“What They Are to Us, We Are to Them”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin Whelan
Keyword(s):  
Balance Of Power ◽  
The Self ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Christian Church ◽  
Christian Community ◽  
Self Presentation ◽  
Legal Precedent ◽  
The One ◽  
Effective Use

This chapter argues that the balance of power in Vandal Africa’s ecclesiastical controversy has consistently been misunderstood. It reconstructs the self-presentation and heresiological polemic of African Homoian clerics. These authors appropriated the legitimizing standards of the late-antique Christian community to portray themselves as members of the one true Christian Church, while painting their Nicene opponents as Homoousian heretics, whose beliefs were similar to other heresies and tantamount to paganism. The sophistication of this heresiology, its effective use of legal precedent, and the furious Nicene responses it received should force contemporary perceptions of the African Christian community to be rethought. For at least some Christians in Vandal Africa, Homoian Christianity would have been orthodox; the Nicene Church, a heretical sect.

Making Amulets Christian

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Theodore de Bruyn
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
The Other ◽  
Social Location ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Religious Institution ◽  
Christian Church ◽  
The People ◽  
The One ◽  
The Individual

This book examines Greek amulets with Christian elements from late antique Egypt in order to discern the processes whereby a customary practice—the writing of incantations on amulets—changed in an increasingly Christian context. It addresses three questions. First, how did the formulation of incantations and amulets change as the Christian church became the prevailing religious institution in Egypt in the last centuries of the Roman Empire? Second, what can we learn from incantations and amulets containing Christian elements about the cultural and social location of the people who wrote them? Finally, how were incantations and amulets indebted to the rituals or ritualizing behaviour of Christians? The book analyses amulets according to types of amulets and the ways in which they incorporate Christian elements. By comparing the formulation and writing of individual amulets that are similar to one another, one can observe differences in the culture of the scribes of these materials. The book argues for ‘conditioned individuality’ in the production of amulets. On the one hand, amulets manifest qualities that reflect the training and culture of the individual writer. On the other hand, amulets reveal that individual writers were shaped, whether consciously or inadvertently, by the resources they drew upon—by what is called ‘tradition’ in the field of religious studies.

“O, Foolish Galatians”: Imagining Pauline Community in Late Antiquity

2016 ◽  
Vol 85 (3) ◽  
pp. 435-467 ◽  
Author(s):  
Todd S. Berzon
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
The Other ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Christian Community ◽  
Object A ◽  
Precise Meaning ◽  
Ethnic Affiliation ◽  
Conscious Choice ◽  
The One

This essay analyzes how late antique commentators on Paul's epistle to the Galatians used the issue of theological disobedience to elaborate the precise meaning of Christian kinship and community in their own times. Paul's anger and frustration at the Galatians, in particular, provided a convenient rhetorical platform for theorizing the nature of and impediments to Christian community in late antiquity. While most Pauline exegetes of the fourth and fifth centuries read the Galatians’ disobedience as a conscious choice born of ignorance, misunderstanding, and weak-mindedness, Jerome located the source of this indiscipline in the Galatians’ ethnic or national disposition. For him, the Galatians were an ethno-theological object—a template upon which he could propose a correlation between Christian error or heresy, on the one hand, and ethnic disposition, on the other. The differences and factions that Paul described in his letters were reimagined in late antiquity as both exemplars of Christian heresy and as heresies of ethnological origin. Ultimately, however, the process of transforming Paul into a heresiologist served only to emphasize the complexity of interpretive maneuvers deployed to define the terms of Christian community vis-à-vis other types of social, political, and ethnic affiliation.

Stories and the Self

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 47-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Krause ◽  
Markus Appel
Keyword(s):  
Meta Analysis ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Lower Degree ◽  
Contrast Effects ◽  
Self Perception ◽  
Self Perceptions ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The One ◽  
Implicit And Explicit

Abstract. Two experiments examined the influence of stories on recipients’ self-perceptions. Extending prior theory and research, our focus was on assimilation effects (i.e., changes in self-perception in line with a protagonist’s traits) as well as on contrast effects (i.e., changes in self-perception in contrast to a protagonist’s traits). In Experiment 1 ( N = 113), implicit and explicit conscientiousness were assessed after participants read a story about either a diligent or a negligent student. Moderation analyses showed that highly transported participants and participants with lower counterarguing scores assimilate the depicted traits of a story protagonist, as indicated by explicit, self-reported conscientiousness ratings. Participants, who were more critical toward a story (i.e., higher counterarguing) and with a lower degree of transportation, showed contrast effects. In Experiment 2 ( N = 103), we manipulated transportation and counterarguing, but we could not identify an effect on participants’ self-ascribed level of conscientiousness. A mini meta-analysis across both experiments revealed significant positive overall associations between transportation and counterarguing on the one hand and story-consistent self-reported conscientiousness on the other hand.

Christus Virgo

2012 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 22-27
Author(s):  
Sissel Undheim
Keyword(s):  
Moral Status ◽  
The Other ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Church Fathers ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Female Sex ◽  
The One ◽  
The Church

The description of Christ as a virgin, 'Christus virgo', does occur at rare occasions in Early Christian and late antique texts. Considering that 'virgo' was a term that most commonly described the sexual and moral status of a member of the female sex, such representations of Christ as a virgin may exemplify some of the complex negotiations over gender, salvation, sanctity and Christology that we find in the writings of the Church fathers. The article provides some suggestions as to how we can understand the notion of the virgin Christ within the context of early Christian and late antique theological debates on the one hand, and in light of the growing interest in sacred virginity on the other.

