scholarly journals Poems in Interreligious Dialogue: Searching for God in the Poetry of Ku Sang and Thomas Merton

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Michael Scaccia
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Comparative Method ◽  
Interreligious Dialogue ◽  
Comparative Theology ◽  
Religious Texts ◽  
Critical Commentary ◽  
Religious Imagery ◽  
Faith Traditions ◽  
Thomas Merton ◽  
Zen Buddhist

<p>Twentieth-century poets Ku Sang and Thomas Merton, two Catholic poets from Korea and America, respectively, were both aware of a space between themselves and God. Their poetry reveals attempts to go and find him. Because their searches for God entailed an interreligious nexus, insofar as their poetry blended Buddhist and Christian religious imagery, I utilise a comparative method, drawn from the field of Comparative Theology, which juxtaposes religious texts from differing faith traditions; I place Zen Buddhist kōans side-by-side with the Christian poems, each poem understood as representing a way to seek God. Moreover, I provide close readings of each poem and kōan, with critical commentary on the poems and interpretation of any new meaning revealed by the juxtaposition of texts. As a result of my examination, I propose that exploration of how these poets expressed their own understanding of God’s whereabouts, achieved by contact with poetic experience at the naked level of the poem, yields insight both into the two men’s unique contributions to broader knowledge of poets searching for God and how they were transformed for the sake of searching at all.</p>

scholarly journals Poems in Interreligious Dialogue: Searching for God in the Poetry of Ku Sang and Thomas Merton

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Michael Scaccia
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Comparative Method ◽  
Interreligious Dialogue ◽  
Comparative Theology ◽  
Religious Texts ◽  
Critical Commentary ◽  
Religious Imagery ◽  
Faith Traditions ◽  
Thomas Merton ◽  
Zen Buddhist

<p>Twentieth-century poets Ku Sang and Thomas Merton, two Catholic poets from Korea and America, respectively, were both aware of a space between themselves and God. Their poetry reveals attempts to go and find him. Because their searches for God entailed an interreligious nexus, insofar as their poetry blended Buddhist and Christian religious imagery, I utilise a comparative method, drawn from the field of Comparative Theology, which juxtaposes religious texts from differing faith traditions; I place Zen Buddhist kōans side-by-side with the Christian poems, each poem understood as representing a way to seek God. Moreover, I provide close readings of each poem and kōan, with critical commentary on the poems and interpretation of any new meaning revealed by the juxtaposition of texts. As a result of my examination, I propose that exploration of how these poets expressed their own understanding of God’s whereabouts, achieved by contact with poetic experience at the naked level of the poem, yields insight both into the two men’s unique contributions to broader knowledge of poets searching for God and how they were transformed for the sake of searching at all.</p>

Interreligious Dialogue

2020 ◽  
pp. 625-645
Author(s):  
Michael Barnes
Keyword(s):  
Interreligious Dialogue ◽  
The Other ◽  
Comparative Theology ◽  
Contemporary Culture ◽  
Cloud Of Unknowing ◽  
Thomas Merton ◽  
The Church ◽  
Zen Buddhist

This chapter asks what the Church has to learn from, and what it can offer to, the contemplative turn in contemporary culture. It begins with one particular aspect of this phenomenon, namely the interreligious spirituality of persons who find themselves caught up ‘between’ the wisdom of established traditions and their pursuit of an authentic personal practice. Thomas Merton and Swami Abhishiktananda are presented as well-known interreligious mystics, two exemplary spiritual guides who seek to pass on their own deeply discerned wisdom about how to live a life of encounter with ‘the other’. In raising some of the theological questions that emerge as they seek to negotiate their interreligious experience, the second part of the chapter leads into a brief exercise or ‘case study’ in Comparative Theology: a dialogue between two well-known mystical texts, the Zen Buddhist Mumonkan and the Christian Cloud of Unknowing.

scholarly journals Comparative variationism for the study of language change: five centuries of competition amongst Spanish deontic periphrases

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-219 ◽  
Author(s):  
José Luis Blas Arroyo
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Comparative Method ◽  
Common Factor ◽  
Decisive Role ◽  
Auxiliary Verbs ◽  
Complementary Distribution ◽  
Modal Verb ◽  
History Of

