The Risk-Taking Character of Wilderness Reading

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Belden C. Lane
Keyword(s):  
Karl Marx ◽  
British Museum ◽  
Zagros Mountains ◽  
History Of Capitalism ◽  
Good Friday ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
The Gift ◽  
History Of ◽  
Eldridge Cleaver ◽  
Prison Camp

Spiritual reading can be dangerous. I’m not talking about the devotional pabulum you find in most religious bookstores, but the truly risky stuff—from Hāfez and Eckhart to Toni Morrison and Oscar Romero. This is especially true of the spiritual “classics,” says theologian David Tracy. They confront us with the disturbing notion that “something else might be the case.” They haunt us with fundamental questions, overthrowing our previous ways of viewing the world. Reading a potentially dangerous book in a landscape perceived to be dangerous can be doubly hazardous. The place heightens the vulnerability occasioned by the text. Challenging books lose their bite when they’re read comfortably at home in a favorite armchair. Their riskiness increases, however, when read by firelight in a forest glade, ten miles from the nearest road. The place where you encounter a book indelibly affects the way you receive it. Claus Westermann read the Psalms in a Russian prison camp, discovering patterns that changed his life as well as his approach to biblical scholarship. Eldridge Cleaver read Thomas Merton in Folsom Prison. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn read Dostoyevsky in a Soviet cancer ward. Karl Marx read the history of capitalism in the elegance of the British Museum. Potentially revolutionary changes occur when people read explosive texts in unsettling places. The stories of the saints are filled with instances of this. Isaac of Nineveh’s world was turned upside down as he read the Scriptures in the desert solitude of the Zagros Mountains in sixth-century Persia. He allegedly made himself blind through his constant pondering of the tear-stained pages. Near the end of his life, Francis of Assisi read the story of Christ’s passion not simply from the pages of the Gospels, but from the huge, split rocks atop Mt. La Verna. He said these cracks had appeared on Good Friday when the stones on Calvary were also rent. He experienced their truth in the opening of wounds in his body through the gift of the stigmata. The mountainous terrain and his body’s interaction with it became active participants in his reading of the text.

scholarly journals The Bancroft Collection

1935 ◽  
Vol 9 (6) ◽  
pp. 93-96
Author(s):  
Arthur H. Cole
Keyword(s):  
British Museum ◽  
The South ◽  
Complete Collection ◽  
The Gift ◽  
History Of ◽  
South Sea ◽  
History Of The South

The Baker Library is particularly happy to announce the gift by Mrs. Hugh Bancroft of Boston, of an exceptionally rich and complete collection on the South Sea Bubble. The collection contains books and pamphlets, with many manuscripts, broadsides, Acts of Parliament, and other fugitive items relating to this strange episode. Except, perhaps, for the material scattered on the shelves of the British Museum, no collection rivals this which was assembled by the late Hugh Bancroft, in its fullness for a history of the South Sea speculation.

The products of a medieval tile kiln at Bawsey, King's Lynn

1955 ◽  
Vol 35 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 162-181 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Eames
Keyword(s):  
Smooth Surface ◽  
British Museum ◽  
Local Tradition ◽  
The Gift ◽  
History Of

In 1843 Daniel Gurney, Esq., F.S.A., discovered the site of a medieval kiln at Bawsey, near King's Lynn in Norfolk. It is known that local tradition had preserved the memory of such a kiln, because the Rev. J. H. Bloom, writing a history of Castle Acre, which was published in 1843 before he knew of the discovery of the site, remarked that tradition said that the priory of Castle Acre possessed a kiln at Bawsey near Lynn. John Gough Nichols, writing two years later in 1845, describes the discovery as follows: ‘Near Lynn in Norfolk was a manufactory of tiles which occur at various places in that neighbourhood. They are of the ordinary form but small, about 4½ inches square, and generally embossed in relief, no second material being inserted to restore a smooth surface.… A considerable quantity of these tiles, together with the kiln in which they were made, has been found at Bawsey near Lynn, and many of them have been placed over the fireplace of the inhabited room at Rising Castle, to which they were presented by Daniel Gurney, Esq., F.S.A. of North Runcton.’ The tiles at Castle Rising are still there, others recovered at the same time are in King's Lynn Museum, and still others found their way to the British Museum in 1855 as the gift of Sir Henry Ellis.

