Jean Bethke Elshtain - (Catholic Ideas for a Secular World) by Debra Erickson & Michael Le Chevallier (Hardcover)

About the Book

Jean Bethke Elshtain is the first attempt to evaluate Elshtain's entire published body of work and to give shape to a wide-ranging scholarly career.

Book Synopsis

Jean Bethke Elshtain (1941-2013) was a noted ethicist, political philosopher, and public intellectual. Her four decades of scholarship defy easy categorization: she wrote both seminal works of theory and occasional pieces for the popular press, and she was variously viewed as radical and conservative, feminist and traditionalist, anti-war and pro-interventionist. Jean Bethke Elshtain: Politics, Ethics, and Society is the first attempt to evaluate Elshtain's entire published body of work and to give shape to a wide-ranging scholarly career, with an eye to her work's ongoing relevance. This collection of essays brings together scholars and public intellectuals from across the spectrum of disciplines in which Elshtain wrote. The volume is organized around four themes, which identify the central concerns that shaped Elshtain's thought: (1) the nature of politics; (2) politics and religion; (3) international relations and just war; and (4) the end(s) of political life. The essays have been chosen not only for the expertise of each contributor as it bears on Elshtain's work but also for their interpretive and analytic scope. This volume introduces readers to the work of a key contemporary thinker, using Elshtain's writing as a lens through which to reflect on central political and scholarly debates of the last few decades. Jean Bethke Elshtain will be of great interest to specialists researching Elshtain and to scholars of multiple disciplines, particularly political theory, international relations, and religion.

Contributors: Debra Erickson Sulai, Michael Le Chevallier, Robin W. Lovin, William A. Galston, Arlene W. Saxonhouse, Don Browning, Peter Berkowitz, Nancy J. Hirschmann, Michael Kessler, Lisa Sowle Cahill, Nigel Biggar, Gilbert Meilaender, Eric Gregory, Daniel Philpott, Marc LiVecche, Nicholas Rengger, John D. Carlson, Chris Brown, Michael Walzer, James Turner Johnson, Erik Owens, Francis Fukuyama, Carl Gershman, and Patrick J. Deneen.

Review Quotes

"A rich collection of essays that helps one understand the importance of Jean Bethke Elshtain's seminal works, and further develops moral and social ideas crucial for our time." --Amitai Etzioni, author of The New Golden Rule: Community and Morality in a Democratic Society

"Debra Erickson and Michael Le Chevallier's collection is in every way a fitting tribute to Jean Elshtain: essays by thoughtful scholars of a wide range of disciplines and viewpoints, from doctoral students to distinguished professors, covering the full range of her work from feminism to sovereignty to just war. The essays are both stimulating reading in themselves and a compelling invitation to read or reread Elshtain's own writings." --Nathan Tarcov, Karl J. Weintraub Professor of Social Thought and Political Science and in the College, The University of Chicago

"Jean Bethke Elshtain (1941-2013) was a distinguished political philosopher who opposed many dominant trends in her field. As the contributors to this volume point out, she closely related personal life and politics. . . . A valuable work for anyone interested in political theory and a useful companion to Elshtain's own books, such as Sovereignty: God, State, and Self and Just War Against Terror." --Library Journal

"The book virtually stands alone in the literature, offering readers in political science, political and social theory, ethics, religious studies, and theology a window into the scholarship of a major voice at the intersection of politics, religion, and ethics in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries." --Studies in Christian Ethics

"The collection displays why Elshtain managed to succeed where so many academics fail: she risked being interesting by pursuing lines of thought or threading needles of nuance that sometimes result in other intellectuals' jealousy or in being cast out of their particular movement (as Elshtain was by some feminists for Public Man, Private Woman). Even for those largely unacquainted with her work, this collection helps us understand what made her such a provocative, relevant, and fascinating public intellectual." --Modern Theology

"What a wonderful tribute this collection of essays is to the person and work of Jean Elshtain who, for some forty years, was one of America's most prominent public intellectuals. The essays, of uniformly high quality, are both admiring and critical of Elshtain's work, lucidly expounding and engaging her thought while also making creative contributions of their own to political theory and social analysis. Suffusing the entire collection is the evident love these writers had, and continue to have, for the winsome, engaged, brilliant, and magnetic person that was Jean Elshtain." --Nicholas Wolterstorff, Noah Porter Professor Emeritus of Philosophical Theology, Yale University

"This book is interdisciplinary, generative, and comprehensive in its aims. It truly establishes the significance of Elshtain's political thought for intersecting fields of politics, political and social ethics, political theology, sexual-gender politics, and social problems. Many of the contributors are a virtual listing of 'Who's Who' in religious, social, and political ethics and political theorists." --Victor Anderson, Oberlin Theological School Professor of Ethics and Society at the Divinity School, Vanderbilt University

"Debra Erickson and Michael Le Chevalier pay wonderful homage to their teacher Jean Bethke Elshtain, and perform an important service for the rest of us who, from various distances regard her as our teacher... The essays contained in this volume pay tribute both to her scholarship and to her as a person. Perhaps most importantly, they recognize how Elshtain regarded the person as the central category of the study of politics." --Journal of Church and State

"Elshtain's legacy lives on and is more vibrant and pertinent than ever . . . [this] collection analyzes [her] body of work from contemporary theoretical and applied perspectives." --The Review of Politics

"This collection is part analysis of Elshtain's work, part application of her work to new problems, and part critique--but always admiration for her commitment to ethics in the political realm. . . a valuable resource to those studying Elshtain's thinking or the various fields in which her work has made an impact." --Reading Religion

About the Author

Michael Le Chevallier is a Ph.D. candidate in religious ethics at the University of Chicago Divinity School.