Locating and leaving Babylon: A missional reading of Revelation 17 and 18 in light of ancient and contemporary political contexts

2019 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 112-126
Author(s):  
Dean Flemming
Keyword(s):  
North American ◽  
Civil Religion ◽  
Ongoing Task ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
Economic Exploitation ◽  
Economic Practices ◽  
Missional Communities ◽  
To Come

This article explores a missional reading of Revelation 17 and 18, focusing on the significance of “Babylon” for John’s audience in Roman Asia and for Christian communities today. John uses the symbol of Babylon to shape missional communities, inviting them to reimagine their world. In John’s 1st-century context, Revelation 17 and 18 expose the idolatry, economic exploitation, and dehumanization of the empire. The symbol of Babylon, however, does not lie frozen in a 1st-century past; it continues to speak loudly into contemporary political and economic realities. The contextual reading in this article particularly describes Babylon’s presence within the civil religion, economic practices, arrogance, and violence of the current North American context. The article then asks, What does it mean to “come out” of Babylon (Rev 18:4), both for Christians in John’s world and today? Finally, the article reflects on nine implications that emerge from John’s treatment of Babylon in Revelation 17 and 18 for the ongoing task of missional hermeneutics.

scholarly journals Locating Medieval Armenia at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 77-82
Author(s):  
Heather Badamo
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Religious Culture ◽  
The Self ◽  
Medieval Art ◽  
Global Context ◽  
Metropolitan Museum Of Art ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
Trading Partners ◽  
Art And Culture ◽  
To Come

Spanning 13 centuries, the exhibition “Armenia!” brings together some 140 objects to present the medieval art and culture of the Armenian peoples in a global context. Armenia has often existed at the borders of medieval art in contemporary scholarship, due to its complex history and continuously shifting borders, which undermine basic understandings of empires and polities. This exhibition seeks to “locate” Armenia through the twin themes of religion and trade, documenting the myriad ways in which Armenians employed visual culture to construct images of the self and community. The works on display demonstrate the distinctive qualities of the Armenian artistic and religious culture, while also documenting contact with an ever-shifting and expanding group of neighbors and trading partners. At once complimenting and extending the reach of the exhibition, the catalog provides scholars with a trove of insightful essays and catalog entries that are, characteristically, deeply researched and will serve as a touchstone in the field for decades to come. Together, this exhibition and catalog calls on medievalists to rethink the way we study and teach medieval art, recognizing the inner diversities, interlocking histories, and extraordinary artistic achievements of Christian communities in the east.

Without God

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maurizio Viroli
Keyword(s):  
Civil Religion ◽  
Good Citizen ◽  
Christian Religion ◽  
History Of ◽  
Considerable Impact ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Impact ◽  
New Religion

This chapter considers the impact of Jean-Jacques Rousseau on the history of republican religion. Rousseau was well aware that republics need religion to come to life and endure. He notes that great lawgivers had to place the rules of civil life in God's mouth and that only men with great souls can persuade people that they have been inspired by God and hence can establish enduring laws. At the same time, he charges the Christian religion with inculcating in its followers a servile mentality. Inasmuch as both past and present religions are ill suited for founding a civil morality, Rousseau recommends a new religion, to be instituted and preserved through the force of laws, founded not on dogmas but rather on “sentiments of sociability without which it is impossible to be either a good citizen or a loyal subject.” Rousseau's ideas on civil religion had considerable impact not only in France but also in Italy during the “Jacobin years” (1796–1799), when, in the shadow of French armies, republican governments were formed.

Liberators for Colonial Anáhuac: A Rumination on North American Civil Religions

1999 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-203 ◽  
Author(s):  
Randi Jones Walker
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
North American ◽  
Civil Religion ◽  
American People ◽  
Divine Providence ◽  
George Washington ◽  
Special Instrument ◽  
Independence Movement ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Working Out

