in fast growing regions of the United States, less research has focused on the new and evolving experiences in these regions in recent years. Editors Paul N. McDaniel and Darlene Xiomara Rodriguez and the contributors in Integration and Receptivity in Immigrant Gateway Metro Regions in the United States fill this gap through case studies of different types of immigrant gateway metro areas. They provide insight into how immigrant settlement, integration, and receptivity processes and practices within each metro area have continued to evolve beyond the nascent experiences documented in the early 2000s. This interdisciplinary volume examines ongoing processes in not only well-established immigrant gateways, but also in previously overlooked regions. This book is a resource for researchers, students, and practitioners to contextualize the ongoing changes in new destination metropolitan regions in the United States and to learn from the challenges, opportunities, and best practices emerging from different metropolitan regional contexts.

African Migrants, European Borders, and the Problem with Humanitarianism presents a probing examination of the contemporary migrant "crisis" in the Mediterranean Basin. By centering our analysis on how racial slavery has shaped European democratic culture, its abolitionist traditions, and the global structures of capital accumulation, P. Khalil Saucier and Tryon P. Woods reveal and confront how contemporary discourse on the migrant "crisis" displaces Black sovereign mobility. Their inquiry into the modern world's culture of politics investigates "freedom of movement" discourse's ostensible confrontation with border policing, the memorializing of Black migrant deaths by artists and advocates, and the visual imagery of a cosmopolitan and multicultural Europe as conceived by filmmakers in response to the migrant "crisis" as variants of a slaveholding culture instantiated in the early Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds. This analysis allows the authors to formulate a new critical framework for analysis of both the problems of contemporary migration and borders and the leading prescriptions on offer from analysts, advocates, and policy makers in order to develop alternate ways of conceptualizing global society.

Critical Theory and Marital Quarrels: Dynamics of Passionate Speech analyzes the pneumatics of conflict through a discursive archeology of police reports, court proceedings, psychiatric cases, therapy sessions, eighteenth-century relationship advice literature, and the nineteenth-century fiction. Todor Hristov argues that in order to extract knowledge from the noise of the marital fights, preachers, moralists, physicians, alienists, sociologists discarded the words as a slag, and in consequence, they were unable to explain either the recurrence or the power of discord. This study is intended as an analysis of the discursive mechanism of contentious speech based on concepts derived from critical theory, discourse analysis, speech act theory and semiotics. The discursive mechanism of quarreling is summed up in the concept of passionate speech relevant beyond family scenes, to scenes of political or public contention. This book applies the concept to examine critically the language of contemporary couples therapy and to describe the unintended effects of the passions shared by the clients and the therapists.

This book examines the impact of and response to the rapidly growing English language learner (ELL) populations in the southeastern United States on K-16 schooling. Using examples of policy and practice from seven states (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee), the book explores how the contemporary context of accountability regimes and neoliberal tenets affect educational responses to the increased linguistic and cultural diversity in schools and how these realities may be different from when traditional states (such as California or Florida) were developing their responses to (im)migration. The collection of chapters addresses key questions of teacher preparation, effective infrastructures, and frameworks for serving ELLs, dual language bilingual education, and advocacy efforts at the state, district, and local level in the Southeast. The authors describe promising practices in each state, but also note the need for more systemic, statewide approaches that resist the enduring monolingual discourse that has historically characterized much of ELL schooling. They call for transformative policies and practices that take current research into account and that stress the centrality of pluralistic principles to design effective schools for ELLs.

Disruptive Women of Literature: Rooting for the Antiheroine critically examines the representation of the literary antiheroine in contemporary Gothic and crime-thriller novels and traces her emergence from the deviant women of Greek mythology and Shakespeare to the twenty-first century. It explores how the antiheroine shifts dependent on genre, time period, and format, demonstrating that she is capable of both challenging and reaffirming problematic ideologies surrounding women, power, violence, sexuality, and motherhood. Eleanore Gardner argues that the antiheroine is almost always defined by her experience of a patriarchal trauma and must therefore navigate her identity differently and more complexly than her antihero counterpart. The author examines a broad range of texts to understand the antiheroine's fluidity, her liminal and abject existence, and what these suggest about cultural anxieties surrounding transgressive women.

