scholarly journals James Lee Burke’s Theology of Redemption

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. p119
Author(s):  
Janis E. Haswell

In his 23 novels featuring character Dave Robicheaux, James Lee Burke poses a fundamentally moral (and unanswerable) question: how does a good man maintain himself in the face of evil? From Neon Rain (1987) to A Private Cathedral (2020), Burke develops Robicheaux as both a detective and a narrator, reminiscent of the pastoral genre, where shepherds spent their leisurely, idyllic summer days in singing contests. Like the classical shepherds/poets double, Robicheaux is cop/storyteller and seeks to redeem criminals in both capacities. Burke ultimately illustrates how good and evil will always, must always, co-exist both within individuals and society.

2021 ◽  
Vol 77 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Johann-Albrecht Meylahn

It has been argued that most countries that had been exposed to European colonialism have inherited a Western Christianity thanks to the mission societies from Europe and North America. In such colonial and post-colonial (countries where the political administration is no longer in European hands, but the effects of colonialism are still in place) contexts, together with Western contexts facing the ever-growing impact of migrants coming from the previous colonies, there is a need to reflect on the possibility of what a non-colonial liturgy, rather than a decolonial or postcolonial liturgy, would look like. For many, postcolonial or decolonial liturgies are those that specifically create spaces for the voice of a particular identified other. The other is identified and categorised as a particular voice from the margins, or a specific voice from the borders, or the voices of particular identified previously silenced voices from, for example, the indigenous backyards. A question that this context raises is as follows: Is consciously creating such social justice spaces – that is determined spaces by identifying particular voices that someone or a specific group decides to need to be heard and even making these particular voiceless (previously voiceless) voices central to any worship experience – really that different to the colonial liturgies of the past? To give voice to another voice, is maybe only a change of voice, which certainly has tremendous historical value, but is it truly a transformation? Such a determined ethical space is certainly a step towards greater multiculturalism and can therefore be interpreted as a celebration of greater diversity and inclusivity in the dominant ontology. Yet, this ontology remains policed, either by the state-maintaining police or by the moral (social justice) police.Contribution: In this article, a non-colonial liturgy will be sought that goes beyond the binary of the dominant voice and the voice of the other, as the voice of the other too often becomes the voice of a particular identified and thus determined victim – in other words, beyond the binary of master and slave, perpetrator and victim, good and evil, and justice and injustice, as these binaries hardly ever bring about transformation, but only a change in the face of master and the face of the slave, yet remaining in the same policed ontology.


Author(s):  
Vincent Valour

Although still widely read in the 1950s, Bernanos has now become an out dated author, if not entirely forgotten. Though he had a very high reputation among his fellow writers — Claudel, Mauriac, and Malraux admired him — Bernanos has always remained an isolated figure. His Catholic faith was the driving force behind his whole work, as a novelist and a polemicist, and is likely to be the reason why his writings have become obsolete. Fulminating against the liberalizing spirit of modern France, which led to spiritual decadence, Bernanos was part of the circle of Charles Maurras and Léon Daudet until 1932. Maurras and Daudet were the intellectual leaders of the monarchist and extreme right movement L’Action Française. Nevertheless, Bernanos deeply denounces the violence of the pro-Franco, as well as the dangers associated with Fascism and Nazism, in his famous pamphlet Les GrandsCimetières sous la lune (1938). His novels, always extremely profound, present the spiritual conflict of good and evil. His two most famous novels, Sous le soleil de Satan (1926) and Journal d’un curé de campagne (1936), revolve around the humble figure of a country priest confronted with the apparent absence of God in the gloomy landscapes of Northern France; they exemplify the Christian message of salvation in the face of failure and death.


