From Letter to Spirit

Author(s):  
John C. Cavadini

This chapter offers an overview of patristic theory and practice of both figurative and literal exegesis, as well as of the relationship between them. It argues that for the fathers of the Church, the literal sense of Scripture was not a free-standing independent sense, but was intrinsically related to, and ordered towards, the figurative or spiritual sense(s). Since that is true, the literal sense of Scripture cannot be fully appreciated apart from an understanding of the spiritual or figurative sense(s), and, since this aspect of patristic exegesis is the one perhaps most foreign to contemporary exegetical sensibilities, the chapter spends the majority of its time demonstrating from patristic texts what is meant by the figurative or spiritual sense of Scripture. This then paves the way for a treatment of the literal sense and its relationship to the figurative sense as it has been presented in the earlier part of the chapter.

2009 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 117-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. J. W. Evans

ABSTRACTIn the vibrant current debate about European empires and their ideologies, one basic dichotomy still tends to be overlooked: that between, on the one hand, the plurality of modern empires of colonisation, commerce and settlement; and, on the other, the traditional claim to single and undividedimperiumso long embodied in the Roman Empire and its successor, the Holy Roman Empire, or (First) Reich. This paper examines the tensions between the two, as manifested in the theory and practice of Habsburg imperial rule. The Habsburgs, emperors of the Reich almost continuously through its last centuries, sought to build their own power-base within and beyond it. The first half of the paper examines how by the eighteenth century their ‘Monarchy’, subsisting alongside the Reich, dealt with the associated legacy of empire. After the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806 the Habsburgs could pursue a free-standing Austrian ‘imperialism’, but it rested on an uneasy combination of old and new elements and was correspondingly vulnerable to challenge from abroad and censure at home. The second half of the article charts this aspect of Habsburg government through an age of international imperialism and its contribution to the collapse of the Dual Monarchy in 1918.


2019 ◽  
Vol 32 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 361-392 ◽  
Author(s):  
Norig Neveu

Abstract In the Emirate of Transjordan, the interwar period was marked by the emergence of the Melkite Church. Following the Eastern rite and represented by Arab priests, this church appeared to be an asset from a missionary perspective as Arab nationalism was spreading in the Middle East. New parishes and schools were opened. A new Melkite archeparchy was created in the Emirate in 1932. The archbishop, Paul Salman, strengthened the foundation of the church and became a key partner of the government. This article tackles the relationship between Arabisation, nationalisation and territorialisation. It aims to highlight the way the Melkite Church embodied the adaptation strategy of the Congregation for the Oriental Churches in Transjordan. The clergy of this national church was established by mobilising regional and international networks. By considering these clerics as go-between experts, this article aims to decrypt a complex process of territorialisation and transnationalisation of the Melkite Church.


2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 340-360
Author(s):  
Carina da Silva Santos ◽  
Ingrid Finger

The present study aimed to investigate the relationship between bilingualism and numerical cognition, more specifically, the way English-Portuguese bilinguals solve simple mathematical problems when these are presented in different formats (digits, English, and Portuguese) and whether their language history background has any effect on such behavior. The main results suggest that bilinguals are faster and more accurate in solving mathematical problems presented in digit format and in solving those problems presented in the written format when the language of the stimuli was the one in which they learned basic arithmetic. Also, the participants’ language background experience did not have any significance in their task performance.


2017 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 103-134
Author(s):  
Niki Papageorgiou

The occupation of government power by a leftist party in Greece (in January 2015) has formed a new political landscape and given rise to new political expectations after a long period of administration by the so-called system parties. The left-wing party, SYRIZA, was voted by Greek citizens as a new political force that could bring new policies, as it had the ambition to solve the country’s economic problems, bring social justice and tackle the severe humanitarian crisis caused by the recent long economic crisis. Regarding the religious field, the fixed aim of leftist parties was the separation between the State and the Church, which would lead to the full independence of the State from any religious or ecclesiastical influence, as well as the seizure of church assets by the State, the obligation for the clergy’s payroll to be covered by the Church, and similar demands regarding many other issues that shape the relationship between the State and the Church in Greece. This paper investigates especially the relationship between SYRIZA and the Church of Greece during the one-year period of the left-wing government, through the official discourse and political practices of the governing leftist party. For this purpose, the left-wing government’s political practices and stance towards the “religious issue,” as they are expressed by the party’s official press medium, the Avgi newspaper, are analyzed.


2020 ◽  
pp. 135-145
Author(s):  
O. A. Balabeikina ◽  
N. M. Mezhevich ◽  
A. A. Iankovskaia

The relevance of any material offered to the scientific and expert community depends on many factors. Objectively, the presence of this or that issue in the center of public attention has a positive effect on the actualization of this or that article. However, there is an obvious danger. Academic approaches that accidentally find themselves in resonance with global trends can fall victim to political conjuncture. Relevance in this case can fall victim to the political moment. Moreover, this or that topic, being in the center of public discussion, negatively affects the academic understanding of the problem. All this fully relates to the question of the relationship between the state and the church in modern Europe and Russia.A few words about global trends. Their essence boils down to the growing confrontation between supporters of new ideological approaches and traditionalists, among whom are many adherents.The relationship between religion and the state testifies to the fact that states and societies have not yet learned to draw an effective line between their interests and those of adherents. This fact presupposes careful state and public participation in the affairs of the church. However, acknowledging this circumstance is not enough. The state must clearly know what, where and how is happening in the church sphere of the life of society in cases where church affairs can affect public and state security.It is also known that almost all the leading churches, to a greater or lesser extent, provide official reporting to the state. However, working with this reporting, its scientific analysis is not always representative.Objective. The presented article is aimed at a partial solution of the problem of increasing the effectiveness of academic research of the church` activities. Moreover, it is made based on official church statistics.The author’s position is the following. States and societies have no right to let go of this vital sphere of life. The functions of the state, in this case, are at least controlling. The ineffective execution of its functions by the state can be revealed in many countries of the world. The situation in France is nothing more than a reference case of a problem that, to one degree or another, exists in most of the countries of the world, which are distinguished by ethnic and confessional heterogeneity.


