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Journal articles on the topic 'Christian cultural narratives'
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1
Classen, Albrecht. "Die Heidin: A Late-Medieval Experiment in Cultural Rapprochement between Christians and Saracens." Medieval Encounters 11, no. 1-2 (2005): 50–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/157006705775032807.
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AbstractWhereas recent scholarship has primarily focused on the hostile attitudes against the Orient espoused by writers in the European Middle Ages, a number of intriguing narratives also indicate surprising open-minded attitudes. These might reflect utopian fantasies, but they still project noteworthy "tolerant" relationships between Christians and "heathens." This paper examines one of these narratives, the Middle High German Die Heidin (late thirteenth century), where courtly love and 'domestic violence' counterbalance each other, instigating the heathen protagonist to flee with her Christian suitor back to his country because her erstwhile loving husband (heathen) had turned toward brutal behavior. This narrative indicates how little European audiences obviously cared about religious and racial conflicts and subsumed them under the much more fascinating discourse on love.
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Mills, Ian N. "Pagan Readers of Christian Scripture: the Role of Books in Early Autobiographical Conversion Narratives." Vigiliae Christianae 73, no. 5 (October 9, 2019): 481–506. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/15700720-12341396.
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Abstract Most scholars agree that “pagans” did not read Christian scripture. This critical consensus, however, places inordinate weight on a decontextualized quotation from Tertullian and neglects a body of evidence to the contrary. In particular, the role of books in early autobiographical conversion narratives suggests that early Christian authors and copyists could sometimes work with a reasonable expectation of pagan readership. Against traditional notions of the restricted appeal and circulation of Christian literature, pagan and Christian sources alike indicate that Christian writings found an audience among philo-barbarian thinkers and that certain Christians promoted their books in pagan circles.
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Sheldrake, Philip. "Constructing Spirituality." Religion & Theology 23, no. 1-2 (2016): 15–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/15743012-02301008.
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How we define “spirituality” and also distinguish and describe different traditions of spirituality is not a simple matter of objective observation. All definitions and descriptions are a matter of interpretation which, in turn, involves preferences, assumptions and choices. In that sense, our approaches to spirituality may often be effectively “political” in that they express values and commitments. Sometimes our historical narratives also reflect the interests of dominant groups – whether in a religious institutional, theological or socio-cultural sense. This process may sometimes be conscious but is more often unconscious and uncritical. This essay first of all explores some of the issues surrounding the question of definition in the study and presentation of Christian spirituality in particular. Second, the essay examines how the history of Christian spirituality has been shaped by certain underlying “narratives”. However, following the thought of Paul Ricoeur, narrative and story are not to be rejected in favour of a quest for history as a form of pure factual “truth”. Rather, what is needed is a more conscious understanding of the power of narrative, its importance and the potential released by identifying forgotten or repressed human stories. Third, the essay then asks whether our approaches to, and descriptions of, particular spiritual traditions have masked prior assumptions about their autonomy, purity and their radical discontinuity (or “rupture”) from what went before or what lies alongside them. Two examples are briefly outlined: the supposed Catholic-Protestant spiritual divide and the often unacknowledged impact of another faith (for example, Sufi Islam) on certain Christian spiritual or mystical traditions. Fourth, the regular geographical-cultural biases in the study of Christian spirituality are noted and one response to this among Spanish-speaking Christians of the Americas, known as “traditioning”, is outlined. Finally, the importance of critical self-awareness in how we employ interpretative frameworks is underlined.
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Hogeterp, Albert L. A. "Reading Stephen’s Speech as a Counter-Cultural Discourse on Migration and Dislocation." Open Theology 7, no. 1 (January 1, 2021): 289–316. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/opth-2020-0162.
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Abstract The speech of Stephen in Acts 7:2–53 contains a wealth of references to biblical migration narratives, but their significance for understanding the message of Luke–Acts has been understudied. This is partly due to a recurrent focus on either accusations against Stephen (Acts 6:8–15) or the polemical conclusion of the speech (Acts 7:47–50.51–53). It also partly relates to a teleological interest in early Christian mission narrative. This article reads Stephen’s speech as a counter-cultural discourse on migration and dislocation. It provides a close reading of its biblical story-telling in conjunction with its polemical upshot, and further compares Lucan narrative choices with early Jewish and Jewish Hellenistic literary cycles about patriarchal and Mosaic discourse. It applies a critical lens to the use of ancient narratives of migration and dislocation in discussions about identity, ethnicity, and “othering;” this is of further importance for contemporary identity politics around migration. Through comparing the speech with intra-Jewish dimensions and Graeco-Roman contexts, Stephen emerges as a counter-cultural speaker whose discourse appeals to human–divine intersectionality, specifically regarding the cause of justice for the ill-treated stranger; at the same time, it avoids cultural stereotyping through categories of Hebrews vs Hellenists, Jews vs Christians, Graeco-Roman elite standards vs supposedly “non-European” profiles.
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Perkins, Judith. "Fictive Scheintod and Christian Resurrection." Religion and Theology 13, no. 3-4 (2006): 396–418. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/157430106779024671.
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AbstractIn his chapter titled 'Resurrection' in Fiction as History, Glen Bowersock examines examples of 'apparent death' (Scheintod) in Graeco-Roman narrative fictions. He concludes his analysis by questioning 'whether the extraordinary growth in fictional writing, and its characteristic and concomitant fascination with resurrection' might be 'some kind of reflection of the remarkable stories that were coming out of Palestine in the middle of the first century A.D.' In this essay I will offer that rather than seeing a relation of influence between fictive prose narratives and Christian discourse (especially Christian bodily resurrection discourse) of the early centuries C.E., these sets of texts should be recognised as different manifestations of an attempt to address the same problem, that of negotiating notions of cultural identity in the matrix of early Roman imperialism. That these texts share similar motifs and themes – gruesome and graphic descriptions of torture, dismemberment, cannibalism and death – results not necessarily from influence, but that they converge around the same problem, drawing from a common cultural environment in the same historical context.
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Dube, Zorodzai. "Healing the female body." STJ | Stellenbosch Theological Journal 6, no. 1 (August 28, 2020): 11–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.17570/stj.2020.v6n1.a01.