2006 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 247-273
Author(s):  
Di Wang

AbstractThis article reveals that teahouses were the scene of a variety of conflicts, from verbal disputes and petty thefts to violence and murder. The author argues that the teahouse, although mainly a place for leisure, business and public life, also became an arena for struggle for livelihood. The teahouse was a microcosm of Chengdu, and anything undertaken there reflected the larger society. Conflicts in the teahouse to a large extent reflected current social issues. Fights broke out when people found it difficult to solve their problems, to make a living and to survive, or when they were anxious or unhappy in the face of injustice, the deteriorating economy, hunger, insecurity and war. On the other hand, conflicts also arose from the abuse of power and privilege and the tyrannical response to social turmoil by thugs, soldiers and outlaws. We can see such unfortunate periods during the first half of the twentieth century. The author also tries to point out that the teahouse functioned as a stage where all kinds of people performed roles that were both good and evil, but all became part of teahouse culture and teahouse life.


Evil ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 429-443
Author(s):  
Gabriel Motzkin

After the Holocaust, we have a new appreciation of the concept of radical evil. Radical evil is evil that is not defined in comparison to the good; it is evil even when there is no good. Crimes against humanity, or crimes that challenge the concept of humanity, are challenges to the whole code, not infractions of some rule. Because radical evil transcends the law, the commission of radical evil is inexpiable. Since such a crime has a conceptual basis, instigators are as guilty if not guiltier than perpetrators. The Holocaust, by linking radical evil to mass extermination, marks a new phase in our historical experience. The contrast between good and evil is replaced by the contrast between good and neutral. Since radical evil reconfigures the good as the neutral, and then also reconfigures the evil as neutral, neutrality in the face of radical evil is no longer an option.


1970 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Greg Noble

The ‘face of evil’ has become a recurring image in recent years in accounts of international terrorism. Yet it has also become a frequent figure in debates around ‘ethnic crime’ and ‘race rape’. It is a motif that demonstrates the ethnicisation of a moralised discourse of good and evil, particularly in the face of religious fundamentalism and moral panic around men of Arabic or Muslim background. The physicality of evil is often obscured in abstract discussions of moral panic. The face of evil ‘fixes’ evil in terms of a certain appearance and manner that are evidence of a deeper ‘truth’ of moral danger.


Author(s):  
Bryan Turnock

This chapter focuses on the birth of modern horror. The horror genre is ultimately concerned with the battle between good and evil. At times this can be very clearly delineated, but in real life this is not always the case. At the time of its release, Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) was truly ground-breaking in its approach to horror in everyday life. Shocking and controversial, it was initially denounced by critics yet became a worldwide box-office sensation and set the direction of the genre for the next fifty years. One of the most analysed and discussed films in cinema history, and arguably the single most influential film in the evolution of the horror genre, entire books have been written about every aspect of Psycho's production, reception and lasting influence. By contextualising the film in the environment of a Hollywood that found itself under mounting pressures, the chapter examines how Hitchock's low-budget film changed the face of horror forever.


2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (9-10) ◽  
pp. 29-36
Author(s):  
Г. І. Савонова