Behold here the motives of that mysterious likeness which give merit to a comparison with Jesus in the work the Supreme Author confided to [Hidalgo]: to save the American people, the continent of Anáhuac!So spoke Padre Antonio Jose Martinez in 1832 in praise of Miguel Hidalgo on the tenth anniversary of the independence of the Republic of Mexico. That same year, Francis Gray extolled George Washington, the hero of another independence movement. Washington was the “Special instrument of divine providence for working out our political salvation, the cloud by day and pillar of fire by night which led us out of bondage.” Two new North American nations attempted to create a national identity and a useable mythology, side by side, if independent of each other. In this essay, I present a North American view of what could loosely be called civil religion.

scholarly journals PLANTATIO ECCLESIAE DAN PAROKI MISIONER DALAM ARDAS KEUSKUPAN SURABAYA 2020-2030

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-47
Author(s):  
Petrus Canisius Edi Laksito
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Local Development ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
Vatican Council ◽  
Christian Love ◽  
To Come ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Ideal

Plantatio Ecclesiae is a particular term elaborated in missiology in the first half of the 20th century, and then used by the Vatican Council II in the decree on the mission activity of the Church Ad Gentes (1965) to designate the definition of mission and its goal, as well. From this perspective, it is believed that mission is not merely a question about converting souls and, therefore, bringing them to eternal salvation, but especially a “plantation of the Church” in the lands not yet touched by christian faith. Thus, mission is not only about individual salvation, but particularly about the formation of new christian communities comprised of indigenous people with their own hierarchical leaders, who live their own native values and culture contributing themselves for the local development and the good of their own society, enlightened by christian faith and strengthened by christian love. Being used to determine the ideal of a missionary parish in the Basic Orientation (Arah Dasar) of the Diocese of Surabaya 2020-2030, this term is important to be studied. This study tries to learn how the ideal of a missionary parish, seen from the perspective of plantatio Ecclesiae theology, could be realized by the Catholic Church of the Diocese of Surabaya in the years to come.

“The Hard Hit is Still to Come”: An Intifada Imaginary

2011 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 105-112
Author(s):  
Philip Rizk
Keyword(s):  
Protest Movement ◽  
The Past ◽  
Economic Exploitation ◽  
Long Time ◽  
To Come

On 11 February 2011, Egyptian protestors from across the country forced their long-time president, Hosni Mubarak, out of power. A revolution does not happen in a vacuum. Thus I want to challenge two widespread notions regarding the events in Egypt. First, toppling ar dictator, does not constitute a revolution until political and economic structures are transformed. Thus, I claim that the Egyptian uprising in early 2011is more akin to the Palestinian Intifada than to a revolution – that is, an uprising against an occupation – though in this case a local one. Second, the demonstrations that started 25 January 2011 did not simply emulate the nearby Tunisian protest movement, but came from attempts, especially by workers in the past few years, to demonstrate against economic exploitation and corruption. By focusing on this earlier history I argue that, in Egypt, a revolutionary uprising is still in the making.

Sanctities, Blasphemies and the (Jewish) Nation

2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-216
Author(s):  
Chaim Noy
Keyword(s):  
North American ◽  
Physical Environment ◽  
Civil Religion ◽  
Orthodox Jews ◽  
The Other ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Robert Bellah ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The One ◽  
Modes Of Interaction

In this article I rematerialize discourse that is articulated in the shape of commemorative visitor book entries, in a national-military commemoration site in Jerusalem, Israel. The materiality and communicative affordances of the commemorative visitor book, the physical environment in which it is situated and which grants it meaning, and the modes of interaction and inscription that it affords are examined. Located in a densely symbolic national commemoration site, the impressively looking book does not merely capture visitors' reflections. Instead, it serves as a device that allows participation in a collective-national rite. While seemingly designated as a visitor book, the discursive device functions performatively as a portal or interface between visitors, on the one side, and the nation and the dead and living soldieries, on the other side. Expectedly, the inscriptions that populate the book's pages are instances of iconic discourse (texts with graphic additions of sorts), that embody one of the heightened ideological and experiential moments of "civil religion" (Robert Bellah). They illustrate the resources used by nationalism in establishing sacred contexts and rituals. Also, they illustrate how different discourses of sanctity (and profanity), are juxtaposed on the same (Jewish) space. Specifically, while local Israeli sightseers present their appreciation for and participation in commemoration of the nation-state in terms of "civil religion," most of the international tourists, who are mostly north American Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox Jews, perform their notions of sanctity and sacredness in messianic and primordial terms, which look through or beyond the nation state.

