Re-Visioning Religious Studies: A Call to Come Home

Horizons ◽  
1978 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald Heinz

AbstractThis is a look at the rise and development of religious studies in the United States, at the terms and implications of its “charter,” and then at current models and perennial phobias (theologizing being an example of the latter). There follows a plea for people working in religious studies to complete the hermeneutical circle, to return to the essence, to explore and act out the religious wager. The paper closes with a glimpse at two possible roles for such a revisioned venture: symbol repository for the university, seminary for an expanded and critical civil religion.

1921 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. E. Scrutton

During the last Long Vacation—which I am afraid, by the way, will be the last long vacation—I Was just about starting out to indulge in a pastime which a don of the rival, but much inferior, university has described as “putting little balls into little holes with instruments singularly unadapted for the purpose” when a letter was put into my hand with an American stamp and a United States postmark. I opened it hastily and glanced at it, and gathered the impression that some unknown society in the United States was inviting me to proceed there in the month of November to deliver an address on some legal subject. I was flattered and puzzled. I threw the letter on the table and went out to indulge in the aforesaid pastime. It was not till I got home and read the letter carefully that I discovered what it was all about. I gathered that your Downing Professor, who prefers to spend his holiday in a dry climate—a bone-dry climate—was conveying to me the request of the University Law Society that I should come back to my old university and my old college and speak to the law students, and I was very much flattered and grateful. I felt a little, however, like the Prodigal Son, for I thought that for the Cambridge Law Society and the Law School of Cambridge to invite a man who had paid little attention to them while he was up, to come and address them, was heaping coals of fire upon his head.


2012 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 473-479
Author(s):  
Michael A. Bernstein

It is now almost a half century since Clark Kerr (1911–2003) delivered the 1963 Edwin L. Godkin Lectures at Harvard University, presenting what was ultimately recognized as one of the most significant and influential ruminations on the nature of higher education in the United States. This sustained reflection on the modern evolution of the research university, ultimately published by Harvard University Press as The Uses of the University (1963), framed discussion and debate regarding the role of what Kerr called “the multiversity” for decades to come. In this endeavor, there was no one at the time better suited to the task. An economist who had served for several years on the faculty at the University of Washington, Seattle, Kerr joined the University of California, Berkeley, in 1945. Appointed Berkeley's first chancellor in 1952, he was the mastermind behind the enormous expansion (in both capacity and excellence) that marked the campus's immediate postwar history. By 1958, as the then legendary Robert Gordon Sproul concluded his 28-year duty as University of California (UC) president, Kerr seemed the obvious and best choice as successor.


2012 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-161
Author(s):  
Steven Wedgeworth

In the opening decades of the nineteenth century, Samuel Brown Wylie, an Irish-Presbyterian minister of a group of Scottish and Scots-Irish Presbyterians known as the Covenanters, and William Findley, a United States Congressman and also a descendant of the Covenanters, debated the Constitution's compatibility with Christianity and the proper bounds of religious uniformity in the newly founded Republic. Their respective views were diametrically opposed, yet each managed to borrow from different aspects of earlier political traditions held in common while also laying the groundwork for contrasting political positions which would more fully develop in the decades to come. And more than a few times their views seem to criss-cross, supporting contrary trajectories from what one might expect.Their narrative, in many ways strange, challenges certain “Christian” understandings of early America and the Constitution, yet it also poses a few problems for attempts at a coherent theory of secularity, natural law, and the common good in our own day.Samuel Brown Wylie is an obscure figure in American history. As a Covenanter, Wylie was forced to immigrate to America due to his involvement in the revolutionary United-Irishmen in Ulster. After finding it impossible to unite with other Presbyterians in Pennsylvania, Wylie became the first minister in the “Reformed Presbyterian Church of the United States,” which would also be called “the Synod of the Reformed Presbyterian Church.” According to his great-grandson, Wylie also went on to become the vice-Provost of the University of Pennsylvania.


Author(s):  
Amy Koehlinger

This chapter surveys scholarly writing about the intersection of religion and sport in the United States and Britain. It reviews the dominant historiography of works on religion and athletics, arguing that historians have focused primarily on clergy within Protestant traditions and the question of whether specific sports were considered licit or illicit in different places and times. This perspective occludes consideration of Catholic and other religions, the historical importance of bloodsport, and the informal nature of the interrelationship of religion and sport in daily life. The chapter also examines approaches to sport in scholarship from religious studies, highlighting the ways that scholars of religion have imagined sport as a form of religion (or “natural religion,” civil religion), often taking the perspective of the spectator and fan. The chapter concludes by exploring newer modes of analysis that explore the body as a site where religion and sport intersect.


1996 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Rodger

This article is the revised text of the first W A Wilson Memorial Lecture, given in the Playfair Library, Old College, in the University of Edinburgh, on 17 May 1995. It considers various visions of Scots law as a whole, arguing that it is now a system based as much upon case law and precedent as upon principle, and that its departure from the Civilian tradition in the nineteenth century was part of a general European trend. An additional factor shaping the attitudes of Scots lawyers from the later nineteenth century on was a tendency to see themselves as part of a larger Englishspeaking family of lawyers within the British Empire and the United States of America.


2015 ◽  
Vol 36-37 (1) ◽  
pp. 163-183
Author(s):  
Paul Taylor

John Rae, a Scottish antiquarian collector and spirit merchant, played a highly prominent role in the local natural history societies and exhibitions of nineteenth-century Aberdeen. While he modestly described his collection of archaeological lithics and other artefacts, principally drawn from Aberdeenshire but including some items from as far afield as the United States, as a mere ‘routh o’ auld nick-nackets' (abundance of old knick-knacks), a contemporary singled it out as ‘the best known in private hands' (Daily Free Press 4/5/91). After Rae's death, Glasgow Museums, National Museums Scotland, the University of Aberdeen Museum and the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, as well as numerous individual private collectors, purchased items from the collection. Making use of historical and archive materials to explore the individual biography of Rae and his collection, this article examines how Rae's collecting and other antiquarian activities represent and mirror wider developments in both the ‘amateur’ antiquarianism carried out by Rae and his fellow collectors for reasons of self-improvement and moral education, and the ‘professional’ antiquarianism of the museums which purchased his artefacts. Considered in its wider nineteenth-century context, this is a representative case study of the early development of archaeology in the wider intellectual, scientific and social context of the era.


2016 ◽  
Vol 69 (4) ◽  
pp. 65-71
Author(s):  
Masha Shpolberg

Hanna Polak was in the United States in December 2015 for a screening of Something Better to Come (2014) and The Children of Leningradsky (2004) at Yale University, where the interview was conducted. Polak's devastating documentary Something Better to Come swept through the festival circuit with force, winning a Special Jury Award at IDFA along with awards at over twenty other festivals. Shot illegally on a garbage dump just outside Moscow over the course of fourteen years, the film follows a girl named Yula from age 10 to 24, as she grows up doing the things that teenagers everywhere do—experimenting with her hair color and makeup, with cigarettes and alcohol—all while living in the most difficult of conditions.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ani Eblighatian

The paper is an off-shoot of the author's PhD project on lamps from Roman Syria (at the University of Geneva in Switzerland), centered mainly on the collection preserved at the Art Museum of Princeton University in the United States. One of the outcomes of the research is a review of parallels from archaeological sites and museum collections and despite the incomplete documentation i most cases, much new insight could be gleaned, for the author's doctoral research and for other issues related to lychnological studies. The present paper collects the data on oil lamps from byzantine layers excavated in 1932–1939 at Antioch-on-the-Orontes and at sites in its vicinity (published only in part so far) and considers the finds in their archaeological context.


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