Introducing a re-reading of Lamentations through the lens of trauma studies: The challenge of the COVID-19 pandemic

2021 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Johan L. Serfontein
Keyword(s):  
Old Testament ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Biblical Studies ◽  
Trauma Therapy ◽  
Trauma Studies ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face ◽  
Pain And Suffering ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Provided Examples

When the world went into lockdown (2020) due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the streets and places of socialising became deserted – much like in the opening verse of Lamentations. This prompted a desire to re-read this book in light of the pandemic. The question was asked whether this book, set amidst the calamity of the Babylonian captivity and destruction of Jerusalem, can be helpful. Can this book help us make meaning and sense in the face of a new enemy that threatens the world? The article took note of all the necessary interpretations and introductions to the book of Lamentations and concluded that it can be read as lament and, in particular, communal lament. The language of lament, sometimes lost in a world of technology and positivity, can be helpful to verbalise loss and trauma. This elicited a discussion of trauma and biblical studies, and how they interact. Much of literature that originated in traumatic circumstances became ‘meaning-making literature’. It was the case with Lamentations back in the wake of 586 BCE and also in many other instances when the book was re-read. This article provided examples of these instances. The invitation was then accepted to read some of the verses in Lamentations through the lens of the trauma created by COVID-19, and many similarities were found.Contribution: Although Jerusalem was destroyed by an enemy that could be seen, and COVID-19 is caused by an enemy that cannot be seen, there are many similarities between the COVID-19 pandemic and the situation in Jerusalem as lamented by Lamentations. As ‘meaning-making literature’, lament is sometimes the only fitting response to the incomprehensible reality of pain and suffering. Lament defies the cheap answers so often given by religion when it is confronted with mystery, doubt and despair. This seemed to be the case in Lamentations. It was concluded that Lamentations can help readers through the process of trauma therapy as it opens the wound and helps the individual to connect with the bigger community in trying to make sense of it all and to involve others in the pain. The newness of the COVID-19 pandemic and a response from an Old Testament perspective, made the scope of this article relevant.

Jeremiah 1–20

1999 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack R. Lundbom
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Environmental Pollution ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Biblical Studies ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
The People ◽  
God's Word ◽  
The World

Jeremiah, long considered one of the most colorful of the ancient Israelite prophets, comes to life in Jack R. Lundbom’s Jeremiah 1-20. From his boyhood call to prophecy in 627 b.c.e., which Jeremiah tried to refuse, to his scathing judgments against the sins and hypocrisy of the people of Israel, Jeremiah charged through life with passion and emotion. He saw his fellow Israelites abandon their one true God, and witnessed the predictable outcome of their disregard for God’s word – their tragic fall to the Babylonians. The first book of a three-volume Anchor Bible commentary, Jack R. Lundbom’s eagerly awaited exegesis of Jeremiah investigates the opening twenty chapters of this Old Testament giant. With considerable skill and erudition, Lundbom leads modern readers through this prophet’s often mysterious oracles, judgments, and visions. He quickly dispels the notion that the life and words of a seventh-century b.c.e. Israelite prophet can have no relevance for the contemporary reader. Clearly, Jeremiah was every bit as concerned as we are with issues like terrorism, hypocrisy, environmental pollution, and social justice. This impressive work of scholarship, essential to any biblical studies curriculum, replaces John Bright’s landmark Anchor Bible commentary on Jeremiah. Like its predecessor, Jeremiah 1-20 draws on the best biblical scholarship to further our understanding of the weeping prophet and his message to the world.

Dressed to Communicate—Or Not

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. R. F. Ferrari
Keyword(s):  
Communicative Intention ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Individual

Intimation is illustrated with an extended example: how we dress. Full-on communication with clothes is rare. The reason is this: unless the audience is already primed for a communication, your clothes must startle if they are to make your communicative intention unmistakable. Most of the messages we send when we dress, fashionably or otherwise, we send as half-on intimations. The chapter concentrates on the intentions of the individual dresser, contenting itself with the metaphor of the cultural ‘brand’ to explain how an entire culture may communicate with its clothes. The point of intimating with clothes is to get something across to another. Since clothes are the face we present to the world, this will most likely be something about ourselves; we tend to use clothes to offer a sample of ourselves. The chapter resists the idea that our clothes are never more than a social disguise.

