Is God Really in History?

1979 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 379-390
Author(s):  
Frederick Sontag

For some time it seemed as if Christianity itself required us to say that ‘God is in history’. Of course, even to speak of ‘history’ is to reveal a bias for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century forms of thought. But the justification for talking about the Christian God in this way is the doctrine of the incarnation. The centre of the Christian claim is that Jesus is God's representation in history, although we need not go all the way to a full trinitarian interpretation of the relationship between God and Jesus. Thus, the issue is not so much whether God can appear or has appeared within, or entered into, human life as it is a question of what categories we use to represent this. To what degree is God related to the sphere of human events? Whatever our answer, we need periodically to re-examine the way we speak about God to be sure the forms we use have not become misleading.

Romantik ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 77 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gry Hedin

During the first part of the nineteenth century, geologists developed a history of the earth so different from that accepted in previous centuries that it encouraged a rethinking of the relationship between man and nature. In this article I will argue that painters followed these changes closely and that some of them let the narratives and images of geology inform the way they depicted nature. In arguing my point, I will focus on images and descriptions of the chalk cliffs on the Danish island of Møn by both geologists and painters. I will follow the scientific advances in geology by referring to the texts and images of Søren Abildgaard, Henrich Steffens, Johan Georg Forchhammer, and Christopher Puggaard, and discuss how their changing theories correspond with paintings of the cliffs by four artists: Christopher Wilhelm Eckersberg, Frederik Sødring, Louis Gurlitt, and Peter Christian Skovgaard.


This volume is an interdisciplinary assessment of the relationship between religion and the FBI. We recount the history of the FBI’s engagement with multiple religious communities and with aspects of public or “civic” religion such as morality and respectability. The book presents new research to explain roughly the history of the FBI’s interaction with religion over approximately one century, from the pre-Hoover period to the post-9/11 era. Along the way, the book explores vexed issues that go beyond the particulars of the FBI’s history—the juxtaposition of “religion” and “cult,” the ways in which race can shape the public’s perceptions of religion (and vica versa), the challenges of mediating between a religious orientation and a secular one, and the role and limits of academic scholarship as a way of addressing the differing worldviews of the FBI and some of the religious communities it encounters.


EMPIRISMA ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohammad Arif Dan Yuli Darwati

This paper will try to explain the relationship between religion and culture. These two topics are the most important items that are inseparable in the history of human civilization from the classical to the modern period. Religion is ahuman belief system that is related to God. If the rule comes from God, then it cannot be said to be a culture, because it is not human creation, but God’s creation that is absolute. Religion is interpreted as part of the life (culture) ofindividuals or groups, each of which has the authority to understand religion and apply it. With the characteristics as indicated by Fazlur Rahman, wherever religion is located, it is hoped that it can provide guidance on values or moralsfor all activities of human life, whether social, cultural, economic or political. Not infrequently also religion becomes a determining factor in the adhesive process of social cultural interaction of the community as well as unifying thenation. Culture and religion are something different but can influence each other so that new cultures or mixing of cultures emerge. The opinion of Endang Saifudin Anshari who said in his writing that religion and culture do notinclude each other, in principle one is not part of the other and each consists of itself. Between them, of course, they are closely related like us, we see in everyday life and human life. As also seen in the close relationship between husband and wife who can give birth to a son but the husband is not part of the wife, and vice versa. Religion and culture are two different things but cannot be separated. The existence of a religion will be greatly influenced and affect thepractice of a religion in question. And conversely, a culture will be greatly influenced by the beliefs of the society in which culture develops. Therefore religion is not only an individual problem but religion is also a social affair whichultimately religious people are not only able to give birth to individual piety but also must be able to give birth to social piety.Key words: Interaction, Religion, Culture,


Author(s):  
Mark Migotti

In this chapter, the author attempts to establish what is philosophically living and what is philosophically dead in Schopenhauer’s pessimism. Against the background of the intriguing the history of the terms “optimism” and “pessimism”—in debates about Leibniz’s theodicy in the early eighteenth century and the popularity of Schopenhauer in the late nineteenth century, respectively—the author points up the distinction between affirming life, which all living beings do naturally, and subscribing to philosophical optimism (or pessimism), which is possible only for reflective beings like us. Next, the author notes the significance of Schopenhauer’s claim that optimism is a necessary condition of theism and explains its bearing on his pessimistic argument for the moral unacceptability of suicide. The chapter concludes that Schopenhauer’s case for pessimism is not conclusive, but instructive; his dim view of the prospects for leading a truly rewarding, worthwhile human life draws vivid attention to important questions about how and to what degree an atheistic world can nevertheless be conducive to human flourishing.


Author(s):  
Cristina Vatulescu

This chapter approaches police records as a genre that gains from being considered in its relationships with other genres of writing. In particular, we will follow its long-standing relationship to detective fiction, the novel, and biography. Going further, the chapter emphasizes the intermedia character of police records not just in our time but also throughout their existence, indeed from their very origins. This approach opens to a more inclusive media history of police files. We will start with an analysis of the seminal late nineteenth-century French manuals prescribing the writing of a police file, the famous Bertillon-method manuals. We will then track their influence following their adoption nationally and internationally, with particular attention to the politics of their adoption in the colonies. We will also touch briefly on the relationship of early policing to other disciplines, such as anthropology and statistics, before moving to a closer look at its intersections with photography and literature.


