scholarly journals The Good Samaritan has Arrived

2020 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 72-83
Author(s):  
Thamil Venthan Ananthavinayagan
Keyword(s):  
Western World ◽  
The West ◽  
Good Samaritan ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Fertile Ground ◽  
Prime Objective ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Set Up

The purpose of this article is to investigate the ongoing attempts by the West to colonize the Non-Western cultures by the means of religion. To this end, the missionary was and is without doubt the frontrunner for the standard of civilization, providing the pretext and fertile ground for the subsequent infiltration of the colonialist who was eager to carve an empire in the ‘discovered’  world - with the goal to exploit African resources for his own good. The exploitation of the resources in the colonized world was accompanied by the early religious Missionaries who set up secular missionaries. Their travels to other countries was not the bible but other documents of conquest such as dubious treaties, guns and trinkets to attract the unsuspecting colonized to be lured to them. Missionaries often aligned themselves with the powerful in order to achieve their prime objective of “saving souls” more rapidly. Colonization, civilisation and religion are means to the creation of imperialism. This article, to this end, will inquire the role of the non-Western world to resist attempts of there West to engage in practices of repeated colonization under the pretext of religion.

MARKETING THE TESTAMENTS: CANONGATE AND THEIR POCKET-SIZED BIBLES

2002 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 221-244
Author(s):  
Keyword(s):  
Biblical Studies ◽  
Christian Tradition ◽  
The West ◽  
Positive Potential ◽  
Publishing Firm ◽  
Investment Promotion ◽  
The Bible ◽  
King James Version ◽  
As If

AbstractRecently the Edinburgh-based publishing firm Canongate has brought out the Bible in the form of single books in the King James Version. Each of these volumes is introduced by a writer not necessarily associated with the Christian tradition, thus inviting the readers to approach them as literary works in their own right. For long the Bible came with commentaries written by prominent religious scholars, but now it looks as if it needed an introduction by novelists, pop artists, scientists including and even by some who are outside the Christian tradition to make the once familiar texts now widely neglected in the West come alive again. The purpose of this essay is to look at the following: the positive potential of this Pocket Canon; the role of the interpreter's personal voice within the process of discovering meaning in a narrative; the marketing of the Bible and appropriation of religious themes by secular marketeers; the re-iconization of the Bible though the King James Version; the colonial parallels in the investment, promotion and dissemination of the Bible; and the challenge of personal-voice criticism to biblical studies. Put at its simplest, can this disparate group of essayists rescue the Bible, which is fast losing its grip and importance in the West, and discover fresh significance in it?

God, Tsar, and People

2020 ◽  
pp. 358-388
Author(s):  
Daniel B. Rowland
Keyword(s):  
Old Testament ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Historical Thinking ◽  
The West ◽  
Russian Culture ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Social Units

This chapter provides a background on the crucial role of fictions in history and in current lives, a role arguably bigger than that played by any other force, human or even natural. It mentions Yuval Noah Harari's claim that cultural skill allowed humans to first organize themselves into political or social units larger than a few tens of individuals. It also reviews developments in Russian culture that made the creation and preservation of the Muscovite state possible. The chapter explains how Muscovite culture was more effective as social cement than the broader, more diffuse, and more divided cultures of the West. It explores some of the themes that Muscovite churchmen created and elaborated, like the importance of the Old Testament to the historical thinking of Muscovy.

How Old Magic Does the Trick for Modern Politics

2013 ◽  
Vol 40 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 428-450
Author(s):  
Claudio Sergio Nun-Ingerflom
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
The West ◽  
Modern Politics ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Material Form ◽  
Spiritual Ideal

This article attempts to interpret the insurrection led by Razin in the seventeenth century as the beginning of modern politics, because it was founded on the immanence of the social in contrast to the transcendent conceptions of power maintained by the court and church. This advance was made possible by the working of magic. Through performative speech, magic permitted the creation of a verbal presence for the non-existent tsarevich Alexis, who, however, was never given material form. In keeping the self-appointed heir invisible and by declaring his father’s rule illegitimate, the rebels reduced the role of the tsar to a pure signifier. The proof that this uprising represented a turn toward modern politics is that it did not rely upon the invocation of an intangible philosophical or spiritual ideal (as in the West); it was built instead upon an armed people, expressing itself in a language that was still archaic but already oriented toward a new representation of power as socially legitimatized. This analysis opens an important line of argument that has power beyond this specific case.