scholarly journals REVEALING THE WORLD OF ONCOLOGICAL TREATMENT THROUGH DRAMATIC THERAPEUTIC PLAY

2015 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 1112-1120 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marileise Roberta Antoneli Fonseca ◽  
Claudinei José Gomes Campos ◽  
Circéa Amália Ribeiro ◽  
Vanessa Pellegrino Toledo ◽  
Luciana de Lione Melo
Keyword(s):  
Preschool Child ◽  
Preschool Age ◽  
Oncological Treatment ◽  
Important Resource ◽  
Preschool Age Children ◽  
The World ◽  
Health And Illness ◽  
The Face ◽  
Pain And Suffering ◽  
Therapeutic Play

ABSTRACT This study aimed to understand the play of the preschool child undergoing oncological treatment through dramatic therapeutic play. A total of five preschool age children with cancer participated in the dramatic therapeutic play sessions, between January and May 2013. The material was analyzed using the framework of phenomenology: analysis of the structure of the phenomenon in place. The following categories emerged from the sessions: Immersing oneself in the world of the disease and the oncological treatment; and Remembering the world without the disease. The study learned that becoming ill with cancer is a process which generates pain and suffering for the child, leading her to feel small and fragile in the face of the discomforts of the numerous procedures to which she is subjected. Therapeutic play was an important resource for revealing how the child with cancer feels during the treatment, and showed the children's difficulty in interacting with the unknown, and how this difficulty makes the balance between the points of health and illness complex.

Cicely Saunders

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Clark
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Palliative Care ◽  
End Of Life ◽  
Advanced Disease ◽  
Professional Life ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Hospice And Palliative Care ◽  
First Time

Cicely Saunders founded St Christopher’s Hospice in London in 1967 as a centre for teaching, research, and care. Its influence quickly spread around the world. Cicely Saunders — A Life and Legacy shows how she played a crucial role in shaping a new discourse of care at the end of life. From the nihilism of ‘there is nothing more we can do’, medicine and healthcare gradually adopted a more purposeful approach to care in the face of advanced disease and at the end of life. This came to be known as palliative care. This biography links for the first time the ideas and practice of Cicely Saunders to the spreading global interest in hospice and palliative care. It explores her deep reflection on the nature of suffering at the end of life, the possibilities of a more informed approach to the medical management of pain and other symptoms, and above all the importance of remaining focussed on the personal and spiritual concerns of the individual patient as death approaches. It is a story of a remarkable personal and professional life and of a seismic shift in twentieth-century medical history.

I and II Esdras

1974 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacob M. Myers
Keyword(s):  
Old Testament ◽  
Theological Seminary ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Times

I and II Esdras is Volume 42 in the Anchor Bible series of new book-by-book translations of the Old and New Testaments and Apocrypha, each by a preeminent scholar. Jacob M. Myers is Professor of Old Testament at the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Gettysburg and the author of three earlier volumes in the series: I Chronicles and II Chronicles and Ezra, Nehemiah. The present work constitutes the first English commentary on I Esdras in sixty years and the first on II Esdras in forty. Written about 10 BCE, I Esdras is a history ranging from the pious reign of Josiah to the religious reforms of Ezra. For this period Josephus follows I Esdras in his Antiquities of the Jews. An apocalyptic work, written 250 years later, II Esdras seeks to offer strength, courage, and hope to those whose faith was severely shaken in the gloom and despondency that followed upon the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. Its chief purpose was to inspire trust in God and the ultimate triumph of righteousness, if not in this world, then in the world to come. “Tracts for the times such as II Esdras,” writes Dr. Myers in his preface, “have a message for us who in a revolutionary age are obsessed with the impatience reflected by Ezra; it was not that he lacked faith in God but that he, like Job, questioned his ways and the delay, perhaps seeming inactivity, in the face of what appeared to the prophet to be terrible urgencies. The questions posed are still asked in the context of our age.” Eight photographs of ancient Near Eastern sculpture and coins help the reader visualize both the events recounted in I Esdras and the apocalyptic imagery in II Esdras. Each book has its own introduction and bibliography.

