Misunderstandings have been examined extensively in studies on cross-cultural (mis)communication which associate them with participants’ differing cultural backgrounds and/or linguistic knowledge. Drawing on a large corpus of misunderstandings from cross- and intra-cultural encounters, this book argues that miscommunication does not relate exclusively to participants’ background differences or similarities, but that its creation and development are tightly interwoven with the dynamic manner in which social encounters unfold. Against a backdrop of Pragmatics, Conversation Analysis and Goffman’s theory of frames and roles, the volume discusses a large number of misunderstandings and shows that they are associated with the constant identity and activity shifts as well as with the turn-by-turn construction of interpretative context in interaction. Besides students and researchers of pragmatics, conversation analysis and sociolinguistics, this book will also appeal to all those interested in the process of making, misinterpreting and clarifying meaning in social interaction.

IN 2016, BOB WELCH--that rare combination of newspaper columnist and Christian--prayed a prayer that he believes changed his life. Over the next five years, he discovered he'd been quietly complicit in allowing the rage of far-right politics to distort the faith of evangelicals, including his own. During a 2020 sailboat trip to spread his mother's ashes, Welch commits to writing a book that he knows may rankle his fellow believers, but he can't stay silent. Amid hot-button issues such as Trump, COVID, and race, he dares to ply the shores of uncertainty in an attempt to answer a question theologian Henri Nouwen so eloquently asked: "To whom do I belong? To God or to the world?"

"This volume displays de Haume's body of work through four compelling themes: Politics and Play, comprising pieces with titles such as Gorbachev Cross and Superhero Cross; Fashion and Fancy, including tributes to the great fashion houses such as Chanel, Hermès, and Louis Vuitton; Poets and Painters, honoring Donne, Hemingway, Schnabel, Warhol, and many more; and Saints and Saintly, venerating not only saints such as St. Dominic and St. Catherine of Alexandria but also saint-like individuals including humanitarian Raoul Wallenberg--"Publisher's description.

"... innovative and important thinking about the various relations between feminist theory, queer theory, and lesbian theory, as well as the possibility that liberation can be mutual rather than mutually exclusive." --Lambda Book Report "Challenging and interesting." --Just Out A collection of fifteen interdisciplinary essays examining the history, current condition, and evolving shape of lesbian alliances with U.S. feminists. Contributors explore the social and aesthetic significance of the terms "lesbian" and "feminist" with the interest of reforming and strengthening them.

Offers a rich historical and theological overview of the evolution of various atonement theories, examining the components of violence and sacrifice as a means of salvation, and using literature, art, and philosophy to provide a creative and provocative reading of Christian atonement. Original.

Culture and Language at Crossed Purposes unpacks the interpretive problems of colonial treaty-making and uses them to illuminate canonical works from the period. Classic American literature, Jerome McGann argues, is haunted by the betrayal of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Indian treaties—“a stunned memory preserved in the negative spaces of the treaty records.” A noted scholar of the “textual conditions” of literature, McGann investigates canonical works from the colonial period, including the Arbella sermon and key writings of William Bradford, John Winthrop, Anne Bradstreet, Cotton Mather’s Magnalia, Benjamin Franklin’s celebrated treaty folios and Autobiography, and Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia. These are highly practical, purpose-driven works—the record of Enlightenment dreams put to the severe test of dangerous conditions. McGann suggests that the treaty-makers never doubted the unsettled character of what they were prosecuting, and a similar conflicted ethos pervades these works. Like the treaty records, they deliberately test themselves against stringent measures of truth and accomplishment and show a distinctive consciousness of their limits and failures. McGann’s book is ultimately a reminder of the public importance of truth and memory—the vocational commitments of humanist scholars and educators.