Liturgical Poetry in the Late Antique Near East

2010 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 336-361 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ophir Münz-Manor
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Study ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Near East ◽  
The Other ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Biblical Poetry ◽  
Contemporary View ◽  
Cultural Dialogue ◽  
The One

The article presents a contemporary view of the study of piyyut, demonstrating that Jewish poetry of late antiquity (in Hebrew and Aramaic) was closely related to Christian liturgical poetry (both Syriac and Greek) and Samaritan liturgy. These relations were expressed primarily by common poetic and prosodic characteristics, derived on the one hand from ancient Semitic poetry (mainly biblical poetry), and on the other from innovations of the period. The significant connections of content between the different genres of poetry reveal the importance of comparative study. Thus the poetry composed in late antiquity provides additional evidence for the lively cultural dialogue that took place at that time.

Maximus

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Byers
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Political Action ◽  
American Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Self ◽  
Postwar Period ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
The One

This concluding chapter charts the continuing significance of the early postwar moment in Olson’s later work, particularly The Maximus Poems. The philosophical and political concerns of the American avant-garde between 1946 and 1951 play out across The Maximus Poems just as they inform later American art practices. The search of the early postwar American independent left for a source of political action rooted in the embodied individual is seen, on the one hand, to have been personified in the figure of Maximus. At the same time, Maximus’s radical ‘practice of the self’ charts a sophisticated alternative to the Enlightenment humanist subject widely critiqued in the United States in the immediate postwar period.

Keeping Company with Sondheim’s Women

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stacy Wolf
Keyword(s):  
Musical Theater ◽  
Married Couples ◽  
Feminist Perspective ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The One

This chapter examines the eight female characters inCompany, what they do in the musical, and how they function in the show’s dramaturgy, and argues that they elicit the quintessential challenge of analyzing musical theater from a feminist perspective. On the one hand, the women tend to be stereotypically, even msogynistically portrayed. On the other hand, each character offers the actor a tremendous performance opportunity in portraying a complicated psychology, primarily communicated through richly expressive music and sophisticated lyrics. In this groundbreaking 1970 ensemble musical about a bachelor’s encounters with five married couples and three girlfriends, Sondheim’s female characters occupy a striking range of types within one show. From the bitter, acerbic, thrice-married Joanne to the reluctant bride-to-be Amy, and from the self-described “dumb” “stewardess” April to the free-spirited Marta,Company’s eight women are distillations of femininity, precisely sketched in the short, singular scenes in which they appear.

The Christian Church in the Last Seventy Years

1943 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-34
Author(s):  
Kenneth Scott Latourette
Keyword(s):  
Large Volume ◽  
The Other ◽  
Recent History ◽  
Christian Church ◽  
The Past ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The Status ◽  
The One ◽  
The Church

A strange contrast exists in the status of the Christian Church in the past seventy years. On the one hand the Church has clearly lost some of the ground which once appeared to be safely within its possession. On the other hand it has become more widely spread geographically and, when all mankind is taken into consideration, more influential in shaping human affairs than ever before in its history. In a paper as brief as this must of necessity be, space can be had only for the sketching of the broad outlines of this paradox and for suggesting a reason for it. If details were to be given, a large volume would be required. Perhaps, however, we can hope to do enough to point out one of the most provocative and important set of movements in recent history.

Mocking Parades and the Place of Pagan Statuary in Late Antique Alexandria

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 270-288
Author(s):  
Jonathan Stutz
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Mob Violence ◽  
Visual Contact ◽  
The Public ◽  
Sacred Objects ◽  
The One ◽  
The City

AbstractWith the present paper I would like to discuss a particular form of procession which we may term mocking parades, a collective ritual aimed at ridiculing cultic objects from competing religious communities. The cases presented here are contextualized within incidents of pagan/Christian violence in Alexandria between the 4th and 5th centuries, entailing in one case the destruction of the Serapeum and in another the pillaging of the Isis shrine at Menouthis on the outskirts of Alexandria. As the literary accounts on these events suggest, such collective forms of mockery played an important role in the context of mob violence in general and of violence against sacred objects in particular. However, while historiographical and hagiographical sources from the period suggest that pagan statues underwent systematic destruction and mutilation, we can infer from the archaeological evidence a vast range of uses and re-adaptation of pagan statuary in the urban space, assuming among other functions that of decorating public spaces. I would like to build on the thesis that the parading of sacred images played a prominent role in the discourse on the value of pagan statuary in the public space. On the one hand, the statues carried through the streets became themselves objects of mockery and violence, involving the population of the city in a collective ritual of exorcism. On the other hand, the images paraded in the mocking parades could also become a means through which the urban space could become subject to new interpretations. Entering in visual contact with the still visible vestiges of the pagan past, with the temples and the statuary of the city, the “image of the city” became affected itself by the images paraded through the streets, as though to remind the inhabitants that the still-visible elements of Alexandria’s pagan topography now stood as defeated witnesses to Christianity’s victory.

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