scholarly journals The Monstrous Other and the Biblical Narrative of Ruth

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Lyonhart ◽  
Jennifer Matheny
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Kingdom Of God ◽  
The Other ◽  
Biblical Narrative ◽  
Homosexual Male ◽  
Kingdom Of Heaven ◽  
Abusive Behaviour ◽  
Sea Monster ◽  
The Government

Guillermo Del Toro’s The Shape of Water (2017) restages the biblical narrative of Ruth in Cold War America, crystallizing the parallel through setting numerous scenes at a local cinema that is playing The Story of Ruth (1960). The book of Ruth tells the tale of how a non-Israelite outsider could be welcomed into the kingdom of God and ultimately into the lineage of Christ. Likewise, del Toro populates his tale with multiple outsiders—multiple ‘Ruths’—including a mute woman, an African American cleaner, a Russian Communist, and an elderly homosexual male. However, these are merely reflections of the ultimate outsider, Del Toro’s ‘Monster’. A new and anthropomorphic species of fish has been caught by the government, and these four outsiders must bind together in order to return him to the sea. During this process, the mute Elisa and the Monster make love, transgressing multiple sexual norms of the age and symbolizing true unity with ‘the other’ (all while being equally as ribald as Ruth at the foot of Boaz’ bed). This ‘otherness’ is contrasted throughout by the main antagonist, Strickland, who quotes bible verses about power in order to justify his own abusive behaviour, suggesting that the central ideological tension in the narrative is between a theology of power and a theology of liberation. The film then ends with the villain dying, while the mute Elisa is resurrected and given the promise of “happily ever after,” paralleling the coming of Christ from the line of Ruth and suggesting that the only way into the kingdom of heaven is through embracing ‘the other’. This parallel is likely intentional, for del Toro similarly ended Pan’s Labyrinth (2007) with the protagonist resurrecting to heaven. Thus, del Toro—himself a Mexican immigrant—has used film and theology to craft a modern version of Ruth that transgresses multiple boundaries in a way similar to the ancient version. Further, in making his modern Ruth into a sea-monster, he not only hints at ethnic, normative and cultural liberation for humans, but the embracing of a trans-human liberation that could include animals and possibly even the future rights of AI.

How Acts Means

2016 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-87
Author(s):  
Kris Brown
Keyword(s):  
Kingdom Of God ◽  
The Other ◽  
Kingdom Of Heaven

In his gospel, Luke is caught up in the power of metaphor, in Jesus’ assertions that the kingdom of heaven is here. In Acts, on the other side of Jesus’ ascension, Luke is left with here where the kingdom of heaven just was. If the miracles of Acts suggests that the kingdom of heaven keeps popping out again, what Luke narrates in Acts is his discovery/rediscovery of this kingdom, outside of metaphor, fact by fact. Acts makes meaning for us as we begin to see how we might connect what is right in front of us to the kingdom of God.

Globetrotting

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Damion L. Thomas
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
Track And Field ◽  
American Values ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
African American Athletes ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Cold War

Throughout the Cold War, the Soviet Union deplored the treatment of African Americans by the U.S. government as proof of hypocrisy in the American promises of freedom and equality. This probing history examines government attempts to manipulate international perceptions of U.S. race relations during the Cold War by sending African American athletes abroad on goodwill tours and in international competitions as cultural ambassadors and visible symbols of American values. The book follows the State Department's efforts from 1945 to 1968 to showcase prosperous African American athletes including Jackie Robinson, Jesse Owens, and the Harlem Globetrotters as the preeminent citizens of the African Diaspora rather than as victims of racial oppression. With athletes in baseball, track and field, and basketball, the government relied on figures whose fame carried the desired message to countries where English was little understood. However, eventually African American athletes began to provide counter-narratives to State Department claims of American exceptionalism, most notably with Tommie Smith and John Carlos's famous black power salute at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics.

“The New Vietnam Scholarship”—A Review Article

1985 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 337-341
Author(s):  
Ngo Vinh Long
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Review Article ◽  
The Other ◽  
South Vietnam ◽  
The Government ◽  
Policies And Programs ◽  
The Cold War

AbstractsThe book under review has been hailed by its supporters as one of the finest examples of “the new Vietnam scholarship.” Like other writings of this genre, this book claims that the United States caused the loss of South Vietnam by going to the Paris peace talks in 1968 and by yielding “far too much to Communist demands” after that. What makes this book stand out from the other writing, however, is its author's unabashed use of highly questionable sources and techniques; he attempts to show that the government of Vietnam is so absolutely evil, its policies and programs such unmitigated failures, and its leaders and cadres so totally inept, corrupt, devious, and callous that the United States and its allies should continue to exert pressure to break that government and to make it capitulate to entire sets of impossible demands prescribed by the author. Given the Cold War climate at present, this book may help to rally people to the anti-Communist cause, but it contributes nothing to scholarship.

