scholarly journals AN IMPERIAL APOSTLE? ST PAUL, PROTESTANT CONVERSION, AND SOUTH ASIAN CHRISTIANITY

2017 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-130
Author(s):  
SHINJINI DAS

AbstractThis article explores the locally specific (re)construction of a biblical figure, the Apostle St Paul, in India, to unravel the entanglement of religion with British imperial ideology on the one hand, and to understand the dynamics of colonial conversion on the other. Over the nineteenth century, evangelical pamphlets and periodicals heralded St Paul as the ideal missionary, who championed conversion to Christianity but within an imperial context: that of the first-century Roman Mediterranean. Through an examination of missionary discourses, along with a study of Indian (Hindu and Islamic) intellectual engagement with Christianity including Bengali convert narratives, this article studies St Paul as a reference point for understanding the contours of ‘vernacular Christianity’ in nineteenth-century India. Drawing upon colonial Christian publications mainly from Bengal, the article focuses on the multiple reconfigurations of Paul: as a crucial mascot of Anglican Protestantism, as a justification of British imperialism, as an ideological resource for anti-imperial sentiments, and as a theological inspiration for Hindu reform and revivalist organization.

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 114-120
Author(s):  
Dmitry Bulgakovsky ◽  
Nick Mayhew

Abstract Xenia the Servant of God, or Andrey Fyodorovich the Holy Fool is a hagiography written by Russian Orthodox priest and publicist Dmitry Bulgakovsy (1843–ca. 1918). Published in Russia in 1890, it is one of the first full accounts of the life of a saint variably referred to by two names: one feminine, Xenia, and the other masculine, Andrey. The saint ostensibly lived in St. Petersburg in the eighteenth century. Identified female at birth and named Xenia, after the death of their husband Andrey, at the age of twenty-six the saint took on the identity of their deceased husband. The saint is popular in Russia today, and stories about their life are disseminated widely. Although they were canonized in 1988 as St. Xenia and are now venerated as a holy woman, accounts of their life always include the story of their gender transformation. In twenty-first-century narratives, this episode tends to be glossed over briefly as proof of the saint's extraordinary love for their husband, serving to embellish their role as a devoted wife. However, in the original nineteenth-century stories of the saint's life—such as the one translated below—there is greater ambiguity in the depiction of their gender.


Neohelicon ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 751-766
Author(s):  
Yi Zheng

AbstractOn the one hand, because of the double historical prejudices from literary criticism against ghost stories and women’s writing, little attention has been paid to investigate the ideals of femininity in women’s ghost stories in nineteenth-century America. This article examines “Luella Miller,” a short story by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, who indirectly but sharply criticized the ideal of femininity in her time by creating an exaggerated example of the cult of feminine fragility. On the other hand, although extensive research has been done on Chinese ghost stories, especially on the ghost heroines in Pu Songling’s Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, there are few studies comparing the Chinese and the American ones. By comparing “Luella Miller” and Pu’s “Nie Xiaoqian,” this article does not primarily aim to list the similarities and differences between the Chinese and the American ideals of femininity, but to provide fresh insights into how both Freeman and Pu capitalized on the literary possibilities of the supernatural, because only in ghost stories they could write about women in ways impossible in “high literature.”


2010 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marie-Luisa Frick

Against the background of the trend of Islamizing human rights on the one hand, as well as increasing skepticism about the compatibility of Islam and human rights on the other, I intend to analyze the potential of Islamic ethics to meet the requirements for vitalizing the idea of human rights. I will argue that the compatibility of Islam and human rights cannot be determined merely on the basis of comparing the specific content of the Islamic moral code(s) with the rights stipulated in the International Bill of Rights, but by scanning (different conceptions of) Islamic ethics for the two indispensable formal prerequisites of any human rights conception: the principle of universalism (i.e., normative equality) and individualism (i.e., the individual enjoyment of rights). In contrast to many contemporary (political) attempts to reconcile Islam and human rights due to urgent (global) societal needs, this contribution is solely committed to philosophical reasoning. Its guiding questions are “What are the conditions for deriving both universalism and individualism from Islamic ethics?” and “What axiological axioms have to be faded out or reorganized hierarchically in return?”


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
CHRISTOPHER VIALS

American studies has developed excellent critiques of post-1945 imperial modes that are grounded in human rights and Enlightenment liberalism. But to fully gauge US violence in the twenty-first century, we also need to more closely consider antiliberal cultural logics. This essay traces an emergent mode of white nationalist militarism that it calls Identitarian war. It consists, on the one hand, of a formal ideology informed by Identitarian ethno-pluralism and Carl Schmitt, and, on the other, an openly violent white male “structure of feeling” embodied by the film and graphic novel 300, a key source text for the transatlantic far right.