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Using narrative, reader-response and social feminist approaches, the study takes a discourse analysis of looking into representations of female bodies within the Jewish-Christian healthcare and Greek Hippocratic healthcare and how such surface in the representation of female bodies in Mark’s healing stories. The study finishes by looking into comparable biases found in some African communities. The gospel of Mark contains some of the early Christian memory concerning Jesus as folk healer and this study selects narratives in the gospel of Mark whereby Jesus dealt with illness pertaining female patients. Instead of dealing with all narratives whereby Jesus healed a female patient, the focus will be on the story concerning the healing of Simon’s mother-in-law and the story concerning the haemorrhaging woman. The underlying question is – what were the socio-cultural ideas concerning the female body and how do such ideas surface in the healing stories? The study hypothesises that, besides being stories that reveal Jesus’ Christological powers or power as folk healer, the healing stories are site to investigate social cultural frameworks concerning illness and gender.
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Kiperwasser, Reuven. "What Is Hidden in the Small Box? Narratives of Late Antique Roman Palestine in Dialogue." AJS Review 45, no. 1 (April 2021): 76–94. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0364009420000422.
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This study is a comparative reading of two distinct narrative traditions with remarkably similar features of plot and content. The first tradition is from the Palestinian midrash Kohelet Rabbah, datable to the fifth to sixth centuries. The second is from John Moschos's Spiritual Meadow (Pratum spirituale), which is very close to Kohelet Rabbah in time and place. Although quite similar, the two narratives differ in certain respects. Pioneers of modern Judaic studies such as Samuel Krauss and Louis Ginzberg had been interested in the question of the relationships between early Christian authors and the rabbis; however, the relationships between John Moschos and Palestinian rabbinic writings have never been systematically treated (aside from one enlightening study by Hillel Newman). Here, in this case study, I ask comparative questions: Did Kohelet Rabbah borrow the tradition from Christian lore; or was the church author impressed by the teachings of Kohelet Rabbah? Alternatively, perhaps, might both have learned the shared story from a common continuum of local narrative tradition? Beyond these questions about literary dependence, I seek to understand the shared narrative in its cultural context.
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Grieve, Patricia E. "Conversion in Early Modern Western Mediterranean Accounts of Captivity: Identity, Audience, and Narrative Conventions." Journal of Arabic Literature 47, no. 1-2 (July 11, 2016): 91–110. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1570064x-12341319.
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In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries captivity narratives written by Spanish and English captives abounded. There is a smaller corpus of such texts by Muslim captives in Spain and England, and by some travelers from the Ottoman Empire who observed their fellow Muslims in captivity. A comparative analysis illuminatingly reveals similar usage of narrative conventions, especially of hagiography and pious romances, as well as the theoretical stance of “resistance literature” taken on by many writers. I consider accounts written as truthful, historical texts alongside fictional ones, such as Miguel de Cervantes’ “The Captive’s Tale,” from Don Quixote, Part I. Writers both celebrated monolithic categories such as Protestant, Catholic, Spanish, English, and Muslim, and challenged them for differing ideological reasons. Writers constructed heroic narratives of their own travails and endurance. In the case of English narratives, didacticism plays an important role. In one case, that of John Rawlins, the account reads like Christian theology: to keep in mind, no matter how grim the situation of captivity may be, one’s identity as an Englishman. Raḍwān al-Janawī used his letters about Muslims in captivity in Portuguese-occupied Africa, in which he points out the vigorous efforts of Christian rulers to secure the liberty of their own people, to criticize Muslim rulers who, in his opinion, exerted far too little energy in rescuing their brothers and sisters from captivity. Ultimately, this essay explores the fictionality of truthful narratives and the truth in fictional ones, and the ways in which people from different cultures identified their own identities, especially against those of “the enemy.”
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O'Donnell, Marcus. "‘Bring it on’: The Apocalypse of George W. Bush." Media International Australia 113, no. 1 (November 2004): 10–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1329878x0411300104.
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This article examines a number of cinematic, literary and journalistic texts in the context of what filmmaker Tom Tykwer calls the ‘aesthetic memory’ of September 11. In particular, it explores the way these narratives relate to deeply embedded Western cultural myths of the apocalyptic. The apocalyptic language of American Christian fundamentalism and the heroic narratives of Hollywood film are explored as twin influences on a powerful civil religion dubbed ‘The Captain America complex’ by Jewett and Lawrence (2003a).
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Bauer, Christian. "Heimat im Offenen?" International Journal of Practical Theology 23, no. 1 (February 28, 2019): 78–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/ijpt-2018-0031.
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Abstract This Habilitation lecture discusses the present rise of right-wing populism as a theological problem. It uses the term „Heimat“ („home“ or „home country“) to explore the social context of this populism. This exploration leads to a discussion of the underlying cultural meta-narratives which serve a sense of shared identity. In a practical theological perspective, the discourse on „Heimat“ may be understood in terms of narrative encounters. Finding a home in an open world is possible – and the Christian faith offers bountiful theological resources for this.
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Mix, Lucas John. "LIFE-VALUE NARRATIVES AND THE IMPACT OF ASTROBIOLOGY ON CHRISTIAN ETHICS." Zygon® 51, no. 2 (May 5, 2016): 520–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/zygo.12253.
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Attar, Karina. "Muslim-Christian Encounters in Masuccio Salernitano's Novellino." Medieval Encounters 11, no. 1-2 (2005): 71–100. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/157006705775032825.
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AbstractClose textual and contextualized analysis of two novellas drawn from Masuccio Salernitano's mid-fifteenth-century collection of short stories, Il Novellino, shows that, while the tales appear to present antithetical notions of Muslim identity, they also blur the categories of good and evil through often over-lapping positive and negative depictions of both Christian and Muslim protagonists. Both narratives discussed are also set within similar contexts (the guerra del corso, maritime travel, enslavement and ransom, inter-racial sexual relations) and can thus function as partial records of particular fifteenth-century cultural and social experiences. Although Salernitano's narratives have often been read as moralizing tales through which the author sought to expose the vices he perceived in society, as this article seeks to show, much more is at stake. The novellas offer significant insights into mid-fifteenth-century notions of Muslim identity and preoccupations about Christian-Muslim encounters and reflect a panorama of contemporary historical and social realities on a scale and in a fashion that remained unparalleled in the subsequent novella tradition.
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Kiperwasser, Reuven, and Serge Ruzer. "Zoroastrian Proselytes in Rabbinic and Syriac Christian Narratives: Orality-Related Markers of Cultural Identity." History of Religions 51, no. 3 (February 2012): 197–218. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/662189.
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Sheridan, Daniel P. "Maternal Affection for a Divine Son: A Spirituality of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa." Horizons 16, no. 1 (1989): 65–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s036096690003989x.