African-on-African Colonization: The Ill-Fated Ambazonia-Cameroun Political Partnership is an extensive study of the phenomenon of African-on-African colonialism in postcolonial Africa; an egregious and vexed development that is causing instability and insecurity in many parts of the continent. Using Ambazonia as a case study, Carlson Anyangwe discusses two manifestations of colonialism that emerged from the ashes of white colonialism (neo-colonialism and African-on-African colonialism) and how Ambazonia has been impacted by both. Anyangwe also examines the Ambazonia-Cameroun political association--that was later turned into Ambazonia (formerly British Southern Cameroons)--to explore Cameroun's colonial occupation of Ambazonia and Ambazonia's long struggle to be free and accede to sovereign statehood. Interweaving several complex issues garnered from historical sources, political developments, and eye-witness accounts, this book provides a deeper understanding of the complexity of motives and concatenation of forces in Ambazonia, expressing the critical need to decolonize Ambazonia in an era of freedoms and democratization. This book is a compulsory reading for Ambazonians and scholars of the distorted history of Ambazonia and Cameroun.

The Federal Election Commission (FEC) is the primary agency enforcing campaign finance laws in the US, and it has long been portrayed as a toothless tiger. Given the importance of campaign finance laws in protecting democracy, the characterization of the FEC as an ineffective regulator is problematic. To understand why the agency has a weak reputation, this book explores changes in campaign finance laws, the underfunding of the agency, untimely commissioner appointments, and how this has affected the enforcement of campaign finance laws between 2002 and 2020. This study finds that as campaign finance laws have weakened in the US, so has the FEC's ability to enforce them. The agency's resources have stagnated, so the penalties and fines issued by the agency have dropped. There are multiple periods when the agency is absent a quorum because of too few commissioners at the Commission, and it is increasingly unable to proceed with agency business. Furthermore, the empty commissioner seats have led to a partisan imbalance that has favored the Republicans and allowed them to dominate decision-making. Now, the outcomes of allegations of wrongdoing are increasingly closing by default rather than bipartisan consensus.

Fenollosa's Legacy in Late Nineteenth Century Japan: An American Scholar's Role in Resurrecting the Art of Japan makes a critical assessment of American art theorist Ernest F. Fenollosa's work in Meiji Japan. Ernest F. Fenollosa was first hired as a Tokyo University professor of political philosophy in 1878 but became an art theorist and policymaker for Japan's Education Ministry. His illustrious career as an art administrator began with the 1882 Bijutsu shinsetsu speech that cemented the reputation of his work. Working closely with Okakura Kakuzō (Tenshin), Fenollosa became the lightning rod in defining the course of modern painting as well as in establishing the first national art school. He is widely credited with resurrecting moribund traditional Japanese painting to health. The author shows this assessment of Fenollosa as the savior of Japanese traditional painting work may not have been deserved by examining the historical context in which he made the 1882 speech. The book offers the first English translation of Fenollosa's 1882 Bijutsu shinsetsu speech that had been previously unavailable to the non-Japanese reading audience.

"Deep time" is a term which attempts to capture temporal scales far beyond human comprehension. These are stretches of time epitomised by geological and cosmic scale processes, vast enough to make the entirety of human existence appear as little more than a footnote. The past few years have seen a boom in texts dedicated to the study of deep time, extending across a broad range of disciplines which fall markedly outside of its geological roots. These studies are unified by two ideas in particular: that deep time thinking and ecocriticism should be considered in conjunction, and that literature and the arts play a vital role in fostering a deep time awareness. Digressions in Deep Time is the first collection of essays which considers the multifarious representations of deep time across literature and the arts, assembling the work of a wide range of prominent scholars whose research frequently engages with temporality and ecocriticism. Featured contributions include work by the Pulitzer-prize winning author John McPhee, who popularised the term deep time in the late seventies, as well as chapters by Richard Irvine (author of An Anthropology of Deep Time), Benjamin Morgan (author of The Outward Mind) and Andrew Tate (author of Apocalyptic Fiction).

