When Walls Could Talk

2021 ◽  
Vol 71 (2) ◽  
pp. 243-268
Author(s):  
Sarah Richardson
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Public Art ◽  
Religious Art ◽  
Religious Texts ◽  
Visual Texts ◽  
Compelling Argument ◽  
Book Collections

Abstract How can visual texts, closed books, and painted images work together in Buddhist temples to reinforce one another and act upon viewers? The fourteenth-century murals at the Tibetan temple of Shalu integrate pictures with long passages of Tibetan texts and select inscriptions that explain the powers of seeing paintings. The murals combine and mix media—books, paintings, cloth—into expressive wholes that ultimately argue that walls are in fact much more than walls. The paintings find ways to make the temple's book collections more accessible. Here we find a public art effort that weaves together a compelling argument for why religious texts and religious art both “work” for and on their audiences. Shalu was a grandly expanded temple showing off its resources and its connections in a broader cosmopolitan sphere of production and exchange. Its walls were designed to weave media together, finding ways to celebrate and explain larger and newer corporate productions (book projects, larger monasteries). An intentional play of materiality (clay, cloth, book) emphasized by the inscriptions and performed in the pictorial compositions assists in the imaginative act of directly seeing deities, while also playing with the awareness that acts of imagination entail the play of just-like/seeing-as. Since neither clay nor cloth nor word on their own are adequate vessels for representing an enlightened being, here they collaborate with each other and with viewers in the imaginative act, promising that the deity, like the teachings, can be directly experienced.

scholarly journals Charity in Medieval Sufi Islam: Spiritual Dimensions

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (5) ◽  
pp. 279-286
Author(s):  
Khurshid Khan
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Religion And Spirituality ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Religious Texts ◽  
Religious Lives ◽  
Ethical Vision

The Early Chishti Sufi Shaikhs from thirteenth and fourteenth century Delhi made critical interventions in the religious lives of the Muslims in South Asia. They cultivated in their adherents the much-needed ethical vision and sensitivity towards the socially marginalized. Yet hardly any attention is paid to the pedagogy of these Sufis on religion and spirituality. Their discourses on their community are documented in their literary works like malfūzāt. Of late, malfūzāt have been studied as a literary genre for the unique processes of their making. But their didactic contents on Islam and their instructions to Sufi initiates have barely been examined. This lacuna stems on account of the usage of these religious texts as fillers for information lacking in court chronicles. The essay studies the pedagogy of the Early Chishtī Shaikhs and as they related to charity in medieval South Asia. It also examines the mechanisms deployed by them to cultivate a philanthropic vision in Muslims in the praxis of faith.

Religion, Language, and the Human Mind

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Linguistics ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Religious Language ◽  
Basic Knowledge ◽  
Cognitive Resources ◽  
Religious Art ◽  
Religious Texts ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
New Horizons

The book is divided into three Parts, all preceded by a full introductory chapter by the editors that discusses modern scientific approaches to religion and the application of modern linguistics, particularly cognitive linguistics and pragmatics. Part I surveys the development of modern studies of religious language and the diverse disciplinary strands that have emerged. Beginning with descriptive approaches to religious language, and the problem of describing religious concepts across languages, we introduce the turn to cognition in linguistics and also in theology. In new interdisciplinary research it is shown how linguistics, cognitive science and neuroscience work together. The final chapter focuses on the brain’s contrasting capacities, and in particular on its capacity for language and metaphor. Part II continues the topic of metaphor – the natural ability by which humans draw on basic knowledge of the world in order to explore abstractions and intangibles. The chapters of this Part look into metaphors in religious texts, what they may be seeking to express and what cognitive resources they are using. The chapters are written by specialists, all of whom apply conceptual metaphor theory in various ways, covering several major religious traditions–Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam and Judaism. Part III seeks to open up new horizons for cognitive–linguistic research into religion, looking beyond written texts to the ways in which language is integrated with other modalities, including ritual, religious art, and religious electronic media. Along with these domains for investigation the chapters in Part III introduce readers to a range of technical instruments that have been developed within cognitive linguistics and discourse analysis in recent years.

