“A Covenant of Death”

Author(s):  
James P. Byrd

Many southerners celebrated the war’s beginning. Others spoke in somber tones. Opinions flew in all directions after Sumter’s fall, as Americans reflected on what the war would mean. One constant presence, however, was the Bible. It helped Americans to brace for war. As the greatest crisis of their lives came into focus, they clung to the scriptures for comfort and justification. This time was remarkable for the variety of biblical responses to the war. Southern women struggled with their zeal for war, which many believed was inappropriate. If many wanted war, others drew back from the conflict, or at least worried about what the war would do to the nation, regardless of which side God was on. Just as northern preachers were sharpening their exegesis for battle, southerners did the same, as did Mormons, who hurled biblical attacks on both North and South from the West.

2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
James W. Wiley

Gerald Handerson Thayer (1883–1939) was an artist, writer and naturalist who worked in North and South America, Europe and the West Indies. In the Lesser Antilles, Thayer made substantial contributions to the knowledge and conservation of birds in St Vincent and the Grenadines. Thayer observed and collected birds throughout much of St Vincent and on many of the Grenadines from January 1924 through to December 1925. Although he produced a preliminary manuscript containing interesting distributional notes and which is an early record of the region's ornithology, Thayer never published the results of his work in the islands. Some 413 bird and bird egg specimens have survived from his work in St Vincent and the Grenadines and are now housed in the American Museum of Natural History (New York City) and the Museum of Comparative Zoology (Cambridge, Massachusetts). Four hundred and fifty eight specimens of birds and eggs collected by Gerald and his father, Abbott, from other countries are held in museums in the United States.


2021 ◽  
Vol 90 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-140
Author(s):  
David J. Neumann

AbstractSwami Vivekananda was the most influential pioneer of a Yogi Christ, illustrating well over a century ago how the life and teachings of Jesus might be incorporated within a larger Hindu worldview—and then presented back to Western audiences. Appropriation of Jesus, one of the central symbols of the West, might be viewed as the ultimate act of counter-Orientalism. This article begins by providing a brief biography of Vivekananda and the modern Hinduism that nurtured him and that he propagated. He articulated an inclusivist vision of Advaita Vedanta as the most compelling vision of universal religion. Next, the article turns to Vivekananda's views of Christianity, for which he had little affection, and the Bible, which he knew extraordinarily well. The article then systematically explores Vivekananda's engagement with the New Testament, revealing a clear hermeneutical preference for the Gospels, particularly John. Following the lead of biblical scholars, Vivekananda made a distinction between the Christ of the Gospels and the Jesus of history, offering sometimes contradictory conclusions about the historicity of elements associated with Jesus's life. Finally, the article provides a detailed articulation of Vivekananda's Jesus—a figure at once familiar to Christians but, in significant ways, uniquely accommodated to Hindu metaphysics. Vivekananda demonstrated a robust understanding and discriminating use of the Christian Bible that has not been properly recognized. He deployed this knowledge to launch an important and long-lived pattern: an attractive, fleshed out depiction of Jesus of Nazareth, transformed from the Christian savior into a Yogi model of self-realization. Through his efforts, Jesus became an indisputably Indian religious figure, no longer just a Christian one. The Yogi Christ remains a prominent global religious figure familiar to Hindus, Christians, and those of other faiths alike.


ALQALAM ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 79
Author(s):  
MASRUKHIN MUHSIN

The word hermeneutics derives from the Greek verb, hermeneuin. It means to interpret and to translate. Hermeneutics is divided into three kinds: the theory of hermeneutics, the philosophy hermeneutics, and the critical hermenmtics. Hasan Hanfi is known as the first scholar who introduces hermeneutics in the Islamic World through his work dealing with the new method of interpretation. Nashr Hamid Abu-Zaid is another figure who has much studied hermenmtics in the classical interpretation. Ali Harb is a figure who also much involved in discussing the critism of text even though he does not fully concern on literature or art, but on the thoughts. Muslim thinker who has similar view with Ali Harab in seeing that the backwardness of Arab-Islam from the West is caused by the system of thoguht used by Arah-Muslim not able to come out of obstinary and taqlid is Muhammad Syahmr. On the other side, ones who refuse hermeneutics argue that since its heginning, hermeneutics must be studied suspiciously because it is not derived from the Islamic tradition, but from the unbeliever scientific tradition, Jews and Chrtians in which they use it as a method to interpret the Bible. Practically, in interpreting the Qur'an, hermeneutics even strengthens something, namely the hegemony of scularism-liberalism in the Muslim World that Muslims must actually destroy. Keywords: Hermeneutics, Tafsir, al qur'an