The Danger of White Innocence

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 11-25
Author(s):  
George D. Yancy ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Black People ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Black Body ◽  
The World ◽  
Black Bodies ◽  
The Face ◽  
Political Dimensions ◽  
White Gaze ◽  
Mode Of Being ◽  
The Stranger

This paper explores how whiteness as the transcendental norm shapes the meaning structure of Black-being-in-the-world. If home is a place, a site, a dwelling of acceptance, where one is allowed to feel safe, to relax, to let one’s guard down, then being Black in white supremacist America is anathema to being at home for Black people. Indeed, to be Black is to be a stranger, something “strange,” “scary,” “dangerous,” an “outsider.” To be Black within white America belies what it means to dwell, to reside, to rest. In other words, one’s sense of racialized Black embodiment remains on guard, unsettled, hyperalert. Phenomenologically, there is a profound sense of alienation, where one’s racialized body is ostracized and shunned. On this score, I examine, within the mundane context of an elevator, how the dynamics of intersubjectivity and sociality are strained (or even placed under erasure) through the dynamics of the white gaze. The white gaze, among other things, functions to police the meaning of the Black body and attempts to de-subjectify Black embodiment. In this way, the only real perspective is white. Black bodies are deemed devoid of a perspective on the world as there is no subjectivity, no sense of agential meaning making. One might say that Black people, on this view, constitute an essence, a typified mode of being. Unlike the existentialist thesis where existence precedes essence, Black people are locked into an objecthood, a fungible and fixed essence. This racial and racist myth is what, for Schutz, would collapse the importance that he places on intersubjectivity and sociality. Indeed, within this paper, I delineate the threatening, necro-political dimensions of whiteness that I experienced after writing the well-known article “Dear White America.” That experience cemented, for me, and for many other readers, what it means to occupy the residence of whiteness, an abode that can take one’s life in the blink of an eye. The experience of the racialized stranger means walking a tightrope, a precarious situation where one flirts with death, where one’s body is deemed hypersexual, inferior, frightening, and monstrous. Based upon this construction, the white body is deemed the site of virtue, safety, deliverer, protector of all things white and pure. Think here of “the white man’s burden” or the idea of “white manifest destiny.” Stain, blemish, taint, and defilement are indelible markers of the stranger. And based upon the logics of racial purity, one must extinguish the “vermin,” the “criminals,” the “rapists.” While I don’t explore this within the paper, Schutz scholars will immediately recognize the genocidal implications of what would have been at stake for Schutz had he not escaped Adolf Hitler’s anti-Semitic gaze and his Anschluss of Austria. My sense is that Schutz would have understood not just the horrors of white racism but would appreciate the necessity of theorizing the need to rethink home as existentially capacious and intersubjectively vibrant. I conclude this paper by thinking through the concept of “breakdown”, delineating its spatial, phenomenological, and subjectively embodied implications. Breakdown, as I use the term, upends forms of white racialized habituation, creating possible embodied psychic space for what I term un-suturing, which involves undoing the machinations of white safety in the face of alterity, where the stranger invokes wonder and self-critique.

The Openness of Life-world and the Intercultural Polylogue

2020 ◽  
Vol 2019 (4) ◽  
pp. 150-162
Author(s):  
Wang Jun
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Philosophy ◽  
Life World ◽  
Open World ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face ◽  
Interactive Relationship ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Difference And Equality ◽  
Open Nature ◽  
Intercultural Philosophy

AbstractThe phenomenological conception of “life-world” lays the theoretical foundation for the openness of the world. The founding relationship between the individual and the world, the interactive relationship among different cultural worlds on the intersubjective level, the free nature of truth and its presence in the open world, the “ek-sistent” characteristics of the human-being, the structural constitution of the life-world – all these topics demonstrate the open nature of the world in a phenomenological way. Based on these ideas, “reflective judgment” as “phronesis” and “fear” as ethic sentiment based on family experience become the practical stance, which is consistent with the “life-world” conception of phenomenology; the characteristics of publicness and intersubjectivity of the open world are thus maintained. In the face of the multicultural world, this attitude presents as a brand-new practice of intercultural philosophy, which is different from the centralism found under the framework of monism and the comparative philosophy under the framework of dualism. Such a practice of intercultural philosophy is “polylog”, i.e. based on the principles of difference and equality and searching for the “overlapping consensus” in full multi-participatory discussion. Through polylog, a harmonious life of human community is constructed. This paper attempts to derive a set of practical principles for maintaining the openness of the world and intercultural polylog in the era of globalization from the theoretical view of the phenomenological life-world.

