Academic literature on the topic 'Christmas plays, Polish'

Traditional nutrition occupies one of the foremost places in the material culture of people, its essential manifestation in the spiritual culture is also natural. At the same time, the ritual load of traditional dishes is not the same; only some of them have become the key to certain customs and rituals. These include, among others, borshch, a unique dish that every housewife in Ukraine cooks according to their recipe. The purpose of this study is to illustrate the use of borshch in the ritual and magical practices of Polishchuks of the Chernihiv region, to find out its causes and internal form. In the context of family and calendar rituals, the use of borshch is quite transparent and almost identical. He plays an important role in commemorating deceased ancestors. According to the ideas, they eat not the dish itself, but the steam from the hot dish as its emanation. In this context, a "hot commemorations," Christmas Eve, or the so-called "Didy" borshch goes into the same paradigm as freshly baked bread or pancakes, freshly cooked potatoes, and so on. Nevertheless, on the "Shchedryi vechir," the panspermic value of borshch is actualized: in addition to the many permanent ingredients, grains of different crops were added there, which was to ensure a high harvest during the next year. Much more difficult to interpret are cases of borshch use in obsessional rites, particularly in meteorological magic. First of all, it is a way to cause rain by throwing a stolen borshch pot in a well, as well as children's well-known calls to the rain in Ukraine, where it is proposed to "boil it to the borshch." The difficulty is the presence of a number of related factors, each of which can be decisive in the ritual of causing rain: not only the borshch was poured into the well, but also the pot was thrown; he who stole it was crying; well after borshch contamination was cleaned and others. However, in the author's opinion, in the meteorological magic of the Polish citizens of the Chernihiv region, the importance of borshch is of paramount importance. Keywords: Eastern Polissia, Chernihiv region, borshch, rituals, calendar, meteorology.

Organized religion has played a key role in shaping national and international policy for millennia. This paper discusses the parts some Christian churches have played in creating and supporting drug control policies stipulated inunmultilateral treaties. Mainstream churches have largely ignored the harms these policies inflict on vulnerable populations, including both people who use drugs, and those who are terminally ill and cannot access controlled medicines for pain relief. Mainstream – especially theologically “conservative” – churches reject people who use drugs, an approach that damages individuals, families, and communities both inside and outside the church, along multiple dimensions. This damage has, dialectically, produced a counter-theology and praxis that prioritizes compassionate ministry and insists on metanoia, a scriptural ethic of hospitality and evidence based care. Churches must play a prophetic role according to scripture, contemporary theologians, and Christians engaged in social justice praxis, in ministering to individuals who are marginalized and criminalized for using prohibited substances.

Decadent authors writing about the past share a common artistic practice: revisionist creativity. I argue in my Zoom sur les décadents that this particular type of creativity uses as its main device recombination of legends, myths, and historical events. Historical, cultural or religious figures are reexamined and shown in a new unexpected light. I show in my book how Villiers de Isle-Adam conflates two crucial battles of the Ancient world: Marathon (490 BC) and Thermopiles (480 BC) in ashort story called "Impatience de la foule." The final result of Villiers's telescoping of separate historical events is a seamless narrative. In Hugues Rebell's "Une Saison à Baia," Saint Paul attempts to convert Roman patricians who mock his incoherent speeches. In "La Gloire de Judas," Bernard Lazare departs from the Gospels and tells the tragic story of Judas whose betrayal made the salvation of the human race possible. In Lazare's short story, Judas is a self-effacing figure who doesn't act on his own but on Jesus Christ's specific order, who sworns him into secrecy.Common in French decadent fiction, religious revisionism was largely tolerated in the secular Third Republic. Whereas censorship was quick to punish naturalist authors writing about debauched clergy in contemporary France (e.g. Louis Deprez and Henry Fèvre's Autour d'un clocher) decadent authors reinventing ancient religious stories and retelling the life of catholic saints enjoyed a relative freedom ofexpression.It is my hypothesis that taken out of its secular context, religious revisionism of the kind practiced by French decadents may be seen as shocking transgression in a fiercely catholic country like Poland. In the country that lost its independence in 1794 and was ever since seeking to regain it, Catholic Church was perceived as an essential ally in the struggle against main occupying powers: Orthodox Russia, and Protestant Prussia. In the course of the 19th century Catholicism and patriotism had been effectively fused in Polish national conscience. In this charged political context a Polish author revisiting Church dogma or tradition was at risk of being perceived not only as a religious outcast but also as a traitor to the cause of Polish independence.To test my hypothesis I propose to examine Igrzysko (Game), a forgotten play by Leopold Staff. Admired today chiefly as a poet, the young Staff wrote Igrzysko in Poland after a long sojourn in Paris where he had lived among the international crowd of fin de siècle writers and artists. The play was first produced in Lemberg in 1909 and after a few performances vanished forever from Polish theatrical repertoire.Leopold Staff's play is set in ancient Rome and depicts tribulations of an actor who, while impersonating a Christian awaiting crucifixion, converts to Christianity. In his play, Staff revives the legend of Saint Genesius, an actor in Arles who died a martyr's death in 286 under Diocletian. In Spain, Saint Genesius's legend inspired Lope de Vega who wrote Acting is Believing (Lo fingido verdadero, 1607). In France, it was the source for Jean Rotrou's Saint Genest (1646). All told, the legend of Genesius is a popular theme for artists who wish to explore the distinction between art and life. An important addition to this old tradition, Staff's play contains, however, a decadent and potentially scandalous twist. Unlike in Acting is Believing and Saint Genest, the protagonist's conversion is very short lived in Igrzysko. Fearing pain, Staff's character commits suicide and is, therefore, condemned for eternity. In my paper, I will discuss the significance of Staff's religious transgression in the context of the turn of the century arch-catholic and patriotic Poland.