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AbstractLove for God as an actual concrete activity of a human being is sometimes obscured in contemporary American Christian culture. This essay studies the role of maternal affection for the divine child Kṛṣṇa, humanly embodied as a male child, in order to serve as a cross-cultural catalyst for the traditions of Christian love for Christ. The focus is the tenth-century Hindu Vaiṣṇava text, the Bhāgavata Purāṇa. Vaiṣṇavas promote the experience of loving God through imaginative participation in narratives of Kṛṣṇa's loves and by identification with human women who loved him, particularly his mothers. They are the exemplars of a maternal love for a divine child. This imaginative participation and identification is open to both men and women. This study illustrates the roles of gender, narrative, and imagination in the experience of loving God with one's whole heart, soul, and might.
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Braun, Willi. "The Past as Simulacrum in the Canonical Narratives of Christian Origins." Religion and Theology 8, no. 3-4 (2001): 213–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/157430101x00107.
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AbstractThis article meditates on the ambiguity of the concept of 'history' in Christian thought and in the historiography of Christian origins. After exploring the ambiguity of 'history', using Jesus as the illustrative case in point, it is argued that 'history' is itself the result of a complex process of historical production, a production of the kind that renders history, especially histories of highly valued origins, into narrative representations of believed-in imaginings, into mythographies that are nevertheless taken to be histories. Recognizing that history is fictioned to serve interests in the present turns history always into 'our' history, and recognizing, too, that this history is imagined to be history as it really was and the only history there can be- in effect turning the past into a simulacrum3/4. exposes 'history' as a mechanism for rationalising wordviews, social constitutions, and cultural preferences. Intellectually and morally, it exposes the fact that 'doing history' is never an innocent doing.
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Mateo Donet, María Amparo. "La intervención divina en los espectáculos romanos de ejecución de cristianos = Divine intervention during the executions of Christians as Roman spectacles." ARYS: Antigüedad, Religiones y Sociedades, no. 15 (November 5, 2018): 261. http://dx.doi.org/10.20318/arys.2017.3837.
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Resumen: Este artículo se centra en un aspecto importante de los relatos martiriales que no ha sido estudiado en profundidad: los pasajes en que Dios interviene para evitar o entorpecer una ejecución pública de cristianos por parte de las autoridades romanas. Añadidos a los textos hagiográficos por diversos motivos (religiosos, políticos, culturales, etc.), estos episodios se convertirán en un recurso utilizado por la literatura cristiana hasta época medieval.Abstract: This paper focuses on a relevant aspect of the martyrial narratives that has yet to be studied in depth: the passages in which God intervenes to avoid or to foil a public execution of Christians by the Roman authorities. Added to hagiographic texts for various purposes (religious, political, cultural, etc...) these episodes will become a resource used in Christian literature until the Middle Ages.Palabras clave: ad bestias, cremación, martirio.Key words: ad bestias, burning, martyrdom.
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Bay, Carson. "Writing the Jews out of History: Pseudo-Hegesippus, Classical Historiography, and the Codification of Christian Anti-Judaism in Late Antiquity." Church History 90, no. 2 (June 2021): 265–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0009640721001451.
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AbstractScholarly narratives of the development of Christian anti-Jewish thinking in antiquity routinely cite a number of standard, well-known authors: from Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Justin Martyr in earlier centuries to Eusebius, John Chrysostom, Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine in the fourth and early fifth centuries. The anonymous author known as Pseudo-Hegesippus, to whom is attributed a late fourth-century Latin work called On the Destruction of Jerusalem (De Excidio Hierosolymitano), rarely appears in such discussions. This has largely to do with the fact that this text and its author are effectively unknown entities within contemporary scholarship in this area (scholars familiar with Pseudo-Hegesippus tend to be specialists in medieval Latin texts and manuscripts). But “Pseudo-Hegesippus” represents a critical contribution to the mosaic of Christian anti-Jewish discourse in late antiquity. De Excidio's generic identity as a Christian piece of classical historiography makes it a unique form of ancient anti-Jewish propaganda. This genre, tied to De Excidio's probable context of writing—the wake of the emperor Julian's abortive attempt to rebuild the Jerusalem Temple, resurrect a robust Judaism, and remove Christians from public engagement with classical culture—renders De Excidio an important Christian artifact of both anti-Judaism and pro-classicism at the same time. This article situates Pseudo-Hegesippus in a lineage of Christian anti-Jewish historical thinking, argues that De Excidio codifies that discourse in a significant and singular way, frames this contribution in terms of its apparent socio-historical context, and cites De Excidio's later influence and reception as testaments to its rightful place in the history of Christian anti-Judaism, a place that modern scholarship has yet to afford it. As a piece of classical historiography that mirrors not Christian historians—like Eusebius and others—but the historians of the broader “pagan” Greco-Roman world—like Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Sallust, Livy, and Tacitus—De Excidio leverages a cultural communicative medium particularly well equipped to undergird and fuel the Christian historiographical imagination and its anti-Jewish projections.
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Passalis, Haralampos. "The Etiology of a Disorder (Dis-ease) and the Restoration of Order (Therapy). Α Case of a Greek Belief Narrative Connected with Charms against Abdominal Diseases." Acta Ethnographica Hungarica 64, no. 2 (December 2019): 375–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.1556/022.2019.64.2.9.
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Abstract:Although belief narratives and charms are regarded as two different folklore genres with different modes of transmission, performance and function, they are both in a constant dialectical relationship, yielding mutual feedback. One of the main forms of this interactive relationship concerns the etiology of a dis-ease (construction of a dis-order, i.e. belief narratives) and its therapeutic treatment (restoration of order, i.e. charms). This relationship between the cause of diseases and their treatment is clearly reflected in a Christian content belief narrative closely associated with incantations used to heal abdominal diseases. The basic personage embodying this belief narrative – registered in many and different areas of Greece – is the figure of a monk or Christ himself, who, often disguised as a beggar, is hosted by a family. Violations of both religious norms associated with fasting and social ethics connected with accepted behaviour towards a guest have as a result the manifestation of an abdominal disease, which eventually the monk or Christ treats using an incantation. This article shows that the parallel analysis of legends and charms, where possible, is necessary since it can provide useful information, not only on the ways by which the charm text is produced and reproduced, but also on the position and status of the genre in the context of a wider folk religious system. Furthermore, it could contribute to the understanding of the charm text, without which the knowledge of the belief narrative is often incomprehensible, if not nonsensical.
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Rubow, Cecilie, and Cliff Bird. "Eco-theological Responses to Climate Change in Oceania." Worldviews 20, no. 2 (2016): 150–68. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/15685357-02002003.