From primitive accumulation to entangled accumulation: Decentring Marxist Theory of capitalist expansion

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 146-164
Author(s):  
Guilherme Leite Gonçalves ◽  
Sérgio Costa
Keyword(s):  
Capital Accumulation ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
Continuous Process ◽  
Sharing Economy ◽  
Marxist Theory ◽  
Primitive Accumulation ◽  
History Of Capitalism ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
History Of ◽  
Care Economy

During the last few decades, the concept of primitive accumulation ( ursprüngliche Akkumulation) introduced by Karl Marx and expanded by Rosa Luxemburg has been revived and improved. Accordingly, scholars have used this framework not to characterize a past moment in the history of capitalism, but to grasp the continuous process of coupling and uncoupling geographical and social spheres in the capital accumulation in different fields: financialization, the care economy, green grabbing, the sharing economy, real estate bubbles, data mining, etc. Despite the quality and productivity of these debates, they are still focused on authors and phenomena observed in the Global North, ignoring a long tradition of similar discussions developed especially in Latin America. The article seeks to decentre these debates by taking seriously into account approaches which address primitive accumulation from the perspective of (post)colonial and (post)slave societies. It coins the concept entangled accumulation to emphasize the interdependencies between practices of exploitation and expropriation, wage and slave labour, state power and illegal violence, and capitalist and non-capitalist economies, which have shaped capital accumulation throughout history.

Vanguard of the Revolution

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. James McAdams
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
North Korea ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
Modern World ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Revolution

This book is a sweeping history of one of the most significant political institutions of the modern world. The communist party was a revolutionary idea long before its supporters came to power. The book argues that the rise and fall of communism can be understood only by taking into account the origins and evolution of this compelling idea. It shows how the leaders of parties in countries as diverse as the Soviet Union, China, Germany, Yugoslavia, Cuba, and North Korea adapted the original ideas of revolutionaries like Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin to profoundly different social and cultural settings. The book is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand world communism and the captivating idea that gave it life.

Grand Illusion

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabriela Cruz
Keyword(s):  
Karl Marx ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Richard Wagner ◽  
Giuseppe Verdi ◽  
Theodor Adorno ◽  
Tristan Und Isolde ◽  
Giacomo Meyerbeer ◽  
History Of ◽  
Grand Opera ◽  
Philosophical Understanding

Grand Illusion is a new history of grand opera as an art of illusion facilitated by the introduction of gaslight illumination at the Académie Royale de Musique (Paris) in the 1820s. It contends that gas lighting and the technologies of illusion used in the theater after the 1820s spurred the development of a new lyrical art, attentive to the conditions of darkness and radiance, and inspired by the model of phantasmagoria. Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno have used the concept of phantasmagoria to arrive at a philosophical understanding of modern life as total spectacle, in which the appearance of things supplants their reality. The book argues that the Académie became an early laboratory for this historical process of commodification, for the transformation of opera into an audio-visual spectacle delivering dream-like images. It shows that this transformation began in Paris and then defined opera after the mid-century. In the hands of Giacomo Meyerbeer (Robert le diable, L’Africaine), Richard Wagner (Der fliegende Holländer, Lohengrin, and Tristan und Isolde), and Giuseppe Verdi (Aida), opera became an expanded form of phantasmagoria.

From Stonehenge to Samarkand

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Fagan
Keyword(s):  
Gustave Flaubert ◽  
Central Africa ◽  
British Museum ◽  
Holy Land ◽  
Cruise Ship ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Ancient Civilization ◽  
Machu Picchu ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Silk Road

