A New Denominational Historiography?

1995 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-263
Author(s):  
John F. Wilson

Over the last decade, a noteworthy number of published studies have, in one fashion or another, been defined with reference to religious denominations. This is an arresting fact, for, coincidentally, the status of religious denominations in the society has been called into question. Some formerly powerful bodies have lost membership (at least relatively speaking) and now experience reduced influence, while newer forms of religious organization(s)—e.g., parachurch groups and loosely structured movements—have flourished. The most compelling recent analysis of religion in modern American society gives relatively little attention to them. Why, then, have publications in large numbers appeared, in scale almost seeming to be correlated inversely to this trend?No single answer to this question is adequate. Surely one general factor is that historians often “work out of phase” with contemporary social change. If denominations have been displaced as a form of religious institution in society in the late twentieth century, then their prominence in earlier eras is all the more intriguing.

AJS Review ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 163-181
Author(s):  
Daniel Reiser

AbstractThe sanctification of Yiddish in hasidic society occurred primarily in the first half of the twentieth century and intensified in the wake of the Holocaust. The roots of this phenomenon, however, lie in the beginnings of Hasidism in the eighteenth century. The veneration of Yiddish is linked to the hasidic attitude towards vernacular language and the status of the ẓaddik “speaking Torah.” Hasidism represented—and represents—an oral culture in which the verbal transfer of its sacred content sanctifies the language spoken by its adherents, in this case, Yiddish. This article presents a theological and sociological examination of the various stages of the sanctification of Yiddish among Hasidim from the movement's early stages to the late twentieth century.


2003 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 132-136
Author(s):  
Boman Desai

During the late twentieth century, the veracity of a particular aspect of Johannes Brahms's boyhood came under challenge. Had he played the piano in Hamburg's dockside bars as many of his biographers had recorded, or had he not? The two sides of the story were debated in the spring 2001 issue of 19th-Century Music. Jan Swafford, Brahms's definitive biographer in English, provided the case for the status quo, citing all the known instances of times when Brahms himself had mentioned the story to friends and biographers. Styra Avins, a translator of many of Brahms's heretofore untranslated letters into English, provided evidence to the contrary by saying all the friends and biographers were mistaken. Swafford's inventory of sources is complete, but there remained more to be said. In "The Boy Brahms" I have attempted to show how Avins's evidence is strictly circumstantial and speculative. At this remove from the incidents in question it can be nothing more. I have attempted to refute the conclusions she has drawn from the young Brahms's handwriting, the testimony of neighbors, and the laws governing attendance in the bars, among other things. I have also attempted to show inconsistencies in Avins's arguments that throw into question her thesis and support the veracity of the original story.


October ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 157 ◽  
pp. 107-127
Author(s):  
James Tweedie

The essay considers Serge Daney's transition from a film critic schooled in New Wave cinephilia to a television critic fascinated by the possibilities of the small screen and the status of cinema as an old medium. Looking in the “rear-view mirror,” Daney challenges foundational film theory that situates cinema at the forefront of technological and cultural modernity, and he introduces the language of belatedness, aging, and delay into his writing on the “adult art” of film. In the 1980s, Daney began to chronicle the experience of watching cinema on television, with old and new media spiraling into each other and the critic engaged in a process of archaeology focused as much on absent or damaged images as the imaginary plenitude of the screen. Tweedie's essay frames the critic's work as a key reference point for film studies in the late twentieth century because it counters both the modernist euphoria of theory produced decades before and the enthusiasm surrounding the digital revolution in the years just after his death, with new media in the vanguard once occupied by cinema. Instead of recomposing this familiar narrative of innovation, succession, and obsolescence, Daney constructs a retrospective and intermedial theory of film, with the act of watching cinema on television revealing both the diminution and the persistence of its most utopian ambitions.