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This paper explores eco-theological responses to climate change in Oceania. First, we review central texts in the contextual theological tradition in Oceania, focusing on recent responses to climate change. This points to a body of theological texts integrating climate change into a broader effort to reform classical theologies and church practices. Secondly, we identify challenges facing the contextual theologies, among them recent claims about climate-change-denying responses by Biblicist Christians in the Pacific region. These challenges apart, we suggest, thirdly, that the churches are important actors in the cultural modeling of climate change. We highlight the uniqueness of Christian narratives from the Pacific region, while alluding to the fact that literal interpretations of scriptures are influential in many other parts of the world too.
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Tizon, Al. "Lifestyles of the rich and faithful: Confronting classism in Christian mission." Missiology: An International Review 48, no. 1 (December 20, 2019): 6–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0091829619893391.
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Classism is collective prejudice formed into a system of inequality that is based on socioeconomic stratification; it is undergirded by embedded cultural narratives surrounding the poor, and then instituted by the powers that be at the expense of the poor. If Christian mission does not challenge classism, then it is complicit in it and thus undermines the work of the gospel. This article proposes an evaluative tool to help align personal lifestyles and organizational practices with an image of Christ among the classes.
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Rozo, Esteban. "Between Rupture and Continuity." Social Sciences and Missions 31, no. 3-4 (August 17, 2018): 284–309. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/18748945-03003007.
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Abstract This paper explores the politics of conversion in the Colombian Amazon, comparing missionary narratives of conversion with indigenous accounts of conversion. It shows how conversion to Christianity articulates new meanings of indigeneity today in Amazonia. Using ethnographic evidence, documents and interviews, the paper demonstrates that neither the missionaries nor the indigenous populations view conversion only as rupture. Although they recognize the transformational process involved in conversion, they both emphasize cultural continuity, albeit for different reasons. It also analyses how indigenous pastors and missionaries combine narratives of rupture and narratives of continuity while articulating a new kind of indigeneity (Christian indigeneity), and a specific politics of conversion. In this context, politics of conversion articulates emergent regimes of indigeneity that postulate strong complementarities between Christianity and indigenous values.
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Peters, Rebecca Anne. "When Your Motherboard Replaces the Pearly Gates: Black Mirror and the Technology of Today and Tomorrow." Comparative Cinema 8, no. 14 (May 22, 2020): 8–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.31009/cc.2020.v8.i14.02.
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This paper considers five episodes from Charlie Brooker’s dystopian science fiction anthology series, Black Mirror (2011–present). The episodes selected are those that—as argued in this text—depict the role of technology as replacing that of religion. To build this claim, they will be compared to one another, to the Christian biblical concepts they mirror, and to historical events related to theological debates within Christianity.Throughout the history of Western civilization, Christian belief has played an important role in shaping cultural ideologies. For that reason, it could be argued that Christian ideas continue to penetrate our cultural narratives today, despite declining self-recognition in the West as religious or spiritual. Concepts of the afterlife, omniscience, vengeance, ostracism and eternal suffering spring up in some of the least expectedplaces within popular culture today. This paper argues that Black Mirror depicts the materialization of these concepts through imagined worlds, thus signaling the modern-day specters of Christianity.
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Sterk, Andrea. "“Representing” Mission from Below: Historians as Interpreters and Agents of Christianization." Church History 79, no. 2 (May 18, 2010): 271–304. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0009640710000041.
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Discussion of mission in east Roman or Byzantine history has typically focused on imperial ambitions, royal conversions, and a “top-down” approach to Christianization. The Christian emperor, the earthly image of the heavenly king, had been called by God to propagate the faith and civilize the barbarians. Toward this end he sent out emissaries to foreign potentates, and the conversion of the ruler was soon followed by the Christianization of his people. Such narratives largely ignore missionaries “from below,” deemed “accidental” evangelists, and focus instead on imperially sponsored or “professional missionaries.” Several recent studies have added nuance to the traditional picture by devoting increased attention to mission from below or presenting Christianization as a process comprising multiple stages that spanned several centuries. Building on my own previous article on this theme, the present essay will reexamine narratives of unofficial mission on the eastern frontiers, in particular accounts of captive women credited with converting whole kingdoms to the Christian faith. In each case a female ascetic has either been taken prisoner or has lived for some time as a captive in a foreign land just beyond east Roman borders. The woman's steadfast adherence to her pious way of life, performance of apostolic signs, and verbal testimony to faith in Christ move the ruler and his people to accept the Christian God.
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Berge, Kåre. "Bibelteologi som skrift?" Dansk Teologisk Tidsskrift 72, no. 2 (June 17, 2009): 140–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.7146/dtt.v72i2.106460.
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This article reviews two books of N. P. Lemche (also published in USA). Lemche discusses how to make biblical theology “after the collapse of history” in the sense of the Copenhagen school. Biblical theology should be based on the texts and narratives not on history. This does not, however, mean a return to literary criticism or structuralism. Biblical texts, in Lemche’s view, should be regarded as arbitrary cultural artifacts, which have to be studied as cultural representations of social conditions in the pre-Christian centuries.
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Sorett, Josef. "“It’s Not the Beat, but It’s the Word that Sets the People Free”: Race, Technology, and Theology in the Emergence of Christian Rap Music." Pneuma 33, no. 2 (2011): 200–217. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/027209611x575014.
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AbstractIn an effort to address lacunae in the literature on hip hop, as well as to explore the role of new music and media in Pentecostal traditions, this essay examines rap music within the narratives of American religious history. Specifically, through an engagement with the life, ministry, and music of Stephen Wiley — who recorded the first commercially-released Christian rap song in 1985 — this essay offers an account of hip hop as a window into the intersections of religion, race, and media near the end of the twentieth century. It shows that the cultural and theological traditions of Pentecostalism were central to Wiley’s understanding of the significance of racial ideology and technology in his rap ministry. Additionally, Wiley’s story helps to identify a theological, cultural, and technological terrain that is shared, if contested, by mainline Protestant, neo-Pentecostal, and Word of Faith Christians during a historical moment that has been described as post-denominational.
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Souch, Irina. "Transformations of the Evil Forest in the Swedish Television Series Jordskott." Nordicom Review 41, s1 (September 10, 2020): 107–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/nor-2020-0011.
