Singing the Resurrection

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin Lambert
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
The Body ◽  
Christian Community ◽  
Community Of Faith ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Resurrection Of The Dead ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Individual

This book explores the lived experience of belief in Reformation Europe through two distinct yet deeply connected themes: the resurrection of the body and the act of singing. In late medieval Europe, the chanting of the Creed in the context of the Mass implied a universal community of faith that began in the time of Christ and was to endure until the dead were raised at the apocalypse. In the sixteenth century, these bonds were broken. European Christians continued to affirm the Creed’s promise of the universal resurrection of the dead, but they raised their voices in a range of new songs, each of which expressed a different interpretation of resurrection’s promise of the restoration of the individual body and the reunion of the Christian community. Using case studies drawn from each of the major traditions of the Reformation—Lutheran, Anabaptist, Reformed, and Catholic—this book reveals sixteenth-century belief in its full complexity. Whereas narratives of the Reformation have long equated belief with doctrine, songs of resurrection reveal contemporary understandings of belief that at once emphasized its understanding and embodiment, its ephemerality and eternal endurance, its utter individuality and its power as a tie that bound. In the religious ruptures of the Reformation, this book argues, belief was transformed into a way of living in the world.

The Resurrection of the Body and the Life Everlasting

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin Lambert
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
The Body ◽  
Christian Community ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Community Of Faith ◽  
Resurrection Of The Dead ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Requiem Mass

Chapter 1 explores the central role that the promise of universal resurrection and its enactment in the liturgy played in the constitution of the late medieval Christian community of faith. Together, it argues, raised voices and the promise of the resurrection of the dead created the ideal of a universal Christian community that was to remain forever united and that was bound together by a shared experience of ritual. The chapter presents a case study of the ways in which resurrection pervaded the aural, visual, and material culture of Nuremberg, particularly in the commemoration of the dead with the Requiem Mass and the Office of the Dead. Throughout the late medieval city, sounds, objects, and gestures defined a community of faith that was understood to encompass all Christians from the time of Christ until the apocalypse.

Making an Exhibition of Ourselves: Using the Dead to Fight the Battles of the Living

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tiffany Jenkins
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Context ◽  
The Body ◽  
Dead Body ◽  
American Military ◽  
Number Of Factors ◽  
Dead Bodies ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Osama Bin Laden ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Nuremberg Trials

In October 2011, graphic images of a blood-stained and dead Muammar Gaddafi were sent around the internet. For some time after his death, his dead body was displayed at a house in Misrat, where masses of people queued to see it. His corpse provided a focus for the Libyan people, as proof that he really was dead and could finally be dominated. When Osama bin Laden was killed by the American military in May that same year, unlike Gaddafi, the body was absent, but the absence was significant. Shortly after he was killed a decision was taken not to show pictures of the dead body and it was buried at sea. The American military appear to have been concerned it would become a physical site for his supporters to congregate, and the photographs used by different sides in a propaganda war. Both cases reflect an aim to control the dead body and associated meanings with the person; that is not unusual: after the Nuremberg trials, the Allied authorities cremated Hermann Göring—who committed suicide prior to his scheduled hanging—so that his grave would not become a place of worship for Nazi sympathizers. These examples should remind us that dead bodies have longer lives than is at first obvious. They are central to rituals of mourning, but beyond this, throughout history, they have also played a role in political battles and provided a—sometimes contested—focus for reconciliation and remembrance. They have political and social capital and are objects with symbolic potential. In The Political Lives of Dead Bodies the anthropologist Katherine Verdery explores the way the dead body has been used in this way and why it is particularly effective. Firstly, she observes, human remains are effective symbolic objects because their meaning is ambiguous; that is whilst their associated meanings are contingent on a number of factors, including the individual and the cultural context, they are not fixed and are open to interpretation and manipulation: ‘Remains are concrete, yet protean; they do not have a single meaning but are open to many different readings’ (Verdery 1999: 28).

