MONSTER METAPHORS: WHEN RHETORIC RUNS AMOK (New York: Routledge, 2023)

his book explores ways in which common metaphors can play a detrimental role in everyday life; how they can grow in outsized importance to dominate their respective terrains and push out alternative perspectives; and how forms of resistance might act to contain their dominance. The volume begins by unpacking the dynamics of metaphors, their power and influence and the ways in which they are bolstered by other rhetorical devices. Adams draws on four case studies to illustrate their destructive impact when they eclipse other points of view—the metaphor of mental illness; the metaphor of free-flowing markets; the metaphor of the mind as a mirror and the metaphor of men as naturally superior. Taken together, these examples prompt further reflection on the beneficiaries of these “monster metaphors” and how they promote such metaphors to serve their own interests but also on ways forward for challenging their dominance, strategies for preventing their rise and ways of creating space for alternatives. Read More

HOW TO TALK ABOUT SPIRITUAL ENCOUNTERS (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020)

This book examines how language is used when speaking about spiritual and mystical encounters. It contends that the vague way of speaking that is typical of such communications is an intentional vagueness and a vagueness that aims to engage the imaginative participation of receptive listeners. The book details how this is achieved by focusing on what it refers to as the presence of “provocative gaps.” These gaps are understood here as open receptacles within linguistic space; they signal an absence or lack of specific content within a speech act. Gaps can be created by direct strategies such as missing out content, failing to refer to content or gradually shifting from concrete to abstract references, but gaps can also be generated by a rich variety of more subtle and indirect devices. Read more

NAVIGATING EVERYDAY LIFE: EXPLORING THE TENSION BETWEEN FINITUDE AND TRANSCENDENCE (Lanham MD: Lexington Press, 2018)

This book explores the special moments, big and small, that rupture the surface of everyday life and that can help readers adjust to the disrupting effects of major life crises. Peter Adams delves into the two forces, finitude (the aspects that constrain a person to a situation) and transcendence (those aspects that enable movement beyond such constraints). Building on this framework, Adams looks at the processes and circumstances that both facilitate and block the tensions between finitude and transcendence in life challenges such as separation, depression, chronic illness, injury, violence, addiction, aging, death, and forgiveness. Read more

REFLECTING ON THE INEVITABLE: MORTALITY AT THE CROSSROADS OF PSYCHOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY, AND HEALTH (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020)

This book combines evidence from several disciplinary fields to explore the varying ways each of us engages with the prospect of personal mortality. Chapters are organized around the question of how an ongoing relationship might be possible when the threat of consciousness coming to an end points to an unspeakable nothingness. The book then argues that, despite this threat, an ongoing relationship with one’s own death is still possible by means of conceptual devices, or ‘enabling frames’. Read more