The Roman World of Early Christianity

Author(s):  
D. H. Williams

Drawing on conventional terminology and concepts, this chapter describes the religious world in which Christianity emerged. It is impossible to offer an accurate count of the number of gods, divinized beings, daimonions, and numina that were thought to populate the universe and have direct influence on the lives of people. It was quite literally “a world full of gods.” Cultural divisions and a wide range of religious practices also existed across the spectrum of what is typically called popular piety, and the more philosophical appropriation of ideas of the divine. According to a scheme that would prove to be foundational, there were three general categories of Roman religion: the gods of poets or what Varro called the “mythical”; the natural (that is, physical) gods of philosophers; and the gods of cultic or civil theology (that is, of the state).

Author(s):  
Harriet I. Flower

The most pervasive gods in ancient Rome had no traditional mythology attached to them, nor was their worship organized by elites. Throughout the Roman world featured small shrines to the beloved lares, a pair of cheerful little dancing gods. These shrines were maintained primarily by ordinary Romans, and often by slaves and freedmen, for whom the lares cult provided a unique public leadership role. This book offers an original account of these gods and a new way of understanding the lived experience of everyday Roman religion. Weaving together a wide range of evidence, the book sets forth a new interpretation of the much-disputed nature of the lares. The book makes the case that they are not spirits of the dead, as many have argued, but rather benevolent protectors. The book examines the rituals honoring the lares, their cult sites, and their iconography, as well as the meaning of the snakes often depicted alongside lares in paintings of gardens. It also looks at Compitalia, a popular midwinter neighborhood festival in honor of the lares, and describes how its politics played a key role in Rome's increasing violence in the 60s and 50s BC, as well as in the efforts of Augustus to reach out to ordinary people living in the city's local neighborhoods. A reconsideration of seemingly humble gods that were central to the religious world of the Romans, this is also the first major account of the full range of lares worship in the homes, neighborhoods, and temples of ancient Rome.


Author(s):  
Charlotte Epstein

This book uses the body to peel back the layers of time and taken-for-granted-ness upon the two defining political forms of modernity, the state and the subject of rights. It traces, under the lens of the body, how the state and the subject mutually constituted each other all the way down, by going all the way back, to their original crafting in the seventeenth century. It considers multiple sites of theory and practice and two revolutions. The first, scientific, threw humanity out of the centre of the universe, and transformed the very meanings of matter, space, and the body; while the second, legal and political, re-established humans as the centre-point of a framework of rights. The book analyses the fundamental rights to security, liberty, and property, respectively, as the initial knots where the state-subject relation was first sealed. It develops three arguments, that the body served to naturalise security, to individualise liberty, and to privatise property. Covering a wide range of materials—from early modern anatomy lesson paintings, to the Anglo-Scottish legal struggles of naturalisation, to the emergence of discrete practices of religious toleration in Central Europe—it shows both how the body has operated as history’s great naturaliser, and how it can be mobilised instead as a critical tool that lays bare the deeply racialised and gendered constructions that made both the state and the subject of rights. The book returns to the origins of constructivist and constitutive theorising to reclaim their radical and critical potential.


2004 ◽  
pp. 21-29
Author(s):  
G.V. Pyrog

In domestic scientific and public opinion, interest in religion as a new worldview paradigm is very high. Today's attention to the Christian religion in our society is connected, in our opinion, with the specificity of its value system, which distinguishes it from other forms of consciousness: the idea of ​​God, the absolute, the eternity of moral norms. That is why its historical forms do not receive accurate characteristics and do not matter in the mass consciousness. Modern religious beliefs do not always arise as a result of the direct influence of church preaching. The emerging religious values ​​are absorbed in a wide range of philosophical, artistic, ethical ideas, acting as a compensation for what is generally defined as spirituality. At the same time, the appeal to Christian values ​​became very popular.


Author(s):  
Anatoliy Ivanovich Bogdanenko

In the monograph the theoretical identification of concepts and categorical series of state regulation of investment-innovation processes are investigated; the directions of optimization of the state policy of innovation and investment development management in Ukraine are determined; the organizational and legal principles of the state regulation of development of intellectual potential of the population are substantiated; the areas of development and improvement of the national innovation system as an object of state policy are highlighted and assessed. The monograph will be interesting for scholars, lecturers, doctoral and graduate students, and will also be useful to practical politicians, journalists and media workers and a wide range of readers interested in investment and innovation activities.


2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (10(79)) ◽  
pp. 12-18
Author(s):  
G. Bubyreva

The existing legislation determines the education as "an integral and focused process of teaching and upbringing, which represents a socially important value and shall be implemented so as to meet the interests of the individual, the family, the society and the state". However, even in this part, the meaning of the notion ‘socially significant benefit is not specified and allows for a wide range of interpretation [2]. Yet the more inconcrete is the answer to the question – "who and how should determine the interests of the individual, the family and even the state?" The national doctrine of education in the Russian Federation, which determined the goals of teaching and upbringing, the ways to attain them by means of the state policy regulating the field of education, the target achievements of the development of the educational system for the period up to 2025, approved by the Decree of the Government of the Russian Federation of October 4, 2000 #751, was abrogated by the Decree of the Government of the Russian Federation of March 29, 2014 #245 [7]. The new doctrine has not been developed so far. The RAE Academician A.B. Khutorsky believes that the absence of the national doctrine of education presents a threat to national security and a violation of the right of citizens to quality education. Accordingly, the teacher has to solve the problem of achieving the harmony of interests of the individual, the family, the society and the government on their own, which, however, judging by the officially published results, is the task that exceeds the abilities of the participants of the educational process.  The particular concern about the results of the patriotic upbringing served as a basis for the legislative initiative of the RF President V. V. Putin, who introduced the project of an amendment to the Law of RF "About Education of the Russian Federation" to the State Duma in 2020, regarding the quality of patriotic upbringing [3]. Patriotism, considered by the President of RF V. V. Putin as the only possible idea to unite the nation is "THE FEELING OF LOVE OF THE MOTHERLAND" and the readiness for every sacrifice and heroic deed for the sake of the interests of your Motherland. However, the practicing educators experience shortfalls in efficient methodologies of patriotic upbringing, which should let them bring up citizens, loving their Motherland more than themselves. The article is dedicated to solution to this problem based on the Value-sense paradigm of upbringing educational dynasty of the Kurbatovs [15].


