Academic literature on the topic 'Christian thriller'

The article considers the existing approaches in linguistics to the study of the concept verbalization in a literary text; a comprehensive approach is applied to the study of the concept ‘misery’ in the eponymous novel by Stephen King, which allows us to determine the contribution of linguaculture, genre and ideostyle of the author to this process. The hypothesis is put forward about the meaningfulness of Christian connotations of the concept ‘misery’ in King’s text.

Paolo Sorrentino called his series The Young Pope “a thriller of the soul.” In this religio-political drama, Sorrentino explores the fortune of the Catholic Church were a young, intransigent, irritable American cardinal elected pope. Building his story line around the life of Christ, with intertextual citations to the New Testament and visual allusions to Christian art and Jesus movies, Sorrentino offers a twenty-first-century gospel to remind the viewer that the gospel is not only about tolerance. By presenting his young pope as the returned Christ, and not as a Christ figure, he shows that conservatism is equally present with liberalism in its message.

Decades before the publishing phenomenon The Da Vinci Code turned millions of readers on to the excitement and glamour of early Christian history and biblical studies, a steady stream of novels—some obscure, some bestsellers were teaching the popular reading public about the thrills and chills of the academic study of Scriptures. These ‘gospel thrillers’ share a common plot: a recently discovered gospel (often a first-person account of Jesus’ ministry by one of his disciples) threatens to turn our understanding of Christianity on its head. In a race against time (and the occasional Vatican assassin) the hero must find out if the new, shocking gospel is real. Of particular interest for the post-Da Vinci Code scholar is the portrayal of academics and academic work in these early ‘gospel thrillers’: from bronzed heroes to bumbling misanthropes to sinister tools of global conspiracies, the scholars of the ‘gospel thrillers’ instructed readers on what to love, and what to mistrust, about the academic project of biblical studies.

During his 1976 presidential campaign, Jimmy Carter promised social conservatives that, if elected, he would convene a conference examining how the federal government could support American families. That promise—alongside Carter's description of being “born again” and his well-documented Christian devotion—thrilled American evangelicals. They provided him with a crucial bloc of support in the 1976 election. Four years later, Carter finally made good on his campaign pledge when he convened the White House Conference on Families. Carter declared that the conference would “examine the strengths of American families, the difficulties they face, and the ways in which family life is affected by public policies.” He recruited a panel of organizers and asked them to focus on how government policy might better support family life.

Background: This study was conducted to determine the complications of arteriovenous fistulae created for haemodialysis access in Christian Medical College, Ludhiana. The complications were classified as early and late complications.Methods: This study was a one year retrospective and one year prospective study conducted in the Department of Surgery and Nephrology, Christian Medical College and Hospital, Ludhiana. After determination of the appropriate limb for surgery, arteriovenous fistulae were done under local anaesthesia in the operation theatre. All anastomosis was end (vein) to side (artery) and were done by using 6’0’ prolene. The fistula created was monitored for a good thrill, pulse, and any immediate complication such as bleeding or thrombosis. After four to six weeks, a fistula with a good thrill was considered to be mature and was subjected to cannulation and then haemodialysis. The fistula flow rate was recorded at initiation of haemodialysis and after four weeks of haemodialysis. A nine month follow up study was done, and the late complications of the fistulae were also noted.Results: Early complication was defined as complications arising within one month of creation of fistula, i.e. before maturation. The most common early complication was thrombus (8.5%). The second frequent complication was wound infection (3.4%). The most common late complication was thrombosis (18.6%). The second common late complication was pseudoaneurysm (4.23%). There was a statistically significant correlation between development of late complications with Diabetes Mellitus Type 2, Systemic Hypertension and history of I/V cannulation and IJV insertion in the study population (p value - 0.000).Conclusions: This study has thus demonstrated that the vascular unit of General Surgery in Christian Medical College, Ludhiana is making arteriovenous access for haemodialysis at a rate comparable to other centres in India and worldwide. The early and late complications were also similar to other data available in India.

No churchgoer born before 1960 can forget the childhood thrill of hearing a missionary speak in church. The missionary arrived in native dress to thank the congregation for its support and, after the service, showed slides in the church hall. The audience sat transfixed, imagining what it might be like to eat termites in Africa, or beg on the streets in India, or study the Bible in a refugee camp. The usually mundane Sunday service became exotic and exciting, as the world beyond the United States suddenly seemed real. In an age before round-the-clock television news, and the immigration of Asians and Latin Americans even to small towns in the Midwest, the missionary on furlough was a major link between the world of North American Christians and the rest of the globe.