Intimations of Immortality in the Thought of Jesus: The Ingersoll Lecture for 1959

1960 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Henry J. Cadbury
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Post Mortem ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Resurrection Of The Dead ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Immortality Of The Soul ◽  
Technical Terms

The historic Ingersoll lectureship on the Immortality of Man requires of the lecturer both some legitimate extension of its terms and some necessary limitation of his field. One is justified in supposing that the pious layman who planned the foundation was not thinking in highly technical terms, but like laymen of our day was thinking of a widely shared belief in the post mortem survival or revival of those who die. If he had wished to specify the indiscriminate persistence of the individual as a philosophical tenet of the nature of man, he could well have used the more familiar term — the immortality of the soul. On the other hand, if he had wished to be faithful to the wording of much of the Bible and to the Church's creeds, he would have spoken of the Resurrection of the Dead.

Life After Life: Bioarchaeology and Post-mortem Agency

2014 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 523-529 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bettina Arnold
Keyword(s):  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Symbolic Capital ◽  
The Body ◽  
Post Mortem ◽  
Select Group ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Anxious Group

In the alternative fairy tale The Princess Bride, as William Goldman's character Miracle Max reanimates the apparent corpse of the hero Westley, he tells the anxious group observing the procedure: ‘There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive’ (Goldman 2007, 313). Only a select group of the dead can be characterized as being ‘slightly alive’, in the post-mortem agency sense, however, and the case studies presented here explore the many ways in which this subcategory of mostly dead individuals have engaged with and continue to impact the living in the past as well as today. Several themes emerge as especially salient: the iteration in the death-scape of the dynamic tension between the individual and the social group, which can result in transgression as well as conformity in the disposition of the body and its effects on the living; the symbolic capital represented by some dead bodies and the ways in which their potency may be affected by various forms of contextual association; and the ways in which the manipulation of the dead for political purposes is subject to constraints specific to the cultural contexts in which these interactions take place.

scholarly journals The Babylonian Exile of the Judaeans and the Formation of the Doctrine of the Bodily Resurrection from the Dead: From the Naturalistic Allegory of the Collective Revival of the Jews upon their Expected Return to Judaea through the Personified Image of the People’s Rising from the Dead to the Concept of an Individual Eschatological Resurrection in the Flesh

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-37
Author(s):  
Igor Tantlevskij
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Persian Period ◽  
Expected Return ◽  
Bodily Resurrection ◽  
Resurrection Of The Dead ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Babylonian Exile

The author reveals the following sequence in the formation of the Jewish doctrine of the bodily resurrection of the dead: during the Babylonian captivity of the Judaeans, a naturalistic allegory of their revival upon their expected return to their Motherland arises (Ezek. 37:1–14, Isa. 26:19, 41:14); by the end of the period of exile / at the very beginning of the Persian period, the personified image of the people’s rising from the dead is developing (the allegory of the Servant of the Lord in Isa. 42:1–9, 49: 1–7, 50:4–9, 52:13–53:12; perhaps also the image of Job, cf. especially: Job 19:25–27a and 42:5, 7–17). In the time of another national catastrophe — the persecution of the faithful Jews under Antiochus IV Epiphanes — the concept of an individual eschatological resurrection in the flesh arises; at this receiving of the afterlife requital is assumed to be realized in the body (Dan. 12:1b–3, 13).

Exploring Near-Death Experiences across Cultures

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory Shushan
Keyword(s):  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
The Body ◽  
Symbiotic Relationship ◽  
Common Elements ◽  
Cultural Process ◽  
Extraordinary Experiences ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Near Death Experiences

Near-death experiences (NDEs) share many common elements worldwide, indicating that they originate in phenomena that are independent of culture. They also have many elements unique to the individual experiencers and their cultures, demonstrating a symbiotic relationship between experience and belief. There are numerous examples worldwide of religious beliefs originating in NDEs and other extraordinary experiences. This is in contradiction to widely accepted notions that all experiences and beliefs are generated entirely by culture or language. Such paradigms not only fail to explain the origins of religious beliefs or the nature of related experiences but also fail to take seriously the testimonies of their sources. Near-death experiences provide perfectly rational grounds for beliefs that the soul can leave the body, and that it can survive death and join spirits of the dead in another world. As such, the phenomenon helps to demonstrate the cross-cultural process of reasoning based on evidence.

