"Books geographically focused on the midwestern and eastern states dominate the study of Mennonites in America. The intriguing history of Mennonites in the American West remains untold. In From Digging Gold to Saving Souls, Brian Froese introduces readers for the first time to the California Mennonite experience. Although a few Mennonites did dig for gold in the 1850s, the real story of Mennonites in California begins in the 1890s with westward migrations for fertile soil and healthy sunshine. By the mid-twentieth century, the Mennonite story in California had developed into an interesting tale of religious conservatives--traditional agrarians--finding their way in an increasingly urban and religiously pluralistic California. Some California Mennonites negotiated new identities by endorsing conservative evangelicalism; some found them in reclamations of sixteenth-century Anabaptists. Still other Mennonites found meaningful religious experience by engaging in social action and justice even when these actions appeared in "secular" forms. These emerging identities--Evangelical, Anabaptist, and secular--covered a broad spectrum, yet represented a selective retaining and discarding of Mennonite religious practices and expressions. From Digging Gold to Saving Souls touches on such topics as migration, pluralism, race, gender, pacifism, institutional construction, education, and labor conflict, all of which defined the experience of Mennonites of California. Brian Froese shows how this experience was a rich, complex, and deliberate move into modern society. In From Digging Gold to Saving Souls, he introduces readers to a dynamic people who did not simply become modern, but who chose to modernize on their own terms"--

This dissertation examines the relationship between (inter)subjectivity, normativity, and politics in Emmanuel Levinas and Karl Marx. At first sight, Levinas depiction of a singular and unique relation to othersa bond which prohibits even the slightest trace of historical, hermeneutic or political contextappears not only at odds with the basic philosophical and political insights of Marx but the whole of the Continental tradition (spanning from, at least, Fichte and Hegel to Heidegger and Foucault). This much is evident from the numerous political critiques and appropriations of Levinas, which condemn him on the grounds that his epistemology, ontology and ethics are needlessly naive, insular, individualistic, and pseudo-theological. Against such readings I argue that if we are to retain the normative kernel of his thought while overcoming such politically limited interpretations we must radicalize and theoretically deepen this impulse to deworld the other. This interpretation opens Levinas thought to a new field of new possibilities which are explored through Marx and related thinkers, such as Fichte, Hegel, Hediegger, and others. I claim that a dialogue with Marx is particularly instructive because it can push Levinas beyond his limited conception of politics and alienation, while, at the same time, provide a better foundation for normative and political questions that were under- or poorly-theorized by Marx. Together, Levinas and Marx can further an understanding of subjectivity and politics that comprehends the importance of mediation, history, collectivity and universality without ceding the profound rootlessness of subjectivity, which, at every moment, retains the asymmetrical structure of the one-for-the-other.