Paul the Letter Writer

Author(s):  
Laura Dingeldein

This essay focuses on the social functions of Paul’s letter writing activities, with the purpose of helping to situate such activities within the landscape of ancient Mediterranean epistolography and religion. After briefly identifying major areas of interest in recent research on Paul’s letter writing activities, the author examines the ways in which Paul’s epistolary practices advanced his goals in social positioning, community building, and virtue cultivation among Christ recruits. Letters were understood within classical antiquity to facilitate conversations among friends, reveal a writer’s character, and provide clear and concise instruction on a given subject. Letter writing also often contributed to the social capital of a letter’s author, insofar as letter writing displayed skills in literacy and textual production. Each of these epistolary functions would have advanced Paul’s goals regarding social positioning, community building, and moral development, thus making letters the ideal written medium for Paul to use in his apostolic activities.

Author(s):  
Thorsten Fögen

The chapter explores reflections on the practice of letter-writing, with equal attention to instructional handbooks (esp. Demetrius’ Περὶ ἑρμηνείας‎, Iulius Victor’s Rhetorica, Pseudo-Demetrius’ Τύποι ἐπιστολικοί‎, Pseudo-Libanius’ Ἐπιστολιμαῖοι χαρακτῆρες‎, and Erasmus of Rotterdam’s De conscribendis epistolis) and the meta-generic statements that letter-writers routinely embed in their correspondence (with a special focus on Cicero, Ovid, Seneca, and Pliny the Younger). In both types of sources, what one might call the social dimension of style registers as a primary concern: in order for the letter to fulfil its purpose, namely to generate a special bond between sender and recipient, the chosen idiolect has to be ‘appropriate’ (πρέπον‎/aptum) to the interpersonal relationship and its specific circumstances and exigencies. Shared stylistic values and the willingness of the letter-writer to adjust his character to that of the recipient generate a sense of community between the correspondents.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tong Zhou ◽  
Xintao Liu ◽  
Zhen Qian ◽  
Haoxuan Chen ◽  
Fei Tao

The social function of areas of interest (AOIs) is crucial to the identification of urban functional zoning and land use classification, which has been a hot topic in various fields such as urban planning and smart city fields. Most existing studies on urban functional zoning and land use classification either largely rely on low-frequency remote sensing images, which are constrained to the block level due to their spatial scale limitation, or suffer from low accuracy and high uncertainty when using dynamic data, such as social media and traffic data. This paper proposes an hour-day-spectrum (HDS) approach for generating six types of distribution waveforms of taxi pick-up and drop-off points which serve as interpretation indicators of the social functions of AOIs. To achieve this goal, we first performed fine-grained cleaning of the drop-off points to eliminate the spatial errors caused by taxi drivers. Next, buffer and spatial clustering were integrated to explore the associations between travel behavior and AOIs. Third, the identification of AOI types was made by using the standard HDS method combined with the k-nearest neighbor (KNN) algorithm. Finally, some matching tests were carried out by similarity indexes of a standard HDS and sample HDS, i.e., the Gaussian kernel function and Pearson coefficient, to ensure matching accuracy. The experiment was conducted in the Chongchuan and Gangzha Districts, Nantong, Jiangsu Province, China. By training 50 AOI samples, six types of standard HDS of residential districts, schools, hospitals, and shopping malls were obtained. Then, 108 AOI samples were tested, and the overall accuracy was found to be 90.74%. This approach generates value-added services of the taxi trajectory and provides a continuous update and fine-grained supplementary method for the identification of land use types. In addition, the approach is object-oriented and based on AOIs, and can be combined with image interpretation and other methods to improve the identification effect.


Author(s):  
Youssef A. Haddad

This chapter examines the social functions of speaker-oriented attitude datives in Levantine Arabic. It analyzes these datives as perspectivizers used by a speaker to instruct her hearer to view her as a form of authority in relation to him, to the content of her utterance, and to the activity they are both involved in. The nature of this authority depends on the sociocultural, situational, and co-textual context, including the speaker’s and hearer’s shared values and beliefs, their respective identities, and the social acts employed in interaction. The chapter analyzes specific instances of speaker-oriented attitude datives as used in different types of social acts (e.g., commands, complaints) and in different types of settings (e.g., family talk, gossip). It also examines how these datives interact with facework, politeness, and rapport management.


This volume provides the first comprehensive overview of the extant Greek and Latin letter collections of late antiquity (ca. 300-600 C.E.). Bringing together an international team of historians, classicists, and scholars of religion, it illustrates how letter collections advertised an image of the letter writer and introduces the social and textual histories of each collection. Nearly every chapter focuses on the letter collection of a different late ancient author—from the famous (or even infamous) to the obscure—and investigates its particular issues of content, arrangement, and publication context. On the whole, the volume reveals how late antique letter collections operated as a discrete literary genre with its own conventions, transmission processes, and self-presentational agendas while offering new approaches to interpret both larger letter collections and the individual letters contained within them. Each chapter contributes to a broad argument that scholars should read letter collections as they do representatives of other late antique literary genres, as single texts made up of individual components, with larger thematic and literary characteristics that are as important as those of their component parts.


