The Quest for Pure Language

2020 ◽  
pp. 19-50
Author(s):  
Samuel Morris Brown
Keyword(s):  
Joseph Smith ◽  
Central Aspect ◽  
The World

Modern philosophical positions have restricted or eliminated the power and scope of the “language beyond language” once thought to have existed at the origins of the world. In this view, mortal language is the only language—either there is no primordial sacred language, or it exists but humans have no access to it. Joseph Smith saw these postures as capitulation to the curse of language at Babel (Genesis 11), which haunted him. The quest for pure language was a central aspect of his religious career and is a direct rejection of modernist assumptions about the potential of language. This quest for pure language—focused especially on the power of the hieroglyph—extended across Smith’s career, including extensive explorations of the Edenic language and traditions about powerful, nonordinary language.

What We Strive For and Value

2019 ◽  
pp. 200-222
Author(s):  
E. Tory Higgins
Keyword(s):  
Goal Orientation ◽  
Self Regulation ◽  
Significant Others ◽  
Shared Reality ◽  
Central Aspect ◽  
The World ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Shared Goals

Humans recognize that their significant others want and expect them to be and to become a certain kind of person, and they accept these goals and standards in their own self-regulation (internalization). This is a critical and central aspect of the shared reality motivation that makes humans special motivationally, and “special” in this case means possessing something distinctive and important. Within positive and within negative child–caretaker interactions, there are different kinds of interactions that create different kinds of shared realities. One kind of interaction creates a promotion shared reality that the world is a place where nurturance, mastery, and growth can occur: Your life can get better and better. Another kind of interaction creates a prevention shared reality that you have to work to maintain or restore safety and security: Your life will remain fine if you are careful. In addition to creating different types of shared goals and standards, different kinds of child–caretaker interactions create shared goals and standards that vary in their strength. The stronger the goals and standards, the more likely a person is to attain them, but the more that person will suffer if he or she fails to attain them. And how strongly people engage in an activity and “feel right” about it depends on whether they pursued a goal in a manner that fits their goal orientation—in an eager way for promotion and in a vigilant way for prevention. Fit intensifies the value of people’s decisions and their achievements, making positives more positive and negatives more negative.

Metaphors of Temporality: Revisiting the “Timeless Hinduism” versus “Historical Christianity” Antithesis

2011 ◽  
Vol 104 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-169
Author(s):  
Ankur Barua
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
British India ◽  
Eternal Recurrence ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
European Context ◽  
Central Aspect ◽  
The World ◽  
Greek Historiography ◽  
Clear Statement

One of the most frequently-made statements about Christianity concerns its “historical” character—its grounding in a set of episodes in the life of the Israelite people that culminated in the climactic Christ-event, an event that brought into sharper focus than before a redemptive process that has been going on since the beginning of times and will last till the end of times. The assertion of this central aspect of Christian self-understanding has often gone hand in hand with a statement of what the Hindu philosophical-religious traditions are alleged to have lacked, namely, a historical sense. It is charged that Hindu thinkers believed that individuals are chained to never-ending cycles that do not lead anywhere, with all sense of meaning or purpose thus drained from temporal existence.1 A clear statement of such a demarcation comes from Alan Richardson, who states, specifically in the European context, that “ ‘Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more; death hath no more dominion over him’ (Rom 6:9) … is the text which changed the outlook of European man upon history…. The European mind was freed by the proclamation of God's saving act in history from the fatalistic theory of cyclical recurrence which had condemned Greek historiography to sterility.”2 The Christian faith is believed to have liberated humanity from the tortuous cosmological circles of eternal recurrence, once in the world of late antiquity when it was still a fledgling in the milieu of Hellenistic mystery cults and much later in colonial British India when it came into contact with the patterns of classical Hindu thought. It is almost as if as an appendix to Saint Augustine's famous remark, “God did not create the world in time, but with time,”3 Christian theologians in his wake had added, “Therefore, Christianity did not come into the world in history, but with history.”

scholarly journals Calling and preparation for missionary service in the life of believers of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons)