AbstractBased on a corpus composed entirely of texts close to the pole of communicative immediacy, mainly private letters from the sixteenth, eighteenth and twentieth centuries (c. 1960), this paper analyses the results of a variationist study on the historical evolution undergone by the Spanish modal periphrases with three distinct auxiliary verbs (haber, tener, deber). Using the heuristic tools of the comparative method, the data show that variation has been constrained by a handful of common factor groups over almost five centuries. Nonetheless, with the odd exception, these factors have conditioned each verb in a different way. Moreover, the sense of this variation changes as time goes by, with especially relevant reorganisation in the first part of the twentieth century. Furthermore, there is a notable association between these constraints and the degree of markedness and the frequency of the conditioning contexts, giving support to a usage-based approach to language change in which cognitive processes such as entrenchment play a decisive role. These data also allow a particular profile to be traced for each modal verb in the history of Spanish, in which tener and haber finally undergo a complementary distribution, whereas deber follows a different pattern. After several centuries of stagnation, tener becomes the star in the deontic firmament of spontaneous communication, diffusing abruptly as a change from below in the twentieth century, and replacing haber, which had been the unmarked variant for centuries.

The Portable Madrasa: Print, publics, and the authority of the Deobandi `ulama

2013 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 845-871 ◽  
Author(s):  
BRANNON D. INGRAM
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Islamic Education ◽  
North India ◽  
Reading Process ◽  
Ritual Practice ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Popular Piety ◽  
Religious Texts ◽  
Islamic Belief

AbstractIn the first decades of the twentieth century, classically trained Muslim scholars (`ulama) of the influential Deobandi school of North India issued a number of immensely popular, mass-printed ‘primers’ on Islamic belief and ritual practice. Now ubiquitous in the Islamic bookshops in South Asia and elsewhere, these primers sought to summarize the rudiments of an Islamic education for a nascent lay Muslim reading public. Focusing on three Deobandi`ulama—Ashraf `Ali Thanvi (d. 1943), Mufti Muhammad Kifayatullah (d. 1952), and Muhammad Manzur Nu`mani (d. 1997)—this paper explores how their primers advanced the Deobandi school's well-known critique of popular piety even as they claimed to address Muslims generally, and how their authors negotiated the subtle dynamics of print. Understanding the potentially subversive power of print to open a space for readers to form their own interpretations of minute doctrinal matters and the threat of mass-printed religious texts to their own authority, these`ulamaimplored readers to refrain from forming their own opinions of the primers’ content and to consult the`ulamathroughout the reading process. Thus, even as they took advantage of print's possibilities, they remained deeply suspect of its ramifications.

scholarly journals Comparative Theology and Scriptural Reasoning: A Muslim’s Approach to Interreligious Learning

Religions ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (10) ◽  
pp. 297
Author(s):  
Betül Avcı
Keyword(s):  
Interreligious Dialogue ◽  
The Other ◽  
Comparative Theology ◽  
Transformative Power ◽  
Islamic Tradition ◽  
Learning Practices ◽  
Depth Study ◽  
Scriptural Reasoning ◽  
Transformative Journeys ◽  
Initial Results

In this paper, I examine Comparative Theology (CT) and Scriptural Reasoning (SR), two distinctive interreligious learning practices, in relation to each other. I propose that these practices, with respect to their dialogical features and transformative power, represent two of the most noteworthy current modes of interreligious dialogue. They achieve this by their ability to explicitly understand the “other.” This is also because they serve not only as tools in service of understanding in academic circles, but also as existentially/spiritually transformative journeys in the exotic/familiar land of the “other.” In respect to religious particularity and (un)translatability, I argue that both CT and SR have certain liberal and postliberal features, as neither of them yields to such standard taxonomies. Finally, I deal with Muslim engagement with CT and SR and present some initial results of my current comparative questioning/learning project. Consequently, I plan for this descriptive work to stand as a preliminary to, first, an SR session that focuses on some Qur’anic verses and biblical accounts with a probable progressivist view of history and, second, an in-depth study of the Islamic tradition in that light.

Georges de La Tour and the Enigma of the Visible

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dalia Judovitz
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Visual Medium ◽  
Religious Imagery ◽  
Conditions Of Possibility ◽  
Spiritual Reality ◽  
Interdisciplinary Study ◽  
Familiar Objects

