The Language of the Poor: Bible Stories as a Critical Narrative of the Present

Images ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 82-108
Author(s):  
Nissim Gal
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Critical Reflection ◽  
Visual Interpretation ◽  
Contemporary Culture ◽  
Biblical Narrative ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Bible Stories ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Opening Up

AbstractThe series of photographs called Bible Stories (2003-2006), made by the photographer Adi Nes, offers a visual interpretation of the biblical narrative as a source for a critical reflection on contemporary culture. The Bible Stories series uncovers the aesthetic, ethical and social codes of the current visual culture. Nes processes the biblical text and rereads it via photography. The renewed appearance of the bible stories connects contemporary photorealism with the tradition of biblical illustration. The contemporary appearance and interpretative recomposition of the biblical episodes invert the hierarchies exemplified in some of the stories, and restructure the apparent gender relations, opening up a way to societal Others in the present, and conscripting the transcendent status of the text in order to criticize contemporary culture through the creative act.

Ancient Israel's Neighbors

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian R. Doak
Keyword(s):  
Nearest Neighbors ◽  
Biblical Narrative ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Social ◽  
Family Level ◽  
The Face ◽  
Social Turmoil

The purpose of this book is to tell the story of Israel’s nearest neighbors—not only discovering what the Bible has to say about them but also what we can know from archaeology, ancient inscriptions, and other sources. The Bible itself presents these neighbors in nuanced and conflicting ways; sometimes they are friends or even related to Israel at a family level, and sometimes they are enemies, spoken of as though they must die in order for Israel to live. We are left wondering how the biblical portrayal might have affected our thinking about these people as historical groups, on their own terms. How would an Aramaean have described her own religion? How would an Edomite have described conflict with Israel? This book explores both the biblical portrayal of the smaller groups surrounding Israel and what people can know about these groups through their own literature, archaeology, and other sources. By uncovering the identity of the Philistines as settlers along the coast at the same time that early Israel carved out their place in the land, for example, one can better understand the social turmoil and political maneuvering that lies just beneath the surface of the biblical narrative, and can see more clearly just how the authors of the Bible saw themselves in the face of others.

Global Thefts of Biblical Narrative

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerald West
Keyword(s):  
Third World ◽  
Biblical Narrative ◽  
Biblical Story ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Narratives ◽  
African Experience ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Family Resemblances ◽  
African Perspective ◽  
The Subject

This chapter takes its starting point from the African experience, across a range of African contexts, of Africa as both the subject and object of biblical narrative. When the Bible came to Africa, it came with well-established colonial metanarratives, constructed in part from biblical narratives. These colonial metanarratives were in turn partly reconstructed by the engagement with African others, from both a European and an African perspective along two diverging trajectories, with biblical narrative making a contribution to both. This chapter focuses on the capacity of biblical narrative, biblical story, to be both incorporated into “local” metanarratives and to shape these metanarratives. The contexts that are the focus of this chapter are largely “third world” contexts, across which there are significant family resemblances and important contextual differences.

Sustenance and Survival in Biblical Narrative

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer L. Koosed
Keyword(s):  
Religious Identity ◽  
Food Production ◽  
Biblical Narrative ◽  
Adam And Eve ◽  
Early Judaism ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Ancient Israel ◽  
Class Status ◽  
Cultural Code ◽  
Shape Characterization

Food is a comprehensive cultural code. In ancient Israel and early Judaism, food production and preparation structured lives; what one did in the process was determined by gender and class status and sometimes even marked by ethnic and religious identity. Food also serves to structure narrative, shape characterization, and add layers of symbolic signification to story. In the Bible, the drama of the first few chapters revolves around proper versus improper eating, and the final book portrays God as a lamb sacrificed for the Passover meal. Between picking and tasting the forbidden fruit, and slaughtering and eating God, a whole host of food-related plots, characters, and images proliferate, many of which revolve around the most important of foodstuffs: bread. This chapter explores the centrality of bread in the story of Adam and Eve, the book of Ruth, and the gospels of Jesus.

scholarly journals Autonomia świata a podmiotowość człowieka w ekoteologii

2010 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-131
Author(s):  
Jarosław Horowski
Keyword(s):  
Modern World ◽  
Ecological Problem ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Contemporary Culture ◽  
Inherent Value ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Teleological Argument ◽  
Christian Worldview ◽  
The World ◽  
Human World