Jurisdiction and Holiness: Reflections on the Coptic-Ethiopian Case

1982 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 245-273 ◽  
Author(s):  
Walter Zander
Keyword(s):  
Small Area ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Legal Issues ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
Christian Churches ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Holy Places ◽  
History Of ◽  
To Come ◽  
Made In

The Coptic-Ethiopian case is the first dispute between Christian Churches over their rights in the Holy Places to come before the Supreme Court of Israel. It concerns only a small area, but the legal issues involved are far-reaching. They deal with the jurisdiction over Holy Sites, and therefore affect potentially all Christian communities which claim rights in the Sanctuaries.The history of the jurisdiction over the Holy Places is dramatic and rich in contradictions. For many centuries control over the Sanctuaries was in the hands of Moslem rulers who decided disputes according to their discretion. In view of the widespread impact of these decisions on the Christian world as a whole, the tendency gradually developed to avoid all changes, and in 1878 the Treaty of Berlin suspended every jurisdiction by its Art. LXII which prescribed “that no alteration can be made in thestatus quoin the Holy Places”.

Washing Away the Sins of Debt: The Nineteenth-Century Eradication of the Debtors' Prison

2013 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 701-724 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gustav Peebles
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Moral Values ◽  
The State ◽  
Economic Practices ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
To Come ◽  
Critical Discourses ◽  
Do So ◽  
Reform Debate

AbstractThis article seeks to come to terms with the extraordinarily swift demise of the debtors' prison in multiple countries during the nineteenth century. While focusing primarily on the reform debate in England, I argue that the debtors' prison quickly came to be seen as a barbaric aberration within the expanding commercial life of the nineteenth century. By turning to a copious pamphletic literature from the era of its demise, I show how pamphleteers and eye-witnesses described the debtors' prison in the idiom of ritual; it was seen as a dangerous sanctuary that radically inverted all capitalistic economic practices and moral values of the world outside its walls. Reformers claimed that, inside these shrines of debt, citizens were ritually guided and transformed from active members of society into “knaves” or “idlers,” or both. As such, the debtors' prison needed to be eradicated. To do so, reformers mobilized at least three critical discourses, all of which sought to mark the debtors' prison as a zone of barbarism that threatened the civility of the state and its citizenry. By focusing on the debtors' prison as a powerful and transformative ritual zone, the article provides a counterintuitive history of this institution that was so crucial to the regulation of credit and debt relations for centuries. In so doing, the article contributes to a broader literature on the spatiality of debt.

scholarly journals After the Tempest: The Post-Holocaust years in the Netherlands and in Greece

HISTOREIN ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Henriette-Rika Benveniste ◽  
Pothiti Hantzaroula
Keyword(s):  
The Netherlands ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
Free Market ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Far Right ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
Economic Exploitation ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Public Sphere

This special issue of Historein offers new documentation and insights in a new area of historical research by contextualising different aspects of Jewish history in the Netherlands and in Greece: efforts to come to terms with sadness and loneliness due to the loss of the family, restitution struggles, disillusionment and hopes, persisting antisemitism, and political constraints. Any effort to better understand those years has to overcome traditional constraints and divisions between “internal” and “external” histories of the Jewish communities. Our issue points in the direction of the transnational approach. The dismantling of narratives that subsumed Jewish victims and their experiences under the general battle against fascism formed the basis for comparative studies that use various axes around which research questions revolve: time as a parameter for understanding the shifts in identities in relation to political and social contexts, the development of welfare politics that emerged as an antidote to the catastrophe, the generational experiences that established new memory frames, and the responses to conflicting memories. We need, at the same time, to remind ourselves that the demise of the “antifascist” narrative that shaped the postwar period was substituted by the “free market” one in European memories, which enabled the articulation of opinions whose expression was not accepted without difficulty in the public sphere. The rise of far-right movements across Europe makes all the more pertinent the comprehension of the economic exploitation and ideological factors that shaped conflicting memories. We hope that the research from the perspective of postwar Jewish experience and its comparative dimension paves the way for the enrichment of the research agenda and will allow us to better understand our contemporary world and those who made it.

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