John E. Hill's Adam Smith's Sociability and the American Dream seeks to correct the three misunderstandings that have hindered the pursuit of the American dream and contributed to excessive individualism at the expense of community. Market fundamentalists ignore the importance of Adam Smith's impartial spectator for capitalism; his ideal economy was not a free market but a sociable and fair one. A fair market would promote individuality within vibrant communities and would be consistent with Smith's "justice, liberty, and equality" formula. Such a sociable market would also be more productive. Second, many Christians misunderstand the love your neighbor commandment, excluding the outsider, so explicit in the parable. Failure to follow John Adams's warnings that aristocrats are dangerous in a republic. Free market advocates devalue the immense contributions communities make to the economy. Greater sociability would also facilitate the pursuit of happiness. It would not be necessary to reinvent the wheel to move to this more ideal society. Cooperative organizations already exist in the United States and in other countries as models for reform.

Bhakti Ethics, Emotions, and Love in Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava Metaethics explores the broader implications of understanding bhakti, "devotional love to the divine," as an ethical theory based on a "realist" account of emotions, where emotions are sensory perceptions of the real ethical qualities of classes of actions. The book spotlights one complex articulation of an Indian epistemology and ontology of ethics based on the metaphysics of Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava psychology of emotions in dialogue with a variety of academic fields, including the philosophy of religion and related methodologies such as virtue ethics, theological voluntarism, and ecofeminist and feminist care ethics. The work discusses how emotions are understood metaphysically as extra-mental, objectively real qualities, what Cogen Bohanec refers to as "affective realism." This follows from a cosmogenic model where the universe emanates from the loving relationship between the divine feminine, Rādhā, and her intense loving relationship with her masculine counterpart, Kṛṣṇa. Since the origin of all of reality emanates from the ultimacy of an affective relationship, then the fabric of reality can be described as having objectively real affective qualities and that is the basis for grounding this ethical system.

Situated at the intersection of library and information science (LIS), Wikipedia studies, and fandom studies, this book is a digital (auto)ethnography that documents the information behavior of Wikipedia "fan editors"--that is, individuals who edit articles about pop culture media. Given Wikipedia's prominence in LIS and fan studies scholarship, both as one of the world's most heavily used reference sources and as an important archive for fan communities, fan editors are a crucial component of this ecosystem as some of Wikipedia's most active contributors. Through a combination of fieldwork observations, insight from key informants, and the author's own experiences as a Wikipedia editor, this monograph provides a rich articulation of fan editor information behavior and offers a significant contribution to scholarship in a number of fields. Scholars of library and information science, media studies, fandom studies, and popular culture will find this book of particular interest.

Sport and Psychoanalysis: What Sport Reveals about Our Unconscious Desires, Fantasies, and Fears explores the intersection of sport and psychoanalysis, emphasizing the often-overlooked psycho-social dimensions underpinning the experience of sport. By challenging the idea that sport offers an "escape" from reality--a realm separate to the politics of everyday life--each chapter critically considers the unconscious desires, fantasies, and fears that underpin the sporting spectacle for both participants and spectators. Indeed, beyond simply applying psychoanalysis to sport, this book proposes how sport can be used to pose questions to psychoanalysis, thus using sport as a medium to elucidate key psychoanalytic ideas and concepts. This volume addresses a diverse range of theorists, including Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Lou Andreas-Salomé, Norman O. Brown, and Frantz Fanon, and applies them across a variety of topics and sports, including NFL coaching, Manny Pacquiao, play, football, basketball, baseball, poker, and the 2023 FIFA Women's World Cup, therefore providing a unique understanding of the cultural, social, and psychic significance of sports. A timely and relevant collection, this book will appeal to scholars and practitioners interested in understanding sport from both the cultural and clinical application of psychoanalytic theory as well as academics and practitioners in sport studies, psychology, sociology, education, and cultural studies.