One of the most difficult problems, which is to be solved by contemporary culture, is the ecological problem. It concerns the culture because the hedonistic and consumerist mentality of man plays an important part in it. Biocentrism states that the ecological problem results from traditional Western attitudes to the non-human world based on the belief that humans are the central and most significant entities in the universe. Biocentrism puts forward a teleological argument for the protection of the environment. It indicates that non-human species have inherent value as well and each organism has a purpose and a reason for being, which should be respected. Biocentrism states that the anthropocentric attitude to the non-human world results from the Christian worldview based on the Bible where it is written that God gives man dominion over all creatures. The author analyses the main issues of the Catholic concept of the relationship between human beings and other creatures. He indicates that ecotheology respects the inherent value of non-human creatures because, as the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the modern world Gaudium et spes says: “all things are endowed with their own stability, truth, goodness, proper laws and order”, but maintains that the purpose of the world is connected with its relationship to God. The author considers also what is the human subjectivity in behaving towards the environment and what is the dependence between the autonomy of the world and the subjectivity of man in ecotheology. In the end, the author comes to the conclusion that according to ecotheology the ecological problem results from the broken relationship between the human and God and in consequence it the broken relationship between the world and God.

scholarly journals The Power of the In-Between: Intermediality as a Tool for Aesthetic Analysis and Critical Reflection

10.16993/baq ◽  
2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Critical Reflection ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Individual Case ◽  
Media History ◽  
Cultural Objects ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Media Objects ◽  
Theatre Studies ◽  
Methodological Approaches ◽  
The Aesthetic

The Power of the In-Between: Intermediality as a Tool for Aesthetic Analysis and Critical Reflection gathers fourteen individual case studies where intermedial issues—issues concerning that which takes place in between media—are explored in relation to a range of different cultural objects and contexts, different methodological approaches, and different disciplinary perspectives. The cases investigate the intermediality of such manifold objects and phenomena as contemporary installation art, twentieth-century geography books, renaissance sculpture, media theory, and public architecture of the 1970s. They also bring together scholars from the disciplines of art history, comparative literature, theatre studies, musicology, and the history of ideas.Starting out from an inclusive understanding of intermediality as “relations between media conventionally perceived as different,” each author specifies and investigates “intermediality” in their own particular case; that is, each examines how it is inflected by particular objects, methods, and research questions. “Intermediality” thus serves both as a concept employed to cover an inclusive range of cultural objects, cultural contexts, methodological approaches, and so on, and as a concept to be modelled out by the particular cases it is brought to bear on. Rather than merely applying a predefined concept, the objectives are experimental. The authors explore the concept of intermediality as a malleable tool of research.This volume further makes a point of transgressing the divide between media history and semiotically and/or aesthetically oriented intermedial studies. The former concerns the specificity of media technologies and media interrelations in socially, politically, and epistemologically defined space and time, and the latter targets formal considerations of media objects and its various meaning-making elements. These two conventionally separated fields of research are integrated in order to produce a richer understanding of the analytical and historical, as well as the aesthetic and technological, conditions and possibilities of intermedial phenomena.

scholarly journals Decoding the Visual Characteristics of Chinese Painting Strokes-A Study on Gao Gu You Si Stroke

2021 ◽  
Vol 236 ◽  
pp. 05093
Author(s):  
Xue Hu ◽  
Eakachat Joneurairatana ◽  
Sone Simatrang
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Le Corbusier ◽  
Visual Design ◽  
Chinese Painting ◽  
Cultural Characteristics ◽  
Local Characteristics ◽  
Visual Characteristics ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The One ◽  
Aesthetic Characteristics

The architect Le Corbusier once said this theory: Design has local characteristics and universal characteristics. Local characteristics are greatly influenced by culture. The strokes are the one essence of Chinese painting that characteristics of the strokes are unique to Chinese visual culture. Among Chinese painting strokes, Eighteen Strokes are the typical representative of the aesthetics of Chinese visual culture. However, the current research on the cultural characteristics of Eighteen Strokes is insufficient. The objective of this article is taking Xie He’s Six Canons as the theory to decode the content of the aesthetic characteristics of the Gao Gu You Si Stroke (one of the Eighteen Strokes), then to get the visual cultural characteristics of Chinese painting strokes and the fundamental perspective characteristics of the inheritance visual cultural. Based on this, this article will use the Content Analysis Approach to conduct research, by decoding the aesthetic content of the Chinese painting strokes to construct the personality and characteristics required by Chinese visual design.