Celebrated due to the aura of mystery attached to his rediscovered works in the twentieth century, Georges de La Tour’s paintings continue to be an object of scholarly interest and public fascination. Exploring the representations of light, vision and the visible in his works, this interdisciplinary study raises seminal questions regarding the nature of painting and its artistic, theological, and conceptual implications. If the visible presents an enigma in La Tour’s pictorial works, this is because familiar objects of visible reality serve as emblems of an invisible, spiritual reality. La Tour’s pursuit of likeness between image and the natural world bears the influence of the Catholic Reform’s call for the revitalization of religious imagery in the wake of Protestant iconoclastic outbreaks. Like the books shown in his paintings which are asking to be read, La Tour’s paintings are examined not just as visual depictions but also as instruments of insight, which ask to be deciphered rather than merely seen. La Tour’s paintings show how the figuration of faith as spiritual passion and illumination challenges the meanings attached to the visual realm of painterly expression. This study shows that La Tour’s emphasis on spiritual insight opens up a broader artistic, philosophical and conceptual reflection on the conditions of possibility of painting and its limitations as a visual medium. By scrutinizing what is seen and how and by questioning the position of the beholder, his works encourage meditation on the role of painting and its engagements with the visible world.

scholarly journals Muhammad Hamidullah on the Islamic theology of revelation: topics for a discussion on comparative theology

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (14) ◽  
pp. 84
Author(s):  
César Andrade Alves
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Interreligious Dialogue ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Divine Revelation ◽  
Comparative Theology ◽  
Second Vatican Council ◽  
Islamic Theology ◽  
Fundamental Theology ◽  
Vatican Council ◽  
Future Work

The dialogue of theological exchange, which can be carried out as comparative theology, is one of the four forms of interreligious dialogue encouraged by the magisterium. A subject of great interest to this form of dialogue is divine revelation, within the field of fundamental theology. Regarding this subject, a discussion partner in the dialogue with Islam is Muhammad Hamidullah, one of the most distinguished Muslim scholars of the 20th century, whose work is the object of growing attention. This article has two objectives: (1) to highlight the importance of Hamidullah for a future work within comparative theology; (2) to categorize issues, derived from his analysis of revelation, that will be relevant to a later theological exchange with a Christian theology of revelation of an ecumenical nature in the light of the Second Vatican Council.

scholarly journals Semantic volume of the word Conviction in the Words and Homilies of the Russian saints of the 20th century

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 665-672
Author(s):  
Yulia V Koreneva
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Semantic Content ◽  
Religious Discourse ◽  
Russian Language ◽  
Inner Life ◽  
Religious Texts ◽  
Modern Language ◽  
Court Judge ◽  
Negative Appraisal ◽  
Semantic Difference

For the first time the article analyzes the semantics of the word conviction in the words and teachings of Russian saints of the twentieth century. The material is extracted from symphonies in the works of saints and from collections of sayings of Russian elders of the twentieth century. The article analyzes the semantics of the use of this word in religious texts as the implementation of religious discourse in comparison with the codified meaning of modern dictionaries. It is shown that the lexeme conviction is included in the etymological-word formative nest of semantics of different words in the modern Russian language ( court, judge, condemn, reason, judgment, fate, judicial , etc.) of the Indo-European root *dhe- (: *-dh-o: *dh-i-) with the semantics of establishment, action, and in addition with the prefix su- , which means combining or mixing, has negative appraisal and is Church Slavism in the Russian language not only by phonetic and orthographic signs, but primarily by semantic signs. The semantic difference in the religious and non-religious use of this word in the Russian and Church Slavonic language element is in the significative side, since in the Orthodox concept-sphere and the Russian religious discourse, conviction is associated with a number of conceptual ideas about the inner life of a person. Conviction is semantized as a destructive state of a person, violating the integrity of his personality and alienating him from God (the article identifies at least three semantic-cognitive features). Such semantic content clearly differs from lexicographical data in modern language, therefore the meaning of a word in Church Slavonic text space is understood as basic, and modern usage is understood as a narrowing of the original semantics.

‘Mystic and a little utopistic’

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 341-362
Author(s):  
Daniel Panka
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Media Content ◽  
State Control ◽  
Television Series ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
The Third ◽  
Critical Commentary ◽  
The Family

The Mézga Family is an animated television series that ran for three seasons in Hungary between 1970 and 1980 (produced between 1968 and 1978). In the first season, the twentieth-century Hungarian family establishes contact with their descendant from the thirtieth century who sends them futuristic gadgets whose use results in various adventures. In the second season, the family’s youngest member goes out on missions to other planets in a spaceship built by himself. In the third season, the family goes on vacation during which several calamities befall them. The irony directed at facile utopian desires allowed the series to subtly express deeper-penetrating concerns but simultaneously remain light-hearted. This article introduces the term ‘cynical utopia’ to explain how the season generates multi-layered meanings and critical commentary. By using the conventions of utopia, sf and fairy tales, the series could discuss social and even political issues in a period when state control over media content was strict in Hungary and the production of a clearly dystopian work on national television would have been unimaginable.

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