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AbstractThis article is an ecocritical reading of the Swedish television series Jordskott. I discuss the effects in the series produced by the combination of the Nordic Noir's style and narrative techniques with elements of other genres, especially Gothic horror. I argue that through the contemporary reworking of the centuries-old Nordic mythology, Jordskott demonstrates how the aggressive powers of nature in Gothic narratives can no more be conventionally explained by referring to the pagan, pre-Christian beliefs, but need to be reconceived in light of the relentless environmental devastation brought about by humankind. The link unveiled between natural ecology and cultural mythology allows the series to surpass the limitations of the regionally informed folkloric story and to evolve into an ecological cautionary tale of global significance.
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Schmid, Pia. "Didactics of Piety in Children’s Edifying Literature in the Early 18th Century." Zutot 16, no. 1 (March 14, 2019): 55–67. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/18750214-12161004.
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Abstract This article focuses on an aspect of Pietist education that may be regarded as a reform, namely a new way of upholding the role model to educational ends – or, more simply put, of teaching by example. This new approach to the example, according to my thesis, manifests itself in an implicit, narrative didactics of piety. This will be illustrated by reference to a popular genre of children’ and young people’s literature dating from the 17th and 18th centuries, namely ‘exemplary children’s stories’ (Kinderexempelgeschichten). Such stories consist of biographical model narratives concerning exemplary pious boys and girls. To demonstrate how this implicit, religious didactic was made explicit, I draw on the text ‘Christliche Lebens=Regeln’ (Christian Rules of Life), which was especifically conceived as a systematic elucidation of exemplary stories.
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Trausch, Tilmann. "Ghazā and Ghazā Terminology in Chronicles from the Sixteenth-Century Safavid Courtly Sphere." Journal of Persianate Studies 10, no. 2 (December 1, 2017): 240–68. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/18747167-12341313.
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Abstract In the later decades of the fifteenth century, adherents of the Safavid order started raiding the regions of the northern Caucasus and eastern Anatolia. As most of these raids involved Christian principalities, they have earned the Safavid shaikhs Joneyd and Haydar the reputation as ghāzis, as fighters for faith against the infidels. This paper explores how scribes from the sixteenth-century Safavid courtly sphere integrated the order’s early military activities into their narratives of the Safavid past. Further, it examines what sound information may be derived from the narratives on these poorly documented events. The paper concludes with the suggestions that a) those doing in history in Safavid times were much less concerned with Islamic “holy war” than modern historians are, and b) their narratives indicate that attempts to establish territorial rule may have outweighed the fight-for-faith motif.
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Montemaggi, Francesca. "A Quiet Faith: Quakers in Post-Christian Britain." Religions 9, no. 10 (October 15, 2018): 313. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/rel9100313.
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Post-Christian Britain is characterised by a rejection of doctrinal and morally conservative religion. This does not reflect solely the experience of those with ‘no religion’ but can be found in the narratives of ‘new Quakers,’ those who have become members or attenders in the past three years. New Quakers contrast Quaker sense of acceptance, freedom from theological ideas and freedom to be a spiritual seeker with conservative Christian churches, which have often been experienced as judgmental and doctrinal. Quaker liberal morality also affords inclusivity to those who have felt marginalised, such as disabled and LGBT people. The way new Quakers articulate their identity shines a light on the contemporary transformation of religious forms and society. Their emphasis on individual spirituality and rejection of theological doctrine reflect the profound cultural shift towards a post-Christian Britain, which is religiously diverse, more open to individual spiritual seeking and more liberal morally and socially.
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Shankar, Shobana. "Race, Ethnicity, and Assimilation." Social Sciences and Missions 29, no. 1-2 (2016): 37–65. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/18748945-02901022.
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This article traces the influences of American anthropology and racial discourse on Christian missions and indigenous converts in British Northern Nigeria from the 1920s. While colonial ethnological studies of religious and racial difference had represented non-Muslim Northern Nigerians as inherently different from the Muslim Hausa and Fulani peoples, the American missionary Albert Helser, a student of Franz Boas, applied American theories and practices of racial assimilation to Christian evangelism to renegotiate interreligious and interethnic relations in Northern Nigeria. Helser successfully convinced the British colonial authorities to allow greater mobility and influence of “pagan” converts in Muslim areas, thus fostering more regular and more complicated Christian-Muslim interactions. For their part, Christian Northern Nigerians developed the identity of being modernizers, developed from their narratives of uplift from historical enslavement and oppression at the hands of Muslims. Using new sources, this article shows that a region long assumed to be frozen and reactionary experienced changes similar to those occurring in other parts of Africa. Building on recent studies of religion, empire, and the politics of knowledge, it shows that cultural studies did not remain academic or a matter of colonial knowledge. Northern Nigerians’ religious identity shaped their desire for cultural autonomy and their transformation from converts into missionaries themselves.
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Tartakoff, Paola. "From Conversion to Ritual Murder: Re-Contextualizing the Circumcision Charge." Medieval Encounters 24, no. 4 (September 4, 2018): 361–89. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/15700674-12340027.
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Abstract In the 1230s, Christian authorities prosecuted Norwich Jews on charges of having seized and circumcised a five-year-old boy in an effort to convert him to Judaism. In the same decade, English chroniclers began to depict this case as an attempted ritual murder. According to Roger Wendover and Matthew Paris, Jews circumcised the boy with the intention of crucifying him at Easter. This article explores what the near simultaneous development of these two intriguing and seemingly disparate narratives suggests about thirteenth-century Christian perceptions and portrayals of circumcision. In so doing, it ushers research on medieval Christian attitudes toward circumcision into new spheres, deepens understandings of thirteenth-century Christian anxieties about conversion to Judaism, and brings to light a marginal note in the autograph copy of Matthew Paris’ Chronica majora that may constitute evidence of evolving Christian views of the relationship between the bodies of Jews’ alleged victims and the body of Christ.
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Kersten, Carool. "Religion and Literature, Identity and Individual: Resetting the Muslim-Christian Encounter." Poligrafi 25, no. 99/100 (December 23, 2020): 5–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.35469/poligrafi.2020.227.
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In the first two decades of the twenty-first century inter-faith encounters have become a casualty of a paradigm shift in the thinking about the global order from the political-ideological bi-polar worldview of the Cold War era to a multipolar world marred by the prospect of culture wars along civilisational fault lines shaped by religiously-informed identity politics. On the back of 9/11 and other atrocities perpetrated by violent extremists from Muslim backgrounds, in particular relations with Muslims and the Islamic world are coined in binary terms of us-versus-them. Drawing on earlier research on cosmopolitanism, cultural hybridity and liminality, this article examines counter narratives to such modes of dichotomous thinking. It also seeks to shift away from the abstractions of collective religious identity formations to an appreciation of individual interpretations of religion. For that purpose, the article interrogates the notions of cultural schizophrenia, double genealogy and west-eastern affinities developed by philosophers and creative writers, such as Daryush Shayegan, Abdelwahab Meddeb, and Navid Kermani.
