Beelzebul Against Satan

Author(s):  
Giovanni B. Bazzana

This chapter is focused on the analysis of an extremely puzzling Gospel pericope. A careful redaction-critical examination of the texts recording the “Beelzebul accusation” shows that these Gospel materials preserve a much more complex and challenging representation of the dynamics of possession. In particular, the pericope describes, by employing a theological political idiom, the diversity and conflict that characterize the “spirit” world. In such a context a medium can find a way to cope with the traumatic and empowering experience of the Other that is at the root of possession and, in so doing, to cease being a “hostage” but rather a true “host.” The chapter's redaction-critical analysis reveals that the earliest form of this pericope represented the performative and dialogical nature of “emergent” possession. However, the immediate developments of the oral and textual tradition already began to re-center the episode christologically and to cast it within a polemical frame.

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 18
Author(s):  
Kym Maclaren

“To consent to love or be loved,” said Merleau-Ponty, “is to consent also to influence someone else, to decide to a certain extent on behalf of the other.” This essay explicates that idea through a meditation on intimacy. I propose, first, that, on Merleau-Ponty’s account, we are always transgressing into each other’s experience, whether we are strangers or familiars; I call this “ontological intimacy.” Concrete experiences of intimacy are based upon this ontological intimacy, and can take place at two levels: (1) at-this-moment (such that we can experience intimacy even with strangers, by sharing a momentary but extra-ordinary mutual recognition) and (2) in shared interpersonal institutions, or habitual, enduring, and co-enacted visions of who we are, how to live, and what matters. Through particular examples of dynamics within these layers of intimacy (drawing upon work by Berne and by Russon), I claim that we are always, inevitably, imposing an “unfreedom” upon our intimate others. Freedom, then, can only develop from within and by virtue of this “unfreedom.” Thus, what distinguishes empowering or emancipating relationships from oppressive ones is not the removal of transgressive normative social forces; it is rather the particular character of those transgressive forces. Some transgressions upon others’ experience—some forms of “unfreedom”—will tend to promote freedom; others will tend to hinder it. This amounts to a call for promoting agency and freedom not only through critical analysis of public institutions, practices and discourses, but also through critical insight into and transformation of our most private and intimate relationships.


Author(s):  
Markus D. Dubber

The first part of Dual Penal State investigated various ways in which criminal law doctrine and scholarship (or “science”) have failed to address the challenge of legitimating penal power in a modern liberal democratic state. This, second, part explores an alternative approach to criminal law discourse that puts the legitimacy challenge of modern penal law front and center: critical analysis of criminal law in a dual penal state. Dual penal state analysis differentiates between penal law and penal police, two conceptions of penal power, and state power more generally, rooted in autonomy, equality, and interpersonal respect, on one hand, and in heteronomy, hierarchy, and patriarchal power, on the other. Chapter 4 applies the distinction between law and police as fundamental modes of governance set out in Chapter 3 to the penal realm and explores the tension between penal law and penal police as constituting the dual penal state.


During the last few years of his life Prof. Simon Newcomb was keenly interested in the problem of periodicities, and devised a new method for their investigation. This method is explained, and to some extent applied, in a paper entitled "A Search for Fluctuations in the Sun's Thermal Radiation through their Influence on Terrestrial Temperature." The importance of the question justifies a critical examination of the relationship of the older methods to that of Newcomb, and though I do not agree with his contention that his process gives us more than can be obtained from Fourier's analysis, it has the advantage of great simplicity in its numerical work, and should prove useful in a certain, though I am afraid, very limited field. Let f ( t ) represent a function of a variable which we may take to be the time, and let the average value of the function be zero. Newcomb examines the sum of the series f ( t 1 ) f ( t 1 + τ) + f ( t 2 ) f ( t 2 + τ) + f ( t 3 ) f ( t 3 + τ) + ..., where t 1 , t 2 , etc., are definite values of the variable which are taken to lie at equal distances from each other. If the function be periodic so as to repeat itself after an interval τ, the products are all squares and each term is positive. If, on the other hand, the periodic time be 2τ, each product will be negative and the sum itself therefore negative. It is easy to see that if τ be varied continuously the sum of the series passes through maxima and minima, and the maxima will indicated the periodic time, or any of its multiples.