The article examines the role of value conglomerate currents in sections of willing machines inthe philosophy of G. Deleuze and F. Guattari. The movement and current of value conglomeratesthrough the person turned away from God is refined and formed. Accordingly, the essence of theconcepts introduced by the philosophers of the «wanting machine» and «body without organs»is clarified. It is noted that the specificity of the terminological apparatus of the collaborationof philosophers is built on the defined ontological plane of diversity and the dichotomouscontradiction of mental and schizoid judgments, where meaning loses the usual forms of logicand is replaced by singularities. The dichotomy of singularities was developed by G. Deleuzein the treatise «The Logic of Meaning», during the study of planes of meaning in the worksof L. Carroll. It is established that the desiring machine becomes the presentation of the basiccomponent of the person - as an organism, mental thinking and unconscious consumption. Havingthe constituent organs of activity, a person is unconsciously formed into a willing machine, thatis, a person moves at will, which is modeled in his instructions for using his own organism. It isnoted that the machine that desires is not just a symbiosis of spare parts, which can be noticed inthe philosophy of G. Deleuze and F. Guattari in the first place, but is a machine that constantlydesires, even when something sucks in itself. Desire pushes the machine to interconnect withother machines, so it becomes a slave of its own desires, and the range of these desires expandsand then narrows like a pendulum oscillation. The desires themselves are irresistible, so someof them are controlled by capitalism and psychiatry through the structure of a society of control,digitization and detritorialization. It is the machines that desire to do everything by the body, butit causes the body to suffer, because the body is already a concept of docking, levers, standards ofconnection, moral regulators of the superconscious. It is determined that the body without organscomes into conflict with the wanting machine, because the body searches for the cause of sufferingin the presence of organs, and therefore removes them, becomes sterile. However, philosopherspoint to the constant repetition of motions not only of the desiring machine, but also of the bodywithout organs: decipherment returns to digitization, the body being filled by the organs of desire.The processes of constant return are deteritized by capitalism. Value conglomerates themselvescombine into the horrible twin of God and the devil, good and evil. The minority replaces themajority. An example of the metamorphosis of a minority homosexual into the majority of LGBTpeople is given. It is stated that the most valuable conglomerates are embedded in the ontologicalmetamorphosis, not in the dualism of the pairs of good and evil. The values themselves are definedas the lines of cutting a person through the pendulum movements of the jacket of good and evil,and therefore, as such, they are not internal to the wanting machine. The model of movement ofthe flows of value conglomerates, which is represented as a continuous cutting of the lines of thegood and evil desires of passive thinking machines, driven into the judgment of the social systemby the method of psychoanalytic compulsion, is defined. In this model, the face of God is alwaysturned away from man, and the desire of man crosses God as if sewing him to his own judgment.


GRUPPI ◽  
2009 ◽  
pp. 29-53
Author(s):  
Lord John Alderdice

- Enduring, violent, social and political conflicts have often been interpreted as rational actor consequences resulting from socio-economic inequity or the struggle for power. The advent of global jihadi terrorism has been presented as a fight between good and evil - each side."Islamist" and "Western", characterising the enemy in similar opposing terms. This has recently been popularized as a clash of religions, cultures or civilizations with an analysis of the problem in terms of Islamic fundamentalism leading to political radicalization and resultant anti-western terrorism. The Author challenges these analyses using a model of societal development and dissolution in the face of threat. The model is based on an evolutionary approach which owes much to the psychoanalytical and psychobiological approaches which have come from working with mentally ill individuals, but applies these ideas to breakdown in the organism which is the larger society. His approach is particularly unusual because it is based on practical political applications through conflict resolution processes in different parts of the world.Key words: fundamentalism, radicalization, terrorism, mimesis, psychoanalysis, peace process.Parole chiave: fondamentalismo, radicalizzazione, terrorismo, imitazione, psicoanalisi, processi di pace


2018 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel G. B. Johnson

AbstractZero-sum thinking and aversion to trade pervade our society, yet fly in the face of everyday experience and the consensus of economists. Boyer & Petersen's (B&P's) evolutionary model invokes coalitional psychology to explain these puzzling intuitions. I raise several empirical challenges to this explanation, proposing two alternative mechanisms – intuitive mercantilism (assigning value to money rather than goods) and errors in perspective-taking.


1997 ◽  
Vol 161 ◽  
pp. 203-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tobias C. Owen

AbstractThe clear evidence of water erosion on the surface of Mars suggests an early climate much more clement than the present one. Using a model for the origin of inner planet atmospheres by icy planetesimal impact, it is possible to reconstruct the original volatile inventory on Mars, starting from the thin atmosphere we observe today. Evidence for cometary impact can be found in the present abundances and isotope ratios of gases in the atmosphere and in SNC meteorites. If we invoke impact erosion to account for the present excess of129Xe, we predict an early inventory equivalent to at least 7.5 bars of CO2. This reservoir of volatiles is adequate to produce a substantial greenhouse effect, provided there is some small addition of SO2(volcanoes) or reduced gases (cometary impact). Thus it seems likely that conditions on early Mars were suitable for the origin of life – biogenic elements and liquid water were present at favorable conditions of pressure and temperature. Whether life began on Mars remains an open question, receiving hints of a positive answer from recent work on one of the Martian meteorites. The implications for habitable zones around other stars include the need to have rocky planets with sufficient mass to preserve atmospheres in the face of intensive early bombardment.


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