Author(s):  
Margaret Bendroth

This chapter assesses Billy Graham’s long-term impact on American evangelicalism and American culture. At last estimates, he evangelized over two billion people during his sixty-year career. He remained culturally nimble enough to stay in the public eye through all the tumultuous years of the late twentieth century. Billy Graham did not just reflect his times—he also changed them. Exactly what that means is a matter of debate. Despite the evangelist’s durable popularity, his legacy is surprisingly difficult to measure. This chapter identifies that there are uncertainties about the future of the evangelical world Billy Graham shaped, and that the long-term prospects for religion in American society remain uncertain. It also discusses the possible successors to Graham and posits that a successor—if there will be one at all—is unlikely to be an American.


Author(s):  
Lesley Orr

During the second half of the twentieth century, a seismic shift in outlook, norms, behaviours, and laws transformed Western societies, particularly in relation to sexuality and gender relations. These changes were characterized and facilitated by escalating rejection of dominant sources of moral authority, including organized religion. This chapter considers the Church of Scotland’s response to the ‘permissive society’. It attempted to grapple theologically with questions concerning marriage and divorce, homosexuality, and women’s ordination, confronted unavoidably with profound questions concerning gender, power, and sexuality. These debates generated controversy and division as the moral consensus fractured. Fault lines opened up between conservatives who defended the validity of Christian moral certainties, and others who embraced more liberal and contextual interpretations of Scripture and tradition. Previously silenced or subordinated voices emerged, challenging but failing to provoke radical institutional change at a time of rapid declension in the status and cultural influence of the national Church.


1998 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 145-150
Author(s):  
Deonna Kelli

Identity politics has become the catch phrase of the postmodern age. Withconcepts such as "exile," "migrancy," and "hybridity" acquiring unprecedentedcultural significance in the late twentieth century, the postcolonial age givesway to new identities, fractured modes of living, and new conditions of humanity.Literature is a powerful tool to explore such issues in an era where a greatdeal of the world is displaced, and the idea of a homeland becomes a disrupted,remote possibility. The Postcolonial Crescent: Islam's Impact onContemporary Literature, is an attempt to discuss how Muslims negotiateidentity at a time of rapid and spiritually challenging transculturation. The bookuses fiction written by Muslims to critique the effects of colonialism, counteractmodernity, and question the status of Islamic identity in the contemporaryworld. It also can be considered as the primary introduction of contemporaryIslamic literature into the postcolonial genre. Muslim writers have yet to submit a unique and powerful commentary on postcolonial and cultural studies;this work at least softens that absence.The Postcolonial Crescent was conceived as a response to The SatanicVerses controversy. Therefore, it is “intimately involved in the interchangebetween religion and the state, and demonstrates that the roles Islam is playingin postcolonial nation-building is especially contested in the absence of broadlyacceptable models” (p. 4). Conflicting issues of identity are approached byinterrogating the authority to define a “correct” Islamic identity, the role ofindividual rights, and the “variegation of Islamic expression within specificcultural settings, suggesting through the national self-definitions the many concernsthat the Islamic world shares with global postcoloniality” (p. 7) ...


2020 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 419-434
Author(s):  
Luba R Charlap

Abstract Menaḥem ben Saruq (Spain, tenth century) is considered to be the first scholar to write a dictionary of Biblical Hebrew - called the Maḥberet - on Spanish soil. His role in the development of Hebrew grammar, however, has not been given pride of place in the scholarly literature. Renewed interest in his theory arose only in the late twentieth century. As some scholars have noted, Menaḥem was the first to reveal the three-consonantal basis of Hebrew roots. This article will continue to establish the basis for this concept, while further elaborating on several emphases in his teaching, especially in the context of the distinction between the radical and the servile letters and their subdivision, which, in our view, led Menaḥem to formulate his root concept. Following our analysis, we note a difference between the ‘lexical root’ concept, by which he arranged the entries in his Maḥberet, and the ‘substantive root’ concept on which he based his innovation. A parallel idea can be seen in the theory of Yusuf Ibn Nūḥ, who set forth the jawhar concept, which means the basic entity of a word on the abstract level (as opposed to a word-based morphology), as Geoffrey Khan has shown. The article concludes with a clarification of the difference between Menaḥem's theory and that of Judah Ḥayyūj. Despite the enormous development made by Menaḥem, he was not able to offer a coherent morphological system, as Ḥayyūj did.