Author(s):  
Lorna Ann Moore

This chapter discusses the one-to-one interactions between participants in the video performance In[bodi]mental. It presents personal accounts of users' body swapping experiences through real-time Head Mounted Display systems. These inter-corporeal encounters are articulated through the lens of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and his work on the “Mirror Stage” (1977), phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1968) and his writings on the Chiasm, and anthropologist Rane Willerslev's (2007) research on mimesis. The study of these positions provides new insights into the blurred relationship between the corporeal Self and the digital Other. The way the material body is stretched across these divisions highlights the way digital media is the catalyst in this in[bodied] experience of be[ing] in the world. The purpose of this chapter is to challenge the relationship between the body and video performance to appreciate the impact digital media has on one's perception of a single bounded self and how two selves become an inter-corporeal experience shared through the technology.


1985 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 782-790 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Koletsos

Introduction. This paper contains a new proof of the Church-Rosser theorem for the typed λ-calculus, which also applies to systems with infinitely long terms.The ordinary proof of the Church-Rosser theorem for the general untyped calculus goes as follows (see [1]). If is the binary reduction relation between the terms we define the one-step reduction 1 in such a way that the following lemma is valid.Lemma. For all terms a and b we have: ab if and only if there is a sequence a = a0, …, an = b, n ≥ 0, such that aiiai + 1for 0 ≤ i < n.We then prove the Church-Rosser property for the relation 1 by induction on the length of the reductions. And by combining this result with the above lemma we obtain the Church-Rosser theorem for the relation .Unfortunately when we come to infinite terms the above lemma is not valid anymore. The difficulty is that, assuming the hypothesis for the infinitely many premises of the infinite rule, there may not exist an upper bound for the lengths n of the sequences ai = a0, …, an = bi (i < α); cf. the infinite rule (iv) in §6.A completely new idea in the case of the typed λ-calculus would be to exploit the type structure in the way Tait did in order to prove the normalization theorem. In this we succeed by defining a suitable predicate, the monovaluedness predicate, defined over the type structure and having some nice properties. The key notion permitting to define this predicate is the notion of I-form term (see below). This Tait-type proof has a merit, namely that it can be extended immediately to the case of infinite terms.


1976 ◽  
Vol 66 ◽  
pp. 87-105 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jasper Griffin

The object of this paper is a reconsideration of the relationship in the Augustan poets between experience and convention, between individual life and inherited forms of expression. The problem, which haunts the Sonnets of Shakespeare and the poems of the Romantics no less than Horace and Propertius, has notoriously been answered in very different ways at different times. Scholars like Zielinski and Wili, for example, created romantic stories about Lydia and Cinara, and worked out Horace's feelings for them, the chronology of the affairs, and the way it all ended. In revulsion from these excesses, some influential modern writers go to an opposite extreme; they distinguish on the one hand ‘Greek’ or ‘Hellenistic’ elements, which are ‘unreal’ or ‘imaginary’, from ‘Roman’ ones which are ‘real’. Thus, to give a few examples at once, Professor G. Williams, in his important book, writes that ‘Horace's erotic poems are set in a world totally removed from the Augustan State’, while Professor Nisbet and Miss Hubbard, in their indispensable Commentary, say ‘The “love interest” of Horace's Odes is almost entirely Hellenistic’, and, of Odes I. 5, ‘Pyrrha herself is the wayward beauty of fiction, totally unlike the compliant scorta of Horace's own temporary affairs’. The argument here will be that this view is over-schematic and makes a distinction false, in this form, to the poets and to their society. It will, I think, prove possible to argue the point without falling into sentimentality or self-indulgence. The aim is not to reconstruct the vie passionelle of the poet, but to discover the setting and the tone in which he means his poems to be read.


2018 ◽  
Vol 72 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Tyler

This article considers inclusion through the lens of embodied ethics. It does so by connecting feminist writing on recognition, ethics and embodiment to recent examples of political activism as instances of recognition-based organizing. In making these connections, the article draws on insights from Judith Butler’s recent writing on the ethics and politics of assembly in order to rethink how inclusion might be understood and practised. The article has three interrelated aims: (i) to emphasize the importance of a critical reconsideration of the ethics and politics of inclusion given – on the one hand, its positioning as an organizational ‘good’, and on the other, the conditions attached to it; (ii) to develop a critique of inclusion, drawing on insights from recent feminist thinking on relational ethics; and (iii) to connect this theoretical critique of inclusion, reconsidered here through the lens of embodied ethics, to assembly as a form of feminist activism. Each of these aims underpins the theoretical and empirical discussion developed in the article, specifically its focus on the relationship between embodied ethics, the interplay between theory and practice, and a politics of assembly as the basis for a critical reconsideration of inclusion.


2018 ◽  
Vol 74 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Leon Geel ◽  
Jaco Beyers

The apparatus theory is used to challenge the interpretation of religion and also to determine whether religion is a factor to contend with in modern society. Religion could be the element that keeps the city intact or could be the one element that is busy ruining our understanding of reality and the way this interacts with society in the urban environment. Paradigms determine our relationships. In this case, the apparatus theory would be a more precise way of describing not only our relationship towards the city but also the way in which we try to perceive our relationship with religion and the urban conditions we live in. This article gives theoretical background to the interpretation and understanding of the relationship between various entities within the city. The apparatus of the city creates space for religion to function as a binding form. Religion could bind different cultures, diverse backgrounds and create space for growth.


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