John and other Gospels

Author(s):  
Harold W. Attridge

Early Christians found many ways to proclaim their ‘good news’, prominently including the kind of popular biography represented by the Gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke. The relationship of the Fourth Gospel to those texts has long intrigued readers. The patristic claim that John supplemented the Synoptics gave way in the twentieth century to the opinion that John was independent. Opinion has recently shifted. While the compositional process complicates the picture, the Fourth Evangelist probably did draw on the Synoptics. He did so creatively, shaping his account to make distinctive theological and Christological points. He also drew from a broad tradition of Jesus’ teaching, evident in such texts as the Gospel of Thomas. Yet the Gospel also works creatively with elements of Synoptic teaching. The Fourth Gospel subsequently attained a wide acceptance and numerous echoes in the second century, including the unknown Gospel on Papyrus Egerton 2.

2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-259
Author(s):  
Joseph Acquisto

This essay examines a polemic between two Baudelaire critics of the 1930s, Jean Cassou and Benjamin Fondane, which centered on the relationship of poetry to progressive politics and metaphysics. I argue that a return to Baudelaire's poetry can yield insight into what seems like an impasse in Cassou and Fondane. Baudelaire provides the possibility of realigning metaphysics and politics so that poetry has the potential to become the space in which we can begin to think the two of them together, as opposed to seeing them in unresolvable tension. Or rather, the tension that Baudelaire animates between the two allows us a new way of thinking about the role of esthetics in moments of political crisis. We can in some ways see Baudelaire as responding, avant la lettre, to two of his early twentieth-century readers who correctly perceived his work as the space that breathes a new urgency into the questions of how modern poetry relates to the world from which it springs and in which it intervenes.


2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-66
Author(s):  
Christine Adams

The relationship of the French king and royal mistress, complementary but unequal, embodied the Gallic singularity; the royal mistress exercised a civilizing manner and the soft power of women on the king’s behalf. However, both her contemporaries and nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historians were uncomfortable with the mistress’s political power. Furthermore, paradoxical attitudes about French womanhood have led to analyses of her role that are often contradictory. Royal mistresses have simultaneously been celebrated for their civilizing effect in the realm of culture, chided for their frivolous expenditures on clothing and jewelry, and excoriated for their dangerous meddling in politics. Their increasing visibility in the political realm by the eighteenth century led many to blame Louis XV’s mistresses—along with Queen Marie-Antoinette, who exercised a similar influence over her husband, Louis XVI—for the degradation and eventual fall of the monarchy. This article reexamines the historiography of the royal mistress.


Author(s):  
Alison James

This book studies the documentary impulse that plays a central role in twentieth-century French literature. Focusing on nonfiction narratives, it analyzes the use of documents—pieces of textual or visual evidence incorporated into the literary work to relay and interrogate reality. It traces the emergence of an enduring concern with factual reference in texts that engage with current events or the historical archive. Writers idealize the document as a fragment of raw reality, but also reveal its constructed and mediated nature and integrate it as a voice within a larger composition. This ambivalent documentary imagination, present in works by Gide, Breton, Aragon, Yourcenar, Duras, and Modiano (among others), shapes the relationship of literature to visual media, testimonial discourses, and self-representation. Far from turning away from realism in the twentieth century, French literature often turns to the document as a site of both modernist experiment and engagement with the world.


Author(s):  
Thomas Barfield

This chapter looks at the first decade of the twenty-first century in Afghanistan. As the twentieth century ended, ever-larger numbers of Afghans had become caught up in political and military struggles from which they had been previously isolated. Whether as fighters, refugees, or just victims of war and disorder, few escaped the turmoil that roiled the country. Ethnic and regional groups in Afghanistan had become politically and militarily empowered, reversing the process of centralization that had been imposed by Amir Abdur Rahman. Yet when the international community set about creating the new Afghan constitution, it did not start afresh but attempted to restore the institutions of old. This brought to the surface long-simmering disputes about the relationship of the national government to local communities, the legitimacy of governments and rulers, and the relationship that Afghanistan should have with the outside world.