A brief but classic account of a Cornish revival is to be found in Salome Hocking’s book Some Old Cornish Folk, published in 1903. Writing semi-fictionally but also semi-ethnographically about a number of years before, the author, herself sprung from Cornish Methodism, described the thronging penitents, the exuberant singing and the ‘thrill of excitement’ that went through the village. Crucially she commented on the circumstances. The revival, she explained, had arisen ‘at a time when no one was thinking about it, and no special services were being held. It seemed to have nothing to do with the preacher either…’ The event, she was suggesting, was entirely spontaneous. Although it was triggered by a young girl going forward to kneel as a convert below the pulpit, the subsequent stir was not the result of any earlier contrivance. The awakening was unexpected, not planned. Much of the writing about revivals – periodic episodes of religious enthusiasm attended by mass conversions in evangelical Protestantism – revolves around this distinction. Nineteenth-century advocates of revivals, in America as well as in the British Isles, contrasted the older pattern in which ‘Christians waited for them as men are wont to wait for showers of rain’ with the later way in which the episodes were promoted by ‘systematic efforts’. Subsequently historians have taken up the theme. John Kent, the leading commentator on English revivals of the Victorian era, while recognizing the existence of planning among some early nineteenth-century Methodists, places the dividing line between the prevalence of contagious spontaneity, and the use of devices to achieve conversions, after 1860.

الملخصتهدف هذه الدراسة إلى إبراز أصول وعناصر الأغلوطة والمغالطة وأصحابها في القرآن، ومقارنتها بما يٌبحث عند المناطقة في هذا الصدد. وقد أبرزت هذه الدراسة أن أصحاب المغالطة في القرآن أصناف متنوعة، ويتبعون أساليب مختلفة؛ فمنهم من كانوا من أهل الكتاب من اليهود والنصارى، ومنهم المنافقون والمشركون والملحدون. وقد نجح القرآن في مواجهة كل مغالطة، وردّ على كل منها بأساليب ومناهج متنوعة مناسبة لنوع المغالطة، وعظم الضرر المترتب عليها. فبيّنت هذه الدراسة مفهوم الغلط والمغالطة في القرآن، وكذلك عند المناطقة، وأنّ القرآن لا يقتصر في بيان أهم العناصر التي قام عليها مغالطة المغالطين، إنما استعمل القرآن مناهج متعددة في الرد على المغالطين، سواء بمنهج الجدل أو منهج الحوار أو منهج التشويق والتعزيز. وكل منهج من هذه المناهج لها خصائصها ومميزاتها التي يتحقق من خلالها الجمع بين إقناع العقل وجمال الأسلوب.الكلمات المفتاحيّة: القرآن، المغالطة، المنهج، المنطق، الضرر. ************************************************AbstractThis study aims to highlight the origins and elements of fallacy and chicanery and their beholders as mentioned in the Qur’an and their comparison with what is being discussed among logicians in this regard. This study has highlighted that the holders of fallacies are of many types according to the Qur’an and they follow varied methods. Some of them were from the people of the Book, Jews and Christians, and some were hypocrites, polytheists and atheists. The Qur’an took serious note of every fallacy and refuted each of them by variety of ways and methods suitable for the type of fallacy and the resulting damage thereof. This study explained the concept of fault and fallacy according to the Qur’an and the logicians. The Qur’an has not simply touched the most important elements on which the fallacies are made, but also used various methods in responding to the people who make fallacies, either by polemical approach or dialogical method or method of the thrill and reinforcement. Each approach has its own advantages and features dealt with convincing reasoning and methodological fascination.Keywords: The Qur’an, Chicanery, Approach, Logic, Damage.