2002 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 221-244
Author(s):  

AbstractRecently the Edinburgh-based publishing firm Canongate has brought out the Bible in the form of single books in the King James Version. Each of these volumes is introduced by a writer not necessarily associated with the Christian tradition, thus inviting the readers to approach them as literary works in their own right. For long the Bible came with commentaries written by prominent religious scholars, but now it looks as if it needed an introduction by novelists, pop artists, scientists including and even by some who are outside the Christian tradition to make the once familiar texts now widely neglected in the West come alive again. The purpose of this essay is to look at the following: the positive potential of this Pocket Canon; the role of the interpreter's personal voice within the process of discovering meaning in a narrative; the marketing of the Bible and appropriation of religious themes by secular marketeers; the re-iconization of the Bible though the King James Version; the colonial parallels in the investment, promotion and dissemination of the Bible; and the challenge of personal-voice criticism to biblical studies. Put at its simplest, can this disparate group of essayists rescue the Bible, which is fast losing its grip and importance in the West, and discover fresh significance in it?


2021 ◽  
pp. 119-186
Author(s):  
Ilan Kapoor ◽  
Zahi Zalloua

This chapter pursues further the stakes of a universal politics in a variety of case studies that serve as key global sites of resistance and antagonism, spanning the West and the East, or the global North and South. It considers the ways the diverse phenomena of climate change, refugee crises, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, political Islam, Bolivia under Morales, the European Union, and Covid-19 open up emancipatory spaces when they manage to short-circuit the democratic liberal script, exhorting us to see to what extent the script works against (most of) us. To that end, the revolutionary potential of these events lies in their capacity to shake our postpolitical myopia by inciting us to read politically and dialectically—to read with an eye for capital and political economy, race and gender, and the libidinal economy that subtends their global circulation.


Traditio ◽  
1977 ◽  
Vol 33 ◽  
pp. 65-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
Walter Goffart

The treatiseDe re militariby Flavius Vegetius Renatus was the bible of warfare throughout the Middle Ages — the soldier's equivalent of the Rule of St. Benedict. The surviving manuscripts exceed 140; there were five separate translations into French within the century following 1284, many more into other languages, and nine incunabula. In contrast to Byzantium, where a succession of authors since Urbicius (ca.500) strove to keep military literature up to date, the Latin civilization of the West was content with a single book. Vegetius, who explicitly omitted cavalry from his exposition, became the philosopher-schoolmaster of Western chivalry. Hrabanus Maurus, John of Salisbury, and Egidius Colonna copied large extracts into works of their own, and so did Machiavelli. Vegetius is among the authors whose popularity in the Renaissance more than equalled their medieval fame. The testimonials continued to mount up through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, an epoch that was perhaps the highest point of Vegetius‘ influence, and reached even to the Napoleonic age, when Marshall de Ligne (best remembered for a witticism about the Congress of Vienna) pronounced a memorable encomium: ‘A god, says Vegetius, inspired the legion, and I say that a god inspired Vegetius. It is he who by his seven orders of battle made us understand the warfare of the Ancients and taught the greatest generals of our time to imitate them.’ What other book without literary distinction was as prized in the Age of Enlightenment as it had been by Bede?