Author(s):  
Joseph Lawson

This chapter considers the history of alcohol in Nuosu Yi society in relation to the formal codification of a Yi heritage of alcohol-related culture, and the question of alcohol in Yi health. The relationship of newly invented tradition to older practice and thought is often obscure in studies that lack historical perspective. Examining the historical narratives associated with the exposition of a Yi heritage of alcohol, this study reveals that those narratives are woven from a tapestry of threads with histories of their own, and they therefore shape present-day heritage work. After a brief overview of ideas about alcohol in contemporary discourses on Yi heritage, the chapter then analyses historical texts to argue that many of these ideas are remarkably similar to ones that emerged in the context of nineteenth and early twentieth century contact between Yi and Han communities.


Author(s):  
Jean-Luc Marion ◽  
Dan Arbib ◽  
David Tracy

This book provides an introduction to the life and work of philosopher and theologian Jean-Luc Marion through a set of interviews, discussing his educational career, his work on Descartes, his phenomenology, his theology, his philosophical methodology, and his views on the future of Catholicism in France. It presents all of his major ideas in fluid dialogue and conversational tone with his former student Dan Arbib. At the same time, it provides an account of French intellectual life, especially in regard to philosophy and theology, in the late twentieth century. Marion also reflects on the relationship of philosophy to history, theology, aesthetics, and literature. The dialogues include discussions of all of his books and present their central arguments in easily comprehensible fashion. They show the overall unity of his work in terms of its focus on giveness, the gift, and the event.


Author(s):  
Frances Young

This chapter focuses on the relationship of the Word of God inscribed in Scripture and Word of God incarnate in Christ, both being expressions of God’s revelation and constitutive of the divine oikonomia, and both involving God’s self-accommodation to creaturely limitations. The development of the Christological meaning of Scripture as a whole is traced from second-century debates about the continuing validity of the Jewish Scriptures to the holistic reading of Scripture in the light of the Rule of Faith, and from allegorical reading to the search for Scripture’s dianoia. Thus it becomes clear that God’s entire purpose and strategy is revealed in Scripture’s testimony to Christ.


Author(s):  
Adam Evans

Since the Treaty and Acts of Union in 1707, Scotland has returned MPs to Westminster. Whilst dwarfed, at least demographically by its partner in that Union, England, Scotland has, on a number of occasions, punched above its weight at the Centre—most notably at either end of the twentieth century when Liberalism and then Labour dominated Scottish politics. This chapter examines the relationship of Scotland with the UK Parliament. It begins by placing this relationship in its historical context, before then turning to an audit of contemporary Scottish influence and representation at Westminster, post-devolution. This chapter does this by breaking down two of the main and interconnected dimensions of Scottish representation at Westminster: (1) Scottish parliamentarians and the Westminster party system; and (2) institutional representation within Parliament. This latter category includes both Scottish-specific institutional mechanisms, such as the Scottish Affairs Committee and the Scottish Grand Committee, and the broader Westminster apparatus that can be leveraged for influence, such as parliamentary question times.


Author(s):  
Nicholas Till

This chapter looks at the relationship of music and architecture, both historically and with regard to the “spatial” and “acoustic” turns in recent cultural thinking. The author suggests that during the twentieth century sound art offered a distinctive challenge to the formalizing tendencies of both modernist music and modernist architecture. Architecture is instead understood in its multi-sensory materiality, while the sonic is understood as an intrinsic property of architectural experience. Similarly, space is understood as an intrinsic property of music, while much recent musical practice is shown to have recognized the inextricable association of sound and space. Examining the work of sound artists alongside the spatially conceived music of composers, this chapter considers the spatial and acoustic turns of the later twentieth century as a means for thinking about the postmodern sonic as a field that challenges the old modernist aspiration of both music and architecture to aesthetic autonomy.


1997 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 429-460 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roxanne L. Euben

The steadily increasing appeal of Islamic fundamentalist ideas has often been characterized as a premodern, antimodern or, more recently, as a postmodern phenomenon. To explore the relationship of Islamist political thought to modernity, and the usefulness of the terminology of “modernity” to situate and understand it, this article explores two comparisons. The first is a comparison across time, and involves the juxtaposition of a prominent nineteenth century Islamic “modernist” and the critique of modernity by an influential twentieth century Islamic fundamentalist thinker. The second is a comparison across cultures, and involves the juxtaposition of this Islamic fundamentalist critique and many Western theorists similarly critical of “the modern condition.” These comparisons suggest that Islamic fundamentalist political thought is part of a transcultural and multivocal reassessment of the value and definition of “modernity.” Such reassessments should be understood in terms of a dialectical relationship to “modernity,” one that entails not the negation of modernity but an attempt to simultaneously abolish, transcend, preserve and transform it.


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