Conclusions

2020 ◽  
pp. 178-184
Author(s):  
Sari Katajala-Peltomaa
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Lived Religion ◽  
Geographical Differences ◽  
Demonic Possession ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
Methodological Tool ◽  
Performative Space ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Demonic

This chapter shows how demonic possession was conceptualized as a lived experience of religion and argues that the diabolical had many functions within the miraculous. Lived religion as a methodological tool, a way to read the depositions of canonization processes, displays the way lay people used demons (not vice versa) in singling out and dealing with uncertainties in their lives. Religion-as-lived was built upon corporeal experiences; the performative space religion created was made real for the individual and the community by embodied signs and practices. As a fluid rhetorical resource, demons also facilitated a contribution to the construction of society and culture. The differences between lay and clerical spheres were visible when demonic possession involved female sexuality or the position of the clergy. Geographical differences demonstrate the limits of the Church’s universalizing discourse and challenge strict categorizations concerning gender, the demonic, and even medieval Europe as a single, coherent unity.

scholarly journals The Shared Origins of Embodiment and Development

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter J. Marshall ◽  
Troy M. Houser ◽  
Staci M. Weiss
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
The Body ◽  
Scientific Study ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Evolution Of Development ◽  
Specific Kind ◽  
Individual Organism ◽  
Living Things ◽  
The World ◽  
The Individual

As a domain of study centering on the nature of the body in the functioning of the individual organism, embodiment encompasses a diverse array of topics and questions. One useful organizing framework places embodiment as a bridge construct connecting three standpoints on the body: the form of the body, the body as actively engaged in and with the world, and the body as lived experience. Through connecting these standpoints, the construct of embodiment shows that they are not mutually exclusive: inherent in form is the capacity for engagement, and inherent in engagement is a lived perspective that confers agency and meaning. Here, we employ this framework to underscore the deep connections between embodiment and development. We begin with a discussion of the origins of multicellularity, highlighting how the evolution of bodies was the evolution of development itself. The evolution of the metazoan (animal) body is of particular interest, because most animals possess complex bodies with sensorimotor capacities for perceiving and acting that bring forth a particular sort of embodiment. However, we also emphasize that the thread of embodiment runs through all living things, which share an organizational property of self-determination that endows them with a specific kind of autonomy. This realization moves us away from a Cartesian machine metaphor and instead puts an emphasis on the lived perspective that arises from being embodied. This broad view of embodiment presents opportunities to transcend the boundaries of individual disciplines to create a novel integrative vision for the scientific study of development.

Walking in the Resurrection

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin Lambert
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Shared Experience ◽  
Christian Life ◽  
Christian Community ◽  
Community Of Faith ◽  
The World ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter explores the ways in which resurrection was transformed in the songs and martyr stories of Dutch Anabaptism, with a particular focus on the trial of a clandestine community in which songs circulated in Amsterdam. Drawing on the theology of Menno Simons, Dirk Philips, and David Joris, Anabaptists sang not of the raising of the body but of a spiritual resurrection that took place with the acceptance of baptism. In turn, they redefined the Christian life as a “walk in resurrection.” A shared walk through the world, comprised of ordinary actions such as breaking bread and singing together, also defined the Christian community. Anabaptists’ songs, this chapter thus suggests, reveal the complexity of the relationship between belief and its enactment, and they reshape our understanding of the community of faith, casting it as the product of shared experience.

Written in the Heart

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin Lambert
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Personal Experience ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Individual

This chapter first explores how elements of fifteenth-century devotion were transformed in sixteenth-century Nuremberg. Using a genre of print culture, the illustrated song pamphlet, it argues that devotional culture provides methodological tools with which to engage with belief. One such pamphlet, containing a hymn originally written to accompany the preaching of the Joachimsthal minister Johannes Mathesius, then provides an avenue into the re-conception of belief in resurrection in Lutheran devotional culture. Mathesius’s writings about resurrection and the power of sight and sound reveal how faith in the raising of the dead was understood to be “written in the heart” of the individual. As Mathesius’s encounter with song in the midst of tragedy confirms, the formation of belief was thus understood to be contingent on personal experience. Yet as the spread of that song across Germany confirms, communal singing also forged an understanding of belief as a tie that bound.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document