2013 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Cultural Relics Conservation Instit

AbstractOn August 19 through 25, 2011, Cultural Relics Conservation Institute of Tibet Autonomous Region and the China Tibetology Research Center made systematic surveys to the three grottoes in Zone I of Chang mo Grottoes. The Grotto 1 in Zone I is a single-chamber statue grotto in Ω-shaped plan, on the west, north and south walls of which clay sculptures and murals are found. Grotto 2 is a multi-chamber grotto, in which remains of clay sculptures and murals are found. Grotto 3 consists of two adjacent single-chamber grottoes, in both of which only murals are found. The discovery of this grotto group has very important reference values to the researches on the developments of the early Buddhism and Buddhist art in Tibet, even the progress of the Tibetan social history in the early Second Propagation of Buddhism. The sculptural format of Vajradhatu Mandala in these grottoes provided precious materials for the researches on the diffusion of Vajradhatu Mandala in Tibet, the development of Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhism and other relevant issues.


Antiquity ◽  
1931 ◽  
Vol 5 (19) ◽  
pp. 351-354
Author(s):  
W. Percy Hedley

The Roman Fort of Borcovicium at Housesteads in Northumberland should need no introduction to anyone interested in archaeology. During the last year it has been brought into great prominence by being presented to the Nation by Mr John Maurice Clayton, and through its close proximity to the portion of Hadrian’s Wall recently threatened by quarrying operations.The fort at Housesteads was one of the earliest to be examined by British antiquaries, but although it has received so much attention its environs have been almost entirely disregarded. On both sides of the Military Way leading out of the west gateway was an extensive civil settlement, and traces of buildings can be seen on the south side of the fort. The hillside sloping to the southward is covered with the remains of early cultivations. These have generally been accepted as of Romano-British age. There are, however, two distinct systems of early cultivation. To the southwest of the fort there is a series of terraces running along the hillside, but on the southeast of the fort there are lynchets running north and south at regular interva up and down the hillside. From the hill to the south of Housesteads it can be clearly seen that where there is terrace cultivation it has been superimposed on the earlier system of lynchets, and this is also shown in air photographs.


1968 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Walzer

Throughout much of the history of political thought in the West, the Bible was at once a constitutional document and a kind of case book, putatively setting limits to speculation as well as to conduct. Theologians and political theorists were forced to be judges interpreting a text or, more often, lawyers defending a particular interpretation before the constituted powers in church and state or before the less authoritative court of opinion. The Bible became, like other such texts, a dissociated collection of precedents, examples and citations, each of which meant what the lawyers and judges said it meant.


1972 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 138 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. R. Haskell

A thick sequence of uppermost Jurassic, Cretaceous and basal Tertiary non-marine sedimentary rocks underlies the Gippsland area of Victoria. The older part of this sequence is extensively exposed in the west of the Gippsland area, but elsewhere it is known dominantly from well intersections. Although several hiates are recognised, palynological data indicate that a comparatively complete Cretaceous section can be compiled from this sequence in the Gippsland area.The uppermost Jurassic to Paleocene rocks can be divided into three units. The oldest unit is uppermost Jurassic and Lower Cretaceous in age. It consists of variably compacted greywackes and lithic sandstones, minor arkoses and interbedded siltstones and mudstones. The overlying early Upper Cretaceous and Paleocene units are distinguishable paleontologically and consist of quartzose sandstones, carbonaceous siltstones and mudstones.There is no indication of marine influence on sedimentation present in the microfossil content of any of the palynotogical preparations from samples taken throughout most of the sequence. Several species of microplankton are common in the oldest unit, but they are indicative of the lacustrine conditions under which the unit was deposited.Minor hydrocarbon shows have been recorded from the oldest unit, but the sandstones are characteristically tight. More significant shows have been reported from the two younger units that contain relatively clean sandstones interbedded with siltstones and mudstones. These units possess the greatest economic potential of all of the pre-Eocene rocks of the Gippsland Basin.The structural framework of the region is composed of separate series of north-easterly and easterly trending faults or monoclines and a south-easterly regional dip. Differential movements of blocks defined by this fault-monocline pattern appears to have resulted in erosion of the more prospective early Upper Cretaceous and Paleocene strata from all but two subrectangular areas respectively immediately north and south of Seaspray.


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