Author(s):  
Ruqaya Saeed Khalkhal

The darkness that Europe lived in the shadow of the Church obscured the light that was radiating in other parts, and even put forward the idea of democracy by birth, especially that it emerged from the tent of Greek civilization did not mature in later centuries, especially after the clergy and ideological orientation for Protestants and Catholics at the crossroads Political life, but when the Renaissance emerged and the intellectual movement began to interact both at the level of science and politics, the Europeans in democracy found refuge to get rid of the tyranny of the church, and the fruits of the application of democracy began to appear on the surface of most Western societies, which were at the forefront to be doubtful forms of governece.        Democracy, both in theory and in practice, did not always reflect Western political realities, and even since the Greek proposition, it has not lived up to the idealism that was expected to ensure continuity. Even if there is a perception of the success of the democratic process in Western societies, but it was repulsed unable to apply in Islamic societies, because of the social contradiction added to the nature of the ruling regimes, and it is neither scientific nor realistic to convey perceptions or applications that do not conflict only with our civilized reality The political realization created by certain historical circumstances, and then disguises the different reality that produced them for the purpose of resonance in the ideal application.


Author(s):  
Shannon Lucky ◽  
Dinesh Rathi

Social media technologies have the potential to be powerful knowledge sharing and community building tools for both corporate and non-profit interests. This pilot study explores the social media presence of a group of forty-six Alberta-based non-profit organizations (NPOs) in this information rich space. In this paper we look at the pattern of presence of NPOs using social media and relationships with staffing structures.Les médias sociaux ont la capacité d’être de puissants outils de partage de la connaissance et de rassemblement communautaire pour les organisations à but lucratif et sans but lucratif. Cette étude pilote explore la présence dans les médias sociaux d’un groupe de quarante-six organisations sans but lucratif (OSBL) albertaines dans cet environnement riche en information. La communication portera sur les modèles de présence des OSBL dans les médias sociaux et les liens avec les structures organisationnelles.


2020 ◽  
pp. 129-148
Author(s):  
Halyna Маtsyuk

The article is devoted to the formation of a linguistic interpretation of the interaction of language and culture of the Polish-Ukrainian border territories. The material for the analysis includes nomic systems of Ukrainian and Polish languages, which are considered as a cultural product of interpersonal and interethnic communication and an element of the language system, as well as invariant scientific theory created in the works of Polish onomastics (according to key theoretical concepts, tradition of analysis, and continuity in linguistic knowledge). The analysis performed in the article allows us to single out the linguistic indicators of the interaction of language and culture typical for the subject field of sociolinguistics. These are connections and concepts: language-territory, language-social strata, language-gender, language-ethnicity, social functions of the Polish language, and non-standardized spelling systems. Linguistic indicators reveal the peculiar mechanisms of the border in the historical memory and collective consciousness, marking the role of languages in these areas as a factor of space and cultural marker and bringing us closer to understanding the social relations of native speakers in the fifteenth-nineteenth centuries.


2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maryam Babaei Aghbolagh ◽  
Farzad Sattari Ardabili
Keyword(s):  

Author(s):  
Hallie M. Franks

In the Greek Classical period, the symposium—the social gathering at which male citizens gathered to drink wine and engage in conversation—was held in a room called the andron. From couches set up around the perimeter of the andron, symposiasts looked inward to the room’s center, which often was decorated with a pebble mosaic floor. These mosaics provided visual treats for the guests, presenting them with images of mythological scenes, exotic flora, dangerous beasts, hunting parties, or the specter of Dionysos, the god of wine, riding in his chariot or on the back of a panther. This book takes as its subject these mosaics and the context of their viewing. Relying on discourses in the sociology and anthropology of space, it argues that the andron’s mosaic imagery actively contributed to a complex, metaphorical experience of the symposium. In combination with the ritualized circling of the wine cup from couch to couch around the room and the physiological reaction to wine, the images of mosaic floors called to mind other images, spaces, or experiences, and, in doing so, prompted drinkers to reimagine the symposium as another kind of event—a nautical voyage, a journey to a foreign land, the circling heavens or a choral dance, or the luxury of an abundant past. Such spatial metaphors helped to forge the intimate bonds of friendship that are the ideal result of the symposium and that make up the political and social fabric of the Greek polis.


Author(s):  
Didier Fassin

If punishment is not what we say it is, if it is not justified by the reasons we invoke, if it facilitates repeat offenses instead of preventing them, if it punishes in excess of the seriousness of the act, if it sanctions according to the status of the offender rather than to the gravity of the offense, if it targets social groups defined beforehand as punishable, and if it contributes to producing and reproducing disparities, then does it not itself precisely undermine the social order? And must we not start to rethink punishment, not only in the ideal language of philosophy and law but also in the uncomfortable reality of social inequality and political violence?


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