The Justified Body: Hauerwas, Luther and the Christian Life

2017 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-78
Author(s):  
Justin Nickel
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Sacramental Theology ◽  
Christian Life ◽  
Stanley Hauerwas ◽  
The One ◽  
God's Grace ◽  
Ethical Significance ◽  
The Way

Stanley Hauerwas and others argue that Luther’s understanding of justification denies the theological and ethical significance of the body. Indeed, the inner, spiritual person is the one who experiences God’s grace in the gospel, while the outer, physical (read: bodily) person continues to live under law and therefore coercion and condemnation. While not denying that Luther can be so read, I argue that there is another side of Luther, one that recognizes the body’s importance for Christian life. I make this argument through a close reading of Luther’s reflections on Adam and Eve’s Fall in his Lectures on Genesis (1545) and the sacramental theology in ‘Against the Heavenly Prophets’. For this Luther, disconnection from our bodies is not a sign of justification but rather the sin from which justification saves us. Accordingly, justification results in a return to embodied creatureliness as the way we receive and live our justification.

Meditation in the Classical Daoist Tradition

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harold D. Roth
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Cultivation Practices ◽  
Teachers And Students ◽  
The One ◽  
The Way

The classical Daoist textual corpus, while often treated as abstract philosophy, emerged from a tradition of teachers and students that was primarily based on a common set of meditative techniques, and goals. These techniques emphasized proper posture (aligning the body and keeping it still), breath cultivation (concentrating, patterning, guiding, relaxing and expanding the breath), the use of attention (focusing on the one or on the center), as well as a variety of apophatic training regimes designed to restrict or eliminate desires, emotions, thoughts, knowledge and sense perceptions and reveal a deeper reality known as the Way, believed to underlie these faculties. With time, a tradition emerged for viewing these self-cultivation practices as particularly beneficial for rulership, connecting the ruler to a correlative web of cosmic energies.

Be[ing] You

2015 ◽  
pp. 18-32
Author(s):  
Lorna Ann Moore
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
The Body ◽  
Mirror Stage ◽  
Head Mounted Display ◽  
Personal Accounts ◽  
The One ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Way ◽  
Video Performance

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.

On the transmodality of signs and their interpretants: Evidence from Peirce’s MS 599, Reason’s Rules

Semiotica ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 (228) ◽  
pp. 223-235
Author(s):  
Winfried Nöth
Keyword(s):  
Media Studies ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
The State ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Communicative Process ◽  
External Sign ◽  
The One ◽  
The Way

AbstractThe paper begins with a survey of the state of the art in multimodal research, an international trend in applied semiotics, linguistics, and media studies, and goes on to compare its approach to verbal and nonverbal signs to Charles S. Peirce’s approach to signs and their classification. The author introduces the concept of transmodality to characterize the way in which Peirce’s classification of signs reflects the modes of multimodality research and argues that Peirce’s classification of the signs takes modes and modalities in two different respects into consideration, (1) from the perspective of the sign and (2) from the one of its interpretant. While current research in multimodality has its focus on the (external) sign in a communicative process, Peirce considers additionally the multimodality of the interpretants, i.e., the mental icons and indexical scenarios evoked in the interpreters’ minds. The paper illustrates and comments on the Peircean method of studying the multi and transmodality of signs in an analysis of Peirce’s close reading of Luke 19:30 in MS 599, Reason’s Rules, of c. 1902. As a sign, this text is “monomodal” insofar as it consists of printed words only. The study shows in which respects the interpretants of this text evince trans and multimodality.

scholarly journals The Enforcement Approach to Coercion

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott A. Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Costs And Benefits ◽  
Physical Force ◽  
Philosophical Literature ◽  
The Social ◽  
State Authority ◽  
The One ◽  
The Right ◽  
Ethical Significance ◽  
The Way