“Spreading the Gospel of Basketball”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Damion L. Thomas
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Cold War ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Board Of Education ◽  
Racial Inequalities ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Government ◽  
American Society ◽  
Racial Progress ◽  
Legal Barriers

This chapter focuses on the Harlem Globetrotters as Cold Warriors between 1947 and 1954. This is an important moment because prior to the passage of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, the State Department was in the unenviable position of trying to defend segregation while stressing racial progress. Moreover, the politics of symbolism associated with the Globetrotters' tours was designed to give legitimacy to existing racial inequalities in American society by stressing “progress” during the early Cold War era, despite the social, political, and legal barriers that hindered African American advancement. The symbol of the successful yet segregated athlete allowed the government to argue that segregation was not an impediment to the advancement of individual African Americans.

God's Heavenly Kingdom and his Servants the Angels: An Account of Kirchliche Dogmatik III/3 §51 by Karl Barth

1951 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 376-382 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. A. Whitehouse
Keyword(s):  
Kingdom Of God ◽  
Karl Barth ◽  
The Other ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
God's Will ◽  
Kingdom Of Heaven ◽  
Doctrine Of Creation ◽  
Pseudo Dionysius

Modern exponents of the doctrine of creation skate as lightly as possible over the thesis that God is Maker of heaven as well as of earth. And St. Matthew's habit of referring to the Kingdom of Heaven does not commend itself as important to most scholars in their elucidation of the Kingdom of God. For Barth, whose doctrine of Providence was outlined in the last issue of this Journal, “God's Kingdom which comes to us on earth is the Kingdom of Heaven; and when God's will is done on earth as it is in heaven, that is not only a divine event, i.e. one established, governed, and consummated by God, but also a heavenly event, i.e. one worked out in the presence, power, co-operation, and co-revelation of heaven on earth” (p. 558). Though this is a secondary aspect of the event, a theology which ignores it is gravely impoverished. And a proper recognition of this aspect entails a further recognition that man's encounter with God in His saving act is also an encounter with the angels of God, the creatures who inhabit heaven. Schleiermacher wrote a notable appendix Of the Angels (§§42–43 in the Second Edition of The Christian Faith) which dismissed the topic from Protestant theology for 150 years, but now it has come back in a treatise which will surely rank with the other two great monuments of angelology, the Celestial Hierarchy of Pseudo-Dionysius, and the Summa Theologica of Aquinas (1.50–64, 106–114), both of which are sympathetically evaluated.

Making It Count

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arunabh Ghosh
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Statistical Data ◽  
New Technology ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
Great Leap Forward ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Statistics ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Great Leap Forward

In 1949, at the end of a long period of wars, one of the biggest challenges facing leaders of the new People's Republic of China was how much they did not know. The government of one of the world's largest nations was committed to fundamentally reengineering its society and economy via socialist planning while having almost no reliable statistical data about their own country. This book is the history of efforts to resolve this “crisis in counting.” The book explores the choices made by political leaders, statisticians, academics, statistical workers, and even literary figures in attempts to know the nation through numbers. It shows that early reliance on Soviet-inspired methods of exhaustive enumeration became increasingly untenable in China by the mid-1950s. Unprecedented and unexpected exchanges with Indian statisticians followed, as the Chinese sought to learn about the then-exciting new technology of random sampling. These developments were overtaken by the tumult of the Great Leap Forward (1958–1961), when probabilistic and exhaustive methods were rejected and statistics was refashioned into an ethnographic enterprise. By acknowledging Soviet and Indian influences, the book not only revises existing models of Cold War science but also globalizes wider developments in the history of statistics and data. Anchored in debates about statistics and its relationship to state building, the book offers fresh perspectives on China's transition to socialism.