2008 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 239-254 ◽  
Author(s):  
U Chit Hlaing

AbstractThis paper surveys the history of anthropological work on Burma, dealing both with Burman and other ethnic groups. It focuses upon the relations between anthropology and other disciplines, and upon the relationship of such work to the development of anthropological theory. It tries to show how anthropology has contributed to an overall understanding of Burma as a field of study and, conversely, how work on Burma has influenced the development of anthropology as a subject. It also tries to relate the way in which anthropology helps place Burma in the broader context of Southeast Asia.


Africa ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 91 (3) ◽  
pp. 493-515
Author(s):  
Gillian Mathys

AbstractThroughout Africa, contemporary boundaries are deemed ‘artificial’ because they were external impositions breaking apart supposedly homogeneous ethnic units. This article argues that the problem with the colonial borders was not only that they arbitrarily dissected African societies with European interests in mind, but also that they profoundly changed the way in which territoriality and authority functioned in this region, and therefore they affected identity. The presumption that territories could be constructed in which ‘culture’ and ‘political power’ neatly coincided was influenced by European ideas about space and identity, and privileged the perceptions and territorial claims of those ruling the most powerful centres in the nineteenth century. Thus, this article questions assumptions that continue to influence contemporary views of the Lake Kivu region. It shows that local understandings of the relationship between space and identity differed fundamentally from state-centred perspectives, whether in precolonial centralized states or colonial states.


2011 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sydney J. Shep

Emoticons are usually associated with the digital age, but they have numerous precursors in both manuscript and print. This article examines the circulation of emotional icons in nineteenth-century typographical journals as a springboard to understanding the relationship between emotion, materiality, and anthropomorphism as well the pre-digital networks of the “typographical press system.” It draws on literature from textual and typographical analysis, including the history of punctuation. It also demonstrates the ubiquity of emoticons in contemporary society and culture outside the world of computers, text messaging, and chat rooms.


Antíteses ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (20) ◽  
pp. 979
Author(s):  
Celso Kraemer ◽  
Dominique Santos ◽  
Aniele Crescêncio

RESUMO Ao observar as relações de Nietzsche com seus contemporâneos verifica-se que ele estava ciente das principais discussões relativas à Unificação da Alemanha (1871). Para a unificação era necessário que os 39 estados alemães compartilhassem o sentimento de pertencimento a uma pátria comum. Nesse meandro, os historiadores prussianos do século XIX desempenharam papel fundamental ao produzir um ambiente filosófico nacionalista, uma maneira científica e objetiva de pensar sobre a história. O objetivo deste trabalho é compreender as interações de Nietzsche com estes círculos intelectuais. Para isto, foram selecionados quatro dos chamados fragmentos póstumos de Nietzsche datados entre 1871 e 1873. De acordo com o ponto de vista de Nietzsche, as pretensões dos historiadores, não tinham nenhuma crítica, pois acreditavam, ingenuamente, que a verdade era um alvo tangível. Por outro lado, ele indicou a necessidade de uma história ligada à cultura, que era trabalhada em conjunto com "instintos artísticos".  ABSTRACT By observing the relationship of Nietzsche with his contemporaries one can notice that he was aware of the main discussions related to the unification of Germany (1871). Unification required 39 German states to share the feeling of belonging to a common homeland. Prussian historians of the nineteenth century played a key role in producing such a nationalist philosophical environment, a scientific and objectivist way of thinking about History. This work aim is to understand the interactions between Nietzsche and this intelectual circles. For this purpose, four of the so-called posthumous Nietzsche fragments, dated between 1871 and 1873, were selected. According to Nietzsche's point of view, some historians had a naive pretension to reach the truth, as if it were a tangible target. On another hand, he pointed out the necessity of a link between History and Culture, which should be understood altogether with ‘artistic instincts’. 


1933 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 547-555 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary G. Calder

The Kidston Collection of fossil plant slides in the Botany Department of the University of Glasgow contains a number of sections of a very notable stem labelled “Lepidodendron textum, Kidston, n.sp.” No mention is made of this species in any of Dr Kidston's publications, but the correspondence relevant to the Collection indicates the history of the slides. This may be briefly summarised.As early as 1883, Dr Kidston had received from Mr J. Coutts two sections (Nos. 51 and 52) of this stem, which had been collected by the latter at East Kilbride, Lanarkshire, Scotland, from the Carboniferous Limestone Series of the Calderwood Beds (Hosie Limestone) in the Lower Limestone Group. Dr Kidston postponed description of this stem till he had better sections at his disposal; the specimen, however, was lost, and it was not till many years later that he rediscovered it in Dr John Young's collection in the Glasgow Municipal Museum, and had more sections cut from it (Nos. 1144–1153). No manuscript notes of Dr Kidston's descriptive of these slides have been found, with the exception of a pencilled reference in his manuscript slide catalogue, opposite Nos. 51 and 52, to the “foliar bundles—there is an appearance as if there was a development of secondary xylem, whereas the axial bundle has no secondary wood.”


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