Visualizing Christ Our Redeemer, Man Our Brother

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kymberly N. Pinder
Keyword(s):  
Public Art ◽  
Black People ◽  
Black Churches ◽  
Religious Art ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Black Liberation Theology ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Historical Figures ◽  
Black Public Sphere ◽  
History Of

This book explores the visualization of religious imagery in public art for African Americans in Chicago between 1904 and the present. It examines a number of case studies of black churches whose pastors have consciously nurtured a strong visual culture within their congregation. It features examples of religious art associated with some of Chicago's most historically significant black churches and art in their neighborhoods. It considers how the arts interact with each other in the performance of black belief, explains how empathetic realism structures these interactions for a variety of publics, and situates public art within a larger history of mural histories. It also highlights the centrality of the visual in the formation of Black Liberation Theology and its role alongside gospel music and broadcasted sermons in the black public sphere. Finally, the book discusses various representations of black Christ and other black biblical figures, often imaged alongside black historical figures or portraits of everyday black people from the community.

scholarly journals Antinomic Comprehension of God in Unity of Transcendent and Immanent Principles in the Leading Religious-Philosophical Systems and Art of the Second Half of the І Millennium ВС — the Beginning of a New Era

2020 ◽  
pp. 132-146
Author(s):  
Yaroslava Bondarchuk
Keyword(s):  
Religious Art ◽  
World Culture ◽  
Religious Texts ◽  
New Era ◽  
Concepts Of God ◽  
Religious Worldview ◽  
Spring Equinox ◽  
History Of ◽  
Religious Systems ◽  
First Time

The article aims to trace the antinomic comprehension of God in unity of spiritual transcendent and material immanent principles in the major religious systems of the second half of the 1st millennium BC — the beginning of a new era and the reflection of this process in the art of that time based on analyzing religious texts, theological and philosophical treatises of the main monotheistic and polytheistic religious worldview ideas and ways of their embodiment. The study showed that the universal idea of religious systems (Taoism, Confucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity) of the indicated period is the idea of embodying the highest spiritual Absolut into a natural anthropomorphic form. In most leading religions of the time (except for Judaism) this interpretation of God became the basis for the development of religious art. For the first time, a comparison of concepts of God in the leading religious-philosophical systems of the researched period was made. Such an interpretation of the deity has been shown to be manifested in religious art, which confirms its worldview subordination. It was hypothesized that the antinomic comprehension of God in the unity of transcendent and immanent principles in the leading religious systems formed at the turn of the millennia determined that the dominant zodiacal Pisces constellation, in which the Sun was rising on the day of the spring equinox, was characterized as a sign of the unity of antinomies. This article may be used for further research, for the courses of lectures in the history of world culture.

Checking library collection enables to analyze its composition as exemplified by the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts Research Library

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olga Parkhomenko ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Fine Arts ◽  
Research Library ◽  
Museum Collection ◽  
Library Collection ◽  
State Museum ◽  
Book Collections ◽  
Museum Of Fine Arts

The Library of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts is rich in rare and unique publications, and those of memorial value. The collection checking envisages visual revision and analysis of every book, and during this process the specialists revealed a number of valuable publications for further research. Also all registered publication went through the stage of initial collection specification (e.g., Rumyantsev museum collection, collection of the New Western Arts Museum, memorial libraries, etc). Currently, this information has been being entered into the e-catalog. This will enable to verify special arrays within the Research Library’s collection and simplify investigations into historical and memorial book collections and individual valuable publications.

The Qur'an, Faith and the Impact of the Feminist Interpretative Movement on the Arabic Text and its Legacy

2004 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 170-183
Author(s):  
Hassan al-Shafīe
Keyword(s):  
Arabic Text ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Religious Texts ◽  
Islamic World ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Intellectual Movement ◽  
Qur'anic Interpretation

The present study discusses the cultural and intellectual movement, now on the point of prevalence in the contemporary Islamic world, which adopts the Western ‘hermeneutical method’ and applies it to the Qur'an in particular, and Islamic religious texts in general. The author shows this movement's complete disregard for the established principles of tafsīr, the traditional Arab-Islamic rules of Qur'anic interpretation and the related Prophetic aḥādīth as preserved in the authenticated Sunna. The author argues that the ‘hermeneutical method’ starts from the preconceived notion that the Islamic heritage is male-centred and biased against women, both theoretically and practically, and, on this basis, proposes that the time has come for an intellectual break with this premise and the re-interpretation of the Qur'an and faith in the light of Western Christian hermeneutics. This paper proposes that this method fails to take historical events and the civilisational Islamic experience into account.

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