2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (16) ◽  
pp. 68-73
Author(s):  
Y. Ostropalchenko

The drama of the American writer Wendy Wasserstein is an important material for literary studies. Of particular interest for the study is the intertextual aspect of her work. The article analyses the interpretation of Chekhov`s motives (on the example of the drama “Three Sisters”) in Wasserstein’s drama on the example of the play “Sisters Rosensweig” (1992). It is determined that the concept of intertextuality in literary studies means the interaction of any text with each other, the superposition of the text on another. The main aspects of intertextuality that are relevant for the analysis of W. Wasserstein’s drama are analyzed and highlighted. Chekhov’s motives are described in the drama “The Sisters Rosenzweig” and the commonalities and differences between Chekhov’s play “Three Sisters” and Wasserstein are highlighted. The ideological-aesthetic and genre transformations of Chekhov’s artistic models proposed by an American woman playwright are analysed. The use of the classification of intertexts rel­evant for the analysis of plays by W. Wasserstein, according to M. Trostnikov is substantiated. In Chekhov’s play adapted by an American female playwrigh, popular plots and motifs receive a different feminist, optimistic sound development that meets the needs of late twentieth-century American society as well as in the con­text of novelty. Chekhov’s motives in Wasserstein’s drama made it possible to assess the degree of intertextuality of the play “The Sisters Rosenzweig”, in particular to find clear components of intertextuality in the drama. Rewriting Chekhov’s drama “Three Sisters” (1901) at the gap of almost a century, American playwright Wendy Wasserstein described the life of the Chekhov sisters in the modern way: successful professionals, two sisters realized themselves at the same time in motherhood and with love. Wasserstein practically preserved the plot, motives, artistic techniques and details in her modern play. The play­wright creates an interesting intertext that captivates the reader with a play on the discovery of “Chekhov style” in the text, the recognition of factual material and fiction.


Author(s):  
Paul Filmer

When it was first produced in 1976,Pacific Overturesattracted praise and opprobrium in almost equal measure. It was characterized by critics as both the supreme intellectual, as well as musical theatrical achievement of the Sondheim–Prince collaborations, and as the most cynical betrayal of the authentic vernacular American tradition of the musical. At a number of levels, both formal and substantive, it is a reflexive exploration of the tension between the national and global conditions of late twentieth-century American cultural identity and ambitions and their relation to the legacy of the Enlightenment origins of American society. The two levels discussed in detail are those of the relations between and modes of representation of the principal characters, and the processes of transition between traditional and modern societies. The chapter argues that the binary structure of the theatrical organization ofPacific Overturesin two sequential parts raises issues of the inevitability of the inversion of progress into tragedy.


What did it mean to be a man in Scotland over the past nine centuries? Scotland, with its stereotypes of the kilted warrior and the industrial ‘hard man’, has long been characterised in masculine terms, but there has been little historical exploration of masculinity in a wider context. This interdisciplinary collection examines a diverse range of the multiple and changing forms of masculinities from the late eleventh to the late twentieth century, exploring the ways in which Scottish society through the ages defined expectations for men and their behaviour. How men reacted to those expectations is examined through sources such as documentary materials, medieval seals, romances, poetry, begging letters, police reports and court records, charity records, oral histories and personal correspondence. Focusing upon the wide range of activities and roles undertaken by men – work, fatherhood and play, violence and war, sex and commerce – the book also illustrates the range of masculinities that affected or were internalised by men. Together, the chapters illustrate some of the ways Scotland’s gender expectations have changed over the centuries and how, more generally, masculinities have informed the path of Scottish history


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