Corpus Christi, Corpus Delicti: A new narrative contract. Władysław Pasikowski’s Aftermath (2012) and the invalidation of the category of the Polish Witness to the HolocaustWładysław Pasikowski’s 2012 feature film Aftermath recapitulates and works through the existing resources in documentary cinema that deals with the Polish context of the Holocaust (Claude Lanzmann, Paweł Łoziński, Marian Marzyński, Agnieszka Arnold). It is also founded on the knowledge amassed in the wake of the countrywide debate about the 1941 Jedwabne massacre (2000–1). As such, it rejects the majority narrative of the Holocaust, one told under the banners of the Righteous Among the Nations (the paradigm of innocence), the Polish witness to the Holocaust (triggering an unjustified identification of the Jaspersian paradigm of unimputable, metaphysical guilt with unwarranted guilt), and the alleged collective Polish trauma of the Holocaust.Aftermath is analyzed as a treatise on antisemitism which problematizes and narrativizes phantasms that are central to this socio-cultural pathology, visualizing the mechanism whereby the phantasm of the Jew is constructed and imposed on actual individuals. It also touches upon the Christian roots and identitarian dimension of antisemitism, alongside its central figure: the Crucifixion. Antisemitism is a matter of religion as a doctrine but also religion as an institution.By displaying a plexus of discourses and practices, attitudes and behaviors, Pasikowski defends the great quantifier as a legitimate category to describe the Polish context of the Holocaust. He debunks the essential differentiation between pre-modern and modern antisemitism (including notions about the secondary nature of Polish antisemitism in relation to the German Nazi exterminatory projects targeted at the Jews).The film convincingly portrays antisemitism as dominating the experience and its representation to such an extent that antisemitic culture loses the ability to reflect on the human condition. Where a non-antisemite sees the irreducible strangeness that is inherent to individual existence, the antisemite sees a Jew, etc. The long duration of violence and exclusion has turned the phantasmic and alternative reality of antisemitism into reality tout court, as it produces a materiality of its own, up to and including the materiality of the atrocity (stolen property, looted corpses, etc.).The text offers an extensive discussion of the essential conflict between Aftermath and the system of Polish culture. The aesthetic is political. The juxtaposition of two genre films (the thriller and the Western) and a plebeian protagonist with a domain that is perceived as proper to the intelligentsia provoked widespread shock and rejection. Accusations of kitsch, exaggeration, improbability, and a colonial gaze enabled critics to sidestep, if not invalidate, the director’s argument. A study of the reception of Aftermath is a study of class distinction in action.Pasikowski’s film portrays antisemitism as a problem of an antisemitic culture and an antisemitic society. This entails a radical invalidation of the notion of antisemitism as an inter-group conflict, thus exposing the fiction and falsehood of such constructs as “dialogue” and “reconciliation.”Despite its pessimistic diagnosis, Aftermath raises the possibility of change and the emancipatory potential of self-empowerment. By considering the cultural and social implications of our knowledge about antisemitism and the Polish context of the Holocaust, the film reveala systemic challenge posed by the imperative to revise culture and reject its toxic models. From this perspective, a new narrative becomes possible as a critique of narratives. Corpus Christi, corpus delicti – nowy kontrakt narracyjny. Pokłosie (2012) Władysława Pasikowskiego wobec kompromitacji kategorii polskiego świadka ZagładyFilm fabularny Pokłosie (2012) Władysława Pasikowskiego przynosi rekapitulację i przepracowanie dotychczasowych zasobów kina dokumentalnego dotyczącego polskiego kontekstu Zagłady (C. Lanzmann, P. Łoziński, M. Marzyński, A. Arnold). Ufundowany jest także na wiedzy narosłej po debacie jedwabieńskiej (2000) oraz na odrzuceniu dotychczasowych dominujących większościowych narracji o Zagładzie: spod znaku Sprawiedliwych (paradygmat niewinności) i spod znaku polskiego świadka Zagłady (paradygmat Jaspersowskiej winy niezarzucanej oraz zbiorowej polskiej traumy Zagłady).Tekst proponuje spojrzenie na Pokłosie jako traktat o antysemityzmie, który problematyzuje i narratywizuje fantazmaty oraz mechanizmy kluczowe dla tej społeczno-kulturowej patologii. Wizualizacja obejmuje mechanizm konstruowania fantazmatu Żyda i nakładania go na realne podmioty. Nie omija też chrześcijańskich korzeni i tożsamościowego wymiaru antysemityzmu z centralną figurą Ukrzyżowania. Antysemityzm jest sprawą religii jako doktryny, ale też instytucji.Unaoczniając splot dyskursów i praktyk, postaw i zachowań, Pasikowski broni wielkiego kwantyfikatora jako zasadnej kategorii opisu polskiego kontekstu Zagłady. Obala też istotowe rozgraniczenie między antysemityzmem przednowoczesnym i nowoczesnym (w tym wyobrażenie o podrzędności polskiego antysemityzmu względem niemieckiego nazistowskiego przedsięwzięcia eksterminacyjnego wymierzonego w Żydów).Film w przekonujący sposób pokazuje, że antysemityzm do tego stopnia zawładnął doświadczeniem i jego reprezentacją, że kultura antysemicka straciła możliwość dostępu do namysłu nad ludzką kondycją. Tam, gdzie nieantysemita widzi nieredukowalną obcość przyrodzoną jednostkowej egzystencji, antysemita widzi Żyda etc. Długie trwanie przemocy i wykluczenia sprawia, że z rzeczywistości fantazmatycznej i alternatywnej antysemityzm staje się rzeczywistością tout court. Wytwarza bowiem własną materialność, do materialności zbrodni włącznie.Tekst obszernie omawia istotowy konflikt Pokłosia z systemem kultury polskiej. Estetyczne jest polityczne. Połączenie kina podwójnie gatunkowego (thriller, western) oraz plebejskiego bohatera z domeną uchodzącą za inteligencki monopol wywołało w większości szok i odrzucenie. Zarzuty – kiczu, przesady, braku prawdopodobieństwa, kolonialnego spojrzenia – pozwoliły w dużym stopniu wyminąć, jeśli nie unieważnić, rozpoznania reżysera. Studium recepcji Pokłosia to studium dystynkcji klasowej w działaniu.Film Pasikowskiego pokazuje antysemityzm jako problem kultury antysemickiej i antysemickiego społeczeństwa. Oznacza to radykalną kompromitację wyobrażenia antysemityzmu jako konfliktu międzygrupowego, czego konsekwencją jest obnażenie fałszu i fikcji konstruktów takich, jak „dialog” i „pojednanie”.Mimo pesymistycznej diagnozy społecznej, Pokłosie wskazuje na możliwość zmiany i potencjał emancypacji tkwiący w samoupodmiotowieniu. Podejmując refleksję nad tym, co wynika dla kultury i społeczeństwa z wiedzy na temat antysemityzmu i polskiego kontekstu Zagłady, film wskazuje na wyzwanie systemowe w postaci imperatywu rewizji kultury i odrzucenia jej toksycznych wzorów. W tym świetle nowa narracja staje się możliwa – jako krytyka narracji.