Ever since Roman tourists scratched graffiti on the pyramids and temples of Egypt over two thousand years ago, people have traveled far and wide seeking the great wonders of antiquity. In From Stonehenge to Samarkand, noted archaeologist and popular writer Brian Fagan offers an engaging historical account of our enduring love of ancient architecture--the irresistible impulse to visit strange lands in search of lost cities and forgotten monuments. Here is a marvelous history of archaeological tourism, with generous excerpts from the writings of the tourists themselves. Readers will find Herodotus describing the construction of Babylon; Edward Gibbon receiving inspiration for his seminal work while wandering through the ruins of the Forum in Rome; Gustave Flaubert watching the sunrise from atop the Pyramid of Cheops. We visit Easter Island with Pierre Loti, Machu Picchu with Hiram Bingham, Central Africa with David Livingstone. Fagan describes the early antiquarians, consumed with a passionate and omnivorous curiosity, pondering the mysteries of Stonehenge, but he also considers some of the less reputable figures, such as the Earl of Elgin, who sold large parts of the Parthenon to the British Museum. Finally, he discusses the changing nature of archaeological tourism, from the early romantic wanderings of the solitary figure, communing with the departed spirits of Druids or Mayans, to the cruise-ship excursions of modern times, where masses of tourists are hustled through ruins, barely aware of their surroundings. From the Holy Land to the Silk Road, the Yucatán to Angkor Wat, Fagan follows in the footsteps of the great archaeological travelers to retrieve their first written impressions in a book that will delight anyone fascinated with the landmarks of ancient civilization.

The Dilemma between Aligned Expectations and Diversity in Innovation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timur Ergen
Keyword(s):  
New Technologies ◽  
Historical Case ◽  
History Of Capitalism ◽  
Synthetic Fuel ◽  
The Us ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
Technology Policies ◽  
Lock In ◽  
Innovation Processes

This chapter brings together arguments from economics, sociology, and political economy to show that innovation processes are characterized by a dilemma between the advantages of aligned expectations—including greater coordination and investment—and those of diversity, including superior openness to new technological possibilities. To illustrate the argument, the chapter discusses a historical case involving one of the largest coordinated peace-time attempts to hasten technological innovation in the history of capitalism, namely the US energy technology policies of the 1970s and 1980s. Close examination of the commercialization of photovoltaics and synthetic fuel initiatives illustrates both sides of the dilemma between shared versus diverse expectations in innovation: coordination but possible premature lock-in on the one hand, and openness but possible stagnation on the other. The chapter shows that even the exploration and interpretation of new technologies may be as much a product of focused investment as of trial-and-error search.

Capitalisms

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Tenth Century ◽  
History Of Capitalism ◽  
Commodity Production ◽  
Production And Distribution ◽  
History Of ◽  
National Boundaries ◽  
Small Producers ◽  
Circulation Of Knowledge ◽  
Industrial Revolutions

Conventional accounts often conceive the genesis of capitalism in Europe within the conjunctures of agricultural, commercial, and industrial revolutions. Challenging this widely believed cliché, this volume traces the history of capitalism across civilizations, tenth century onwards, and argues that capitalism was neither a monolithic entity nor exclusively an economic phenomenon confined to the West. Looking at regions as diverse as England, South America, Russia, North Africa, and East, South, West, and Southeast Asia, the book explores the plurality of developments across time and space. The chapters analyse aspects such as historical conjunctures, commodity production and distribution, circulation of knowledge and personnel, and the role of mercantile capital, small producers, and force—all the while stressing the necessity to think beyond present-day national boundaries. The book argues that the multiple histories of capitalism can be better understood from a trans-regional, intercontinental, and interconnected perspective.

The Bible in the German Empire

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joerg Rieger
Keyword(s):  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Friedrich Schleiermacher ◽  
German Empire ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
Cultural Climate ◽  
Colonial Empire ◽  
History Of Religions ◽  
History Of ◽  
Intellectual Production

Even though Germany’s colonial empire lasted merely three decades, from 1884 to 1915, German colonial fantasies shaped intellectual production from the late eighteenth century onward. This cultural climate shapes a great variety of engagements with the Bible, from the beginnings of liberal theology with Friedrich Schleiermacher to missionary efforts and the rather abstract academic productions of biblical scholarship in the late nineteenth century, including the prominent history of religions school. At the same time, there are also efforts to resist colonial tendencies, sometimes in the work of the same authors who otherwise perpetuate the colonial spirit.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document