This essay differentiates two approaches to understanding the concept of coercion, and argues for the relative merits of the one currently out of fashion. The approach currently dominant in the philosophical literature treats threats as essential to coercion, and understands coercion in terms of the way threats alter the costs and benefits of an agent’s actions; I call this the “pressure” approach. It has largely superseded the “enforcement approach,” which focuses on the powers and actions of the coercer rather than the perspective of the coercee. The enforcement approach identifies coercion with certain uses of the kinds of powers that agents need to accumulate and wield in order to be able to make significant, credible threats. Though there is considerable overlap extensionally in the instances of coercion recognized by the two approaches, the enforcement approach encompasses some uses of power to coerce that do not involve threats (in particular some direct uses of physical force). It also circumscribes which threats should be counted as coercive, though notably it provides a picture of coercion that is non-moralized in its essentials. While there may be specific purposes for which a pressure account is to be preferred, I argue that the enforcement approach better describes how coercion works, and elucidates factors that are often tacitly assumed by pressure accounts. It also is more useful for explaining the social and political significance of coercion, and why coercion is thought to have the implications commonly associated with it. In particular, I argue that it helps us understand why uses of coercion are in general a matter of ethical significance, why state authority depends on commanding a monopoly on the right to use coercion, and why being coerced may reasonably provide one a defense against being held responsible for actions one is coerced into taking.

scholarly journals Power & Surveillant Gaze in Howard Barker’s The Gaoler’s Ache

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 239
Author(s):  
Ramin Farhadi ◽  
Mohammad Amin Mozaheb
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Historical Approach ◽  
Conventional View ◽  
Foucauldian Analysis ◽  
The Way

One of the goals of Howard Barker’s Theatre of Catastrophe is to challenge conventional view of historical events and writing of history. Barker’s historical approach is to first identify the repressive power institutions and their destructive effects on the lives of characters, then take up an uncompromising stance against the discourse of authority that tries to construct history according to its ends and attitudes. The Gaoler’s Ache (1998) is a play by which Barker represents the post-Revolutionary France and the exercise of disciplinary mechanism of power in a society that by means of surveillance and domination over the body, the revolutionaries cast off the monarchy and make the imprisoned queen an abject, an object of gaze and disgrace. Yet the abject queen by expressing her sexuality openly attempts to subvert the patriarchal and authoritarian society of the revolutionary State. In this respect the researchers, by using Foucauldian analysis and close reading, explore the way in which Barker makes use of the two notions of surveillance and abjection coined by the French thinkers Foucault and Kristeva respectively to stage how under the pressure of history and its constitutive discourses modes of resistance such as sexual self-making are anticipated. 

Menno Simons

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scot Mcknight
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Sacramental Theology ◽  
Infant Baptism ◽  
Life Threatening ◽  
Love Of God ◽  
Institutional Church ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Way

This chapter addresses the Anabaptist theology of the sacraments of Menno Simons. The way the Anabaptists viewed the sacraments took considerable courage because it could be life-threatening and lead to their martyrdom. Nevertheless, Simons advocated personal conversion and regeneration versus simply participating in the institutional church, believers’ baptism versus infant baptism, and all believers receiving both the bread and wine at Eucharist versus only clergy receiving the wine. Moreover, he maintained that baptism “accomplished nothing in sacramental terms” but was rather an act of obedience to Jesus’s command and example. Eucharist in his view did not involve any “re-sacrificing” of Christ, nor did the bread and wine undergo transubstantiation into the Body and Blood of Christ—rather, it was an expression of the love of God for the church. Thus the sacramental theology of Menno Simons and the Anabaptists could essentially be deemed non-sacramental.

CHURCHLAND, KANDEL AND DOOYEWEERD ON THE REDUCIBILITY OF MIND STATES

2002 ◽  
Vol 67 (2) ◽  
pp. 148-172 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerrit Glas
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Neuroscience ◽  
Conceptual Analysis ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
Short Introduction ◽  
Brain Functioning ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Eric Kandel ◽  
The Way

This article is devoted to the conceptual analysis of two texts of leading scholars in cognitive neuroscience and its philosophy, Patricia Churchland and Eric Kandel. After a short introduction about the notion of reduction, I give a detailed account of the way both scientists view the relationship between theories about brain functioning on the one hand and consciousness and psychopathology, respectively, on the other hand. The analysis not only reveals underlying philosophical mind/brain conceptions and their inner tensions, but also the conceptual relevance of distinctions that are fundamental in the work of Dooyeweerd, such as the distinction between modes and entities, between law and subject and between subject function and object function. After a brief clarification of the way these distinctions function in Dooyeweerd’s theory of the body as an ‘enkaptic structural whole’, I try to explain how the conceptual framework, developed here, could be applied to brain functioning and leads to greater clarity in neuroscientific theorizing.