The Aramaic Bible in the East

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-66
Author(s):  
Philip S. Alexander
Keyword(s):  
Systematic Study ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
The West ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Bible Translation ◽  
The Bible ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ready Access

Abstract This article challenges the assumption that insofar as the Jewish communities of Babylonia were a ‘people of the book’, their book was a Hebrew Bible. Functionally the Bible that most people would have known was the Aramaic Targum of Onqelos and Jonathan. The Bible’s content—its law, narrative, and prophecy—was culturally mediated through Aramaic. Even in Rabbinic communities, where some had competence in Hebrew that gave them ready access to the original, the lack of formal and systematic study of Miqra may have made the Targum the tradition of first resort for understanding the Hebrew. The situation in the Aramaic-speaking east may not, then, have been all that different from the west, where a Greek Bible shaped the religious identity of the Greek-speaking Jewish communities. This essay is offered as a contribution to the neglected study of the role of Bible translation in the history of Judaism.

The Creation of Sustainable Orientalism in Cinema

2021 ◽  
pp. 574-590
Author(s):  
Can Diker ◽  
Esma Koç
Keyword(s):  
Western World ◽  
The Political ◽  
Film Festivals ◽  
The West ◽  
Hollywood Films ◽  
World Cinema ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Masses ◽  
The Relationship

The myth of modern culture's superiority to other cultures is instilled as a norm to the masses through the media. The myth of the cultural superiority of the West not only formed with the economic possibilities of the West but was also supported by the non-Western world by self-orientalism, thus becoming sustainable. While themes such as modernity, development, and technological superiority are watched within the scope of Hollywood films, several platforms have been created for non-US countries to watch alternative films. Although films known as European and World Cinema have the chance to show themselves at film festivals rather than film theatres, non-Western directors face a cultural challenge in these festivals due to the sociocultural structure of Western-based film festivals. In this study, by examining how non-Western directors are directed towards self-orientalism indirectly through festivals and funds, the relationship between the creation of sustainable orientalism in cinema and the political economy of the film industry will be revealed.

The Role of Law in Addressing the Good Samaritan’s Dilemma: A Chinese Model?

2014 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Man Yee Karen LEE
Keyword(s):  
East Asia ◽  
Western World ◽  
Good Samaritan ◽  
Chinese Model ◽  
Pros And Cons ◽  
Hit And Run ◽  
The Law ◽  
Civil Liabilities

AbstractThis article begins with an account of the contexts surrounding China’s “Good Samaritan’s Dilemma”—the fear of civil liabilities as a result of a rescue attempt. It highlights how a notorious hit-and-run case in 2011 has prompted several provinces to consider Good Samaritan law—legislation aimed at encouraging altruism. In light of diverse opinions over the pros and cons of Good Samaritan law, it considers whether law should have a role to play in shaping moral behaviours. On the basis that the law has been on the books for as long as over a century in much of the Western world and parts of East Asia, this article explores how overseas experience may provide insights to China in its adaptation of Good Samaritan law. It concludes that, in China’s case, a non-punitive regime that seeks to protect and compensate Good Samaritans may help encourage the proverbial Chinese bystanders to be altruistic neighbours.

scholarly journals The Role of Pakistan in the Organization of Islamic Conference

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 51-78
Author(s):  
Sulayman S. Nyang
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Indian Subcontinent ◽  
Islamic State ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
The West ◽  
Naval Power ◽  
Muslim People ◽  
The World ◽  
The Creation