The article aims at identifying and analysing the particularities of the federalist ideas of Polish clandestine catholic organisation the Union. In 1943 the group merged with the Christian-democratic Labour Party (SP) becoming its ideological centre. Throughout the Second World War the Union produced a series of programmatic documents and clandestine press where it discussed the shape of future Europe which was to become a pan-federation of regional federations cemented by the common values and principles enshrined in Christianity which were the foundations of Western civilization. In elaborating future plans for Europe, the Union drew explicitly from the memory of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth setting it as an example for modern Poland and other European States. Historical Poland was perceived not just as a state but as a “normative power”, this was possible because the Union rejected the modern, ‘westphalian’ concept of state. Instead it advocated creation of a pluralistic federation of nations bound together by common values, where national egoisms were mitigated by common Christian values.

AbstractFaith schools have (re)gained an increasingly prominent place within the public education system in the UK. Whilst the former Labour government expanded the number of state-funded faith schools during its terms in office, they continue to be supported by the current coalition government. The expansion of faith schooling has continued despite widespread opposition attributing much of the religious divisions and lack of community cohesion within society to faith schooling, particularly after ‘race riots’ in the north of England in 2001. This article does not seek to contribute to the largely polarised debate arguing either for or against faith schools. Instead, I explore how religion circulates in governmental discourse supporting faith schools and the sociopolitical work it does through law. I focus on the key contention put forward particularly by the former Labour government that faith schools, contrary to being divisive, can actually play an important role in the promotion of community cohesion, precisely because of the values and ethos of these schools. I examine how this governmental discourse is influenced by social capital and communitarian theories that highlight the role of Christian or church school values in fostering citizenship and community cohesion through education. I suggest that the influence of these theories on government policy has led to church schools becoming a benchmark for other schools to emulate, especially where they embody state/British values which are sometimes posited as being universal and secular. Rather than the expansion of faith schools being a policy that supports schools of all faiths, Muslim schools in particular have been singled out as posing a potential ‘threat to the nation’ and the social cohesion within it. In addition, I argue that the often invisibilised normative influence of de-theologised Christian/secular values plays a role in regulating the boundaries of ‘acceptable’ religion. The potential effects of delimiting religion through the discourse of values, coupled with the engendering of citizenship and belonging of children from minority religious/ethnic backgrounds within the education system, might also be viewed as effectively resulting in a form of ‘racial upliftment’. My analysis draws on critical religion and race perspectives that remain largely absent within socio-legal scholarship on law and religion and indeed citizenship. One exception is more recent scholarship on gender and the banning of Muslim religious dress in schools and other public spaces, and the recognition of certain areas of Muslim family law within Western legal systems. However, analyses that attend to the contingent ways in which religion can circulate and be produced through law relating to children are urgently needed alongside those attending to gender.