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Dabiri, Ghazzal. "Reading ʿAttār’s Elāhināma as Sufi Practical Ethics: Between Genre, Reception, and Muslim and Christian Audiences." Journal of Persianate Studies 11, no. 1 (October 19, 2018): 29–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/18747167-12341318.
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AbstractThis paper seeks to contribute to the field of reception and audience studies by analyzing ʿAttār’sElāhināma. Little studied, theElāhināmaoffers an opportunity to understand better ʿAttār’s attitudes towards socio-religious issues, as well as the types of audiences that the text seeks, how it addresses them, and what possible aims it has. The paper argues that theElāhināmamobilizes the formal characteristics of practical ethics and mirrors while disrupting them at the level of meaning towards its own aims, namely, a just society grounded in the tenets of Sufism, for a broad, non-specialized audience, which also includes Christians and Muslims. The paper analyzes and discusses not only the structure of the overall text, but also the first story, the “Tale of the Virtuous Woman,” which sets the tone. This story is an interesting case since it resembles the way that lives of female Byzantine Christian saints are constructed. It thus offers an opportunity to comment on the itinerant nature of narratives across Eurasia and more specifically the types of tales circulating in medieval eastern Iran.
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Markey, OP, John J. "Notes from the Road More Traveled: Doing Theology in a US Cultural Context." New Theology Review 28, no. 2 (March 28, 2016): 18. http://dx.doi.org/10.17688/ntr.v28i2.1221.
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One of the most significant consequences of Vatican II has been the worldwide effort at inculturation and contextualization of the Christian tradition, particularly at the level of foundational theology and method.This process implies drawing on the unique patterns of thought, social structures, cultural narratives, and rituals to develop new theological and pastoral sensibilities.This process, termed “prophetic dialogue” by Steve Bevans and Roger Schroeder,[1] seems to be dramatically underway practically everywhere in the Roman Catholic world except, most notably, in the United States.While Hispanics/Latin@s, African Americans, Asian Americans, feminists, etc., have continuously served with an awareness of the need for contextualization, Euro-American academic and ecclesial theology has largely failed to analyze, articulate, and critique its own US cultural context and to engage it in a serious evangelical and theological dialogue. In this article, I propose to offer what I believe are four significant insights about to the task of inculturation/contextualization as it relates particularly to Euro-American theology in the church and academy in the coming decade.[1] Stephen B. Bevans And Roger P. Schroeder, Constant in Context: A Theology of Mission for Today, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2004, 385-95.See also Bevans and Schroeder, Prophetic Dialogue: Reflections on Christian Mission Today, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011.
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Al-Ghamdi, Hassna. "Al-Khawaja Yanni (Yanni the Westerner): An Example of Muslim-Christian Tolerance in Jeddah during the 20th Century." Academic Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies 6, no. 2 (July 26, 2017): 61–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/ajis-2017-0007.
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Abstract This paper handles a unique example of religious tolerance and Christian-Muslim coexistence in one of the most conservative Islamic societies; the Saudi Arabian society, by going through the story of Khawaja Yeni, the Greek merchant who lived in the city of Jeddah in the middle of the twentieth century, integrated with its people, formed extensive relations with its Muslim people, and was able to remain vivid in the collective memory of its inhabitants despite his death has Christian decades ago. The Yeni model represents a model of mutual understanding and coexistence between Islamic and Christian cultures. It would not have mattered if the story had been in another Islamic country, but it was in Saudi Arabia and in the city of Jeddah, which is part of the emirate of Mecca, the holy capital of Muslims, this has made the story of Yeni eye-catching and intriguing. Therefore, I saw fit to give that subject a special care and a thorough inquest in order to capture the details of the social, cultural and religious life experienced and interacted with by this Greek merchant. In the absence of official documentation of the details of public life in the mid-20th century, the stories and news about Yeni remained only circulating amongst the inhabitants of Jeddah, and were not written or collected in an academic research that would have saved them from loss and made them available for specialists to study and analyze. Therefore, I relied on the method of “oral history’s documentation” and I gathered these narratives from the mouths of the men who lived and worked with Yeni. Then I analyzed these narratives and drafted them in an academic form that brings together all the narratives from popular circles about the personality of this wonderful Christian who gave a wonderful example of coexistence and integration into a very conservative Islamic society.
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Ukah, Asonzeh. "ADVERTISING GOD: NIGERIAN CHRISTIAN VIDEO-FILMS AND THE POWER OF CONSUMER CULTURE." Journal of Religion in Africa 33, no. 2 (2003): 203–31. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/15700660360703141.
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AbstractPentecostalism in Nigeria is increasingly altering the way that those who are attracted in large numbers by its practices and resources perceive their relationship with local culture and material goods. One of the practices of Pentecostalism that has captured popular imagination is the production of Christian video-films. This paper discusses how these popular narratives negotiate both the local worldview and the cultural marketplace. It argues that the rhetoric of Pentecostalism as portrayed in locally produced video-films is implicated in changing consumer tastes and behaviour. Although this type of Pentecostalism speaks the language of traditional worldviews in terms of the emphasis on occultism, it is harnessed to a project of westernised system of commodity consumption.
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Čepaitienė, R. "The GULAG experience in cultural narratives and collective identity of post-Soviet Lithuania." VESTNIK ARHEOLOGII, ANTROPOLOGII I ETNOGRAFII, no. 2(53) (May 28, 2021): 166–76. http://dx.doi.org/10.20874/2071-0437-2021-53-2-16.
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In this paper, the tendencies of rethinking the GULAG in the cultural memory of post-Soviet Lithuania (after 1990) are analyzed. The sources for the analysis were represented by ego-documents, literary works, and visual arts (movies and comics). The author draws attention to the specifics of female and, in part, children’s experience of the deportation, to the ways of perceiving, rethinking, and reproducing collective trauma in an ethno-historical context, to the role of post-memory in the formation and support of the national identity in the modern Lithuanian society. In recent years, in the field of perpetuating the memory of the Stalinist period in Lithuania, the public at-tention is increasingly shifted from the direct and authentic evidence to heterogeneous visually striking artistic representations. This shift in the focus of interest can be explained by the generational change, which warrants the search for a new stylistic language and message forms. As a result, works are created that belong to the field of post-memory, which are characterized by a higher degree of adaptability of the traumatic experience of previ-ous generations to the knowledge and mentality of modern viewers / readers, as well as by attempt to increase their attractiveness through vivid and memorable characters and stories. The main difference between the most literarily valuable texts of the ‘first’ and the ‘second’ generation of the Lithuanian authors can basically be de-scribed as a different degree of ontological intensity. If the former authors seek to comprehend the experienced repressions within the framework of existentialism (Grinkevičiūtė and Kalvaitis) or Christian metaphysics (Dirsyte and Miškinis), then the latter authors, for obvious reasons, no longer achieve this level of reflection on the ex-tremely traumatic experience, focusing on embedding their personal biographies into the great historical narrative about the “struggle and sorrows” of the nation, which has already become canonical.