The rise of Western naval power in the world was the consequence ofthe earlier Iberian discovery of peoples, societies and cultures beyond theseas known to the Europeans of the early fifteenth century. It was indeedthese forays and adventures that gradually led to the imposition ofWestern colonial and imperial rule over what were previouslyindependent societies and cultures in Asia and Africa. The Muslimsocieties, along with Buddhist, Hindu, Eastern Christian and traditionalAfrican peoples, were all brought under one European imperial roof,and their societies exposed to the transforming powers of Westernindustrial might.It was of course this rise of the West and the decline of the East that ledto the parcelling out of Muslim lands and to the alteration in the directionand flow of cultural and intellectual exchanges between the Muslims ofthe Indian subcontinent and their brethren elsewhere in Dam1 Islam.With such a division of the Muslim lands, each Muslim people livingunder a given colonial power tried to maintain its Islamic identityagainst whatever odds there were in that colonial system. Pakistaniswere part of this global phenomenon and the creation of their country in1947 dramatized the Muslim feeling of loss of unity and the urgent needto recover the universal feeling of Islamic solidarity which colonial ruleseemingly derailed from the tracks of human history.In this paper I intend to examine and analyze the role of Pakistan inthe Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC). Working on theunderstanding that Pakistan at the time of the formation of the OIC in1969, was the most populous Islamic state in the world and that its verycreation was occasioned by the Islamic sentiments of the Muslim ...

The Politics of Interpretation: Understanding Biblical History in Palestinian Rural Culture

2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-20
Author(s):  
Elizabeth S. Marteijn
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Rural Community ◽  
Political Change ◽  
Rural Culture ◽  
The West ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical History ◽  
Cultural Belonging

This article investigates the role of the biblical story in the Palestinian context of cultural and political change. It explores how Palestinian Christians have depicted modern-day Palestinian rural culture as being a continuation of biblical culture. The article explores two different ways of understanding the bible to which this continuation thinking applies: first, when the bible is being read through the eyes of the Palestinian rural community (or ‘the Bible through peasant eyes’, as New Testament scholar Kenneth E. Bailey put it) and secondly, through the eyes of the politically oppressed. To illustrate this, the small Palestinian Christian village of Taybeh in the West Bank serves as a case study. In the post-1967 context, it became important for the inhabitants to portray their village as going back historically to the Ophrah and Ephraim of the bible, thus reimagining their identity as being essentially biblical. This insertion of contemporary Palestinian history into biblical history, and vice versa, is for the inhabitants of Taybeh a way to give scriptural sanction against Zionist constructions and a way to express their theological and cultural belonging to the land. This article demonstrates how their view both relates to and stands in conflict with Western understandings of biblical history, featuring the work of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century travellers, missionaries and ethnographers from Europe.

scholarly journals Why the Hardship? Islam, Christianity, and Instrumental Affliction

Open Theology ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 636-645
Author(s):  
Christopher Nicolas Pieper
Keyword(s):  
Western Tradition ◽  
The West ◽  
Christian Doctrine ◽  
Islamic Perspective ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Biblical Teaching ◽  
Instrumental Role

AbstractViewing hardship through the Western tradition of theodicy, Western theologians and philosophers sometimes approach their Muslim neighbors with questions about the Islamic perspective on suffering. But merely by asking about “suffering,” these Western friends already project a theological category foreign to most Muslims, particularly those from a non-Western background. In order for Christian and post-Christian Westerners to understand the Islamic approach to hardship, they must first learn to distinguish between affliction and suffering. This requires a careful look at the creation narratives each tradition tells: for example, does God initiate human affliction? And what does the answer to this question say about the nature of affliction, if God is also good? Answering these queries helps one to distinguish Christian and Islamic responses to catastrophe, pain, and even violence. Furthermore, examining the koranic reply may redirect Western persons to teachings within the biblical tradition, which Christians often overlook or avoid. The instrumental role of affliction is relatively unpopular in the West, but dialogue with Islam uncovers the fact that it is a concept neither alien nor unimportant to biblical teaching. In fact, God’s repurposing of affliction is vital to Christian doctrine. Dialogue with Islam may help to recover this Christian lesson.

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