2019 ◽  
pp. 93-110
Author(s):  
Sergiusz Anoszko
Keyword(s):  
Jesus Christ ◽  
Creative Process ◽  
Religious Movement ◽  
Latter Day Saints ◽  
Joseph Smith ◽  
Missionary Training ◽  
The Family ◽  
The World ◽  
Missionary Service ◽  
The Church

Serving on a mission is almost an indispensable part of the image of the adherents of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, commonly known as Mormons, quasi-Christian new religious movement. The next text attempts to analyse and take a closer look at the theme of calling and preparing for the ministry of being a missionary as an attribute of this Church that was founded by Joseph Smith. Starting from an upbringing in the family and social expectations of the Church’s members through education in the Missionary Training Center, we can follow the vocation path and the creative process of the future Mormon missionary who preach the Gospel in various corners of the world. Missionary ministry is important in the life of each Mormon believer, even those who didn’t serve as a missionary, because it leaves a lasting imprint and affects the minds of the members of this new religious group for the rest of their lives.

Populism and Worldwide Turbulence

2020 ◽  
Vol 37 ◽  
pp. 152-164
Author(s):  
Roland Robertson ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Global South ◽  
Mao Zedong ◽  
Al Qaeda ◽  
Western World ◽  
The West ◽  
Central Aspect ◽  
The World ◽  
Entire World

This contribution consists in an attempt to make sense of one central aspect of the present worldwide turbulence, one which might well be called the contemporary, perfect, global storm. A pivotal problem that will be interrogated is the issue of the circumstances that have produced this phenomenon in most parts of the world, although it should be emphasized that the term populism is, more often than not, applied to the Western world rather than the East or, for the most part, the global South. However, this reservation does not amount to a severe caveat, since all the contemporary signs are that what is here called populism is sweeping across the entire world as a whole, even though it is not necessarily given this name in non-Western regions. To this generalization it should be added that there are, rather obviously, parallels to what has become known as populism in the West. Examples of this are anarchism in nineteenth century Russia and the movement known as the Long March under the leadership of Mao Zedong in the years 1934 and 1935 particularly, as well as al Qaeda and its various offshoots.

Individualization in Europe and America: Connecting Religious and Moral Values

2006 ◽  
Vol 5 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 203-230 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Cochrane ◽  
Neil Nevitte
Keyword(s):  
Significant Role ◽  
North American ◽  
Moral Values ◽  
Rate Of Change ◽  
World Values Survey ◽  
Central Aspect ◽  
The World ◽  
Time Variations ◽  
Cross National

AbstractAfter reviewing the major variations in how individualization is interpreted and explained, this article turns to the World Values Survey (WVS) data to empirically investigate one central aspect of individualization, namely, the connection between religiosity and moral values. That analysis demonstrates, first, that rates of decline in levels of religiosity in most advanced industrial states have been quite modest. The rate of change in moral outlooks, by contrast, has been much more striking. Those two core findings, we argue, draw attention to the question of what explains these cross-national and cross-time variations. The remainder of the article empirically explores a variety of plausible explanations. The results of that analysis reveal not only significant variations between European and North American publics, but also that associational behavior plays a significant role in gearing the dynamics of individualization.

Good workers: television documentary, migration and the Italian nation, 1956–1964

Modern Italy ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-17
Author(s):  
Mark Hayward
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
Central Aspect ◽  
Colonial Expansion ◽  
The World ◽  
Television Documentary ◽  
The One

This paper examines a series of documentaries produced in the period between 1956 and 1964 that document the activities of Italian migrants around the world (a corpus of more than 100 films and programmes altogether). These films, which record the dedicated and laborious nature of Italians around the globe, play a double role. On the one hand, they serve as a necessary adjunct to the establishment of a ‘labour culture’ in Italy, a central aspect of the compromise between labour unrest and the demands of capital in which the figure of the worker is continually praised. At the same time, they serve to obscure and rewrite the Italian collective memory concerning the legacy of Fascist imperialism and Italian involvement in colonial expansion, in the process recasting the Italian coloniser as the ‘good worker’.