The number of forcibly displaced people globally has been on the rise in recent years. The refugee crises in the Middle East, Africa, Europe and South and East Asia are the most notable. Due to such crises, the refugee population has been a key challenge for humanity. It has also put a strain on many refugee-hosting countries as most of the displaced populations are hosted in low and middle income countries rather than wealthier countries. Force displacement creates challenges for the refugees and the host societies. Displacement and Refugee Issues in South Asia: Uncovering the Contested Realities brings out the cases of forcibly displacement from five South Asian countries: Rohingya in Bangladesh, India and Nepal, Tamils in Sri Lanka, and the Afghan refugees in Afghanistan and Europe. Bulbul Siddiqi and contributors reveal that the refugee population in various South Asian countries have been living with vulnerabilities and uncertainty due to ineffective repatriation and the lack of dignified living conditions in host countries. It requires urgent support and initiatives from global and regional powers and international humanitarian organizations to ensure that the dignified lives of these vulnerable populations in different countries.

The U.S. Supreme Court is as important as ever in the lives of Americans. Contrary to the image-enhancing claims of independence that many of its members claim, however, the Court's current supermajority has transformed it into a powerful political institution that wages ideological war meant to return the nation to a previous period, at the same time denying rights to millions. The "Stench" of Politics: Polarization and Worldview on the Supreme Court opens a window into the Supreme Court that helps us to understand the institution and its rulings.At the heart of this analysis is worldview, a phenomenon that every person, including Supreme Court justices, possesses. Whether someone's worldview is "fixed" or "fluid" affects who they are, what they believe and what they do. In addition, interpreting the Constitution as an "originalist" or "living constitutionalist" often dictates case outcomes. By applying these and other constructs to the Supreme Court, the book reveals how the once-revered institution has evolved into one whose majority not only has neglected its commitment to the inscription on its own building, "Equal Justice Under Law," but is also determined to remake both the law and the nation.

Few places are more revealing than the Alps to grasp the uneven EU core-periphery dynamics intrinsic to the EU border regime. In 2015, the reintroduction of controls at northern Italian borders, as a response to asylum seekers' mobility, gave rise to a series of conflicts, contradictions and solidarities which this book explores. By contextualizing the governance of borders and migration in a broader framework, which includes the governance of EU states' debt, the book focuses on the effects of border regimes not only on migrants but also on EU societies. The ethnographic analysis of the everyday life of the French/Italian and Austrian/Italian borders makes visible the impacts of governance strategies which promote social polarization to contain potentially subversive moments of disruptions and transgressions. In particular, the book aims to challenge the idea of a supposed lack of morality of all non-white migration facilitators (derogatorily called "passeurs"), in contrast to white facilitators' ethical and political commitments; and the supposed incompatibility between white workers supporting reactionary populism and the New Left's "Welcome Culture".

This book examines the origins of genocide and mass murder in the everyday conflicts of ordinary people, exacerbated by special interests. We examine cases harming people simply because they are considered unworthy and undeserving--for instance, if they are dehumanized. We confine our attention to genocide, mass murder, large-scale killing motivated by hate or desire for gain, and fascism as an ideology since it usually advocates and leads to such killing. The book draws on social psychology, especially recent work on the psychology of prejudice. Much new information on the psychology of fear, hate, intolerance, and violence has appeared in recent years. The world has also learned more on the funding of dehumanization by giant corporations via "dark money," and on the psychology of genocidal leaders. This allows us to construct a much more detailed back story of why people erupt into mass killing of minorities and vulnerable populations. We thus go on to deal with the whole "problem of evil" (or at least apparently irrational killing) in general, broadening the perspective to include politics, economics, and society at large. We draw on psychology, sociology, economics, political science, public health, anthropology, and biology in a uniquely cross-disciplinary work.