2020 ◽  
pp. 63-72
Author(s):  
Yu. Olefir ◽  
E. Sakanyan ◽  
I. Osipova ◽  
V. Dobrynin ◽  
M. Smirnova ◽  
...  

The entry of a wide range of biotechnological products into the pharmaceutical market calls for rein-forcement of the quality, efficacy and safety standards at the state level. The following general monographs have been elaborated for the first time to be included into the State Pharmacopoeia of the Russian Federation, XIV edition: "Viral safety" and "Reduction of the risk of transmitting animal spongiform encephalopathy via medicinal products". These general monographs were elaborated taking into account the requirements of foreign pharmacopoeias and the WHO recommendations. The present paper summarises the key aspects of the monographs.


Author(s):  
Sergey S. Pashin ◽  
Natalia S. Vasikhovskaya

The article is devoted to the study of the movement for communist labour at the Tyumen Shipbuilding Plant during the period of the seven-year plan (1959-1965). The authors seek to fill a historical narrative with the particular facts connected with the peculiarities and specifics of such phenomenon as the movement for communist labour. They consider it in the context of microhistory and as the most important element of production routine. The employees of the largest industrial enterprise of Soviet Tyumen — Shipbuilding Plant in concrete historical circumstances came under the spotlight of the authors. The submitted article is written with attraction of a wide range of archival documents, taken from the funds of the State Archive of the Tyumen Region and also funds of the State Archive of Socio-Political History of the Tyumen Region. Having studied the documents the authors come to conclusion that the movement for communist labour had little effect on the production progress of the plant employees.


1992 ◽  
Vol 57 (12) ◽  
pp. 2553-2560
Author(s):  
Zdravka Popova ◽  
Katia Aristirova ◽  
Christo Dimitrov

The aromatization of a wide range of model aliphatic and cycloaliphatic hydrocarbons (ethene, ethane, propene, n-hexane, 1-hexene, methylcyclopentane, cyclohexane, cyclohexene) on copper-containing NaZSM-5 and HZSM-5 zeolites has been investigated. It was established that the degree of aromatization is related to carbenium ion formation and depends on the acid strength and copper content of zeolite. Experiments with copper-containing samples reduced prior to use indicated the possibility to enhance the selectivity to aromatization. The change of the state of Cu2+ ions during catalytic experiments confirmed the assumption about participation of Cu0 simultaneously with the Bronsted acid centers in the dehydrogenation/hydrogenation steps.


Author(s):  
Leonardo Cardoso

This book is an ethnographic study of controversial sounds and noise control debates in Latin America’s most populous city. It discusses the politics of collective living by following several threads linking sound-making practices to governance issues. Rather than discussing sound within a self-enclosed “cultural” field, I examine it as a point of entry for analyzing the state. At the same time, rather than portraying the state as a self-enclosed “apparatus” with seemingly inexhaustible homogeneous power, I describe it as a collection of unstable (and often contradictory) sectors, personnel, strategies, discourses, documents, and agencies. My goal is to approach sound as an analytical category that allows us to access citizenship issues. As I show, environmental noise in São Paulo has been entangled in a wide range of debates, including public health, religious intolerance, crime control, urban planning, cultural rights, and economic growth. The book’s guiding question can be summarized as follows: how do sounds enter and leave the sphere of state control? I answer this question by examining a multifaceted process I define as “sound-politics.” The term refers to sounds as objects that are susceptible to state intervention through specific regulatory, disciplinary, and punishment mechanisms. Both “sound” and “politics” in “sound-politics” are nouns, with the hyphen serving as a bridge that expresses the instability that each concept inserts into the other.


Author(s):  
David Fisher

There are eight columns in the Periodic Table. The eighth column is comprised of the rare gases, so-called because they are the rarest elements on earth. They are also called the inert or noble gases because, like nobility, they do no work. They are colorless, odorless, invisible gases which do not react with anything, and were thought to be unimportant until the early 1960s. Starting in that era, David Fisher has spent roughly fifty years doing research on these gases, publishing nearly a hundred papers in the scientific journals, applying them to problems in geophysics and cosmochemistry, and learning how other scientists have utilized them to change our ideas about the universe, the sun, and our own planet. Much Ado about (Practically) Nothing will cover this spectrum of ideas, interspersed with the author's own work which will serve to introduce each gas and the important work others have done with them. The rare gases have participated in a wide range of scientific advances-even revolutions-but no book has ever recorded the entire story. Fisher will range from the intricacies of the atomic nucleus and the tiniest of elementary particles, the neutrino, to the energy source of the stars; from the age of the earth to its future energies; from life on Mars to cancer here on earth. A whole panoply that has never before been told as an entity.


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