“My Tabernacle ‘Mormon’ Choir”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Hicks
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Salt Lake ◽  
Salt Lake City ◽  
The Other ◽  
Joseph Smith ◽  
The World ◽  
Letting Go ◽  
The Face ◽  
Lake City ◽  
Made In

This chapter discusses the activities of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir under the direction of its conductor, Evan Stephens. In 1890 Mormons outgrew two fads, one doctrinal, the other musical. First was the idea that the world would end between December 1890 and December 1891. This commonplace belief, which helped nurture Mormon ferocity in the face of anti-polygamy legislation, derived from a statement Joseph Smith had made in 1835. In musical terms, entering the mainstream meant full commitment to standard musical notation and a letting-go of the musical fad of the Tonic sol-fa method. In 1891, William D. Davies, Welsh cultural ambassador from the New York newspaper Y Drych, toured Utah, heard Stephens's Choir and pronounced it the best choir in the world. This chapter considers the controversies faced by the Choir during Stephens's term as well as its concerts, domestic tours, and the competitions it joined. It also examines how the Choir continued its mission of public visibility without even leaving Salt Lake City.

Transcendence in Technology

2015 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 291-313 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ciano Aydin ◽  
Peter-Paul Verbeek ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Max Weber ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Religious Experiences ◽  
Technological Mediation ◽  
Central Aspect ◽  
Mediation Theory ◽  
The World ◽  
Scientific Ambition

According to Max Weber, the “fate of our times” is characterized by a “disenchantment of the world.” The scientific ambition of rationalization and intellectualization, as well as the attempt to master nature through technology, will greatly limit experiences of and openness for the transcendent, i.e. that which is beyond our control. Insofar as transcendence is a central aspect of virtually every religion and all religious experiences, the development of science and technology will, according to the Weberian assertion, also limit the scope of religion. In this paper, we will reflect on the relations between technology and transcendence from the perspective of technological mediation theory. We will show that the fact that we are able to technologically intervene in the world and ourselves does not imply that we can completely control the rules of life. Technological interference in nature is only possible if the structures and laws that enable us to do that are recognized and to a certain extent obeyed, which indicates that technological power cannot exist without accepting a transcendent order in which one operates. Rather than excluding transcendence, technology mediates our relation to it.

“The Appearance of Ancient Work, and of Curious Workmanship”

2019 ◽  
pp. 415-455
Author(s):  
Larry E. Morris
Keyword(s):  
Bearing Witness ◽  
Joseph Smith ◽  
The World

The eight witnesses were Christian Whitmer, Jacob Whitmer, Peter Whitmer Jr., John Whitmer, Hiram Page, Joseph Smith Sr., Hyrum Smith, and Samuel Smith. Their statement, titled “The Testimony of Eight Witnesses,” states, “Joseph Smith Jr., the translator of this work, has shown unto us the plates of which hath been spoken, which have the appearance of gold; and as many of the leaves as the said Smith has translated we did handle with our hands; and we also saw the engravings thereon, all of which has the appearance of ancient work, and of curious workmanship. And this we bear record, with words of soberness, that . . . we have seen and hefted, . . . and we give our names unto the world, . . . and we lie not, God bearing witness of it.”

First Vision

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Harper
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
Jesus Christ ◽  
Information Age ◽  
Memory Studies ◽  
Latter Day Saints ◽  
Joseph Smith ◽  
Privileged Position ◽  
The World ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Way

Joseph Smith, the founder of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, remembered that his first audible prayer, uttered in spring 1820, resulted in a vision of heavenly beings who forgave him and told him Christianity had gone astray. “The Mormon narrative,” according to a 2012 blog post, “seems to always start with a young boy who asked God a question one spring morning in 1820.” That is true if one qualifies the always, for it has not always been so. When and why and how did Joseph Smith’s “first vision,” as Latter-day Saints or “Mormons” know the event, become their seminal story? What challenges did it face along the way? What changes did it undergo as a result? Can it possibly hold its privileged position against the tides of doubt and disbelief, memory studies, and source criticism—all in the information age? First Vision tells how Joseph Smith—by remembering his past in various present contexts—opened the way for alternatives, how saints chose the collective memory they did, and what difference it has made for them and their critics. This book is the biography of a contested memory and how it was born, grew, changed the world, and was changed by it.

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