The Chronicle of Higher Education gives its blessing to David Weddle’s new book, Miracles: Wonder and Meaning in World Religions, in a review by Kacie Glenn.

In Miracles: Wonder and Meaning in World Religions (New York University Press), David L. Weddle examines miracle stories from Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam, explaining their significance in the context of those faith traditions and why they play such a pervasive role in religious belief.

Greeting-card sentiments to the contrary, not all happy events count as miracles: “To take a sensitive example, some folks gush over a birth as ‘the miracle of life,’ but there are reasons to be more reserved,” says the scholar, a professor of religion at Colorado College. The arrival of “another helpless resident” on a crowded planet is doesn’t qualify as miraculous, he says, unless the bundle of joy is destined to be a prophet or saint.

A miracle, he stipulates, is a rare and transcendent event—not necessarily involving a deity—that invokes wonder. Often it reflects the political situation of the storytellers, and because it disrupts the course of normal life, it tends to stoke revolutionary desires. In Tibet, for example, “the belief that the Dalai Lama is a divine incarnation, a living miracle, supports a sense of national identity under his leadership and encourages resistance to Chinese rule.”

Stephen Ortiz talked about his book Beyond the Bonus March and GI Bill: How Veteran Politics Shaped the New Deal Era (New York University Press, 2009). In his book he presents a history of World War I veterans and their efforts to organize into a political interest group. Mr. Ortiz examines the benefits that the veterans secured, including state pensions and bonuses and the affect they had on the New Deal era. He responded to questions from members of the audience at the seventh annual Roosevelt Reading Festival. It was held by the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in the Henry A. Wallace Visitor and Education Center in Hyde Park, New York.

Although C-Span isn’t letting us embed the video, you can watch it online here.

Kupchik spent time inside four schools in two states observing teachers, administrators and students. Two of the schools are located in the Southwest and two are in the Mid-Atlantic region. In each state, one school’s student body is mostly middle-class white students and one school’s population is composed of mostly lower-income minority students.

Kupchik found discipline was doled out similarly in all four schools. “When students got in trouble, the people in charge of discipline didn’t ask questions about why they got into trouble or didn’t try to solve their underlying problems,” he said.

Instead, disciplinarians followed what Kupchik calls excessive and counterproductive strategies for dealing with students’ misbehavior, one of the worst of which is the popular notion of zero tolerance, policies that assign a certain punishment to an infraction regardless of circumstance.

From an interview with Aaron Kupchik, author of the forthcoming Homeroom Security: School Discipline in an Age of Fear

It was as true in 1781 as it is today: the city of Los Angeles as much an idea as a municipality. When it was established that year, El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Angeles Del Rio de Porciuncula was already foreshadowing its future as a vibrant, polyglot, world-class city, with a population whose ethnic mix prefigured the L.A. of today.

But the journey of L.A.’s black citizens was one and the same as with the drive for influence and self-determination by black Americans elsewhere in America, with the same challenges and setbacks.

Popmatters takes an in-depth tour at this alternative city scape in their review of Black Los Angeles: American Dreams and Racial Realities, edited by Darnell Hunt and Ana-Christina Ramon

We just learned that this year’s ASA International Migration Section Distinguished Career Award is being given to Nancy Foner, author of Across Generations: Immigrant Families in America and In a New Land: A Comparative View of Immigration. Congratulations to Nancy for her impressive achievements!

You can meet Nancy Foner and our sociology editor, Ilene Kalish, at the ASA annual meeting in Atlanta this August.

A review of Faces of America: How 12 Extraordinary People Discovered their Pasts, by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., at Kirkus.

The complex immigrant story of the United States viewed through extensive genetic and genealogical research into the backgrounds of 12 ethnically diverse, famous Americans.