Abstract Drawing on extensive research in Arts Council and government archives in Belfast and the collections of Seamus Heaney’s manuscripts, this essay reconstructs for the first time Northern Irish state cultural policy at the height of the crisis years 1968–1972. It also examines the response of a major poet to this policy, through a genetic mapping of the complex development of Heaney’s poem ‘The Last Mummer’, between 1969 and its publication in 1972. The poem refers to the mumming plays practiced at Christmas when troupes of young men, or ‘Rhymers’ would enter and perform in the houses of both communities in the North. This practice also informed ‘Room to Rhyme’, the Arts Council sponsored 1968 tour of several towns in Northern Ireland by Heaney and Michael Longley and the folk musician Davy Hammond. The make-up of the performers on the tour, the itinerary and accompanying booklet, suggest a deliberate attempt on the part of the Arts Council Northern Ireland to assert a role for itself, and for culture, in the political thaw of the time. In the years immediately after the tour, however, major confrontations between civil rights marches and police, widespread sectarian rioting and ultimately troops on the streets, resulted in even more extreme polarization in the North. As this essay shows, Heaney’s manuscripts from this period provide a valuable resource for the examination of the relationship between poetry, the public sphere and notions of cultural tradition in early 1970s Northern Ireland.

Some time in the second half of the eighteenth century, there emerged a Jewish legend that glorified a conversion to Judaism and a martyr's death of a Polish noble from a very prominent Polish aristocratic family, sometimes referred to as Walentyn Potocki, or Graf Potocki—the legend of ger ẓedek, a righteous convert, of Wilno. The story was enthusiastically embraced by Eastern European Jews, and it subsequently became a subject of numerous novels and novellas. Even today its appeal continues. It is currently mentioned on a number of Jewish web sites as “a true story of a Polish Hrabia (count) . . . who descended from a long line of noble Christian rulers and who sacrificed wealth and power to convert from Christianity to Judaism,” and it serves as a basis for school plays in some Ḥaredi schools for girls. Although converts to Judaism were not unheard of in the premodern era, few stories of this kind emerged. Rabbinic authorities had an ambiguous attitude toward non-Jewish conversions, and few encouraged proselytizing or glorified non-Jewish converts. The legend of ger ẓedek of Wilno, though said to be a true story, appears to be a carefully crafted tale of conversion, a polemical and apologetic response to a number of challenges that the Polish Jewish community faced from the mid-eighteenth century.

AbstractWestern democracies are undergoing a process of extraordinary religious and cultural pluralization which is largely a result of an intensified immigration over the last decades. This article analyzes in a structural and an actor-oriented perspective the way in which religion affects the immigration policies in 19 Western democracies. Based on a typology of immigration regimes in 19 Western democracies, the article asks what role Christian legacies (Catholic and Protestant traditions, church-state regimes, Christian parties) and churches (both Catholic and Protestant) play in bringing about particular immigration policies. It follows the “family of nations” concept in comparative policy research (F. Castles) and argues that the interplay of nation building, religious traditions and church-state-relations affect churches' role in the making of immigration policy. This role signifies a disjuncture between the countries' general patterns of religious traditions and immigration policies on the one hand, and the actual policy positions and effects of churches on the other.

This article investigates the political and cultural practices of the ducal House of Alburquerque to demonstrate its commitment to one of the basic principles of Charles V’s foreign policy, that of maintaining peace among Christians and warring against the Turk. It studies the specific conditions of the emperor’s reign that allowed the high noble courts of Castile to flourish. Among these courts, the ducal House of Alburquerque at Cuéllar is exemplary for its literary patronage of the humanist and dramatist Hernán López de Yanguas (1487–1547?), whose plays served to express the duchy’s involvement in imperial politics.

The author begins with underscoring Norwid’s defence of the intellectual achievements of the Middle Ages in part XII of Rzecz o wolności słowa. It prompts her to speculate about the importance and trajectories of reflections on the Middle Ages in Norwid’s poetry in general. Subsequently, Halkiewicz-Sojak casts the topic against the background concerning the romantic fascination with the Medieval tradition and specifically Polish difficulties in adapting the European (northern) variation of that current. On the one hand, Norwid’s considerations upon Godfred’s attitudes in Tasso’s Jersusalem Delivered and Cervantes’s Don Quixote lead to the conclusion that a nineteenth-century poet can only repeat Cervantes’s character’s gestures; therefore, for the author the Medieval props will be the book and the candle rather than a continuation of chivalrous adventures. On the other hand, Norwid – especially in the early drama mystery plays – conjures up poetic worlds of the Slavic Middle Ages and focuses his attention on the Christian initiation of the Slavdom.