2020 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
pp. 545-557
Author(s):  
Rituparna Roy

AbstractA lonely wife in Kolkata and a bachelor in London have a virtual affair, but are forced to re-think their relationship when they discover he is her brother-in-law. Charulata 2011 is an ingenious post-millennial adaptation of Tagore’s novella, Nastanir (The Broken Nest, 1901), already immortalized by Satyajit Ray in his classic Charulata (1964). This intertextuality, especially with Ray, lends an added dimension to the film, allowing Chatterjee to contrast two modernities in Bengal – the colonial and glocal – over the course of a century. Both these women gain temporary respite from their suffocating marriage through an affair, but their circumstances are vastly different. While Tagore/Ray’s heroine (like Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary and Lady Chatterley) could only bond with a man she knew, technology expands Charulata’s choice in 2011. She romances the strange and the unknown – an unseen tall dark stranger with a gift for words. While the nineteenth century Bengali heroine had to reign in her erotic impulse, her twenty-first century counterpart submits to it, though with an overwhelming sense of guilt. But there are similarities too – both are childless homemakers; have a literary sensibility; and though a 100 years apart, in both their cases, the lover eventually departs, and duty ultimately wins over passion, bringing back the duly chastened wife to the wronged husband. Charulata 2011 thus dramatizes a glocalized South Asian narrative, where the protagonist negotiates an uneasy juxtaposition of a globalized outlook on the world with the entrapment of age-old social obligations in her self.


2020 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-277
Author(s):  
Tzu-Lung Chiu
Keyword(s):  
The One ◽  

Vinaya rules embody the ideal of how Buddhists should regulate their daily lives, and monastics are required to observe them, despite the fact that they were compiled nearly 2,500 years ago in India: a context dramatically different not only from Chinese Buddhism's present monastic conditions, but from its historical conditions. Against this backdrop, rules of purity (qinggui) were gradually formulated by Chinese masters in medieval times to supplement and adapt vinaya rules to China's cultural ethos and to specific local Chinese contexts. This study explores how the traditional qinggui are applied by the Buddhist sa?gha in present-day Taiwan, and contrasts modern monastics' opinions on these rules and their relation to early Buddhist vinaya, on the one hand, against classical Chan literature (such as Chanyuan qinggui) and the Buddhist canon (such as Dharmaguptakavinaya), on the other. This comparison fills a notable gap in the existing literature.


1970 ◽  
Vol 41 (116) ◽  
pp. 33-48
Author(s):  
Dennis Meyhoff Brink

DANTE’S LITERARY ATMOSPHEROLOGY | The article argues that recent theories on affect and atmosphere by, for instance, Teresa Brennan, Lauren Berlant, and Peter Sloterdijk, can enter into an extraordinarily fruitful interchange with Dante’s Divine Comedy. On the one hand, these theories can direct our attention to the hitherto overlooked atmospheric phenomena that occur ubiquitously in Dante’s Comedy and provide us with concepts that render them legible as products of human emissions. On the other hand, the numerous descriptions of different atmospheres in Dante’s Comedy can contribute to overcoming the lack of linguistic specifications and distinctions which – according to theorists such as Brian Massumi and Peter Sloterdijk – characterizes today’s Western understanding of affective atmospheres and impedes its ongoing theorization. Based on readings of a selected number of atmospheres in Dante’s Comedy, the article argues that the Comedy not only anticipated insights that were not articulated theoretically until the twentieth and twenty-first century, butalso makes up an exceptional encyclopedia of affective atmospheres that have not yet been examined, neither by Dante researchers, nor by theorists of affects and atmospheres. Therefore, both camps have much to learn from Dante’s literary atmospherology, which the article aims to make explicit.


2016 ◽  
Vol 61 (S24) ◽  
pp. 93-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rossana Barragán Romano

AbstractLabour relations in the silver mines of Potosí are almost synonymous with the mita, a system of unfree work that lasted from the end of the sixteenth century until the beginning of the nineteenth century. However, behind this continuity there were important changes, but also other forms of work, both free and self-employed. The analysis here is focused on how the “polity” contributed to shape labour relations, especially from the end of the seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth century. This article scrutinizes the labour policies of the Spanish monarchy on the one hand, which favoured certain economic sectors and regions to ensure revenue, and on the other the initiatives both of mine entrepreneurs and workers – unfree, free, and self-employed – who all contributed to changing the system of labour.


2018 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 205-234
Author(s):  
Warren C. Campbell

This article examines both 4 and 5 Ezra as two textual reactions to Roman imperialism utilizing Homi Bhabha's notion of ‘hybridity’. The central argument offered here is that 4 and 5 Ezra both exemplify resistance to and affiliation with the discourse of dominance integral to imperial ideology. Such reactions are, however, inverted. On the one hand, 4 Ezra primarily offers a theodicean resistance to the destruction of the Second Temple during the First Jewish Revolt (66–70 CE), but relies upon essentialized binaries integral to a colonial discourse of domination. On the other hand, 5 Ezra advances a notion of religious replacement in the aftermath of the Bar Kokhba revolt (132–135 CE); an expression of dominance that is simultaneously a strategy of communal preservation arising from a position of proximity to a Jewish heritage.


Author(s):  
Robert Wuthnow

This chapter discusses Texas politics and religion in the twenty-first century. Republicans could count on winning in nearly any national election and in an increasing number of local elections. The contests were less between Republicans and Democrats than between moderate and conservative Republicans. The state's largest Protestant denomination was still Southern Baptist, but its members remained divided between moderates and conservatives, and local autonomy increasingly meant pastors of mega-sized congregations influencing both the denomination and local communities. Denominational identities were less important than informal alliances among the leaders of conservative evangelical congregations who regarded themselves as the true adherents of biblical doctrine, on the one hand, and similar networks among progressive faith communities that emphasized inclusivity, on the other hand.


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