scholarly journals Sin, Penance And Confession From A Protestant Perspective

2020 ◽  
pp. 485-507
Author(s):  
Sławomir Nowosad

Although the reality of evil and moral weakness belongs to the most commonhuman experience, only rational analysis does not allow for the rightful understandingof these aspects of the human condition. Christianity comes to man’said here when it sheds supernatural light on its essence and Divine origin, and atthe same time on weakness and the need of grace. In view of the entire Christiantradition, Protestantism appears as an important and serious tradition, howeverevaluated sometimes as unilateral or extremely pessimistic. "e Reformationalassumptions and multi-century subsequent history of theological thought andsacramental-pastoral practice, particularly in Lutheran, Calvinist and Anglicantradition, demand careful studies and analyses, so that this aspect of humanfate and supernatural destiny should be comprehensively understood.

Author(s):  
Alan L. Mittleman

This chapter explores the connection between holiness and ethics or between holiness and goodness. Drawing on a theory of holiness in Judaism, it considers how holiness relates to other values, including moral ones, and whether holiness is more primordial or primitive than ethics. The discussion is anchored on two texts: the first from the Book of Leviticus, and the second from the modern Jewish thinker, Abraham Joshua Heschel. The chapter argues that holiness and morality are equally primordial, equally original to the human condition, and goes on to propose a natural history of holiness in which the human experiences of love and awe, of goodness and holiness arise together against man's evolutionary background as a social primate. It also examines the concepts of primordial morality, natural morality, ethical naturalism, and moral realism before concluding with an analysis of intuition in relation to the good, the right, and the holy.


2020 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
pp. 156-176
Author(s):  
Joachim Schaper

Abstract Amongst Hebrew Bible scholars the question of the understanding of biblical key terms and concepts pertaining to the human condition has attracted a fair amount of interest. And amongst those key terms and concepts it is the concept of nefeš that has proved to be particularly attractive and challenging. New light is thrown on the biblical concept by the recent discovery of the Katumuwa stele in Zincirli. The present article examines the evidence and draws conclusions with regard to the history of the concept of nefeš in the Hebrew Bible and in North-West Semitic literature and religion generally.


2019 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 425-441
Author(s):  
Katarina O'Briain

Abstract This article argues that Frances Burney's long, diffuse works of fiction develop an ethics of accident within the history of the novel. Whereas critics from the eighteenth century to today have privileged “art”—in the sense of careful, deliberate skill and conduct—as a crucial marker of human character, Burney insists on filling her novels with a succession of unexpected events and a multitude of characters surprised by their own actions. By refusing to treat accident as a mistake to be improved upon—in the realm of either characterological conduct or authorial craft—Burney posits an ethics of the novel that treats matters of chance and modes of depleted agency as central aspects of the human condition rather than as markers of moral or aesthetic failure. Setting Burney's texts within ascendant modes of economy and finance in the eighteenth century, the article suggests that this ethics marks a key change within the rise of the novel that continues well into late capitalism.


2016 ◽  
Vol 216 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Instr. Amer Rasool Mahdi / Ph.D.

The present study attempts to probe into a genre reading of John Bunyan's The Pilgrim Progress as this is deemed as one of the founding texts in English letters. It thus tries to have Bunyan's work re-contextualised within the historical and formal debate of the rise of the novel and the very idea of Novelness. Within the framework and practice of novelness, it is proposed here that formal (generic) self-consciousness is pre-structured within the allegorical renditions of the human condition; these renditions are more likely to be seen as gearing toward being part of the pre- or parallel-history of the novel vis-à-vis the debatable norms of formal realism.


Author(s):  
Rónán McDonald

Beckett, arguably the most important playwright of the twentieth century, has achieved an international reputation that goes well beyond his achievement as a writer. There is in effect a ‘Beckett brand’, a marketable image of the man and his works. The abstraction of his theatre work, its lack of definite geographical or specific referents, has led to a tenacious discourse of universalism. His global fame developed from the first production ofWaiting for Godot, seen as the epitome of modernist experiment, delivering a profound image of the human condition free of historical specificity and thus available to any number of different interpretive schemes. The production history of Beckett’s work in recent times, however, has shown that it is at its most effective in its trans-historical capacity, represented most tellingly in instances such as the productions ofGodotin Sarajevo or New Orleans. Beckett is ‘glocal’ rather than global.


2002 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 429-445 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caroline B. Brettell

In facing up to the problem of structure and agency social theorists are not just addressing crucial theoretical problems in the study of society, they are also confronting the most pressing social problem of the human condition.


2020 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
David Schmidtz

AbstractOur modern observation-based approaches to the study of the human condition were shaped by the Scottish Enlightenment. Political Economy emerged as a discipline of its own in the nineteenth century, then fragmented further around the dawn of the twentieth century. Today, we see Political Economy’s pieces being reassembled and reunited with their philosophical roots. This issue pauses to reflect on the history of this new but also old field of study.


Author(s):  
Jonathan Swift

‘Thus, gentle Reader, I have given thee a faithful History of my Travels for Sixteen Years, and above Seven Months; wherein I have not been so studious of Ornament as of Truth.’ In these words Gulliver represents himself as a reliable reporter of the fantastic adventures he has just set down; but how far can we rely on a narrator whose identity is elusive and whoses inventiveness is self-evident? Gulliver’s Travels purports to be a travel book, and describes Gulliver’s encounters with the inhabitants of four extraordinary places: Lilliput, Brobdingnag, Laputa, and the country of the Houyhnhnms. A consummately skilful blend of fantasy and realism makes Gulliver’s Travels by turns hilarious, frightening, and profound. Swift plays tricks on us, and delivers one of the world’s most disturbing satires of the human condition. This new edition includes the changing frontispiece portraits of Gulliver that appeared in successive early editions.


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