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Hezser, Catherine. "Jewish–Christian Dialogues on Scripture in Late Antiquity: Heretical Narratives of the Babylonian Talmud." Journal of Jewish Studies 71, no. 2 (October 1, 2020): 440–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.18647/3471/jjs-2020.
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Shahid Abdullah, Md Abu. "Construction of Home, Nation and Identity in Rohinton Mistry’s Tales from Firozsha Baag." Shanlax International Journal of English 7, no. 4 (September 1, 2019): 18–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.34293/english.v7i4.626.
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Rohinton Mistry is one of the central figures of the Indian diaspora involved in the task of constructing alternative narratives of national identity. His texts articulate a new conception of the nation by problematising the stable and unitary configurations of national-cultural identity. Mistry’s experience and awareness of the complex tensions of his cultural and geographical location in the diaspora are evident in Tales from Firozsha Baag. Mistry implies that because the Parsi culture is constituted by heteroglossia, there is no such thing as a ‘purely’ Parsi identity. In destabilising notions of a self-enclosed Parsi identity, he goes for inserting the ‘other’ into his Parsi narratives: for instance, Gajra, the Marathi maid, in “Auspicious Occasion”; Francis, the Christian man who does odd-jobs, in “One Sunday”; and Jaakaylee, the Catholic Goan ayah, in “The Ghost of Firozsha Baag”. “Swimming Lessons” is the only story set entirely outside the Parsi area of the Baag and in fact outside India. We move from a closed and homogenous cultural system to finally a transgressive ground where the borders between cultures are so fluid that there can no longer be any stable conception of national essences.
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Vrana, Heather. "The Precious Seed of Christian Virtue: Charity, Disability, and Belonging in Guatemala, 1871–1947." Hispanic American Historical Review 101, no. 2 (May 1, 2021): 265–95. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00182168-8897490.
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Abstract This article addresses the role of disability and disabled people in the construction of citizenship and nation through the ideologies and practices of charity from the 1870s through the 1940s. These periods of Guatemalan history are generally thought of as distinct: the Liberal triumph over Conservatives, Liberal dictatorship, and democratic revolution. To the contrary, practices of charity reveal the continuity of these political forms. This article explains the three models of charity that characterized modern Guatemala—caridad, beneficencia, and asistencia social—and outlines how they reflected understandings of the relationship between individuals and the state. It also provides a window into the daily lives of patients at the nation's insane asylum, leprosarium, and general hospital, who were not merely objects of charity but also political subjects who engaged charity models to gain access to resources, people, and mobility. In sum, this article integrates disability into broader historical narratives.
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Fulkerson, Mary McClintock. "Receiving from the Other: Theology and Grass-Roots Organizing." International Journal of Public Theology 6, no. 4 (2012): 421–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/15697320-12341251.
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Abstract Many Christian theologians today highlight the absence of community and the common good as values in a secular culture: absence that privileges individualism, autonomy and self-sufficiency. Theological perspectives and grass-roots organizing invoke mutual accountability as a key feature of political life that sustains human flourishing for all. Theological community takes the form of sacrament, worship and creed in the encounter with Christian tradition and narratives. The grass-roots Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) and similar organizations form community through relational meetings and the enhancement of human agency in American society. Both theological and grass-roots communities provide alternatives to the individualism of secular society. Attention to the gifts of theology and grass-roots organizing encourages the growth of a broader cultural imagination, theological attention to conflict and negotiation, and mutual accountability in receptive encounter with the other.
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Balberg, Mira, and Ellen Muehlberger. "The Will of Others." Studies in Late Antiquity 2, no. 3 (2018): 294–315. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/sla.2018.2.3.294.
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Scholarly reflections on the concept of the will as it is articulated in late ancient texts have centered on the male individual and the difficulties he faces as he tries to train or direct his intentions. By contrast, in this article we seek to explore late ancient concepts and negotiations of the will by considering a cluster of ancient Jewish and Christian narrative scenarios in which women are under the threat of sexual assault. Rather than a split between warring parts of one person, these narratives treat moments when the will of one actor is in conflict with the will of another. Thus, these scenarios raise questions that cannot otherwise be accessed about human intention, agency, and subjectivity, and their limitations by social and cultural realities. We argue that these cases should be viewed not as the marginal troubles that sometimes happen to women, but as expressions of the fundamental problems at the heart of the theories of the will embraced within late ancient Judaism and Christianity.
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Gruber, Mayer I. (Mayer Irwin). "The Creation of Man and Woman: Interpretations of the Biblical Narratives in Jewish and Christian Traditions (review)." Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 21, no. 3 (2003): 159–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/sho.2003.0017.
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Piovanelli, Pierluigi. "What Is a Christian Apocryphal Text and How Does It Work? Some Observations on Apocryphal Hermeneutics." NTT Journal for Theology and the Study of Religion 59, no. 1 (January 18, 2005): 31–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.5117/ntt2005.59.031.piov.
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Abstract The new trend in the study of Christian apocryphal texts is to include among them not only the traditional ‘New Testament apocrypha’, but also other texts written later than the first centuries of our era, or clearly reworked in the Middle Ages. Behind this wider choice stands the opinion of Éric Junod and Jean-Claude Picard that there is no temporal limit for the rise of apocryphal texts. Using the evidence provided by some modern ‘strange new Gospels’, I argue that the process of producing apocryphal narratives is the outcome of a creative exegesis that is still at work in many cultural contexts.
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Carden, Siún. "Cable Crossings: The Aran Jumper as Myth and Merchandise." Costume 48, no. 2 (June 1, 2014): 260–75. http://dx.doi.org/10.1179/0590887614z.00000000053.