Environmental Narratives in the Huainanzi and the Anthropocene analyzes the contemporary discourse of the Anthropocene using the Huainanzi 淮南子, an eastern Eurasian text from the second century BCE. Written to preserve and strengthen the Han Empire (202 BCE-220 CE), the Huainanzi describes a mode of rulership premised on periodizing the present as the end of history that domesticates humans and non-humans. Matthew James Hamm provides a contextualized reading of the Huainanzi's argument and uses it as a theoretical lens to read Anthropocene scholarship in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Hamm argues that--irrespective of the name or historical narrative used to describe it--the idea of the Anthropocene as a new epoch not only lacks empirical evidence, but also empowers the existing periodization of modernity to provide ideological support for environmentally destructive neoliberal structures rooted in Western European imperial orders. By doing so, the Anthropocene framework actively inhibits the transformative social change needed to address global environmental crises such as climate change and mass extinction. Consequently, this book rejects periodization as a conceptual framework for addressing those issues and advocates for greater scholarly engagement with environmental theories outside the European and Anglo-American traditions, such as the Huainanzi.

English Education in Southeast Asian Contexts: Policy, Practice, and Identity provides an account of English education, English language teaching, and language policy in Southeast Asian countries. Both local and international researchers offer conceptual and empirical work that spans a wide range of topics, geographical contexts, and educational levels, providing a unique perspective on English education and policies in Southeast Asia. The issues addressed in this volume include the relationships among English, nation building, and national identities, English teaching and learning (including challenges in grade-level schools and in higher education), teacher preparation, and professional development.

As long as there has been formal curriculum, there has been disappointing curriculum. In an increasingly authoritarian world, problematic curricula are on the march, leaving teachers in a bind. Faced with these problematic curricula, some teachers will submit and do as they are told. Other teachers will oppose the problematic curricula, and, in some cases, face the consequences. Instead, the author argues for reworking problematic curricula. Turning to the nearest bookshelf, the author engages with his own troubling inheritance, a problematic curriculum. As a gift from a beloved family member, that text proved too dear to discard and too problematic to accept unchanged. Drawing on examples of assemblage art, the author reworks the problematic curriculum through cutting, juxtaposing with other materials, and re-contextualizing in a different setting. Navigating in the wake of reactionary movements, the author concludes by encouraging the teacher to find forms of subsistence while continuing to work toward a larger vision of social justice.

A Jewish Heart: A Struggle for Status and Identity in Asia is at once the saga of a modest charitable grant in 1903, an unimagined windfall ninety years later, and a history of Progressive Judaism in Asia. Enriched with profiles of key players, the author rootsthe narratives in the entrepreneurial and philanthropic activities of two legendary Baghdadi families, the Sassoons and the Kadoories, beginning in mid-nineteenth century Bombay, Shanghai, and Hong Kong and unfolding against the backdrop of worldwide waves of Jewish arrivals. The story gains currency when challenges are raised over community funding, facilities, preserving or replacing the aging synagogue, and accommodating Reform Judaism. Robert L. Green provides a thorough and previously undocumented account of the decade-long religious, legal, and public relations battles that follow, engaging the attention of international media and top rabbinical and legal authorities in Hong Kong, Israel, Australia, United States, and United Kingdom. The author focuses on questionable legal gymnastics as trustees, facing China's impending takeover of Hong Kong, undertake efforts to protect the funds from unknown perils. Concurrently, he chronicles the establishment of a vibrant Reform congregation, braided with Jewish lore, and the struggles of visionaries hoping to make Hong Kong an oasis of Jewish worship, learning, and recreation in Asia.