The Mosaicistsʼ “Bible”. Reading the Visual Narratives in Byzantine Arabia and Palaestina

2018 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 9-36
Author(s):  
Basema Harmaneh
Author(s):  
Annamaria Motrescu-Mayes ◽  
Heather Norris Nicholson

In the rapidly growing study of amateur film, this groundbreaking book addresses the development of British women's amateur visual practice. Drawing upon social and visual anthropology, imperial and postcolonial studies and British, Commonwealth and gender history, the authors explore how women in Britain and overseas, used the evolving technologies of moving imagery to create visual stories about their lives and times. Locating the making, watching and sharing of women's recreational film-making against wider societal, technological and ideological changes, British Women Amateur Filmmakers discloses how women from varied backgrounds negotiated changing lifestyles, attitudes and opportunities as they created first personal visual narratives about themselves and the world around them. Using non-fictional films and animations, the authors invite readers to view films through different interpretative lens and provide detailed contexts for their case-studies and survey of over forty women amateur filmmakers. Whether in remote communities, suburban homes, castles, missionary or diplomatic enclaves, or simply travelling as intrepid sightseers, women filmed their companions, other people and their surroundings, not only as observers but often displaying agency, autonomy and aesthetic judgment during decades when careers, particularly after marriage, were often denied in film and other professions. Research across Britain on films in private hands and specialist archives, interviews and extensive study of the Institute of Amateur Cinematographers (IAC's) collections enable the authors to reposition an activity once thought of as overwhelmingly male and middle class.


2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 202-219
Author(s):  
Aminta Arrington

The Lisu are a largely Christian minority group in south-west China who, as an oral culture, express their faith more through a set of Christian practices done as a group and less through bible reading as individuals. Even so, the Lisu practice of Christianity specifically, and Lisu culture more generally, was profoundly impacted by the written scriptures. During the initial evangelisation of the Lisu by the China Inland Mission, missionaries created a written script for the Lisu language. Churches were constructed and organised, which led to the creation of bible schools and the work of bible translation. In the waves of government persecution after 1949, Lisu New Testaments were hidden away up in the mountains by Lisu Christians. After 1980, the Lisu reclaimed their faith by listening to the village elders tell the Old Story around the fires and reopening the churches that had been closed for twenty-two years. And they reclaimed their bible by retrieving the scriptures from the hills and copying them in the evening by the light of a torch. The Lisu bible has its own narrative history, consisting of script creating, translating, migrating, and copying by hand. At times it was largely influenced by the mission narrative, but at other times, the Lisu bible itself was the lead character in the story. Ultimately, the story of the Lisu bible reflects the Lisu Christian story of moving from missionary beginnings to local leadership and, ultimately, to local theological inquiry.


Author(s):  
Shaun Blanchard

This book sheds further light on the nature of church reform and the roots of the Second Vatican Council (1962–65) through a study of eighteenth-century Catholic reformers who anticipated the Council. The most striking of these examples is the Synod of Pistoia (1786), the high-water mark of late Jansenism. Most of the reforms of the Synod were harshly condemned by Pope Pius VI in the bull Auctorem fidei (1794), and late Jansenism was totally discredited in the ultramontane nineteenth-century Church. Nevertheless, much of the Pistoian agenda—such as an exaltation of the role of bishops, an emphasis on infallibility as a gift to the entire Church, religious liberty, a simpler and more comprehensible liturgy that incorporates the vernacular, and the encouragement of lay Bible reading and Christocentric devotions—was officially promulgated at Vatican II. The career of Bishop Scipione de’ Ricci (1741–1810) and the famous Synod he convened are investigated in detail. The international reception (and rejection) of the Synod sheds light on why these reforms failed, and the criteria of Yves Congar are used to judge the Pistoian Synod as “true or false reform.” This book proves that the Synod was a “ghost” present at Vatican II. The council fathers struggled with, and ultimately enacted, many of the same ideas. This study complexifies the story of the roots of the Council and Pope Benedict XVI’s “hermeneutic of reform,” which seeks to interpret Vatican II as in “continuity and discontinuity on different levels” with past teaching and practice.


Author(s):  
K. K. Yeo

This chapter challenges the ‘received’ view that traces the expansion of the dominant theologies of the European and North American colonial powers and their missionaries into the Majority World. When they arrived, these Westerners found ancient Christian traditions and pre-existing spiritualities, linguistic and cultural forms, which questioned their Eurocentric presumptions, and energized new approaches to interpreting the sacred texts of Christianity. The emergence of ‘creative tensions’ in global encounters are a mechanism for expressing (D)issent against attempts to close down or normalize local Bible-reading traditions. This chapter points to the elements which establish a creative tension between indigenizing Majority World approaches to the Bible and those described in the ‘orthodox’ narrative, including: self-theologizing and communal readings; concepts of the Spirit world and human flourishing; the impact of multiple contexts, vernacular languages, sociopolitical and ethno-national identities, and power/marginalization structures; and ‘framing’ public and ecological issues.


Author(s):  
Neil Cohn

AbstractResearch in verbal and visual narratives has often emphasized backward-looking inferences, where absent information is subsequently inferred. However, comics use conventions like star-shaped “action stars” where a reader knows events are undepicted at that moment, rather than omitted entirely. We contrasted the event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to visual narratives depicting an explicit event, an action star, or a “noise” panel of scrambled lines. Both action stars and noise panels evoked large N400s compared to explicit-events (300–500 ms), but action stars and noise panels then differed in their later effects (500–900 ms). Action stars elicited sustained negativities and P600s, which could indicate further interpretive processes and integration of meaning into a mental model, while noise panels evoked late frontal positivities possibly indexing that they were improbable narrative units. Nevertheless, panels following action stars and noise panels both evoked late sustained negativities, implying further inferential processing. Inference in visual narratives thus uses cascading mechanisms resembling those in language processing that differ based on the inferential techniques.


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