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This article considers the Aran jumper as a cultural artefact from an anthropological perspective. As an internationally recognized symbol of Irishness that comes with its own myth of origin, the Aran jumper carries emotionally charged ideas about kinship and nativeness. Whether read as an ID document, family tree, representation of the landscape or reference to Christian or pre-Christian spirituality, the Aran jumper’s stitch patterns seem to invite interpretation. Emerging at a particular period in the relationship between Ireland and America, this garment and the story that accompanies it have been shaped by migration and tourism, but may be understood very differently on either side of the Atlantic. The resilience of the myth of a fisherman lost at sea, whose corpse is identifiable only by designs his relatives have stitched into his clothing, is explained in light of its resonance with diasporic narratives and transnational longings.
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Salakory, Revaldo Pravasta Julian Mb, Izak Yohan Matriks Lattu, and Rama Tulus Pilakoannu. "Teong Negeri: Sentralitas Folklore Nama Lokal Komunitas dalam Jejaring Sosio-Kultural Islam Kristen di Maluku." Jurnal Antropologi: Isu-Isu Sosial Budaya 22, no. 1 (May 31, 2020): 70. http://dx.doi.org/10.25077/jantro.v22.n1.p70-80.2020.
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This article analysis about Teong Negeri has folklore centrality of community local name of Muslim-Christian socio-cultural network in Maluku. This study is qualitative research. Data were collected through interviews, documentary studies an observation. Methods analysis employed was descriptive qualitative. In the folklore of the village Wassu of Erihatu Samasuru (Christian), it has pela of the village of Haya Nakajarimau (Muslim) which means leader (older brother) for his three brothers, the village of Hatu Silalou (Christian) and the village of Tehua Lounusa Amalatu (Muslim). Communal narratives bind and become a link to give spirit to identity because society listens to local stories about Teong Negeri that have strong meanings, believing in each other. The four villages, in central Maluku, which are Wassu, Haya, Hatu, and Tehua, use the Teong Negeri symbol as an identity to maintain relations of kinship bond. The network that was built was challenged when the religious communal conflict happened, but the spirit towards the culture was always unheld. Teong Negeri became a symbol of central identity towards the traditional village that was able to regulate the socio-cultural system of every village in Maluku. not only for every community that has a bond of brotherhood or ethnicity. However, it becomes a universal symbol when, as a socio-cultural capital that is able to bridge the community from outside (buton migrants) based on cross-generation dialogue carried out by early generations of indigenous Maluku people with Buton migrants (migrants) in Maluku in order to have knowledge about the relationship harmonious.
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Bush, Olga. "Entangled Gazes: The Polysemy of the New Great Mosque of Granada." Muqarnas Online 32, no. 1 (August 27, 2015): 97–133. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/22118993-00321p07.
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In 2003 a mosque was inaugurated in Granada, overcoming opposition voiced by neighbors, officials, and cultural institutions during two decades of heated debate. At issue was the meaning of the mosque within the contexts of local, regional, national, and global history. Current, large-scale immigration of North African Muslims stands clearly in the background. There was, however, a prior movement of conversion to Islam by young Spanish Christians in and around Granada at the end of the Franco dictatorship. These neo-Muslims conceived and built the Great Mosque of Granada, whose architectural design and decoration mobilize contested historical and cultural narratives. The mosque poses the fraught ideological issues in terms of what will be visible (or invisible) and to whom. The site of the mosque at the summit of the Albayzín hill, facing the Alhambra, has been the crux of entangled visualities. The mosque is not only an object of the gaze but also a privileged subject position for the gaze, in rivalry with the Christian gaze from the adjacent Church of San Nicolás and its mirador. The new mosque is a key to the transformation of the discourse of Spain’s relation to its Muslim past into debate about its Muslim present.
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Perkins, Judith. "Animal Voices." Religion and Theology 12, no. 3-4 (2005): 385–96. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/157430106776241204.
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AbstractThis article suggests that the presence of talking animals in the Apocryphal Acts of Paul, Peter, Thomas and Phillip, examples of Christian prose fiction, shows a Christian intervention in a wider cultural discussion taking place in the period about human self-understandings and identity. The hierarchical thinking of ancient culture consigned many humans to animal status. Two second-century narratives, Apuleius' Metamorphoses and the Greek Onos, through their depictions of a human suddenly transformed into an ass, suggest that authors of the period used this image of an animal-man to reflect on what it would be like for someone to lose his or her place and voice in society (as those reduced to slavery did) and suddenly find oneself in the position of an animal, treated as less than fully human, as so many people in this period were. The Apocryphal Acts through their motif of talking animals worked to unsettle traditional status structures. Their representation of speaking animals figured a message of universal inclusiveness and equal participation by all species in the Christian community and worked to challenge the contemporary social hierarchy that devalued some persons in the society as too akin to animals.
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Ebong, Epiemembong Louis. "Living Together in Unity and Interdependence: Reviving the African Spirit of Altruism and Benevolence." Holiness 6, no. 1 (January 1, 2020): 35–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/holiness-2020-0005.
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Abstract How can we live together in peace? This article reflects on the need to develop an ethic of social responsibility that values and enhances solidarity. It is a response to the proliferation of violence in many African communities and seeks to argue against egoism (individualism) which it considers the root cause of much political and socio-economic insecurity across the continent. It maintains that a way of addressing this situation is the development of an altruistic mindset. The article thus attempts to combine traditional African cultural and religious narratives with comparable principles within the Christian tradition in order to explore the importance of altruistic action in the contemporary African context.
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Lofton, Kathryn E. "The Preacher Paradigm: Promotional Biographies and the Modern-Made Evangelist." Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 16, no. 1 (2006): 95–123. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/rac.2006.16.1.95.
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AbstractBetween 1886 and 1931, Christian publishing houses in the United States offered an unprecedented biographical profile of the contemporary American evangelist as an unambiguously modern figure. Sold at tabernacle tents, Christian bookshops, and church fund-raisers, these texts simultaneously document concerns with the modern landscape as they regale readers with the styles and stories of headlining American Protestants, including Dwight Moody (1837–1899), Sam Jones (1847–1906), Reuben Archer Torrey (1856–1928), J. Wilbur Chapman (1859–1918), Rodney “Gipsy” Smith (1860–1947), Billy Sunday (1862–1935), and Baxter “Cyclone Mac” McClendon (1879–1935). Although it is not difficult to discern distinguishing marks and regional inflections within the anecdotal particularities of these men, the overarching structure and themes of their chronologies is consistent. The purpose of this essay is to produce the beginning of a collective biography of the turn-of-the-century preacher, highlighting the persistent paradigm represented in the promotional products of these preachers. Whereas previous historians have described these men as antiquated proponents of an “old time” religion, this article argues that their narratives reveal a strikingly modern man, poised in an engaged and contradictory conflict with his contemporary moment.