The voice is the voice of Jacob, yet the hands are the hands of Esau. Genesis 27:22 Jewish literature of the Hellenistic and Roman periods has attracted different groups of scholars for different reasons. In modern times, it was Western Christian scholars—or Western scholars interested in the beginnings of Christianity—who first took up the challenge. They were fascinated by the opportunity to reconstruct the context and background of the New Testament world and benefited from the accessibility of manuscript sources preserved in Greek, Latin, and the vernacular languages of the West. Eastern Christian scholars, in turn, often belonged to emergent national schools and were thrilled that their heritages, typically unknown to Western scholars, could also contribute to the study of an ancient and universal legacy....

Chapter 6 examines the diffusion of ancient Near Eastern history and its archaeological discovery to popular culture. It focuses on the archaeological murder mysteries of Agatha Christie, one of Britain’s top-selling writers and a popular modernist. An amateur archaeologist, Christie took an active part in excavations in Iraq and Syria for nearly three decades, working with her husband, archaeologist Max Edgar Lucien Mallowan. The chapter considers her domestication of the remote past and role as a mediator between archaeology and Mesopotamian antiquity, and a broad and mainly middle-class readership of her “whodunnits”. It draws on her seven imperial archaeological novels set in the Near East, especially in mandate territories, particularly Murder in Mesopotamia, An Appointment with Death, espionage thriller They Came to Baghdad, and archaeological autobiography Come Tell Me How You Live, as well as on other autobiographical and archival material. The chapter demonstrates Christie’s comparison between archaeology and detective work, the archaeologist and the sleuth, and between deciphering a murder and the interpretation of clues to the past. The chapter considers the impact of archaeological imagery and practices on the classical detective story whose heyday coincided with that of the new culture of antiquity, examining Christie’s adaptation of the overarching image of the Tell, or man-made mound, built of layers of human habitation and destruction, as the unifying image in her writing. At the same time as domesticating antiquity, Christie related it to modern technologies of transport and industrialization.