This book examines the role of the papacy and the crusade in the religious life of the late twelfth through late thirteenth centuries and beyond. Throughout the book, the contributors ask several important questions. Was Innocent III more theologian than lawyer-pope and how did his personal experience of earlier crusade campaigns inform his own vigorous promotion of the crusades? How did the outlook and policy of Honorius III differ from that of Innocent III in crucial areas including the promotion of multiple crusades (including the Fifth Crusade and the crusade of William of Montferrat) and how were both pope’s mindsets manifested in writings associated with them? What kind of men did Honorius III and Innocent III select to promote their plans for reform and crusade? How did the laity make their own mark on the crusade through participation in the peace movements which were so crucial to the stability in Europe essential for enabling crusaders to fulfill their vows abroad and through joining in the liturgical processions and prayers deemed essential for divine favor at home and abroad? Further essays explore the commemoration of crusade campaigns through the deliberate construction of physical and literary paths of remembrance. Yet while the enemy was often constructed in a deliberately polarizing fashion, did confessional differences really determine the way in which Latin crusaders and their descendants interacted with the Muslim world or did a more pragmatic position of ‘rough tolerance’ shape mundane activities including trade agreements and treaties?

How do rituals differ in an em world? Today, we use rituals such as graduations, marriages, retirement parties, and funerals to jointly and overtly affirm community values at key social transitions. However, if we use a broader sense of the term “ritual,” most social interactions and many apparently non-social processes are also rituals, wherein emotional energy becomes amplified as participants achieve a common focus of attention and act in ways that are finely synchronized and coordinated with each other ( Collins 2004 ). during rituals, synchronized feelings and body movements of people who are adjacent to one other become especially potent. Such group synchronization shows participants that they feel similarly to others in the group, and know each other well. people, things, and beliefs that are the mutual focus of attention in such rituals acquire added importance and emotional energy, and become able to increase the passion of subsequent rituals. The emotional energy that comes from a common focus of attention on synchronized actions has long influenced the frequency and structure of many forms of synchronized human activities, in dances, plays, movies, concerts, lectures, protests, freeways, business meetings, group recitations in schools, consumption of advertised products, and group songs that coordinate work in hunting, farming, sailing, armies, and factories. We expect ems to continue to show this tendency to prefer social situations where vivid awareness of finely synchronized actions can assure them of shared capacities and values. For example, similar to people today we expect ems to say hello and goodbye as they join and leave meetings, and to find reasons for frequent face-to-face meetings at work. Some examples of common overt rituals today are when the police stop a driver, when a waiter takes an order, when two sports teams battle in front of a crowd, and when an audience watches a movie together. In the industrial era, we have a substantially lower rate of such rituals than did our forager and farmer ancestors. For our ancestors, in contrast, it was more like having Christmas or Thanksgiving happen several times a month, with many smaller ceremonies happening several times a day (Collins 2004).

Princeton, read a trustees’ report in January 1927, “has always recognized a dual obligation to its undergraduates.” One side of this commitment involved providing “a curriculum which will meet the needs of a modern university” and the other involved creating within students “those spiritual values which make for the building of character.” Wilson had reshaped Princeton into a modern university and had left as his legacy an unyielding commitment to serving national interests. Undergraduate education, graduate training, and a variety of impressive specialized research programs enabled the university to help meet the nation’s need for liberal, civic-minded leaders and the demand for science and practical technology. Wilson and his successors in early-twentieth-century Princeton continued to insist, like their nineteenth-century predecessors, that Protestantism was indispensable to the public good and that civic institutions, such as Princeton, served public interests when they sought to inculcate students with a nonsectarian Protestant faith. In this way, the university, they believed, helped mainline Protestantism play a unifying and integrative role in a nation of increasing cultural and religious diversity. By doing so, they reasoned, Princeton, like other private colleges and universities, would maintain its historic religious mission to advance the Christian character of American society. During the presidency of Wilson’s successor, John G. Hibben, controversies challenged the new configuration of Princeton’s Protestant and civic missions. These controversies, however, helped to strengthen the new ways in which the university attempted to fulfill its religious mission in the twentieth century. In liberal Protestantism, the university found a religion that was compatible with modern science and the public mission of the university. Those traditional evangelical convictions and practices that had survived Wilson’s presidency were disestablished during Hibben’s tenure. Fundamentalists’ criticisms of the university hastened this process in two ways. Sometimes fundamentalist attacks upon the university convinced the administration to adopt policies that guaranteed the displacement of traditional evangelical convictions and practices. This was the case, for example, when fundamentalists’ condemnations of the theological liberalism of the university’s Bible professor accelerated the administration’s approval of a policy of academic freedom.