Morrison's Beloved and its Two "Amadas": Postcolonial Signifying upon Translation within African-American Intertextualities

1969 ◽  
Author(s):  
José Endoença Martins
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Main Idea ◽  
Black Nationalism ◽  
The Other ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Specific Source ◽  
Theoretical Foundations ◽  
Specific Concern

This article compares two different Brazilian translated versions of Toni Morrison's novel Beloved: the first published in 1994, the other in 2007, both as Amada. The analysis concentrates on the speech delivered by Baby Suggs, in which she exhorts her listeners to care for their bodies. The main idea behind this article is that Beloved and the Amadas converse or talk, thus performing signifyin(g), a concept which, in Henry Louis Gates's words, explains how intertextual conversation happens through “repetition and revision, or repetition with a signal of difference” (xxiv). Its general theoretical foundations include interconnections involving several instantiations of signifyin(g): between Black nationalism and negritude, postcolonialism and African Americanism. In its specific concern with translation, the conversation that the source keeps with the target texts involves two translation theories: fluency and resistance; two kinds of translating interventions: omission and addition; and three types of strategies: syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic. These distinct categories help readers grasp translation as a continuum by means of which a specific source text encounters its target equivalents and, then, returns to its origin. The original article is in English.

MEMBANGUN PENDIDIKAN KARAKTER SEJAK USIA DINI

Edupedia ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-64
Author(s):  
Agus Supriyadi
Keyword(s):  
Human Resources ◽  
Character Education ◽  
Moral Values ◽  
The Other ◽  
Educational Institutions ◽  
Early Age ◽  
National Education ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The Government ◽  
The One

Character education is a vital instrument in determining the progress of a nation. Therefore the government needs to build educational institutions in order to produce good human resources that are ready to oversee and deliver the nation at a progressive level. It’s just that in reality, national education is not in line with the ideals of national education because the output is not in tune with moral values on the one hand and the potential for individuals to compete in world intellectual order on the other hand. Therefore, as a solution to these problems is the need for the applicationof character education from an early age.

Deceptive Ambiguity by Police and Prosecutors

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger W. Shuy
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Relative Frequency ◽  
The Other ◽  
Cooperative Principle ◽  
Case Examples ◽  
Police Interviews ◽  
Performance Errors ◽  
Criminal Suspects ◽  
The Government ◽  
Speech Events

Much is written about how criminal suspects, defendants, and undercover targets use ambiguous language in their interactions with police, prosecutors, and undercover agents. This book examines the other side of the coin, describing fifteen criminal investigations demonstrating how police, prosecutors, undercover agents, and complainants use deceptive ambiguity with their subjects, which leads to misrepresentations of the speech events, schemas, agendas, speech acts, lexicon, and grammar. These misrepresentations affect the perceptions of judges and juries about the subjects’ motives, predispositions, intentions, and voluntariness. Deception is commonly considered intentional while ambiguity is often excused as unintentional performance errors. Although perhaps overreliance on Grice’s maxim of sincerity leads some to believe this, interactions of suspects, defendants, and targets with representatives of law are adversarial, non-cooperative events that enable participants to ignore or violate the cooperative principle. One effective way the government does this is to use ambiguity deceptively. Later listeners to the recordings of such conversations may not recognize this ambiguity and react in ways that the subjects may not have intended. Deceptive ambiguity is clearly intentional in undercover operations and the case examples illustrate that the practice also is alive and well in police interviews and prosecutorial questioning. The book concludes with a summary of how the deceptive ambiguity used by representatives of the government affected the perception of the subjects’ predisposition, intentionality and voluntariness, followed by a comparison of the relative frequency of deceptive ambiguity used by the government in its representations of speech events, schemas, agendas, speech acts, lexicon, and grammar.

Comparative Area Studies

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dirk Berg-Schlosser
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Ivory Coast ◽  
Qualitative Comparative Analysis ◽  
The Other ◽  
Area Studies ◽  
International Context ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
Cross Area Studies ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Analytical Approaches

Area studies have undergone significant changes over the last two decades. They have been transformed from mostly descriptive accounts in the international context of the Cold War to theory-oriented and methodological analytical approaches. More recent comparative methods such as “Qualitative Comparative Analysis” (QCA) and related approaches, which are particularly suitable for medium N studies, have significantly contributed to this development. This essay discusses the epistemological background of this approach as well as recent developments. It provides two examples of current “cross area studies,” one concerned with successful democratic transformations across four regions (Africa, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and East Asia), the other with political participation in marginalized settlements in four countries (Brazil, Chile, Ivory Coast, Kenya) in a multilevel analysis. The conclusion points to the theoretical promises of this approach and its practical-political relevance.

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