scholarly journals Aesthetization of the christian ethical ideal in o. wilde's fairy tale «The Happy Prince»

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (22) ◽  
pp. 11-16
Author(s):  
Vitaliia Aleksenko ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Ancient Philosophy ◽  
Christian Doctrine ◽  
Dead Bird ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Christian Love ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Precious Stones

The paper explores the problem of the relationship between the ideas of aesthetics and the Christian doctrine of active love in the famous tale written by O. Wilde. The research which emphasizes the Christian basis of the author's outlook became the methodological basis of the present study on the background of a detailed analysis of various assessments of the writer's position, interpreted as an immoral aesthete and as a supporter of socialist ideas or a recipient of ideas of ancient philosophy of spiritual beauty. The study proves this in detail, analyzing the plot and figurative solutions of the fairy tale «Happy Prince», taking into account the traditional Christian symbols. Thus, the image of the Prince-Statue, decorated with gold and precious stones, is interpreted as a symbol of Christ, who gives his splendor and power to save the poor. It is also reminiscent of the words of Christ, who tells a young rich man who seeks perfection to sell his wealth and give money to the poor. The very values of the earthly world, gold and precious stones, luxurious things made of them, are transparently interpreted in an ironically reduced tone. The confirmation of the fact that the aestheticization of being yields to the hidden spiritual greatness of Christian love and self-sacrifice is also that that the values of the earthly world, gold and precious stones are transparently interpreted in an ironic tone in the fairy tale. The swallow, being the ancient symbol of the Renaissance, this bird was lured by the perishable beauty of idols and tombs of Egypt, the biblical symbol of captivity. The swallow finds its purpose in the service of the Prince, scattering his precious clothes to the poor. And here the ethical criterion turns out to be higher than the aesthetic one. They are not rewarded on the Earth: the bird dies of the cold, and the remains of an unpresentable statue of the prince are demolished, the decisive word to belong to the professor of aesthetics. However, the angel of God brings the most precious things he has found in this city to the heavenly palaces of the Lord: the tin heart of the Prince, torn by grief, and a dead bird. By analyzing the writer's ideological system with implicit implications, Wilde's position is quite obvious: despite his apparent admiration for the aesthetics of beauty, the writer rejects ultimately the doctrine of aesthetics and exalts Christian values, setting out his concept in the style of a parable.

The Artist as Reader of the Bible. Visual Exegesis and the Adoration of the Magi

2005 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 337-373 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin O'Kane
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
Biblical Narrative ◽  
Biblical Story ◽  
Image Viewer ◽  
The Bible ◽  
History Of ◽  
Entire History ◽  
Visual Exegesis ◽  
Textual Meaning

AbstractThe article explores the processes at work in a painting's engagement of its viewer in biblical subject matter. It accentuates the role of the artist as an active reader of the Bible and not merely an illustrator of biblical scenes, the dynamic that occurs in the text-reader process as paradigmatic for the image-viewer relationship and the important role of the developing tradition that felt the need to change or rewrite the biblical story. The processes are explored in terms of hermeneutics and exegesis: hermeneutics defined as 'the interweaving of language and life within the horizon of the text and within the horizons of traditions and the modern reader' (Gadamer) and exegesis as 'the dialectic between textual meaning and the reader's existence' (Berdini). Applied to the visualization of biblical subject matter, the approaches of Gadamer and Berdini illumine the key role given to the viewer in the visual hermeneutical process. The biblical story of the adoration of the Magi (Matt. 2: 1-12), the first public and universal seeing of Christ and one of the most frequently depicted themes in the entire history of biblical art, is used to illustrate their approach. The emphasis in the biblical narrative on revealing the Christ child to the reader parallels a key concept in Gadamer's hermeneutical aesthetics, namely Darstellung, the way in which a painting facilitates its subject matter in coming forth, in becoming an existential event in the life of the viewer.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document