Renowned scholar Gates (African American Studies/Harvard Univ.; The Signifying Monkey, 2010, etc.), who narrated the recent PBS mini-series on which this book is based, selected people of accomplishment who interested him, including writers, a director, a chef, a musician, a comedian, a physician, a figure skater, even a queen. With the assistance of genealogical researchers and geneticists, he explored their very different backgrounds and shared his findings with his subjects—not only about their named ancestors but also about what their genes revealed about their family trees. After an introduction and some explanatory notes about DNA testing, Gates offers 12 similarly structured chapters. First he briefly cites the subject’s accomplishments, tells why he or she is part of the project and provides a brief biographical sketch. In the next section, the author puts the ancestors’ personal stories into a broader historical context. Finally he tells each subject what the DNA tells him about the subject’s ancestral lineage, where his ancestors probably lived in the distant past, how they are linked with others on the human family tree and what percentage of the subject’s heritage is European, African or Asian/Native American. Each chapter concludes with the subject’s reaction to the facts and the linkages that Gates has uncovered for them—e.g., Mike Nichols was thrilled to learn that he is a distant cousin of Albert Einstein, and Malcolm Gladwell was stunned to learn that his mixed-race Jamaican ancestors were slave-owners. Other subjects include such luminaries as Meryl Streep, Yo-Yo Ma, Stephen Colbert, Mario Batali and Mehmet Oz.

While the personal discoveries provide human interest in a sometimes tedious recitation of genealogical information and technical genetic data, it is the broader sweep of history and the causes and ramifications of human migrations that engage the reader and give the book its impact.

An op-ed by Margaret K. Nelson, the author of Parenting Out of Control, appeared in the Washington Post on July 4th:

A woman I’ll call Erica, a 45-year-old mother of three, has a system for monitoring her children’s television and movie watching. Three systems, actually: one for the 9-year-old, one for the 13-year-old and one for the 16-year-old. To implement these systems, she told me, she often watches television with her children. She also tries, when possible, to accompany them to movies outside the home. Finally, she requires them to discuss with her the content of what they’ve seen, whether she watched it with them or they viewed it alone.

When people worry about today’s hyper-involved parenting — or helicopter parenting, as some have dubbed it, for its constant hovering — that worry is almost always directed at children. Critics fret that the children of helicopter parents will lack maturity, self-reliance, self-esteem and good old-fashioned gumption.

Her post was then quoted in a similar article at the New York Times. Also, Professor Nelson’s interview in Inside Higher Ed was the most e-mailed article of the month!

The Huffington Post considers NYU Press one of the “upstarts and rebels and truly ornery literary entrepreneurs” in their list of 15 Feisty Small Presses:

NYU Press consistently publishes scholarly yet accessible books. New releases include Margaret Nelson’s Parenting Out of Control (a sociologist exploring the excessively close parenting among today’s elite parents), Ali Mirsepassi’s Democracy in Modern Iran (understanding the future course of democracy in Islamic societies), Jonathan Hafetz and Mark Denbeax’s The Guantanamo Lawyers (Guantanamo as seen by the men and women fighting for the detainees’ civil rights), The Left at War (a devastating account of the American left during wartime, and at war with itself), and Cary Nelson’s No University Is an Island (a look at the forces undermining academic freedom).

Read the full article here.

Margaret Nelson, Professor of Sociology at Middlebury College, talks about her book Parenting Out of Control: Anxious Parents in Uncertain Times.

For more videos from Margaret Nelson, visit the Middlebury College newsroom, as she discuses inequities among students and effects on parents.

Paul Gregory Alms from PopMatters recently reviewed Arnaldo Testi’s Capture the Flag: The Stars and Stripes in American History– read the full review here:

The stars and stripes signify a national flag that changes and grows along with the country itself. The number of stars are tied to the number of states in the Union. As the Unites States acquired more states, so too the flag its stars.

Besides being a territorial and national marker, Testi makes clear that the flag is a kind of national, secular sacrament, a quasi religious, tangible object demanding faith, worship and sacrifice around which a disparate community seeks to find unity. There are ceremonies and creeds and holy days and rubrics that have clustered around the “sacred emblem”. The historical roots to these observances show that of course America was not born with an intact flag cult. It developed over time.

To read more of Testi’s writing on American history and nationalism, check out his other NYUP blog articles:

• “Does Manifest Destiny Apply to the Moon?“: Concerns and controversies surrounding flags on our moon.
• “What Is the Flag?“: A discussion of four very different encounters with the Stars and Stripes.