The Dark Ages and Twentieth Century Africa: A Comparison in Churchmanship

1955 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 127-141
Author(s):  
W. V. Stone
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Christian Life ◽  
Dark Ages ◽  
African Churches ◽  
African Student ◽  
The One ◽  
The Way

Bishop Stephen Neill, in his Survey of the Training of the Ministry in Africa, writes as follows: ‘I could not but feel profound sympathy with the African student who remarked: “It seems to me that missionaries are much too hard in their judgments on the African Churches. Did you never have a period of struggle in your own Churches? ” Indeed we did. In that moment I suddenly saw that, for the African Churches in their contemporary struggle, the most important period is the one that ordinarily we never teach them in detail, the Dark Ages.… They wrestle with precisely the same difficulties and are called to find anew the way out of the twilight of the coexistence of the old and new into a more genuinely Christian life and social order. ’

scholarly journals Сharms and spells from a dislocation in the oral tradition of the Middle Irtysh region

2019 ◽  
pp. 26-32
Author(s):  
V. A. Moskvina
Keyword(s):  
Functional Groups ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
Structural Elements ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The One ◽  
The Way

The article deals with the spells of one functional-thematic group recorded in the Middle Irtysh region. The features of existence of these spells in the regional tradition of the Middle Irtysh region and versification of their plots are re- vealed. The prevalence of spells in cause of a wrench in the two Northern districts of Omsk region is caused by the settle- ment of Belarusians in these places in the late XIX – early XX centuries. This suggests that the place of the exodus tra- dition of the spells from a wrench is in Belarus. The analysis of the plots of these spells confirms this assumption. The method of examining the Siberian plots is based on the systematization of structural elements of plots proposed by T. A. Agapkina and A. L. Toporkov which researchers call episodes. The article compares the episodes of the second Mersebourg spell in Belarusian spells with Siberian texts. The comparison shows that the language of this spells being subjected to Russification. On the one hand, this leads to the loss of some motives and formulas, i.e. the violation of the integrity of the plot, on the other hand, the rhythm of the text is enhanced, the rhyme appears. These processes open the way to the penetration of verbal components from other functional groups into the considered spells. As the result, one can observe the extension of ideas that this disease is not necessarily associated with the violation of integrity of the body.

scholarly journals Travelling Huts and Invading Spaceships: Marianne Heske, Tiril Schrøder, and Norwegian Romantic Landscapes

Romantik ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 51
Author(s):  
Sigrun Åsebø
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
The Body ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Hybrid Space ◽  
Hybrid Spaces ◽  
Contemporary Context ◽  
The Way ◽  
Contemporary Artists

The article discusses the art of the contemporary artists Marianne Heske and Tiril Schrøder, their quotations of romantic landscape, and the way this has been defined in art history. Most readings of Heske and Schrøder place them firmly in a contemporary context. By exploring the reference often made between the two artists and the concept of ‘landscape’ in art history, the article highlights how many readings, despite insisting on deconstruction in Heske and Schrøder’s art, still situate their art firmly in a narrative where landscape figures as a genre, where meaning is inherent, and where the artist serves as the visionary mind that sets the whole play off. Through a close reading of Prosjekt Gjerdeløa [Project Gjerdeløa] in relation to ideas of nationality and site as fixed, and to romantic constructions of the painter/scientist as a masculine structure, the article concludes that Heske and Schrøder’s art can be characterized as deconstructive and hybrid spaces. By inscribing meaning and value to hybrid space, their art represents a ‘view from elsewhere’ (de Lauretis), a view that can open doors to new conceptualisations of identity and the body.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document