PEDIATRICS ◽  
1984 ◽  
Vol 74 (6) ◽  
pp. 1113-1114
Author(s):  
DALE L. PHELPS

Preventing handicaps in premature infants is a pressing goal, and vitamin E has been offering some hope for the prevention of one of the most emotionally distressing sequelae, blindness. The report of Speer et al1 confirms the observation of Chiswick et al2 that vitamin E may also reduce severe CNS hemorrhage, one of the other major handicapping conditions faced by the premature infant. Naturally, we welcome this information, but in our eagerness to find a cure, we must not blunt the sharp edge of critical examination of the data. Extreme caution must be still be exercised for the following reasons: (1) some questions have been raised about the data to be examined; (2) a third study suggests the opposite result3; and (3) there are significant differences in the vitamin E formulations that were used and those available for use in the United States.


Res Publica ◽  
1970 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-132
Author(s):  
Bernard Remiche ◽  
Charles-Etienne Lagasse

The 1970 amended Belgian Constitution is at the cross-roads of two currents of history, on one hand, once more the traditional values of the Occidental society ; on the other hand a double communal pressure contests an unitary state : from underneath affirmation of three Belgiannational communities, from above, apparition of a «supra-national party».The authors make a critical examination of the cropping up of bonding institutions in a «pré-fédéral» state, then they clearly state the principles of a really federal Constitution based upon the acknowledgement of the 2 large communities and the 3 regions and the principles of a democratic organization of an economic politic.


2013 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 174-192
Author(s):  
Dejan Petrovic

Key contemporary sociological theorists, such as Foucault or Habermas rarely explicitly discussed gender in their studies. This fact has not caused a lack of interest in the critical examination of the theoretical systems of these authors within a feminist perspective. During the 1990?s feminists? attention was drawn to Pierre Bourdieu?s social theory. French sociologist?s study Masculine Domination deals with issues of gender dynamics and its reproduction. In this study the persistence of the asymmetric distribution of social power between women and men is explained by concepts of habitus and symbolic violence. As this article will show, social change cannot be explained by Bourdieu?s concept of habitus, as a key link between social structure and action, due to its reduction of actors to socialized bodies, which are practically deprived of any true action potential. On the other hand, with regard to social activism as a permanent feature of feminist theory, this paper seeks to examine whether critical examination of Bourdieu?s conceptual apparatus achieves to provide the means to overcome the aforementioned shortcomings of the theoretical system of French sociologist. In other words, this article seeks to answer the question whether such a modification of habitus is possible, which will allow for actors whose action is truly structured and structuring, and lead to possible change of existing power relations.


Author(s):  
Mohamed el Mouden

In this work, the Dutch critical thinker and the socio-cognitive researcher on discourse and power issues, Teun A. Van Dijk, gives us a critical analysis of power and its discursive strategies for domination. It exposes us some forms of abuse of speech on the part of power (such as the media) that end up provoking hate discrimination and rejection of the other.


1989 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 160-199 ◽  
Author(s):  
N. Scott Arnold

Marx believed that what most clearly distinguished him and Engels from the nineteenth-century French socialists was that their version (or vision) of socialism was “scientific” while the latters' was Utopian. What he intended by this contrast is roughly the following: French socialists such as Proudhon and Fourier constructed elaborate visions of a future socialist society without an adequate understanding of existing capitalist society. For Marx, on the other hand, socialism was not an idea or an ideal to be realized, but a natural outgrowth of the existing capitalist order. Marx's historical materialism is a systematic attempt to discover the laws governing the inner dynamics of capitalism and class societies generally. Although this theory issues in a prediction of the ultimate triumph of socialism, it is a commonplace that Marx had little to say about the details of post-capitalist society. Nevertheless, some of its features can be discerned from his critical analysis of capitalism and what its replacement entails.


Author(s):  
W. Edward Glenny

This essay discusses the textual history of the Minor Prophets in the Hebrew manuscripts and the Versions, excluding Qumran. The most important textual tradition for the Minor Prophets is the Hebrew Masoretic Text tradition from the medieval period (MT), which continues the earlier proto-masoretic textual tradition that is represented in the Qumran scrolls and is the basis of the translations of the Targums and Peshitta. The Septuagint (LXX) is the most important ancient Version of the Hebrew Bible, because it was the first complete translation and because its Hebrew source differed considerably from the other textual witnesses. Other important Versions of the Hebrew Bible are the Targums, the Syriac Peshitta, and the Latin Vulgate.


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