scholarly journals THE INDIVIDUAL IN THE CONTEXT OF MODERN EDUCATION: A PHILOSOPHICAL VIEW

2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 25-32
Author(s):  
SVETLANA VOLKOVA
Keyword(s):  
Meaning Making ◽  
Three Dimensions ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Modern Education ◽  
Educational Anthropology ◽  
The World ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Contemporary Education ◽  
Electronic Technologies

The article focuses on the little-studied interrelationship between the human way of being and education. The goal of the study is twofold. First, it is to reconstruct the image of the individual that lies at the basis of the scholars’ worldview. Secondly, it is to develop a model of philosophy that would correspond to this image and correlate with the problems and challenges of modern education. Drawing attention to the widespread use of information and electronic technologies in education, the author argues that the model of human being as embodied presence (embodiment) is very important for pedagogical activities. The significance of this model is that it enables to distinguish the meaning-making dimension of human consciousness so needed by contemporary education. The author demonstrates that an individual sees and cognizes the world not so much with the organs that are available and ready, but rather with those that are constituted in the acts of reflexing. Meaning, therefore, is the reflexive functional organ that reproduces the substance of the personality of a human being as a student. The author also notes that the perception and comprehension of the world is carried out from the perspectives of both the “pure” and the embodied mind. Thus, one of the main tasks of education is to engage and reveal the mind-body system as a source of the subject’s meaning-making activity. So, orienting education towards the individual as a being who does not possess meanings but searches for them will succeed only if the human being is viewed as an integral whole rather than as separate parts. The author concludes that both philosophy and pedagogy need to develop educational anthropology, an interdisciplinary area that would explore the subject of education in the integrity of their three dimensions – mind, body and language, taken as sources of creating meanings.

A Qualitative Study of Anxiety for Santri at the “Durrotu Ahlissunah Wal Jamaah Semarang” Islamic Boarding School in Facing the Covid-19 Pandemic

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Akhmad Zahid ◽  
Eem Munawaroh
Keyword(s):  
Boarding School ◽  
Descriptive Study ◽  
World Health ◽  
Research Subjects ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face ◽  
Response To Stress ◽  
Health Organization ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Keywords Anxiety

Anxiety is a normal symptom in humans. However, it will be called pathological if the symptoms persist and disturb the peace of the individual. Anxiety can occur as a result of a response to stress or conflict. The response is in the form of worry, anxiety, fear, and a sense of discomfort as a result of the threat of danger from inside and outside the individual. On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the spread of COVID-19 to be categorized as a pandemic. This research is a descriptive study with qualitative methods. The research subjects were 5 students of the Durrotu Ahlissunah wal Jamaah Islamic Boarding School. The results showed that the students of the Durrotu Ahlissunah Wal Jamaah Islamic boarding school felt that there was no sense of feeling in the face of the ongoing Covid-19 conditions. Keywords: anxiety, pandemic, santri

In the openness of “own” being (on the example of Leo Tolstoy’s novel ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’)

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 83-106
Author(s):  
Nadezhda Kasavina
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
The Other ◽  
Existential Anxiety ◽  
Terminal Stage ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Boundary Situation

The article considers the work of Leo N. Tolstoy The Death of Ivan Ilyich in the context of the concept of boundary situations by K. Jaspers; the phenomena of “intercession in death”; one’s own and non-own Being-toward-death by M. Heidegger; the stages of personal acceptance of death which were identified by E. Kubler-Ross on the basis of psychotherapeutic work with incurable patients. The situation of Ivan Ilyich shows the position of a person in the face of existential anxiety and threats of loneliness, a sense of meaninglessness, despair, actualized by the boundary situation of death. The dynamics of the state of the novel’s protagonist is interpreted as the formation of “one’s own Being-towards-death”, which has the character of being in relation to “one’s own ability of being” (M. Heidegger). Presence is completely surrendered to itself, essentially open to itself. Loneliness acts as a way to open existence. In the openness of presence for the individual the world opens itself, the other and others in their unique way of being. Ivan Ilyich experiences this before his death as an epiphanic phenomenon, which unfolds the destiny of the personality, leading it beyond the limits of only his or her life and suffering. The interaction of the protagonist with others is considered from the perspective of the problems identified by E. Kuebler-Ross in the relationship of doctors, relatives and patients in the terminal stage of their illness and the transition to the acception of their own finiteness, which acquires the character of historicity.

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