By Pencil and Camera

Author(s):  
Rachel McBride Lindsey

This chapter spirals out from one commissioned photographic tour of Palestine in 1894 to consider the broader framework of halftone photography as a mechanism of ethnographic display and imperial regimes. The chapter follows a set of negatives made by the St. Louis photographer Robert Edward Mather Bain in 1894 from their original publication as part of a commercialized art-folio into the pages of the Bible. Here, the communion of shadows cast living inhabitants of Palestine—Bain’s photographic contemporaries—as relics of a biblical imaginary that affirmed American beholders’ confidence in the power of the camera to capture on glass the Holy Land of the Bible.

AJS Review ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 395-398
Author(s):  
Rehav Rubin

Many of the pioneers and settlers who came to America held the Bible in their right hands and were strongly inspired by this “Good Book.” They believed they had come to the “New Promised Land,” and consequently gave Biblical names to the new towns and villages, as well as to their children. It was, therefore, almost natural that the remote land in the east, known as the Holy Land, Palestine, the Promised Land, or The Land of Israel, had, and probably still has, a very special place in American culture and society.


2019 ◽  
pp. 210-226
Author(s):  
Simon Mills

This chapter explains the remarkable popularity of Henry Maundrell’s A Journey from Aleppo to Jerusalem at Easter AD 1697 (1703). It argues that Maundrell’s eye-witness reportage of his travels in the Holy Land provided the book’s readers with a storehouse of geographical observations and descriptions of eastern customs with which they could recreate imaginatively the world of the Scriptures. Tracing the book’s use by editors, commentators, translators, and paraphrasts, it argues that Maundrell was most often put to work in defence of the Bible against attacks on its claims to truth. Yet in the hands of Maundrell’s late eighteenth-century German translator, the naturalist and historicist tendencies inherent in his account were brought into sharper focus; ‘sacred geography’ was transformed into a history of biblical culture.


2014 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 447-497
Author(s):  
John D. Thomas

In the early nineteenth century, the study of “sacred” geography gained traction in American Sunday schools, buoyed by the popular belief that students needed to familiarize themselves with the Holy Land in order to understand the Bible. As religious educators designed geographic curricula, they turned to cartography for assistance and developed map-based lesson plans that would, they hoped, enliven the study of scripture by making visible the spatial layout of ancient Palestine. This article tracks the emergence and widespread use of a particular type of thematic map that featured the life of Jesus superimposed onto the Holy Land, a form of biographical mapmaking that I call “biocartography.” To help students visualize scripture, mapmakers translated the gospel narratives into vectors that crisscrossed Palestine, which meant that they had to overlook the New Testament’s textual discontinuities in order to create a seemingly authentic mosaic of biblical history. Paying close attention to the semiotics of cartography, I explain how biographical circuits that were largely (if not entirely) speculative were regarded as historical fact and how educators who used such maps invented a wide range of cartographic activities to help students comprehend and internalize the Bible’s most salient passages.


1994 ◽  
Vol 4 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 135-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamar Liebes

Abstract This article analyzes the famous Biblical account of a group sent by Moses to scout the Holy Land in anticipation of its conquest (Num. 13-14) and focuses on the unhappy ending of the story. It examines three explanations for why the scouts were punished: (a) for adding their opinions to the facts they were supposed to report (editorializing), (b) for insinuating their opinions into the report itself (bias), and (c) for releasing the report to the public rather than funneling it through the leader. The article analyzes not only the story itself but also the story of the story to reveal the narrator's ideological position. (Mass Communication)


2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 45-65

This study examines the pilgrimage of Christian women ascetics in the early Christian period from the fourth to sixth centuries AD, focusing on wealthy Roman women who were influenced by the Church Fathers, such as Jerome and left their world, freedom, family and social class. They sold their properties in order to come to the Holy Land (the Land of the Bible) to visit the holy places and the desert hermits and to build monasteries, hospitals, hospices, orphanages and accomodations for old people through the Holy Land. The pilgrimage of women ascetics was a characteristic feature of the period. In spite of the difficult journey, these ascetic women came to fulfill their religious and spiritual needs. These women have been remembered throughout the ages for their faith, piety, tenderness, purity and devotion and have served as role models for women after them. This study examines the concept of pilgrimage in Christianity and the pilgrimage of the women ascetics and their religious and social accomplishments in the Holy Land.


2021 ◽  
pp. 146-169
Author(s):  
Elizabeth A. Clark

Chapter 8 depicts the voyage to and settlement in Jerusalem, with a stop in Alexandria and surroundings, to meet bishops and holy men. On a return trip to Egypt, they visited the so-called desert fathers and attempted to leave them funds. Egypt and Palestine (called the “Holy Land” by Christians in this era) were the prime destinations for Christian pilgrims, women as well as men, from the fourth century onward. Some “Westerners” settled there and founded monasteries, including Melania’s own grandmother and other Roman aristocrats. The Bible provided a virtual tour guide for pilgrims in Palestine. The family of Constantine saw to the erection of the churches of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem and of the Nativity in Bethlehem. Accompanying these developments was the burgeoning quest for relics (of the “True Cross,” of the body parts of martyrs and saints). Melania, too, sought relics for the monasteries she established in Jerusalem. For some years before undertaking the building of monasteries and soliciting inhabitants for them, however, she lived in semi-solitary confinement on the Mount of Olives. The author of the Life describes the ascetic practices in these establishments. After the monasteries were built, there is little evidence that Melania participated much in the larger worship life of Jerusalem, which is described in other sources. The author of the Life aligns his heroine with his own religious preferences and depicts her as a fierce opponent of “heresy.”


2004 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-244
Author(s):  
Duncan Macpherson

For Christian preachers the Holy Land is essential to understanding the Bible. Preachers often leave modern Israel-Palestine out of their preaching picture. Others, fundamentalist preachers, support modern Israel for its part in an apocalyptic drama of the last times. A third group sees the land as the recompense to the Jewish people for their sufferings – reinforced for some by a residually literalist interpretation of Scripture. Still others show solidarity with indigenous Palestinian Christians, developing a theology of liberation emphasising God's preferential option for the poor – the Palestinians and all oppressed people. Homiletic strategies will be sketched to illustrate this last approach.


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